The last 40 years have witnessed huge changes in the educational experiences of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN), with increased emphasis on inclusive approaches to meeting their needs. This has been reflected in international agreements, also in UK Government legislation and reports during this period. Increasingly, pupils with SEN were educated in mainstream schools and so required to make a transition between schools at age 11. Successful transition from primary to secondary education is important for later wellbeing and attainment (West et al 2010). Pupils with SEN face increased demands as they move from spending most of the day with a single class teacher in their primary school to the organisational and relationship complexities of needing to work with several different adults during the week in the secondary setting. This research investigated the experiences of children with SEN statements as they made the potentially difficult transition from mainstream primary to mainstream secondary school. It explored those social, academic and personal organisation matters often mentioned by children as of concern to them at time of transition. A largely qualitative approach was adopted, exploring the views of children, parents and school staff about this process and the approaches taken by mainstream schools in an English Local Authority to facilitate the transition experience for the children involved. Evidence was collected through questionnaires and interviews, and analysed for purposes of this research with the use of vignettes. It was found that the children interviewed looked forward with a mixture of excitement and concern. Most optimism was expressed about the prospect of enhanced opportunities in sport, science and school lunch! There were three broad areas of concern; social concerns ranging from making new friendships to fear of bullying; academic concerns relating to the anticipated increased amount/complexity of the work and decreased support for their specific difficulties; and worries about personal organisation in a larger school with different subjects each requiring specific materials. The eight primary and three secondary schools visited during this research all made arrangements to introduce children to their new school in advance of transfer, with additional activities for children with SEN. Post-transition interviews with the remaining seven participants demonstrated that transition proceeded smoothly, and that any concerns expressed in year 6 were unfounded. The original contribution of this longitudinal research has been to demonstrate the difference between participants' pre-transition expectations and eventual reality, also to ascertain what features participants identified as the most effective in facilitating transition, for a sample of pupils with widely varying SEN.


Tightly confined plasmon waveguide modes supported by semicircular cross section top silver nanoridges are investigated. Mode field profiles, dispersion curves, propagation distances, confinement factors, and figures-of-merit of the semicircular top silver nanoridge plasmon waveguide mode are calculated for different radii of curvature at different wavelengths. It is found that semicircular top silver nanoridges support tightly confined quasi-transverse electromagnetic (TEM) and quasi-cylindrical plasmon waveguide modes. The surface plasmon mode of a semicircular top silver nanoridge waveguide has longer propagation distance and higher figure-of-merit than the surface plasmon mode of a cylindrical silver nanowire of the same radius of curvature.


Tree density is an important parameter affecting ecosystems functions and management decisions, while tree distribution patterns affect sampling design. Pittosporum undulatum stands in the Azores are being targeted with a biomass valorization program, for which efficient tree density estimators are required. We compared -Square sampling, Point Centered Quarter Method (PCQM), and -tree sampling with benchmark quadrat (QD) sampling in six 900 m2 plots established at P. undulatum stands in Sao Miguel Island. A total of 15 estimators were tested using a data resampling approach. The estimated density range (344–5056 trees/ha) was found to agree with previous studies using PCQM only. Although with a tendency to underestimate tree density (in comparison with QD), overall, -Square sampling appeared to be the most accurate and precise method, followed by PCQM. Tree distribution pattern was found to be slightly aggregated in 4 of the 6 stands. Considering (1) the low level of bias and high precision, (2) the consistency among three estimators, (3) the possibility of use with aggregated patterns, and (4) the possibility of obtaining a larger number of independent tree parameter estimates, we recommend the use of -Square sampling in P. undulatum stands within the framework of a biomass valorization program.


The estimation of time-varying quantities is a fundamental component of decision making in fields such as healthcare and finance. However, the practical utility of such estimates is limited by how accurately they quantify predictive uncertainty. In this work, we address the problem of estimating the joint predictive distribution of high-dimensional multivariate time series. We propose a versatile method, based on the transformer architecture, that estimates joint distributions using an attention-based decoder that provably learns to mimic the properties of non-parametric copulas. The resulting model has several desirable properties: it can scale to hundreds of time series, supports both forecasting and interpolation, can handle unaligned and non-uniformly sampled data, and can seamlessly adapt to missing data during training. We demonstrate these properties empirically and show that our model produces state-of-the-art predictions on multiple real-world datasets.


