1. Introduction Punctuation can be defined as the use of spacing and conventional signs to help the understanding of the handwritten and printed texts. Punctuation marks are used to create sense, clarity and stress in sentences and they are also used to structure and organize the text. The punctuation rules vary with language and register. Some punctuation aspects of are stylistic choices. For language such Arabic, the punctuation marks are relatively a modern innovation since Arabic did not use punctuation and therefore the punctuation rules in Arabic are not always consistently used. From a Natural Language Processing (NLP) perspective, punctuation marks can be useful in the automatic sentence Segmentation tasks, since the sentences boundaries and phrase boundaries can be estimated according to punctuation marks. Moreover and as shown by a number of studies, the absence of punctuation could be confusing both for humans and computers. Furthermore, many NLP systems trained on well formatted text often have problems when dealing with unstructured texts. In order to build robust automatic punctuation systems, large scale manually punctuated corpora are usually needed. In this abstract, we present our effort to build a large scale error corrected punctuated corpus for Arabic. We present our special punctuation annotation guidelines designed to improve the inter-annotator agreement. Our guidelines were used by trained annotators and a regular inter-annotator agreement were measured to ensure the annotation quality. 2. Corpus Description: In this work, we describe the 2M words corpus developed for the Qatar Arabic Language Bank (QALB) project a large-scale error annotation effort that aims to create a manually corrected corpus of errors including punctuation errors for a variety of Arabic texts (Zaghouani et al., 2014; Zaghouani et al., 2015). The goal of the annotation in this project is twofold: first, to correct the existing punctuation found in text, than to add the missing necessary punctuation when needed. The comments are selected from the available comments related to news stories. The native student essays data is 150k words extracted from the Arabic Learners Corpus (ALC). The non-native student essays data, is 150k words corpus selected the Arabic Learners Written Corpus (ALWC). The data is categorized by the student level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), learner type (L2 vs. heritage), and essay type (description, narration, instruction). Finally, the machine translation output data is collected from 100k words of English news article taken from the collaborative journalism Wikinews website. The corpus includes 520 articles with an average of 192 words per article. The original English files were in HTML format and were exported to a UTF-8 plain Text standard format so it can be used later on in the annotation tool. Afterwards, the corpus collected was automatically translated from English to Arabic using the Google Translate API service. 3. Punctuation Annotation Guidelines Our punctuation guidelines focus on the types of punctuation errors that are targeted and describe the process of how to correct them and also when to add the missing punctuation marks. Many annotated examples are provided in the guidelines to illustrate the various annotation rules and exceptions. Since the Arabic punctuation rules are not always clearly defined, we adopted an iterative approach for developing the guidelines, which includes multiple revisions and updates needed to different rounds of updating and annotation to reach a consistent set of directions. In order to help our annotators with some complex punctuation rules, we wrote a summary of the most common punctuation marks rules in Arabic as an appendix to the guidelines. The rules of punctuation vary with language and register. Moreover, aspects of punctuation use vary from author to author, and can be considered a stylistic choice. While punctuation in the English or French language is guided by a series of grammar-related rules, in other languages such as Arabic, punctuation is a recent innovation as pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. According to Awad (2013), there is an inconsistency in the punctuation rules and usage in Arabic, and omitting the punctuation marks is a very frequent error. We use the Arabic standard general punctuation rules commonly used today and described in Awad (2013). Punctuation errors are especially present in student essays and online news comments. This is mainly due to the fact that some punctuation mark rules are not clearly defined in Arabic writing references. We created a set of simple rules for correcting punctuation and adding missing ones. 4. Annotation Procedure The lead annotator is also the annotation work-flow manager of this project. He frequently evaluate the quality of the annotation, monitor and report on the annotation progress. A clearly defined protocol is set, including a routine for the annotation job assignment and the inter-annotator agreement evaluation. The lead annotators is also responsible of the corpus selection and normalization process beside the annotation of the gold standard to be used to compute the Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) portion of the corpus. The annotators in this project are five university graduates with good Arabic language background. To ensure the annotation quality, an extensive training phase for each annotator was conducted. Afterwards, the annotator's performance is closely monitored during the initial period, before allowing the annotator to join the official annotation production phase. Moreover, a dedicated on-line discussion group is frequently used by the annotation team to keep track of the punctuation questions and issues raised during the annotation process, this mechanism, proved to help the annotators and the lead annotator to have a better communication. This framework includes two major components: 1. The annotation management interface which is used to assist the lead annotator in the general work-flow process, it allows the user to upload, assign, monitor, evaluate and export annotation tasks. 2. The annotation interface is the actual annotation tool, which allows the annotators to do the manual correction of the Arabic text and add the missing punctuation or correct the existing ones. All the annotation history is recorded in a database and can be exported to an XML export file to keep a trace of the entire correction actions for a given file. 5. Evaluation To evaluate the punctuation annotation quality, we measure the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) on randomly selected files to ensure that the annotators consistently following the annotation guidelines. A high annotation agreement is a good indicator of the data quality. The IAA is measured over all pairs of annotations to compute the AWER (Average Word Error Rate). In this evaluation, the WER measures the punctuation error against all punctuation marks in the text. The average IAA results obtained was 89.84% (WER) computed over 10 files from each corpus (4,116 words total) annotated by at least three different annotators. Overall, the results obtained showed that the annotators are consistently following the punctuation guidelines. 6. Conclusions We presented our method to create an Arabic manually punctuated corpus, including the writing of the guidelines as well as the annotation procedure and the quality control procedure used to verify the annotation quality. We showed that there is a high variety in the use of punctuation in Arabic texts and despite the existence of punctuation rules, the use of punctuation in Arabic is highly individual and it depends on the style of the author who defines his own use of punctuation. 7. References Awad, D. (2013). La ponctuation arabe: histoire et regles. Zaghouani, W., Mohit, B., Habash, N., Obeid, O., Tomeh, N., Rozovskaya, A., Farra, N., Alkuhlani, S., and Oflazer, K. (2014). Large scale arabic error annotation: Guidelines and framework. In International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014). Zaghouani, W., Habash, N., Bouamor, H., Rozovskaya, A., Mohit, B., Heider, A., and Oflazer, K. (2015). Correction annotation for non-native arabic texts: Guidelines and corpus. Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 129–139.


The Rescue, Edward Sackville-West's 1943 radio dramatization of part of Homer's Odyssey with music by Benjamin Britten, appears to be the first substantial treatment of Homeric epic on BBC Radio, and also the most enduring (with six further productions to 1988). The Homeric epics are rich sources of material for radio dramatization: the poems offer much that is worth re-telling, with many 'dramatic' episodes; furthermore, a great proportion of each poem is delivered in direct speech. But there is also a strong affinity between the ancient performance of Homeric epic and the modern radio play. Both tell of characters and events that the audience cannot see: ancient bard and modern radio practitioners (writers, composers, actors, etc.) must capture and hold the imagination of the audience without the aid of bodily impersonation. This article considers two interrelated aspects of this particular radio Odyssey: first, how the collaboration of Sackville-West and Britten made a distinctive exploration of the dramatic potential of radio; second, how the close association of words and music suggest a reflective awareness of The Rescue's relationship with ancient epic performance, especially through the character of the bard Phemius. The narrative of The Rescue both resonates with the contemporary international situation and argues for the humanizing potential of aesthetic experience: in the Epilogue, Phemius implores the (radio) audience to 'Forget the poem I made; but remember/The purer voice you hear behind my words', distilling a theme of the play which encourages characters and listeners to search for the meaning and value of things. Thus, the listener is encouraged not only to hear the story but also to listen to its meaning – not simply hear the music, but listen to what it is saying. The article concludes with a consideration of the evidence in the Listener Research Report of how individual listeners actually engaged with and responded to the 1943 premiere and later productions.


In this work, we report the first direct experimental observations of carbon nanotubes (CNT) field emitting in an oxygen environment, using aberration-corrected environmental transmission electron microscopy in combination with an electrical biasing specimen holder under low-dose, field-free imaging conditions. Our studies show that while the CNTs remain stable during high vacuum field emission, they experience abrupt decreases in length, also termed "burn-back", when field-emitting in an oxygen environment at around 30 Pa pressure. Furthermore, we perform correlative field-free and aberration-corrected, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy imaging to understand how the structure of the CNTs - particularly the opening of the nanotube caps - is influenced by its gas environment during field emission. This work provides significant insight into the mechanism of carbon nanotube behavior under non-ideal field emission conditions.


Fused silica (a-SiO2) exposure to low-energy femtosecond laser pulses leads to interesting effects such as a local increase of etching rate and/or a local increase of refractive index. Up to now the exact modifications occurring in the glass matrix after exposure remains elusive and various hypotheses among which the formation of color centers or of densified zones have been proposed. In the densification model, shorter SiO2 rings form in the glass matrix leading to an enhanced etching rate. In this paper, we investigate quantitatively the amount of volume variation occurring in well-defined laser exposed areas. Our method is based on the deflection of glass cantilevers and hypotheses from classical beam theory. Specifically, 20-mm long cantilevers are fabricated using low-energy femtosecond laser pulses. After chemical etching, the cantilevers are exposed a second time to the same femtosecond laser but only in their upper-half thickness and this time, without a subsequent etching step. We observe micron-scale displacements at the cantilever tips that we use to estimate the volume variation in laser affected zones. Our results not only show that in the regime where nanogratings form (so called type II structures), laser affected zones expand but also provide a quantitative method to estimate the amount of stress as a function of the laser exposure parameters.


The paper illustrates the development of an electronic dictionary of the Daghestanian language Archi, and discusses the problems that such a morphologically complex language poses for lexicographers. The dictionary is built on a Microsoft Access database, and the paper discusses the linguistic issues of designing this. First, we provide general information about the Archi language (Section 1), then we give a brief sketch of its morphology, stressing the issues that are relevant for the dictionary (Section 2). Section 3 discusses the structure of lexical entries and describes the database. Section 4 discusses the general lexicographic problems that arise when one works on a dictionary of an unwritten language.


Performance assessment of water supply and wastewater services is today a major issue. Over the past six years, the National Civil Engineering Laboratory (Portugal) has been developing performance assessment systems for drinking water treatment plants (WTPs) and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). In 2009, a national field-test was launched in Portugal, 'PASt21', involving 27 plants (10 WTPs and 17 WWTPs). This paper presents an overview of the second generation of the performance indicator (PI) systems for the overall performance assessment of WTPs and WWTPs, the extent to which the systems were applied in the 5-year study period (2006–2010), and the aggregated results (average, median, percentiles 25 and 75, maximum and minimum) of representative PIs in each assessment group. It was concluded that all indicators are relevant, and the results show the ability of the proposed PI systems to assess the overall performance of a given treatment plant. The aggregated results are very important for the continuous improvement of the plant performance through benchmarking and periodic reassessment of targets.


This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a first-order impact on creative innovations—innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical innovation, and on how managers of different ages and human capital are sorted across different firms with different degrees of openness to disruption, we provide firm-level, patent level and cross-country evidence consistent with this pattern. Our measures of creative innovations proxy for innovation quality (average number of citations per patent) and creativity (fraction of superstar innovators, the likelihood of a very high number of citations, and generality of patents). Our main proxy for openness to disruption is the age of the manager - based on the idea that only companies or societies open to such disruption will allow the young to rise up within the hierarchy. Using this proxy at the firm, patent and country level, we present robust evidence that openness to disruption is associated with more creative innovations, but we also show that once the effect of the sorting of young managers to firms that are more open to disruption is factored in, the (causal) impact of manager age on creative innovations is small.


We present user-friendly and adaptable software to provide biologists, clinical researchers and possibly diagnostic clinicians with the ability to robustly detect and reconstruct viral genomes from complex deep sequence datasets. A set of modular bioinformatic tools and workflows was implemented as the Metavisitor package in the Galaxy framework. Using the graphical Galaxy workflow editor, users with minimal computational skills can use existing Metavisitor workflows or adapt them to suit specific needs by adding or modifying analysis modules. Metavisitor can be used on our Mississippi server, or can be installed on any Galaxy server instance and a pre-configured Metavisitor server image is provided. Metavisitor works with DNA, RNA or small RNA sequencing data over a range of read lengths and can use a combination of de novo and guided approaches to assemble genomes from sequencing reads. We show that the software has the potential for quick diagnosis as well as discovery of viruses from a vast array of organisms. Importantly, we provide here executable Metavisitor use cases, which increase the accessibility and transparency of the software, ultimately enabling biologists or clinicians to focus on biological or medical questions.


This work is concerned with the nature of liquid flow across industrial sieve trays operating in the spray, mixed, and the emulsified flow regimes. In order to overcome the practical difficulties of removing many samples from a commercial tray, the mass transfer process was investigated in an air water simulator column by heat transfer analogy. The temperature of the warm water was measured by many thermocouples as the water flowed across the single pass 1.2 m diameter sieve tray. The thermocouples were linked to a mini computer for the storage of the data. The temperature data were then transferred to a main frame computer to generate temperature profiles - analogous to concentration profiles. A comprehensive study of the existing tray efficiency models was carried out using computerised numerical solutions. The calculated results were compared with experimental results published by the Fractionation Research Incorporation (FRl) and the existing models did not show any agreement with the experimental results. Only the Porter and Lockett model showed a reasonable agreement with the experimental results for cenain tray efficiency values. A rectangular active section tray was constructed and tested to establish the channelling effect and the result of its effect on circular tray designs. The developed flow patterns showed predominantly flat profiles and some indication of significant liquid flow through the central region of the tray. This comfirms that the rectangular tray configuration might not be a satisfactory solution for liquid maldistribution on sieve trays. For a typical industrial tray the flow of liquid as it crosses the tray from the inlet to the outlet weir could be affected by the mixing of liquid by the eddy, momentum and the weir shape in the axial or the transverse direction or both. Conventional U-shape profiles were developed when the operating conditions were such that the froth dispersion was in the mixed regime, with good liquid temperature distribution while in the spray regime. For the 12.5 mm hole diameter tray the constant temperature profiles were found to be in the axial direction while in the spray regime and in the transverse direction for the 4.5 mm hole tray. It was observed that the extent of the liquid stagnant zones at the sides of the tray depended on the tray hole diameter and was larger for the 4.5 mm hole tray. The liquid hold-up results show a high liquid hold-up at the areas of the tray with low liquid temperatures, this supports the doubts about the assumptions of constant point efficiency across an operating tray. Liquid flow over the outlet weir showed more liquid flow at the centre of the tray at high liquid loading with low liquid flow at both ends of the weir. The calculated results of the point and tray efficiency model showed a general increase in the calculated point and tray efficiencies with an increase in the weir loading, as the flow regime changed from the spray to the mixed regime the point and the tray efficiencies increased from approximately 30 to 80%.Through the mixed flow regime the efficiencies were found to remain fairly constant, and as the operating conditions were changed to maintain an emulsified flow regime there was a decrease in the resulting efficiencies. The results of the estimated coefficient of mixing for the small and large hole diameter trays show that the extent of liquid mixing on an operating tray generally increased with increasing capacity factor, but decreased with increasing weir loads. This demonstrates that above certain weir loads, the effect of eddy diffusion mechanism on the process of liquid mixing on an operating tray to be negligible.


This paper investigates catastrophe risk for South African life insurers by considering the additional deaths that could arise from a 1-in-200 year mortality shock. Existing South African academic research on catastrophic risk has mostly focused on property losses and the resulting impact on property insurance companies. Life catastrophe risks have not been extensively modelled in a South African context. Local research would be beneficial in terms of quantifying these catastrophic risks for South African life insurers, and would assist firms when assessing their own catastrophe mortality solvency requirements under the new Solvency Assessment and Management (SAM) regime by providing a summary of data relating to various past catastrophes. In this paper we model a wide range of catastrophes to assess such mortality risk faced by life insurance companies in South Africa. An extensive exercise was undertaken to obtain data for a wide range of catastrophes and these data were used to derive severity and frequency distributions for each type of catastrophe. Data relating to global events were used to supplement South African data where local data were sparse. Data sources included official government statistics, industry reports and historical news reports. Since, by nature, catastrophic events are rare, little data are available for certain types of catastrophe. This means there is a large degree of uncertainty underlying some of the estimates. Simulation techniques were used to derive estimated distributions for the potential number of deaths for particular catastrophic events. The calculated overall shock for the national population was 2.6 deaths per thousand, which was lower than the SAM Pillar 1 shock of 3.2 deaths per thousand for the same population. It has been found that a worldwide pandemic is by far the main risk in terms of number of deaths in a catastrophe and, given that this is the most significant component of catastrophe risk, prior research on this risk in an South African context is summarised and revisited.


On July 7, Tom Price, MD, secretary of the Department of Health and H u m a n S e r v i c e s ( H H S ) , announced the appointment of Brenda Fitzgerald, MD, as the 17th director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To this position, Dr Fitzgerald brings her experience as Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, a role in which she championed infant health and survival, tobacco control, and obesity prevention. Other significant choices of individuals to head agencies that affect the public's health include the recent nomination of Jerome Adams, MD, MPH, as surgeon general, and reappointment of Francis Collins, MD, PhD, as National Institutes of Health director. While such choices appear to bode well for public health, how well these agencies and others will be funded for programs affecting public health both inside and outside the United States matters enormously. What has the Trump administration signaled about its intentions in its proposed budget?


In the past few decades it has become obvious that many phenomena in nature and in social systems result from the non-linear processes and interactions that often occur in such systems. The main characteristics of these complex systems are interconnectivity, microdiversity, indeterminism and co-evolution. Research on these phenomena has become known as 'complexity science'. Many fields are closely linked to complexity science, including nonlinear science, system dynamics, systems theory, chaos theory, spontaneous self-organisation, cellular automata and complex adaptive systems.


This study expands tests of the overconfidence hypothesis to international markets, where the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that stock prices the world around are also biased by investor overconfidence. A novel aspect of the test here is combination of the overconfidence hypothesis with valuation theory. When stocks are categorized according to how quickly they are expected to grow, there is an interaction effect between earnings growth and the payoffs to contrarian and momentum strategies. Data from France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. show that successful investment strategies differ, depending on a stock's growth rate. A momentum strategy of buying stocks with positive earnings estimate revisions and selling stocks with negative estimate revisions is significantly more profitable in fast-growth companies, for instance, while a contrarian strategy of buying low P/E stocks and selling high P/E stocks produces greater and more consistent profits in slow-growth companies. The results suggest that traditional value-oriented managers should focus on slow-growth companies, while successful growth managers should ride winners and be willing to sell when confronted with bad news.