This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events—the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation—to a broad family of concepts and principles generating constraints on possible change. The book looks at determinism, locality, stability, symmetry principles, conservation laws, and the principle of least action—causal constraints that serve to distinguish events and processes that our best scientific theories mandate or allow from those they rule out. The book's approach reveals that causation is just as relevant to explaining why certain events fail to occur as it is to explaining events that do occur. It investigates the conceptual differences between, and interrelations of, members of the causal family, thereby clarifying problems at the heart of the philosophy of science. The book argues that the distinction between determinism and stability is pertinent to the philosophy of history and the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that the interplay of determinism and locality is crucial for understanding quantum mechanics. Providing a historical perspective, the book traces the causal constraints of contemporary science to traditional intuitions about causation, and demonstrates how the teleological appearance of some constraints is explained away in current scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. The book represents a bold challenge to both causal eliminativism and causal reductionism—the notions that causation has no place in science and that higher-level causal claims are reducible to the causal claims of fundamental physics.


The main aim of this thesis is to develop and test industry-specific, applied work procedures and tools for environmental and emerging sustainability work in the graphic arts industry. This includes methods to quantify, follow-up, evaluate, manage, improve and communicate the environmental performance of activities in the graphic arts supply chain and printed products. In order to achieve the aims of the thesis, a selection of work areas were chosen as the basis for developing the industry-specific work procedures and tools. The selected work areas are the following: environmental management (being a part of sustainability management), environmental and sustainability strategies, environmental indicators and design for environment (DfE). The research presented in this thesis was based on survey research methods, case studies and multi-company studies. Within the framework of these methods, quantitative and qualitative techniques for data gathering were used. The companies included in the studies were selected according to their willingness, interest and motivation to participate and develop their environmental or sustainability work. The most significant results of the research presented in this thesis regarding the selected work areas are the following: • An evaluation of early certified environmental management systems (EMSs) in Sweden identified four areas as priorities in making the EMSs more efficient. Two of them, viz. improvement in the follow-up of environmental work, and the linking of EMSs to product design, were developed for the graphic arts industry. The remaining two areas were clarifying the identification process and assessment of environmental aspects, and streamlining and co-ordinating different management systems. • An established and successfully tested working method for formulating and realising corporate sustainability strategies in the graphic arts industry. • Industry-specific environmental indicator models for the graphic arts industry with defined methods for standardised inventorying and calculations. These models have been tested, used and approved of by the industry itself. • Collected and compiled data for the developed environmental indicator models. Data have been collected from quite a large number of companies (10-20 companies for each of the printing techniques covered, i.e. coldset offset, heatset offset and gravure) over a period of several years. • The use of the industry-specific environmental indicator models was developed and illustrated. • A described and recommended work procedure for DfE in graphic arts companies including industry-specific tools for applying DfE to printed products, in the form of a manual and a checklist. The checklist was designed so that it can serve as a simple tool for the environmental assessment of printed products. The tools were tested by graphic arts companies.


Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a chronic disorder of carbohydrate metabolism (glucose) in the body and its prevalence is getting higher. Until 2015, 10 million cases of DM found in Indonesia and allegedly ever increasing. Type II DM is the most common types of DM in the world and its characterized by insulin resistance and β cell damage.  Due to the serious side effects caused when taking chemical antidabetes drugs, herbal medicine searches from natural materials continue to be done. Various spesieces of cinnamon plants have been studied and known to have antidiabetic activity. One of them is Cinnamomum burmanii which is found in Indonesia. Among the spesieces of cinnamon have the same health benefits including antidiabetes, antimicrobial, anti-fungal, antiviral, antioxidant, antitumor etc. Although the antidiabetic mechanism of cinnamon is still debated, it is thought that cinnamon affects several insulin signaling pathways, among others, in insulin receptors, glucose transporter 4 (GLUT 4), glucose transporter-1 (GLUT 1), peroxisome proliferator activator receptor (PPAR), α activity glucosidase etc. This activity is caused of the bioactive compounds it contains. The main compounds that have hypoglycemic activity are Methylhidroxy Calcone Polymer (MHCP), sinamaldehyde, and polymer pro-ayanine type-A polymers or proanthocyanidin.


We present a novel, semi-supervised approach to training discriminative random fields (DRFs) that efficiently exploits labeled and unlabeled training data to achieve improved accuracy in a variety of image processing tasks. We formulate DRF training as a form of MAP estimation that combines conditional loglikelihood on labeled data, given a data-dependent prior, with a conditional entropy regularizer defined on unlabeled data. Although the training objective is no longer concave, we develop an efficient local optimization procedure that produces classifiers that are more accurate than ones based on standard supervised DRF training. We then apply our semi-supervised approach to train DRFs to segment both synthetic and real data sets, and demonstrate significant improvements over supervised DRFs in each case.