Background: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have the potential to optimize the rhizospheric soil characteristics considerably thereby affecting plant growth. Objectives: The aim is to investigate the effects of fungi inoculation (Glomus intraradices) on morphological, physiological and phytochemical traits of Rosemary (Rosemarinus officinalis L.) under salt stress. Methods: A factorial experiment was conducted on the basis of randomized complete blocks design in three replications at the Institute of Medicinal Plants in the Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR). The mycorrihzal fungi in two levels (inoculation and non-inoculation) and saline conditions in five levels (EC of 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 dS.m -1 ) were the two studied factors. The essential oil content and its components were measured with Clevenger-type apparatus and GC/Mass and GC. Results: The results showed that the interaction effect of fungi inoculation and salinity was significant (P≤0.01) on morphological and phytochemical traits. The highest number of shoots per plant in fungi inoculation and salinity of 2 dS.m -1 , number of leaves per plant in fungi inoculation and salinity of 6 dS.m -1 , stem diameter in non-inoculation and salinity of 8 dS.m -1 was recorded, while the maximum leaf width in non-inoculation and salinity of 2 dS.m -1 , stems fresh weight in fungi inoculation and control and, roots fresh and dry weight in treatment of fungi inoculation for both traits and salinity of 8 dS.m -1 and 6 dS.m -1 was recorded, respectively. Also, interaction effect of fungi inoculation and salinity significantly increased essential oil content and its components.


This research investigates the applicability of mathematical
and computer procedures for the simulation of
theoretically normal human blood biochemistry to the problem
of simulating the unique blood of certain clinical
patients. This Memorandum reviews only briefly the earlier
methods for the steady-state simulation of large biochemical
systems, and then adapts the basic concepts to the problem
of automatically modeling the unique blood of an individual.
The procedures and algorithms are discussed, and, in particular,
it is shown that given sufficient laboratory data
a unique model can automatically be defined.
In thirty separate laboratory experiments, a model of
individual blood was obtained and tested against the real
blood in vitro, under various chemical stresses. Results indicate satisfactory agreement except in cases where time dependent
or kinetic parameters are involved as in potassiumion
uptake by the cells. These results have encouraged the
belief that with subsequent improvement, in particular,
development of procedures based upon minimal data, modeling
procedures will be applicable and useful in a clinical
setting.


For the past five years, the Department of Energy's Co-Optima program has explored biomass-derived blendstocks with fuel properties that boost the efficiency of engines, seeking to enable technology for fuel-engine cooptimization. Past analysis quantified benefits of introducing co-optimized fuels and engines for light-duty vehicles with the core assumption that efficiency gains would be the same for vehicles with and without hybridized power trains. Vehicles with hybridized powertrains, however, could experience a different energy efficiency change than conventional vehicles, which could be a decrease, if the blended fuel is not tailored for their operation, or an increase, if the hybrid engine's operational conditions take better advantage of the blended fuel. Therefore, this study examines opportunities to reduce the environmental effects of light-duty transportation when fuel properties are tailored to the unique needs of hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid electric (HEV, PHEV) vehicles to improve their engine efficiency. The analysis tracks greenhouse gas emissions reductions on a well-to-wheels basis when co-designed fuels and engines for vehicles with hybridized power trains are introduced into the market. Engine efficiency gains and incremental vehicle cost are key parameters in the analysis as we seek fuel-engine technology that will significantly boost overall vehicle efficiency at a price point that is commercially viable. Twelve co-deployment scenarios were generated based on 3 different levels of engine efficiency improvement (8% ,10% and 12%) and 4 level incremental costs ($100, $250, $500 and $1000) and the corresponding environmental effects are tracked as the technologies gain market adoption. The preliminary results show that the effect of incremental cost and efficiency gain on vehicle sales indicates that adoption of co-optimized HEV, and PHEVs are relatively insensitive to incremental vehicle purchase costs up to $250. In addition, the results indicate higher adoption of cooptimized HEVs at $100 and $250 price increase and 12% efficiency gain while the adoption of HEVs and PHEVs across other scenarios remain consistent. From the best-case scenario ($100, vehicle price increase and 12% engine efficiency increase), the result shows that using biofuels with tailored properties and advanced engines to achieve an increase hybridized engine efficiency could translate to 17.5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the light duty vehicle fleet including non-hybridized vehicles in


1 Plant ecologists have developed numerous ways to measure competition and to rank the effects of competition relative to other factors. According to one line of logic, there is an important distinction between competitive intensity (broadly, the absolute, proximate effects on individuals) and the importance of competition (loosely, the relative effects on ecological or evolutionary processes). 2 It has been argued recently that there is a great deal of confusion in the literature regarding these concepts. We agree and suggest that this arose because of loose logic in the initial formulation, and that this has been perpetuated and exacerbated in recent critiques. 3 Using a simple example, we argue that recent analyses have generated new problems because of a failure to measure importance in terms of individual fitness (defined in an evolutionary sense) or per capita rates of population change. Only when calculated in this way can importance be measured relative to all other processes in the life cycle. 4 It is not possible to directly measure the importance of competition from short‐term experiments that last less than one generation, using data from artificial conditions, or using data from glasshouse experiments. 5 Too often researchers use the term 'importance' without stating clearly what this is measured with respect to. We highlight, for example, that importance could be measured for population growth rate, community composition or community invasibility and that the appropriate measure would differ in each case. 6 Synthesis. We ask whether a single index of importance is really useful in plant ecology. The concept focuses on index‐based measures of competition using experimental data, narrowly concentrating on comparing two theories of plant competition. In the rest of the ecological world, researchers are using model‐based analyses of field data and increasingly sophisticated fitting techniques to dissect out the various processes determining the dynamics of single and interacting populations and making a great deal of progress. It is obviously very useful to disentangle the effects of competition at different stages in the life cycle and to determine how these vary along environmental gradients. However, the measure of competition and the measure of importance should be tailored to the question being addressed.


Abstract. Mean properties of individual contrails are characterized for a wide range of jet aircraft as a function of age during their life cycle from seconds to 11.5 h (7.4–18.7 km altitude, −88 to −31 °C ambient temperature), based on a compilation of about 230 previous in situ and remote sensing measurements. The airborne, satellite, and ground-based observations encompass exhaust contrails from jet aircraft from 1972 onwards, as well as a few older data for propeller aircraft. The contrails are characterized by mean ice particle sizes and concentrations, extinction, ice water content, optical depth, geometrical depth, and contrail width. Integral contrail properties include the cross-section area and total number of ice particles, total ice water content, and total extinction (area integral of extinction) per contrail length. When known, the contrail-causing aircraft and ambient conditions are characterized. The individual datasets are briefly described, including a few new analyses performed for this study, and compiled together to form a contrail library (COLI). The data are compared with results of the Contrail Cirrus Prediction (CoCiP) model. The observations confirm that the number of ice particles in contrails is controlled by the engine exhaust and the formation process in the jet phase, with some particle losses in the wake vortex phase, followed later by weak decreases with time. Contrail cross sections grow more quickly than expected from exhaust dilution. The cross-section-integrated extinction follows an algebraic approximation. The ratio of volume to effective mean radius decreases with time. The ice water content increases with increasing temperature, similar to non-contrail cirrus, while the equivalent relative humidity over ice saturation of the contrail ice mass increases at lower temperatures in the data. Several contrails were observed in warm air above the Schmidt–Appleman threshold temperature. The emission index of ice particles, i.e., the number of ice particles formed in the young contrail per burnt fuel mass, is estimated from the measured concentrations for estimated dilution; maximum values exceed 1015 kg−1. The dependence of the data on the observation methods is discussed. We find no obvious indication for significant contributions from spurious particles resulting from shattering of ice crystals on the microphysical probes.


We study call routing policies commonly used in call centers with multiple call types and multiple agent groups. We propose a new weight-based routing policy where each pair (call type, agent group) is given a matching priority defined as an affine combination of the longest waiting time for that call type and the longest idle time in that agent group. The coefficients in this combination are parameters to be optimized. This type of policy is more flexible than traditional ones found in practice, and it performs better in many situations. We consider objective functions that account for the service levels, the abandonment ratios, and the fairness of occupancy across agent groups. We select the parameters of all considered policies via simulation-based optimization heuristics. This only requires the availablity of a simulation model of the call center, which can be much more detailed and realistic than the models used elsewhere in the literature to study the optimality of certain types of routing rules. We offer a first numerical study of realistic routing rules that takes into account the complexity of real-life call centers.


The Gulf of Mexico is a place where the environment and the economy both coexist and contend. It is a resilient large marine ecosystem that has changed in response to many drivers and pressures that we are only now beginning to fully understand. Coastlines of the states that border the Gulf comprise about half of the US southern seaboard, and those states are capped by the vast Midwest. The Gulf drains most of North America and is both an economic keystone and an unintended waste receptacle. It is a renowned resource for seafood markets, recreational fishing, and beach destinations and an international maritime highway fueled by vast, but limited, hydrocarbon reserves. Today, more is known about the Gulf than was imagined possible only a few years ago. That gain in knowledge was driven by one of the greatest environmental disasters of this country's history, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The multitude of response actions and subsequent funded research significantly contributed to expanding our knowledge and, perhaps most importantly, to guiding the work needed to restore the damage from that oil spill. Funding for further work should not wait for the next major disaster, which will be too late; progress must be maintained to ensure that the Gulf continues to be resilient.


Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimization of women by Non-western cultures. In this paper, I argue that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women.


Sediment samples (46 sites) and green-lipped mussels Perna viridis (L.) (19 sites) from
the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia were sampled between 1998 and 2001 and were
analyzed for Cd, Cu, Hg, Pb and Zn. The mean levels of the metals in the west coast
(offshore: intertidal) sediments were 0.75 ± 0.06 : 0.86 ± 0.11 µg/g dry weight (dw) for
Cd, 4.27 ± 0.36 : 29.22 ± 8.84 µg/g dw for Cu, 38.87 ± 2.93 : 60.10 ± 9.47 µg/g dw for
Hg, 17.36 ± 0.99 : 23.32 ± 3.39 µg/g dw for Pb and 37.22 ± 2.01 : 84.64 ± 12.62 µg/g dw
for Zn. The metal levels in the soft tissues (ST) of P. viridis were found to be 0.25-1.35
µg/g dw for Cd, 6.31-20.21 µg/g dw for Cu, 20.00-152.00 µg/g dw for Hg, 1.27-8.76
ug/g dw for Pb and 53.82-135.50 µg/g dw for Zn. All these metal levels were relatively
low in comparison with previously published regional data. In general, the metal levels
were higher in the intertidal sediment than in the offshore sediment. Geochemical studies
in the sediments revealed that about 58.6 : 57.7% for Cd, 53.3 : 46.3% for Cll, 72.6 :
54.3% for Pb and 34.5 : 48.7% for Zn, in the offshore and intertidal sediments,
respectively, were most likely due to anthropogenic sources. Localized elevations of heavy metals in a few locations indicated that the offshore and intertidal areas of the west
coast of Peninsular Malaysia were likely to have received anthropogenic metals.
By using the protein level a1lozyme approach, the genetic differentiation among the
different geographical populations of this species fell within the range for conspecific
populations. Since P. viridis populations are sedentary, widely distributed in the west
coastal area of Peninsular Malaysia and have low genetic differentiation, the species
generally is a good biomonitoring agent for heavy metals in the area. The mussel P.
viridis collected from the field also showed that the metal concentrations in its total ST
were positively and significantly (P< 0.05) correlated with Cd, eu and Pb in the
environment as represented by the sediment samples.
The suitability of P. viridis as a biomonitoring agent for heavy metals was experimentally
studied. The results of the laboratory experiments showed that the ST of P. viridis was
readily capable of accumulating heavy metals especially Cd, Pb and Hg to elevated
levels. Depuration studies also showed that the metal levels in different STs were
significantly (P< 0.05) correlated with those of the seawater. By using endpoints
mortality, filtration rate (FR) and condition index (CI), P. viridis was found to be a
sensitive but tolerant organism to Cd, Cu, Pb and Zn. The byssus (BYS) of P. viridis was
found to be a sensitive biomonitoring tool for Zn whereas its total shell was a good
biomonitoring material for Cd and Pb. Allozyme polymorphism of P. viridis was found
to be a potential biomarker for metal contamination. Simple indicators (aerial exposure
and shell deformities of P. viridis) for heavy metal pollution were also identified.


This paper presents a fabrication method and image transmission characteristics of a plastic focusing fiber which is flexible and has a nearly parabolic refractive index distribution. A new fabrication method is given, and the optimum control of index profile has been attained in order to reduce the aberration for imaging. A prototype fiber scope with TV monitor using the plastic fiber was made. Resolving power of 5-6 l/mm was shown to be attainable for fibers 3 mm in diameter and 150 mm in length.


During the Covid-19-induced financial turbulence, central counterparties (CCPs) issued large margin calls, weighing on the liquidity of clearing member banks. In spite of the turbulence, CCPs remained resilient, as intended by the post-crisis reforms of financial market infrastructures. Higher margins should be expected during heightened turbulence, but the extent of the procyclicality of margining is the consequence of various design choices. Systemic considerations call to examine the nexus between banks and CCPs. Therefore, when thinking about margining, central banks need to assess banks and CCPs jointly rather than in isolation.


OBJECTIVE
Many "guideline-development studies" have presented the sensitivity (SN) and specificity (SP) of a new decision tool to describe the potential improvements in utilisation of imaging techniques as a result of adopting the new guideline. However, SN and SP are measures designed to assess how well a new guideline compares with a gold standard. These measures do not evaluate how many patients with a positive test actually have the disease; nor do they evaluate how many patients with a negative test do not have the disease. To evaluate these characteristics of a decision tool, other measures, namely the positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV), should be calculated. This report highlights some of the main methodological challenges in interpretation of the studies that attempt to evaluate the development of an imaging guideline and the effectiveness of an imaging guideline in real world practice.

METHODS
We define four key measures of a decision tool: SN, SP, PPV and NPV. Using data from two hypothetical populations, we explain how these measures can be calculated and interpreted. We place special emphasis on the purpose of and differences between the SN-SP and PPV-NPV.

RESULTS
Borrowing information from two studies, we demonstrate how these measures should be used in the radiology healthcare services research to evaluate decision guidelines.

CONCLUSION
The use of appropriate measures for the specific question at hand will ensure the guidelines are useful, safe, cost reducing and effective clinical tools.


Images of artworks can be stored in media that preserve different characteristics of the original. Differences exist in the extent to which we can preserve color, three-dimensionality, surface texture, fine structure, tonal gradations, temporal variations and other characteristics that lend uniqueness to individual artworks. Usually, we are willing to sacrifice some of these characteristics in exchange for the permanence and recoverability offered by storage media. Thus, a color slide (diapositive), which is a common medium for storing images of artworks, compromises all of the above properties to different extents but is nevertheless considered useful for the archival properties it offers for images of artworks. Digital storage media used in conjunction with computers offer new opportunities and demand new compromises in storing art images. An unusual challenge is offered by the possibility of providing intelligence to a computer. The authors make clear the sense in which we may ascribe intelligence to the computer and how this may be used to 'perceive' the image of an artwork. The computer then uses its knowledge of the artwork with respect to a large class of such works not only for archival storage but also to achieve economy in the use of the storage medium. The authors illustrate the achievement of storage economy as much as tens of thousands of times greater than storage without intelligence. The intelligence is provided to the computer as syntactic descriptions of classes of artworks. The syntactic descriptions incorporate insight from the art historian, critic or artist who uses innovative tools like shape grammars to provide the computer with a small part of the intelligence that the educated human viewer brings to the perception of the artwork.


Translation is an age old multilingual activity whose increasingly more important relevance is being captured by today's multidisciplinary character of translation studies. This contribution first sketches the linguistic product-oriented approach, focusing on texts in different languages (translations, their source texts and comparable texts) and investigating highly frequent translation features such as explicitation. Secondly, recent inquiries into the translation process are described, catching glimpses of the translator's multilingual cognitive activity and applying methods of keystroke logging and eye-tracking. A third and final kind of studies has been inspired by the digital advances of recent years, which have led to a drastic change in translators' activities, having them integrate Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools into their daily multilingual translation workflow.


In many situations, telecommunication engineers are faced with the problem of extracting information from the network. This corresponds in many cases to infer on functionals of spectrum of random matrices with only a limited knowledge on the statistics of the matrix entries. Here, the inference on the spectrum of random matrices is realized by moments method. In its full generality, the problem requires some sophisticated tools related to free probability theory and the explicit spectrum (complete information) can hardly be obtained (except for some trivial cases). Results in the asymptotic case and in the finite case are presented and simulations show how the moments method approach can be applied in practice. Several still open problems in this field are also presented.


Heart rate response to electrical stimulation of the right stellate ganglion of vagotomized cats was studied before and after the administration of sodium pentobarbital. The increase and decrease of heart rate with the initiation and cessation of sympathetic stimulation could be accurately described by separate exponential time functions. The time constants of rise and decline, the maximum steady-state heart rate, and the time between cessation of stimulation and initial decrease of heart rate (lag) were functions of the frequency and voltage of stimulation. The main effects of sodium pentobarbital were: 1) to prolong the rise of heart rate by 20-30 percent (P smaller than 0.0001),2) to prolong the decay of heart rate by 36-56 percent (P smaller than 0.005), and 3) to decrease the resting heart rate. The effects were observed 10 min after administration of the drug and lasted at least 4 h.


Big data analytics platforms have played a critical role in the unprecedented success of data-driven applications. However, real-time and streaming data applications, and recent legislation, e.g., GDPR in Europe, have posed constraints on exchanging and analyzing data, especially personal data, across geographic regions. To address such constraints data has to be processed and analyzed in-situ and aggregated results have to be exchanged among the different sites for further processing. This introduces additional network delays due to the geographic distribution of the sites and potentially affecting the performance of analytics platforms that are designed to operate in datacenters with low network delays. In this paper, we show that the three most popular big data analytics systems (Apache Storm, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink) fail to tolerate round-trip times more than 30 milliseconds even when the input data rate is low. The execution time of distributed big data analytics tasks degrades substantially after this threshold, and some of the systems are more sensitive than others. A closer examination and understanding of the design of these systems show that there is no winner in all wide-area settings. However, we show that it is possible to improve the performance of all these popular big data analytics systems significantly amid even transcontinental delays (where inter-node delay is more than 30 milliseconds) and achieve performance comparable to this within a datacenter for the same load.