Color filters play a key role for applications like CMOS image sensors, liquid crystal displays and light emitting diodes. Using a nanohole array as a plasmonic color filter offers important advantages, in particular compatibility with CMOS processes. In this paper, a set of primary filters (red, green and blue) consisting of a square-lattice of sub-wavelength holes in an aluminum film and a silicon dioxide substrate are presented for employing in CMOS image sensors. Despite their simple structure and ease of fabrication, the results have shown a transmission peak of 30-67 percent with a FWHM of 40 nm, 50 nm and 105 nm in accurate wavelengths of red, green and blue, respectively. Furthermore, reducing the cross-talk of the filters is investigated by utilizing a silicon dioxide overlay to enhance the coupling of SPPs at both sides of the aluminum film.


Abstract The literature indicates that corporate reputation has been acknowledged as having the potential to impact customer loyalty and behavior toward an organization (Barich & Kotler, 1991; Nha & Gaston, 2001). More importantly, the influence of corporate reputation can be expected to become more critical when a company needs to provide high quality service to its customer (Cretu & Brodie, 2007). Corporate reputation-related studies are increasing; in addition, the indices that have been utilized differ from one study to another (Chen & Chen, 2008). Recently, studies on the Taiwanese leisure service industry in accordance with the reputation indices proposed by Hung (2002) found that in the opinion of the experts, Uni-President Health Resort is the benchmark among the Taiwanese leisure service industry (Chen & Chen, 2008). The study argued that such a finding is acquired from the opinions of related background experts; nevertheless, since customer satisfaction plays a crucial role in determining the long-term development of the leisure service industry, the aim of this study is to utilize the opinions of customers with the Fuzzy Integral and Fuzzy Measure methods to determine the precise value of the performance reputation of Uni-President Health Resort. The main finding of this study is that in the opinions of members of Uni-President Health Resort, its performance reputation is between "Moderately good" and "Good" in linguistic variables. This result means that although the reputation of Uni-President Health Resort is high among leisure service resorts in Taiwan, it still needs to improve to achieve prominence in customers' minds. Further discussion of the key research findings of this study and some suggested directions for future research are provided. Introduction With the importance of consumer consciousness increasing, more and more organizations are making their best efforts to satisfy the needs of their customers. to attract potential consumers, most of them are striving for the highest reputation in their respective industries. It is no wonder that there is a body of studies stating that building reputation is critical for businesses in industries where customers have little idea as to what exactly they are buying or where choice risks are driven by fads, with fashion reputation being a key example (Charles & Siah, 2002). Furthermore, managing and building corporate reputations can three major strategic benefits: attracting more firms than similar competitors, sustaining the company in times of crisis, and increasing financial returns (Greyser, 1999). Thus, the role of reputation as a strategic asset has the potential to greatly impact overall business success (Hall, 1992). In this regard, corporate reputation today has become a strategic factor among various kinds of organizations; thus, it is highly specific for each firm (Gregorio et al., 2006). Recently, more and more people have started to focus on health and privacy in Taiwan; when vacation season arrives, advertisements abound from numerous leisure service companies. Nevertheless, it is easy to notice that some of them close down suddenly or appear on television in negative news stories. Due to the above-stated phenomenon, domestic researchers conducted a study and determined a benchmark in leisure service industries, Uni-President Health Resort, based on prestige performance (Chen & Chen, 2008). Since the study sampled experts in the field, it argued that customer satisfaction plays a crucial role in determining the long-term development of a leisure service industry. Hence, to acquire more precise results, this study surveys a sample of members of Uni-President Health Resort to evaluate the value of its reputation. Literature Review Corporate Reputation Reputation serves as a signal of future performance relying on perceptions of past performance (Shane & Cable, 2002). …


With growing concerns regarding natural resources security over the last fifty years, a range of movements, including the notion of the tragedy of the commons suggest how to enhance sustainability of natural resources. A case in point is the discourse on the necessity of introducing regulatory and market schemes for the challenges to the sustainability of the commons. This article, inter alia, highlights the literature on the tragedy of the  commons, in order to understand its theoretical and practical strengths, and examine the applicability of its core ideas to current issues of water security. As contemporary water security problems are interconnected and complex, the article challenges the adequacy and effectiveness of coercive regulatory arrangements to individual water users' behavior in sustaining water security. It also examines the variation of new initiatives (in natural resources  management) from the traditional perspectives of the tragedy of the  commons. It is argued that introducing coercive regulatory  institutional arrangements is not by itself sufficient because water security may require comprehensive regulatory and non-regulatory institutional arrangements at national and transnational levels (supplemented by comprehensive  implementation strategies) to address a range of water pressures. Key words: Tragedy of the Commons, the Commons, open- access,  institutional arrangements, water security, water pressures


Characteristics and Treatment Outcomes of Newly Diagnosed Epilepsy in Older People: A 30-Year Longitudinal Cohort Study Alsfouk BAA, Hakeem H, Chen Z, Walters M, Brodie MJ, Kwan P. Epilepsia. 2020;61(12):2720-2728. doi:10.1111/epi.16721 Objectives: To describe the clinical characteristics and evaluate the long-term treatment outcomes in older people with newly diagnosed epilepsy over the past 30 years. Methods: We included patients newly diagnosed with epilepsy and commenced on anti-seizure medications (ASMs) at age 65 years or older between July 1982 and October 2012 at the Western infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland. They were followed up until April 2016 or death. Seizure freedom was defined as no seizure for at least 1 year on unchanged medication at the last follow-up. Results: A total of 201 patients (median age 73 years, 59% male) were included. The median duration from initial seizure to starting treatment was 8 months (interquartile range: 3.0-24.0 months); 42.2% (85/201) patients had more than 5 seizures before commencing treatment. Brain imaging showed potentially epileptogenic lesions in 19.7% (38/193) of patients and other abnormalities in 56.5% (109/193); 78.6% patients (158/201) were seizure-free at the last follow-up, of whom 94.9% were taking monotherapy. Concomitant aspirin use (n = 80) was associated with a lower probability of being seizure-free (relative risk 0.82, 95% confidence interval 0.70-0.97; P = .02). The use of second-generation ASMs as the initial monotherapy increased from 31.5% (23/73) before 2000 to 70.3% (90/128, P < .001) from 2000 onward. However, the seizure freedom rates (67.1% vs 55.5%; P = .35) and intolerable adverse-effect rates (16.4% vs 19.5%; P = .45) did not show any significant difference. Significance: There was often a long interval between seizure onset and the initiation of treatment in older people with new-onset epilepsy, although the majority responded well to ASM treatment. Brain imaging showed a high rate of abnormalities. Despite the increased use of second-generation ASMs, treatment outcomes in later-onset epilepsy have not improved over time. The possible effect of aspirin on treatment response warrants further investigation.


Frequency selectivity in the human auditory system is often measured using simultaneous masking of tones presented in notched noise. Based on such masking data, the equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) of the auditory filters can be derived by applying the power spectrum model of masking and assuming a rounded-exponential filter shape. If a forward masking paradigm is used instead of simultaneous masking, filter estimates typically show significantly sharper tuning. This difference in frequency selectivity has commonly been related to spectral suppression mechanisms observed in the cochlea. Considering bandwidth estimates from previous studies based on forward masking, only average data across a number of subjects have been considered. The present study is concerned with bandwidth estimates in simultaneous and forward masking in individual normal-hearing subjects. In order to investigate the reliability of the individual estimates, a statistical resampling method is applied. It is demonstrated that a rather large set of experimental data is required to reliably estimate auditory filter bandwidth, particularly in the case of simultaneous masking. The poor overall reliability of the filter estimates was found to be mainly related to the very short tone duration (i.e., 10 ms) that was chosen. Applying 300-ms long tones in simultaneous masking drastically improved the reliability of the filter estimates. The tone duration in forward masking had to be very short to elicit a sufficient amount of masking. Based on extensive data for three subjects, the difference between forward and simultaneous masking estimates of auditory filter bandwidth was found to be even larger than previously reported, with a bandwidth decrease by a factor of about 1.8 rather than 1.4. The results of the study can be used to optimize the measures of frequency selectivity which is particularly useful when studying consequences of (individual) hearing impairment.


Expropriation is a hotly debated issue in international investment law. This is the first study to provide a detailed analysis of its norm-theoretical dimension, setting out the theoretical foundations underlying its understanding in contemporary legal scholarship and practice. Jorg Kammerhofer combines a doctrinal discussion with a theoretical analysis of the structure of the law in this area, undertaking a novel approach that critically re-evaluates existing case-law and writings. His approach critiques the arguments for a single expropriation norm based on custom, interpretation and arbitral precedents within international investment law, drawing also on generalist international legal thought, to show that both cosmopolitan and sovereigntist arguments are largely political, not legal. This innovative work will help scholars to understand the application of theory to investment law and help specialists in the field to improve their arguments.