Religious communication affects political behavior through two primary channels: political messages coming from a religious source and religious messages coming from a political source. In terms of the first channel, political scientists have found that clergy do tend to get involved in politics, and church-goers often hear political messages over the pulpit, although not as frequently as might be expected. Sometimes these political messages are successful in swaying opinions, but not always; context matters a great deal. In terms of the second channel, politicians use religious rhetoric ("God talk") in an attempt to increase their support and win votes. When this happens, some groups are more likely to respond than others, including political conservatives, more frequent church attenders, and racial/ethnic minorities. The scope and effectiveness of religious communication remains a field ripe for further research, especially in contexts outside of the United States.


We have solved the crystal structures of the EphA3 tyrosine kinase in complex with nine small-molecule inhibitors, which represent five different chemotypes and three main binding modes, i.e., types I and I1/2 (DFG in) and type II (DFG out). The three structures with type I1/2 inhibitors show that the higher affinity with respect to type I is due to an additional polar group (hydroxyl or pyrazole ring of indazole) which is fully buried and is involved in the same hydrogen bonds as the (urea or amide) linker of the type II inhibitors. Overall, the type I and type II binding modes belong to the lock-and-key and induced fit mechanism, respectively. In the type II binding, the scaffold in contact with the hinge region influences the position of the Phe765 side chain of the DFG motif and the orientation of the Gly-rich loop. The binding mode of Birb796 in the EphA3 kinase does not involve any hydrogen bond with the hinge region, which is different from the Birb796/p38 MAP kinase complex. Our structural analysis emphasizes the importance of accounting for structural plasticity of the ATP binding site in the design of type II inhibitors of tyrosine kinases.


Three-year-old grapevines of four cultivars (Garnacha tinta (Grenache noir), Tempranillo, Chardonnay and Airen) were grown on 35 L container under full irrigation and restricted irrigation conditions in order to determine the effect of water stress on carbohydrate allocation. Total grapevine dry matter was measured at pruning, fruitset, veraison and harvest. Roots, wood, shoots, leaves and clusters were dried separately. Shoots were the most affected organs by water stress, while wood was the least affected. Vines under water stress partitioned more dry matter to wood and roots to the detriment of fruits and shoots. The period from fruitset to veraison was the most active for dry matter accumulation under conditions of stress, whereas non-water stressed vines accumulated more dry matter from veraison to harvest. Under both irrigation treatments, fruits competed with roots for dry matter partitioning. Irrigation treatment and cultivar determined fruit size. Fruit size determined dry matter partitioning between organs and the dry matter accumulation pattern.


Paper aims at defining the value, taking conceptual ideas from the service economy, and at designing main conceptual criteria for correcting of routine approach in economics. It is built as a theoretical questioning and debate, starting with reminding certain issues from the Mercantilist and Physiocrat economic thought. The servicity view is thus reasoned, i.e. the respect to the actual service brought to the whole socio-economic and natural environment, being a part of a larger research. The actual context of the debate is given by the knowledge society in the post-industrial era. The results indicate theoretical clarifying, bringing a renovating interpretative view of value, particularly concerning the Physiocrat roots of value and productivity, as well as new questions to be answered, in a heterodox approach, containing the reserve of new horizons to be developed and applied in concrete circumstances.


This paper analyzes the impact of longer school schedules on children's 2nd grade reading comprehension skills in Chile. In a setting where families choose schools, we identify the causal effect of longer schedules with instrumental variables, using the local availability of full-day schools as an instrument. We find that lower-income families are more likely to choose full-day schools, and after controlling for selection, longer school schedules lead to an increase of 0.14 standard deviations in reading comprehension. Effects are heterogeneous, with greater benefits among children attending public (municipal) and urban schools, and among girls. We also find that the benefits of longer school days accumulate over time.


I. Flores has written a number of books on computers encompassing a broad spectrum of topics from logical design and system architecture to software and programming. This book on data structure and management examines the subject of data management in computer systems and gives a comprehensive treatment of the many facets of data; their encoding schemes, their representations in computer storage, the access and maintenance techniques for data structures and the related system-control operations to carry out data access and maintenance. The book starts from the fundamentals of data and data structures and places special emphasis on the reality of business data processing. The basic notions are then developed into thorough treatment of data management functions in both hardware and software, primarily in the context of IBM/ 360 type of systems. Despite the complexity of the subject matter, the material in the book is organized in a reasonably simplified manner to facilitate comprehension. The book can be used by students who major in computer systems and is also a good reference for practitioners in the data processing profession. For those readers who are information specialists but not involved in programming or managing computer systems, the book is a valuable text to gain understanding of the problems of data management.


Abstract The northern Kenya Rift is bounded on the west by uplands of Turkana which comprise horst-like blocks that include metamorphic basement rocks, locally overlain unconformably by the Cretaceous Lubur Sandstone, in turn overlain by predominantly volcanic sequences in which relatively thin sedimentary packages occur. Amphibolite facies crystalline rocks of the basement yield Early Palaeozoic K–Ar cooling ages reflecting the Pan-African Orogeny. Volcanism in Turkana was initiated through voluminous eruptions of transitional tholeiitic basalts commencing about 36 Ma ago in the Late Eocene, with some evidence for concomitant rhyolitic volcanism. Volcanism became dominantly rhyolitic in the interval from about 27 to 23 Ma ago, but remained bimodal as basaltic lavas are also known from this period. From about 19 to 15 Ma or younger, basaltic volcanism again dominated, often alkaline in nature, with thin but significant sedimentary sequences interleaved that have yielded important vertebrate faunal assemblages. Parallels exist between the volcanic history recorded in Turkana and that found in the Nabwal Hills east of Lake Turkana. In the southern Turkana region, oil exploration by seismic methods and deep drill holes has shown the existence of northerly-trending half-graben with up to 7 km of fill, and that these developed from at least Oligocene and possibly Late Eocene times. This suggests that the widespread basaltic volcanism at about 36 Ma ago (Late Eocene) heralds an earlier initiation of the Kenya Rift in northern Kenya than most workers have previously suggested.


Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is the most abundant neurosteroid synthesized de novo in the central nervous system. We previously reported that stimulation of the sigma-1 receptor by DHEA improves cognitive function by activating calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII), protein kinase C and extracellular signal-regulated kinase in the hippocampus in olfactory bulbectomized (OBX) mice. Here, we asked whether DHEA enhances neurogenesis in the subgranular zone of the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) and improves depressive-like behaviors observed in OBX mice. Chronic treatment with DHEA at 30 or 60 mg/kg p.o. for 14 days significantly improved hippocampal LTP impaired in OBX mice concomitant with increased CaMKII autophosphorylation and GluR1 (Ser-831) phosphorylation in the DG. Chronic DHEA treatment also ameliorated depressive-like behaviors in OBX mice, as assessed by tail suspension and forced swim tests, while a single DHEA treatment had no affect. DHEA treatment also significantly increased the number of BrdU-positive neurons in the subgranular zone of the DG of OBX mice, an increase inhibited by treatment with NE-100, a sigma-1 receptor antagonist. DHEA treatment also significantly increased phosphorylation of Akt (Ser-473), Akt (Ser-308) and ERK in the DG. Furthermore, GSK-3β (Ser-9) phosphorylation increased in the DG of OBX mice possibly accounting for increased neurogenesis through Akt activation. Finally, we confirmed that DHEA treatment of OBX mice increases the number of BrdU-positive neurons co-expressing β-catenin, a downstream GSK-3βtarget. Overall, we conclude that sigma-1 receptor stimulation by DHEA ameliorates OBX-induced depressive-like behaviors by increasing neurogenesis in the DG through activation of the Akt/GSK-3β/β-catenin pathway.


This study describes the fabrication of a sensitive and selective graphene-based electrochemical nanosensor for the detection of aliskiren (ALS). It is the first research study where the electrochemical oxidation and determination of ALS were investigated by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and adsorptive stripping differential pulse voltammetry (AdsDPV) using a 2D nanocomposite electrode modified with reduced graphene oxide/platinum nanoparticles/nafion (rGO/PtNPs/NFN/GCE). An rGO/PtNP nanocomposite was synthesized directly from graphene oxide (GO) and platinum salt using a single-step chemical reduction method. The synthesized rGO/PtNPs were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The developed sensor exhibited excellent electrocatalytic activity (i.e. shifting the potential from 1225 to 1059 mV) towards the oxidation of ALS. The voltammetric responses of ALS presented a good linearity with an increase in concentration within two concentration ranges of 0.045–0.45 μM and 0.45–2.70 μM with a low detection limit of 8.2 nM. The analytical applicability of the proposed sensor was demonstrated by determining ALS with the recovery result of 97.0% in human blood plasma. The results strongly suggested that the proposed sensor could be promising as an alternative analytical approach for routine analysis of ALS in clinical samples.