Abstract Along-strike variations in sediment supply and process regime may result in different facies distributions, preservational biases, and stratigraphic architectures in shallow-marine strata. Data from a large (c. 100 km), nearly continuous outcrop belt aligned oblique to depositional strike was integrated with nearby subsurface well data and petrological analysis of distal fine-grained deposits, to analyze along-strike variations in stratigraphic architecture in a single parasequence in the upper Cretaceous Star Point Sandstone, Wasatch Plateau, central Utah, USA. The parasequence comprises wave-dominated shoreface deposits in the southern part of the study area and represents a single episode of shoreline regression and transgression. Four progradationally stacked bedsets (BS1–BS4) in the distal deposits of the parasequence are the expression of minor variations in relative sea level, sediment supply, and/or wave climate. The four bedsets can be traced to river-dominated deltaic deposits (Panther Tongue) in the northern part of the study area. We interpret the parasequence on the scale of the Wasatch Plateau outcrop belt as the record of deposition in a regressive river- and wave-influenced delta deflected asymmetrically towards the SSW, subparallel to the regional paleo-shoreline trend, and a coeval wave-dominated strandplain. The lateral transition from river- to wave-dominated facies is attributed to the localization of a major river acting as a sediment point source in the north, with wave-induced longshore transport to the south. Our results imply that characterizing lateral facies distributions and the expression of bedsets is vital for interpreting along-strike variability in controlling mechanisms of stratigraphic architecture, and that external forcing may be recorded differently along depositional strike.


The resurgence of strikes in the non-union fast food and retail sectors has created unprecedented momentum for increases in state, local, and company-specific minimum wages. The once fantastical demand for a $15 an hour wage floor has been legislated into life in two states, four major cities, and counting. Early work, drawing from organizational studies, identified "improvisation" as the theoretical engine of the walkouts, and while that strategy remains, the ground has since shifted. Today's strikes are no longer just about McDonald's or Walmart but low wage jobs generally, from child care, to adjunct teaching, to security, and beyond. The article tracks this ambitious next step and asks the critical question of whether improvised resistance can play a truly foundational and widespread role in workplace advocacy. The answer is "yes" — but only if the law lets it. Workers improvise when they trust each other, and they trust each other when they can talk to each other in relaxed settings. At work, and under longstanding labor law, that means break time. But work changed and the law did not. Today's low wage service economy is nothing like the post-War industrial age when the main law governing workplace relationships was established. A prime consequence is the end of opportunities to informally hang out on the job — that means less talk, less trust, and a much diminished potential that improvisation will arise organically. This article argues that protecting the right to improvise in low wage work requires reform of the labor law super-principle that "working time is for work" and nothing else. In 2016 working time is often the only time, so workers must be empowered to interact freely right there and then. Two specific changes are proposed. First, workers should be allowed to chit-chat — about any topic — in the midst of assigned tasks. While allowing talking while working might seem like a productivity menace, multitasking research suggests the opposite. Second, labor law should carve out space for workers to take "micro-breaks," short concerted worktime stoppages that impact production only modestly. Both changes are possible through existing precedent and without amendment to the National Labor Relations Act.


This review describes The Ethics of Computer Games, a recent academic release by Miguel Sicart.  Sicart uses a philosophical framework of various ethical and ontological theories to analyze how different games and game designs invoke or ignore the moral virtues of the culture in which they exist.  According to Sicart, the most ethical games are those which take into account the complex subjective role of the player and the game community, and inscribe in the gameplay a kind of ethical system that either cultivates "virtuous" exploration or challenges the player to come to a specific ethical conclusion based on careful reflection.


Tacotron-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems directly synthesize speech from text input. Such frameworks typically consist of a feature prediction network that maps character sequences to frequency-domain acoustic features, followed by a waveform reconstruction algorithm or a neural vocoder that generates the time-domain waveform from acoustic features. As the loss function is usually calculated only for frequency-domain acoustic features, that doesn't directly control the quality of the generated time-domain waveform. To address this problem, we propose a new training scheme for Tacotron-based TTS, referred to as WaveTTS, that has 2 loss functions: 1) time-domain loss, denoted as the waveform loss, that measures the distortion between the natural and generated waveform; and 2) frequency-domain loss, that measures the Mel-scale acoustic feature loss between the natural and generated acoustic features. WaveTTS ensures both the quality of the acoustic features and the resulting speech waveform. To our best knowledge, this is the first implementation of Tacotron with joint time-frequency domain loss. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines and achieves high-quality synthesized speech.