This book examines the crisis of EMU through the lenses of comparative political economy. It retraces the development of wage-setting systems in the core and peripheral EMU member states, and how these contributed to the increasing divergence between creditor and debtor states in the late 2000s. Starting with the construction of the Deutschmark bloc, through the Maastricht process of the 1990s, and into the first decade of EMU, this book analyzes how labour unions and wage determination systems adjusted in response to monetary integration and, in turn, influenced the shape that monetary union would eventually take. Before the introduction of the Euro, labour unions were disciplined by central banks and governments, after social conflict in the north of the continent and with the use of social pacts in the others. Since controlling inflation had become the main goal of macro-economic policy, national central banks acted as a backstop to keep militant unions and profligate governments under control. Public sector wages thus were subordinated to manufacturing wages, a set-up policed by export sector unions, aided by the central bank. With the introduction of the single currency, the European Central Bank replaced the national central banks and, as a result, their capacity to control labour unions disappeared. The strong links between wages in the public sector unions and wages in the manufacturing export sector weakened dramatically in many countries, wage inflation re-emerged, and the stage was set for the current account divergences at the basis of the crisis of EMU.


This is the primary Earth Sciences guide to support teaching and research for the Earth Sciences through the doctoral level and beyond.


This study attempts to look at the internal and external factors which result in improved interior design project management through the proposal and empirical validation of a theoretical model. The model incorporates three major dimensions: users' technology readiness, their perceptions of information system quality, and project management effectiveness. Sample data collected from 50 interior design companies located in north, central and southern urban cities in Taiwan (n = 497) were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results showed that both users' technology readiness and information system quality have positive effect on project effectiveness. Specifically, technology readiness influences project management effectiveness indirectly through information system quality, indicating that it is crucial for organizations to invest and enhance quality technological performance support tools in conjunction with fostering users' acceptance and readiness of technology adoption and application.


Ventilation breakdown and narrow escapes occur at regular intervals, and sometimes these result in lethal outcomes. A ventilation breakdown in animal houses can cause a very rapid increase in air temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide concentrations inside the barn. The most severe narrow escapes occur in calf sheds (calves / beef), and houses for pigs and poultry. The most common cause of ventilation breakdown is power failure. Other causes can be failing control equipment and damaged fans. Ventilation breakdowns are most severe during summer time. According to a Swedish standard (SIS, 1992), the air temperature inside an animal house shall not exceed the outside air temperature with more than 4 oC when it is 21 oC outside. A limited increase of the temperature within a barn can cause a decrease in production. When the temperature exceeds an upper critical temperature a severe increase of the body temperature of the animals occur resulting in a lethal outcome. Heat stress in cows result in decreased milk production and a decrease in fertility. Hyperthermia is a common cause of death for poultry. Power failures in broiler houses are meant to be especially fatal. Pigs are meant to be especially sensitive to high temperatures since they not sweat, and not pant especially good. In directions from the Swedish Animal welfare Agency (DFS 2007:5) demands are present concerning emergency ventilation, and calf sheds (calves / beef), pig and poultry houses must be equipped with alarm equipment for excess temperature, power failure and failure concerning the alarm equipment etc. For making a summary of different brands and different models of alarm equipment available, information and pamphlets were collected from different companies. A number of equipments on the Swedish market fulfil relevant demands on alarm equipment for animal houses. A questionnaire was sent to producers with poultry, pigs and cattle in order to map the present state of alarm and emergency ventilation at Swedish farms. Totally 180 questionnaires were sent to farmers with poultry, pigs and cattle and the response rate was 72 %. The study showed that at the present time some types of alarms were missing in a number of barns. Presence of alarm was most frequent in poultry houses. Alarm for excess temperature and power failure were present in most houses with poultry. About two thirds of the poultry producers noted that they had alarm warning for alarm equipment failure. Among the pig producers about 30 % noted that they had alarm warning for excess temperature in the barn and about 20% noted that they had alarm warning for power failure and stopped fans. For producers with cattle only a small fraction noted that alarm equipments were installed in the barns. Different systems for making responsible personnel aware of an alarm exist. Combinations of different methods were frequently used. Many producers have combinations of sound / light signals, alarms to the dwellings, and alarms to mobile phones, and some producers also have alarm going further on to a central alarm station e.g. SOS Alarm or Falk. Most of the producers (more than 80 %) noted that they tested the alarm with regularity. On farms with milk production and cattle, the emergency ventilation was achieved in far most cases by the help of manually opened doors and windows, and by the help of manually 10 started electric works connected to a tractor. On farms with poultry production the emergency ventilation was managed by the help of automatic systems to a great extent. On farms with pig production, emergency ventilation was managed to a great extent by the help of windows, doors and manually started electric works connected to tractors. The study showed that power failures occurred 1-5 times per year or more frequent at more than 90 % of 120 producers answering to the question. At none of the farms animals had died as a consequence of the power failures. About 70 % of those who answered noted that they had a plan for how the emergency ventilation should be organised in case of power failure. A number of measures can be taken to improve the systems. Some producer pointed out the problem with false alarms and automatic opening of inlets / outlets leading to unwanted low temperatures in the barn during winter time. Another producer mentioned problems with the ordinary telephone net during thunderstorms and suggested switching over to mobile phones. At some farms a number of persons were meant to be able to handle problems coming up. Natural air exchange with closed and to some extent open inlets / outlets (ventilation openings) were measured in five buildings without animals by the use of trace gas technology. Measurements were made during summer time since the driving force for natural ventilation is low due to small temperature differences during that time of the year. The air exchange rate was measured by the help of sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) spread inside the buildings. The air exchange rate was calculated from the rate of concentration change by time after stopping the supply of gas. Gas concentration was registered by the help of an infrared spectrophotometer. Measurements in conventional buildings showed ventilation rates far below minimum ventilation rates. In such buildings a considerable increase of the inside air temperature will take place if animals producing heat are present. Studies in a comparatively less airtight and not insulated building showed air exchange rates well above minimum ventilation rates. The ventilation rate increased by increased inlet area and increased wind velocity. In order to estimate the rate of change in temperature during a ventilation breakdown a simple calculation model was derived from building characteristics and animal heat production equations. Calculations were made for ventilation rates of 2 m3·h-1·m-2 and 8 m3·h-1·m-2 for barns housing different animals. Calculations show a considerable increase of temperature during the first 30 minutes after a ventilation breakdown. The increase in temperature is higher in a light building compared to a heavy building. The increase in temperature are also high in buildings with pigs weighing 90 kg and houses with almost finished broilers compared to barns with cows and houses with 15 laying hens per m2 floor area. High temperatures during a ventilation breakdown can occur also at temperatures as low as 5 °C. In systems with much stored manure inside the buildings there is a risk for extremely high gas concentrations during a ventilation breakdown due to gases released from the manure. In calf sheds (beef barns) with tied animals an increase of temperature comparable to barns with dairy cows can be expected. When calves (beef) are housed on deep litter high gas concentrations may occur during a ventilation breakdown due to gases released from the litter. The studies point out that a very fast increase in temperature can occur at a ventilationbreakdown when openings between the barn and the outside air are small (inlet- /outlet openings). Calculations suggest that the temperature during unfavourable circumstances may increase up to 10 °C during less than 30 minutes. Thus, the time for arranging emergency ventilation may be very short.


In recent years, online chat has become a dominant mode of communication. This text-based medium has the potential of improving information awareness within an organization, but only if the critical information within messages can be identified and directed to where it is most needed. Such a goal has many challenges that traditional Information Extraction (IE) approaches have rarely addressed: the text is "dirty" (containing typos, misspellings, sparse punctuation, etc.), messages are fragmented and refer implicitly to previous messages and shared knowledge, messages from multiple topics are interleaved, etc. Past work in conversation analysis has included in-depth discussions of dialog acts, i.e., the individual utterances that comprise conversations. This paper describes how dialog acts within online chat differ from those within two-person voice conversations. It then presents methods for identifying dialog acts and the role that dialog acts play in identifying individual conversations within a chat stream. Identifying conversations is a necessary step for extracting actionable information, such as identifying individuals with specific expertise, recognizing reports of offline activities, and alerting decision makers to critical developments. Finally, we describe Chat-IE, a prototype software system that performs live dialog identification on chat streams.


This study suggests that multitasking constitutes an important source of gender inequality, which can help explain previous findings that mothers feel more burdened and stressed than do fathers even when they have relatively similar workloads. Using data from the 500 Family Study, including surveys and the Experience Sampling Method, the study examines activities parents simultaneously engage in and how they feel when multitasking. We find that mothers spend 10 more hours a week multitasking compared to fathers and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare. For mothers, multitasking activities at home and in public are associated with an increase in negative emotions, stress, psychological distress, and work-family conflict. By contrast, fathers' multitasking at home involves less housework and childcare and is not a negative experience. We also find several similarities by gender. Mothers' and fathers' multitasking in the company of a spouse or children are positive experiences, whereas multitasking at work, although associated with an increased sense of productivity, is perceived as a negative experience.


In standard epistemic logic, knowing that p is the same as knowing that p is true, but it does not say anything about understanding p or knowing its meaning. In this paper, we present a conservative extension of Public Announcement Logic (PAL) in which agents have knowledge or belief about both the truth values and the meanings of propositions. We give a complete axiomatization of PAL with Boolean Definitions and discuss various examples. An agent may understand a proposition without knowing its truth value or the other way round. Moreover, multiple agents can agree on something without agreeing on its meaning and vice versa.


A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we take a unifying view of this space of algorithms, and consider their trade-offs of three fundamental quantities: update variance, fixed-point bias, and contraction rate. This leads to new perspectives of existing methods, and also naturally yields novel algorithms for off-policy evaluation and control. We develop one such algorithm, C-trace, demonstrating that it is able to more efficiently make these trade-offs than existing methods in use, and that it can be scaled to yield state-of-the-art performance in large-scale environments.