Automatic speech segmentation has many applications in speech processing and phonetics, e.g., in automatic speech recognition and automatic annotation of speech corpora. In both processes of training and evaluation of speech recognition systems large aligned speech-to-text corpora are needed. Once aligned, identification of phonemes could be based on samples that are picked-up inbetween phonemes' boundaries. Because manual segmentation is costly and extremely time consuming, automatic methods of alignment are searched for. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet efficient, method for speech to text recognition based on a machine learning approach, using a Romanian speech corpus.


Multiple access communication accommodates a large population of relatively uncoordinated users of a common spectral allocation in the same and neighboring geographical areas with the number of simultaneous users proportional to various variable parameters. A continuous-time Markov chain model for an asynchronous spectrum packet radio network is presented. The network consists of N fully connected nodes and the mobile users in all nodes are assumed identical. Packets arrive at each node and are re-transmitted when lost, according to Poisson processes with different rates and with packet lengths that are exponential in distribution. A simple threshold approximation is used to account for the multi-user interference and the preamble collision probability at receiving mobile users to account for the capture effect. Results obtained demonstrate the effects on throughput and packet delay performance of the network according to the variations of the network size, the packet re-transmission rate, the preamble collision probability at receiving mobile users, and the threshold value of the radio channel capacity. Further the approximate analysis results are very close to those obtained by computer simulations.


Leaders are central to social movements, yet scholars have devoted relatively little attention to understanding the concept of leadership or its effects on movements. In this article, we explore leadership's influence on movement dynamics by examining Nigeria's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the Catholic Left-inspired Plowshares movement, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the liberation movement in El Salvador. Building on Bourdieu, Putnam, and the existing literature on social movement leadership, we argue that these movements' leaders possessed "leadership capital" having cultural, social, and symbolic components. We then turn our attention to the conditions under which leadership capital affects three key processes in movement development: mobilization of aggrieved parties, activation of third-party supporters, and responses to repression. We conclude by calling for more comprehensive, systematic, and comparative investigation of factors influencing leadership in domestic and transnational movements.


Qatar, a backwater state in regional and international politics until 1995, has in recent years pursued a high-profile foreign policy in the areas of dispute mediations, maintaining balanced relations with allies and adversaries alike, adept use of soft power tools, and even military interventions in fellow Arab states, Libya in particular, to aid the Arab pro-democracy forces. This high-profile foreign policy has aimed at strengthening Qatar's national security in the Gulf neighbourhood and playing a more proactive role in the Arab world. This article examines Qatar's activist foreign policy role in the Arab Spring and probes whether such a role is sustainable in future in view of the constraints Qatar faces at home, in the Gulf neighbourhood and beyond. It concludes that Qatar, as a tiny state, has little choice other than to strike a balance between its oversized foreign policy role and the imperatives of regional and international realities.


The present essay sketches the outline and the intention of Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod's principal task appears to be the identification (and praise) of the best way of life for his wayward brother Perses, but in carrying out this task, Hesiod speaks of justice and its human and divine supports in such a way as to go well beyond what would be of benefit to his brother. For in the course of his analysis of justice, or as a result of it, Hesiod praises also the life of autonomous understanding, the life that appears to be the poet's own. In crucial ways, then, Hesiod explores the chief themes of what was to become political philosophy, and for this reason, among others, he deserves the attention of all those who are also concerned with it.


Air and road traffic congestion around cities, e.g., in the BOSWASH corridor, can be reduced by high speed rail systems. But high speed trains on elevated rails/guideways encounter extra costs and problems; even more so for underground tunnels between cities. An interesting alternative is to place the rail systems offshore, in submerged floating tunnels which are suspended 30+ meters below the surface, running parallel to the coast. The tunnels become part of a larger, multifunction offshore construct which features a string of permanent, waste entombing islands with a storm surge protector in between: THE MEGABIGHT BARRIER project. Underground/underwater trains or people-movers bring passengers and cargo from major cities to connecting stations within the islands. The paper discusses two underwater transport projects proposed by other countries and presents this new offshore possibility for the U.S.


Abstract The evolution of the nuclear market explains why there are only nine members of the nuclear club, not twenty-five or more, as some analysts predicted. In the absence of a supplier cartel that can regulate nuclear transfers, the more suppliers there are, the more intense their competition will be, as they vie for market share. This commercial rivalry makes it easier for nuclear technology to spread, because buyers can play suppliers off against each other. The ensuing transfers help countries either acquire nuclear weapons or become hedgers. The great powers (China, Russia, and the United States) seek to thwart proliferation by limiting transfers and putting safeguards on potentially dangerous nuclear technologies. Their success depends on two structural factors: the global distribution of power and the intensity of the security rivalry among them. Thwarters are most likely to stem proliferation when the system is unipolar and least likely when it is multipolar. In bipolarity, their prospects fall somewhere in between. In addition, the more intense the rivalry among the great powers in bipolarity and multipolarity, the less effective they will be at curbing proliferation. Given the potential for intense security rivalry among today's great powers, the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity does not portend well for checking proliferation.


This paper presents EinsteinPy (version 0.3), a community-developed Python package for gravitational and relativistic astrophysics. Python is a free, easy to use a high-level programming language which has seen a huge expansion in the number of its users and developers in recent years. Specifically, a lot of recent studies show that the use of Python in Astrophysics and general physics has increased exponentially. We aim to provide a very high level of abstraction, an easy to use interface and pleasing user experience. EinsteinPy is developed keeping in mind the state of a theoretical gravitational physicist with little or no background in computer programming and trying to work in the field of numerical relativity or trying to use simulations in their research. Currently, EinsteinPy supports simulation of time-like and null geodesics and calculates trajectories in different background geometries some of which are Schwarzschild, Kerr, and KerrNewmann along with coordinate inter-conversion pipeline. It has a partially developed pipeline for plotting and visualization with dependencies on libraries like Plotly, matplotlib, etc. One of the unique features of EinsteinPy is a sufficiently developed symbolic tensor manipulation utilities which are a great tool in itself for teaching yourself tensor algebra which for many beginner students can be overwhelmingly tricky. EinsteinPy also provides few utility functions for hypersurface embedding of Schwarzschild spacetime which further will be extended to model gravitational lensing simulation.


This paper studies determinants of some aspects of the structure of cities, including density and the price of land and housing. We use a version of the Alonso-Muth-Mills model, calibrated to broadly match some of the features of a representative large city. While the calibrated model omits many real-world features, it can nonetheless be used to explore the impact of factors such as: (i) the provision of transport infrastructure; (ii) zoning policies that limit housing density; (iii) frictions on the production of housing; and (iv) population size. The empirical section of the paper shows that the model is consistent with some empirical regularities for large Australian cities. The results of the paper draw attention to structural factors that may have contributed to developments in the Australian housing market in recent years.


Introduction: This paper reports the first phase of a two-phase longitudinal study which explored the attitudes of radiographers in two countries (UK and New Zealand) towards CPD, before and after the introduction of a mandatory CPD policy. In addition, this paper outlines in brief the planned phase two of the project, which will be undertaken to assess whether attitudes change over time, following the introduced mandate. Methods: 1739 radiographers across both countries were approached via a survey using a written questionnaire with quantitative and qualitative components endorsed by the relevant professional body in each country (Society of Radiographers and the New Zealand Institute of Medical Radiation Technologists). The questionnaire was statistically analysed using t-tests. In addition, the qualitative components were analysed thematically, to add depth and explanations to the findings. This paper presents the results, focusing especially on the qualitative data in order to fully explore the attitudes demonstrated. Results: The results of the study showed that a degree of apathy surrounded CPD participation, despite the professional expectation that staff be CPD active. On an individual level, radiographers self reported a low level, or a complete lack of formal recording of CPD. A number of barriers were identified, which were perceived by participants to restrict their CPD activity, including, of particular note, poor staffing levels and lack of employer support. Radiographers in both countries appeared to have a narrow understanding of what is perceived to constitute CPD, with an apparent focus on formal, attendance-based activities. Less formal, on-the-job activities were not always considered as CPD by participants in this study. Conclusion: This study outlined a range of factors which impact on attitudes towards CPD, with many similarities in findings across both countries represented. A lack of intrinsic motivation was demonstrated, which is perceived to hamper active participation in CPD. There was a desire for personal benefit from CPD participation to be evident, in order to motivate individuals to get actively involved. The complexity of the current working environment was outlined, with acknowledgement that the mandatory policy towards CPD is not the only factor affecting participation. While further research will be required to examine the impact of all the variables affecting CPD, the results of this study may allow individuals and managers to begin to interact with CPD participation in order to attempt to increase the level and effectiveness of learning in practice.