This paper argues that religion influences the ways that people think and speak about corruption, typically leading to condemnation. However, it is also argued that, in a systemically corrupt country, such condemnation is unlikely to influence actual corrupt behaviour. Based on fieldwork in India, the paper finds that existing anti-corruption policies based on a principal-agent understanding of corruption, even if they incorporate religious organisations and leaders, are unlikely to work, partly because people consider "religion" to be a discredited entity. Instead, the paper argues that if corruption were to be seen as a collective action problem, anti-corruption practice would need significant rethinking. Despite its current lack of influence, revised policies and practices may see a role for religion.


Epipelic diatoms dominate the microphytobenthos of estuarine sediments, where they play important roles in ecological processes such as primary production, secondary production and sediment stability. Grazing (top-down control) and nutrients (bottom-up control) regulate the bio- mass and species composition of intertidal benthic diatom assemblages. However, observations of grazing/predation effects on species richness differ under contrasting nutrient conditions. We inves- tigated the interactive effects of grazing, nutrients and temperature and compared the impacts of Corophium volutator and Hydrobia ulvae—2 species that differ in their feeding strategies and bio- turbation effects. Diatom assemblages were collected from 2 estuaries (Biezelingsche Ham, Wester- schelde, high nutrient, and Zandkreek, Oosterschelde, low nutrient) in The Netherlands that differ in their dominant macrofaunal grazer species. Assemblages were grown in the laboratory without (con- trol) and with grazing activity under different nutrient and temperature regimes. C. volutator exerted a strong regulatory influence on epipelic diatoms by reducing biomass, and preferentially consuming certain dominant taxa, thereby increasing species richness, evenness and diversity. The percentage of epipsammic species increased in the presence of C. volutator, at the expense of Navicula species. Biezelingsche Ham assemblages grazed by C. volutator were not influenced by nutrient or tempera- ture regime, while control assemblages were influenced by temperature. In contrast, differences in the structure of diatom assemblages between the treatments were far less pronounced for H. ulvae- grazed and control Zandkreek assemblages. H. ulvae appeared to be a general consumer, grazing subdominant species. Species richness was greater at low temperature, regardless of nutrient level. Macrofaunal grazing did not predictably increase or decrease species diversity, but could potentially do both, and it may mask the effects of environmental and bottom-up control.


A gfp (green fluorescent protein) cassette for transcriptional fusions has been developed to study gene expression in Azoarcus sp. BH72 in association with plant roots. The bacteria expressed nitrogenase genes (nifHDK) in the rhizosphere, on root tips, and in epidermal cells of rice seedlings. Green fluorescent protein fusions also visualized promoter activity of single cells in soil.


The transfer pricing of intangibles (patents, trademarks, etc.) is an important issue in international tax law, because it determines how superprofits generated by multinationals through the exploitation of valuable intellectual property (IP) in their worldwide value chains are allocated among the jurisdictions in which they do business. For decades, multinationals have used IP transfer pricing to shift taxable profits out of high-tax jurisdictions, causing serious base erosion. Both the United States and the OECD seek to combat these practices through mandatory transfer pricing rules aimed at ensuring that IP superprofits are taxed where the intangible value was created. The profit allocation process prescribed by these rules is analysed in this text.

The first part of the process determines the amount of superprofits allocable to a unique and valuable IP (royalty amount). The US and OECD transfer pricing methods that govern this determination are analysed, applying a distinction between unique and non-unique value chain contributions, and it is observed that the methodology has evolved significantly over the years, from primarily relying on imprecise third-party benchmarking to more substance-based approaches that seek to ensure results that adhere to the realistic alternatives of the controlled parties.

The second part of the profit allocation process determines to which group entity, and thus indirectly also to which jurisdiction, the amount of IP superprofits will be allocated. The US and OECD intangible ownership provisions that govern this determination are analysed, applying an original analytical distinction between manufacturing and marketing IP. The analysis shows that, while both the US and OECD rules go a long way towards aligning the allocation of superprofits from R&D-based manufacturing IP with value creation, the allocation of superprofits from marketing IP still largely hinges on formal legal ownership and thus opens the opportunity for tax planning from multinationals and should be ripe for future reform.

This book is suited for those that have an interest in transfer pricing analysis, e.g. students, lawyers, accountants and economists. The historical background of the current transfer pricing rules is explained, allowing for an "all-in-one" solution for catching up with the US and OECD transfer pricing development over the last decades.


What has happened to the 'art' of speech-writing and speech making? Where are the men and women whose words set the heart racing with passion, turn battles, inspire populations to extraordinary endeavour: 'Ask not what your country can do for you', 'We shall fight on the beaches', 'I have a dream', and, 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Quote these words today and they still have the power to stop us in our tracks. This is a book that should be required reading, a book that should be on every bookshelf in the country. Here are fourteen key speeches of the 20th century introduced by prominent figures ranging from F.W. de Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev to Antony Beevor and Gordon Brown. 'Winston Churchill - We shall fight on the beaches' is introduced by Simon Schama. 'J.F. Kennedy - Ask not what your country can do for you' is introduced by Kennedy's speech writer Ted Sorensen. 'Nelson Mandela - An ideal for which I am prepared to die' is introduced by F.W. de Klerk. 'Harold Macmillan - No going back' is introduced by Douglas Hurd. 'Franklin D. Roosevelt - The only thing we have to fear is fear itself' is introduced by Gordon Brown. 'Nikita Khrushchev - The cult of the individual' is introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev. 'Emmeline Pankhurst - Freedom or death' is introduced by Germaine Greer. 'Martin Luther King - I have a dream' is introduced by Gary Younge. 'Charles de Gaulle - The flame of French resistance' is introduced by Antony Beevor. 'Margaret Thatcher - The lady's not for turning' is introduced by Simon Jenkins. 'Jawaharlal Nehru - A tryst with destiny' is introduced by Ian Jack. 'Aneurin Bevan - Weapons for squalid and trivial ends' is introduced by Tam Dalyell. 'Earl Spencer - The most hunted person of the modern age' is introduced by Beryl Bainbridge. 'Virginia Woolf - Shakespeare's sister' is introduced by Kate Mosse.


An area of great current interest is the synthesis and characterisation of molecules possessing moving parts, with the goal that they can function as "nanoscopic machines" carrying out tasks that molecules with flxed conventional architectures cannot do. Rotaxanes and catenanes (mechanically interlocked architectures) represent one approach towards achieving these aims as their component wheels and lor threads are connected together but can still move in certain, controlled, directions. This thesis focuses on the problem that many of the reactions (clipping and capping) that lead to interlocked architectures are carried out under kinetic control and as a result if clipping or capping does not occur via an already threaded precursor, "mistakes"- non-interlocked molecules- are produced that cannot be "corrected" leading to lower yields.

Chapter One gives a brief outline of the common synthetic approaches to interlocked architectures and the thermodynamically controlled routes that are now being developed to address the problems outlined above.

Chapters Two and Three are concerned with probing the mechanism of hydrogen bond-assembled rotaxane formation and gaining insight into the requirements of a thermodynamically controlled synthesis of interlocked architectures.

Chapter Four outlines the remarkable binding properties of the component macrocycle of a hydrogen bond-assembled catenane.

Chapter Five uses the results of chapter four to synthesise a rotaxane under thermodynamic control using slippage illustrating exactly why this approach to synthesis is a poor one.

Chapter Six describes the true thermodynamically controlled synthesis of hydrogen bond-assembled rotaxanes employing the results of chapter four and olefm metathesis.

Chapter Seven describes an efficient synthesis of catenates using octahedral metal templates. These catenates complement structurally analogous hydrogen bond assembled catenanes as they provide a way of fixing the conformational preference of the component rings. In addition there are elements of thermodynamic control built into the synthesis.


The main objective of this article is to study the recent Directive on the application of patients' right in cross-border healthcare by putting it into perspective with the case law that initiated it, together with the trade-offs that had to be taken into account. The drafters of the Directive have dealt with a number of trade-offs among the requirements of the respect for the freedom to receive care (as part of the freedom to provide services), the recognition of rights for the patients, the respect for the historical competence of Member States and the diversity of different healthcare models, and the protection of national financial balances. As a result of theses trade-offs, the Directive goes beyond a mere codification of the Kohll and Geraets-Smits case law. It displays an original combination of the codifying solutions derived from the free provision of services, the facilitation of the exercise of patient mobility by highlighting information in relation to such mobility, and a notable focus on several cooperating tools between States in connection with Article 168 TFEU. The article then raises some questions about the efficiency of this combination and its contribution to the realization of a genuine European Health policy.


Contrary to current notions about water abundance in Lebanon, the country is facing serious problems of unavailability, both in quantity and quality, geographical and sectoral. Even though this is due to several existing human-related aspects, i.e. management, ill-finance, non-integration and lack of relevant awareness on water use, the new dimension of climate change is unfortunately adding to the water problems in the country. Databases in Lebanon are not quite consistent and accurate, implying difficulty in interpreting correctly trends of change. Water supplies vary in the country from typically mild wet Mediterranean at the coast (600-800m.m.), through oromediterranean at the mountains (800-1200m.m.), to semi-arid inland (200 + 400m.m.). But actual records on the supply, i.e. precipitation, reflect a decreasing pattern over the last century. This is in agreement with predicted trends of temperature and precipitation values obtained from the GCM models over Lebanon. The HadCM2/HHGGax model predicts an average of 1.6 deg.C increase in temperature by the year 2020, and an equivalent average of about 3 percent less precipitation. Water balance is overall still positive, but deficits are commonly felt locally. The projection in ten to fifteen years, however, predicts an annual deficit of up to 800m.c.m. with the business as usual. The expected resultant impacts of climate change on resources, natural settings and human settings are directly related to water. The former includes, in addition to water itself, forestry, biodiversity and fisheries. In the latter two are incorporated inland and coastal zones as well as all the productive sectors. Cross impact structural analysis can reveal which socio-economic variables are most influenced, and then a driving power/dependency chart can reveal four types of strong or weak drivers, or otherwise. In view of the above, adaptation measures are given at strategic, population and individual levels with different opportunities from short to medium to long-term phases.


[1] High-latitude regions are underlain by the most organic carbon (OC)-rich soils on earth and currently subject to intense climate warming, potentially increasing remobilization and mineralization of soil OC. Sub-Arctic Scandinavia is located on the 0°C mean annual isotherm and is therefore particularly vulnerable to climate change. This study aimed to establish a baseline for soil OC release over the past century into Lake Tornetrask, the largest lake in sub-Arctic Scandinavia, through bulk geochemical and molecular radiocarbon analyses in chronologically constrained sediment cores. Our results suggest a dominance of peat-derived terrestrial OC inflow. We show that the annual terrestrial OC inflow to the lake is ∼12 times higher than the in-lake produced particulate OC, and consists for a large part (ca. 60%) of old OC from deep reservoirs in the catchment. The sedimentary record shows signs of increasing inflow of more degraded terrestrial matter since ∼1975, as indicated by increasing %TOC concentrations, a lowerδ13C value and lower TOC:TN ratios. Based on simultaneous changes in local climate and reported signs of permafrost degradation (e.g., active layer deepening, mire/peat erosion), the observed changes in the sedimentary record of Scandinavia's largest mountain lake likely reflect a climate warming-induced change in terrestrial OC inflow.


Room temperature ionic liquids confined in a solid material, for example, nano-porous silica, are particularly propitious for energy related applications. The aim of this study is to probe the molecular interactions established between the protic ionic liquid diethylmethylammonium methanesulfonate (DEMA-OMs) and silica, where the latter consists of nano-porous micro-particles with pores in the size range of 10 nm. The changes in the local coordination and transport properties induced by the nano-confinement of the ionic liquid are investigated by a combination of Raman and solid-state NMR spectroscopy. In particular, one-dimensional (1D) (1)H and (29)Si and two-dimensional (2D) (29)Si{(1)H} HETOCR solid-state NMR are combined to identify the sites of interaction at the silica-ionic liquid interface. Pulsed field gradient (PFG) NMR experiments are performed to estimate the self-diffusion of both bulk and nano-confined DEMA-OMs. Complementary information on the overall coordination and interaction scheme is achieved by Raman spectroscopy. All these advanced experimental techniques are revealed to be crucial to differentiate between ionic liquid molecules residing in the inter- or intra-particle domains.


Objective It is recognised that ketamine treatment can reduce suicidal ideation (SI) in people with depression, at least in the short term. However, information is lacking on patients' perspectives on such effects. Studying these can contribute to greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying impact of ketamine treatment on SI. The aim of this study was to investigate patients' reports of the impact of treatment on their SI, the duration of effects and possible mechanisms. Design and setting This qualitative study consisted of semi-structured interviews with patients who had received ketamine treatment for depression. Interview data were analysed thematically. Participants Fourteen patients (8 females, 6 males, aged 24–64 years) who had received treatment with ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, and had SI at the initiation of treatment. Two participants also had a diagnosis of bipolar type 1 and two of emotionally unstable personality disorder. Eight had a history of self-harm. Results SI reduced following ketamine treatment in 12 out of 14 participants for periods of a few hours following a single treatment to up to three years with ongoing treatment. Reduction of SI was variable in terms of extent and duration, and re-emergence of suicidal thoughts often occurred when treatment ceased. Participants' accounts indicated that reduced SI was associated with improved mood and reduced anxiety, as were clarity of thought, focus and concentration, and ability to function. Participants reported experiencing some or all of these effects in various orders of occurrence. Conclusion Generally, ketamine treatment was experienced as effective in reducing SI, although duration of effects varied considerably. Patients' perspectives indicated similarities in the mechanisms of reduction in SI, but some differences in their manifestation, particularly in relation to chronology. Experiences of this cohort suggest that reduced anxiety and improvement in ability to think and function were important mechanisms alongside, or in some cases independently of, improvement in mood. Further studies of patients' experiences are required to gain enhanced understanding of the variability of effects of ketamine on SI and functionality.


This study analyzes how morphosyntactic structures and information flow characteristics are used by interlocutors in producing and understanding clauses in conversational Javanese, focusing on the Cirebon variety of the language. While some clauses display grammatical mechanisms used to code their structure explicitly and redundantly, many other clauses include few if any of these grammatical resources. These extremes mark a cline between the morphosyntactic and paratactic expression of clauses. The situation is thrown into relief by the frequency of unexpressed referents and conversationalists' heavy reliance on shared experience and cultural knowledge. In all cases, pragmatic inference grounded in the interactional context is essential for establishing not only the discourse functions, but indeed also the very structure of clauses in conversational Javanese. This study contributes to our understanding of transitivity, emergent constituency, prosodic organization and the co-construction of meaning and structure by conversational interlocutors.


This paper explores architectural support for interfaces combining pen, paper, and PC. We show how the event-based approach common to GUIs can apply to augmented paper, and describe additions to address paper's distinguishing characteristics. To understand the developer experience of this architecture, we deployed the toolkit to 17 student teams for six weeks. Analysis of the developers' code provided insight into the appropriateness of events for paper UIs. The usage patterns we distilled informed a second iteration of the toolkit, which introduces techniques for integrating interactive and batched input handling, coordinating interactions across devices, and debugging paper applications. The study also revealed that programmers created gesture handlers by composing simple ink measurements. This desire for informal interactions inspired us to include abstractions for recognition. This work has implications beyond paper - designers of graphical tools can examine API usage to inform iterative toolkit development.


Background: Several studies in the recent decade have supported a relationship between different types of infections and CHD (Coronary Heart Disease); however, such a relationship is not definitely proven. Helicobacter pylori is one of the most common infections in human. The role of inflammation in the pathogens of CAD (Coronary Artery Disease) has been widely discussed; although, the mechanism is not clearly known yet. Methods: In this systematic review and meta-analysis all case-control articles on the relationship between Helicobacter pylori and CHD published from 31st June 2000 to 31st June 2016 indexed in Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, and Iranian databases Magiran, Iran Medex, Irandoc, and SID were included. The articles were searched using the following keywords in Farsi and English. The extracted data was imported into Microsoft Excel and analyzed in Stata 12. Results: Thirty case-control studies conducted in different regions of Iran (15 provinces) have been published from 2001 to 2015 included in this study. A general estimate of OR (Odds Ratio) for the association of Helicobacter pylori and heart diseases in Iran was 2.351 (95 CI: (1.715, 3.221)). Conclusion: According to the observed association between Helicobacter pylori and heart diseases in the resent study, most of the hosts of the bacterium are afflicted with the infection in their childhood. Therefore, personal hygiene promotion and preventive programs for Iranian children may have a considerable role in reducing the risk of the infection and cardiovascular diseases, consequently.


A persistant left superior vena cava (PLSVC) draining to the coronary sinus (CS) is the most common venous anomaly of the thorax, affecting approximately 0.5% - 2% of the general population, and is present in up to 10% of patients with other congenital cardiac anomalies.(1) The embryological development of the thoracic venous system is complex and subject to significant variation. Usually, most of the left cardinal system involutes, leaving only the coronary sinus, which drains the cardiac veins, and the ligament of Marshall (a remnant of the left superior vena cava).(2) The presence of a PLSVC is usually an incidental finding at either echocardiography, cardiac catheterisation or device implantation.(1) The typical echocardiographic findings are that of a dilated CS, which can be appreciated on the parasternal long axis view, the parasternal short axis at mitral valve level, the apical 2 chamber view and a modified apical four chamber view scanning down to visualise the CS (Figure 1). A contrast study with agitated saline ("bubble study") done via the left brachial vein will demonstrate the dilated CS draining into the right atrium (Figure 2).


We present spatial-coordinate transformation techniques to control the propagation of electromagnetic fields in several surprising and useful applications. The implementation of this approach is based on the fact that Maxwell's equations are form-invariant under coordinate transformations. Specifically, the effect of a general coordinate transformation can be realized by means of an equivalent anisotropic material, in which the original forms of Maxwell's equations are still preserved in the transformed space. Constitutive parameters of the anisotropic material are determined to appropriately reflect the consequences of the coordinate transformation on the electromagnetic fields. In this paper, we introduce novel implementations and interpretations of the coordinate-transformation approach for the purpose of "reshaping" objects in electromagnetic scattering, and for reshaping and miniaturizing waveguides. We demonstrate the applications of the proposed techniques via several finite-element simulations.