In this study the effect of extraction solvent (type, composition, pH, and temperature), and the extraction method (maceration and soxhlet) on the amount of oleuropein extracted from olive leaves obtained from West Bank /Palestine was investigated. It was found that pure solvents (100% water, 100% methanol, and 100% ethanol) are not good solvents for oleuropein extraction, while mixtures of the solvents (methanol/water and ethanol/water) gave higher oleuropein content. It was found that 80% ethanol give the highest oleuropein content followed by 20% acetonitrile. Temperature of extraction was found to have a significant effect on the oleuropein content where higher temperature gave higher oleuropein content. It was found also that the amount of oleuropein extracted decreases with increase in pH where highest amount was obtained at pH 3. Soxhlet extraction was found to give higher oleuropein content compared to maceration method.


Potato virus Y is the most economically important potato viral pathogen. We aimed at unraveling the roles of small RNAs (sRNAs) in the complex immune signaling network controlling the establishment of tolerant response of potato cv. Désirée to the virus. We constructed a sRNA regulatory network connecting sRNAs and their targets to link sRNA level responses to physiological processes. We discovered an interesting novel sRNAs-gibberellin regulatory circuit being activated as early as 3 days post inoculation before viral multiplication can be detected. Increased levels of miR167 and phasiRNA931 were reflected in decreased levels of transcripts involved in gibberellin biosynthesis. Moreover, decreased concentration of gibberellin confirmed this regulation. The functional relation between lower activity of gibberellin signaling and reduced disease severity was previously confirmed in Arabidopsis-virus interaction using knockout mutants. We further showed that this regulation is salicylic acid-dependent as the response of sRNA network was attenuated in salicylic acid-depleted transgenic counterpart NahG-Désirée expressing severe disease symptoms. Besides downregulation of gibberellin signaling, regulation of several other parts of sRNA network in tolerant Désirée revealed similarities to responses observed in mutualistic symbiotic interactions. The intertwining of different regulatory networks revealed shows how developmental signaling, disease symptom development and stress signaling can be balanced.


This paper aims at fulfilling a gap that is present in different scholarly debates, namely those found in Hegel-studies and in the theory of architecture. On the one hand, Hegel's chapter about architecture was never an object of investigation in the previous Italian and German research on Hegel's aesthetics. On the other hand, Hegel's revealing approach is entirely ignored in the contemporary discussions on theories of architecture. Accordingly, this study has two purposes: first, to reconstruct Hegel's understanding of architecture within the context ofhis speculative philosophy. Second, to highlight Hegel's answers to questions that challenge contemporary theories of architecture. In the first part, I isolate Hegel's 'determination' of architecture in the lectures on philosophy of art and place them into the wider context of Hegel's philosophical system. In addition to his philosophy of art, I take into account Hegel's philosophy of nature, his anthropology and furthermore his philosophy of right. I inquire into the connections which are implicit in his philosophy of art, but are never actually addressed. This analysis leads to a more profound understanding of his theory of architecture. The study concludes by extracting the potential of Hegel's approach for the present discussion on architecture. I address it in the second part, by putting Hegel's views in dialogue with debates on architectural functionalism, pragmatism and architecture free of any purpose. At the core of this final discussion, the dichotomy of old and new will give insights into the archetype of architecture itself.


The wonderful and positive images captured by Robin Laurance on his photographic journey through the heart of Islam - from the desolate open spaces of the mid-Atlas mountains in Morocco to the lush green paddy fields of Southeast Asia - will do much to dispel such ignorance of the realities of the Muslim world, of its extraordinary achievements and of the way of life of its ordinary men and women as they pursue their everyday existence. As a foretaste to the photographs, Dr Robin Ostle provides a valuable background, explaining the historical background and principles of Islam; the tenets of the faith; its place in law, state and society; and its relation to the other two great monotheistic religions - Judaism and Christianity. This timely book shows the Islamic lands and people as they really are: richly colourful, markedly diverse and, above all, powerfully inspiring.


SUMMARY New initiatives in agroforestry are seeking to integrate indigenous trees, whose products have traditionally been gathered from natural forests, into tropical farming systems such as cacao farms. This is being done to provide from farms, marketable timber and non-timber forest products that will enhance rural livelihoods by generating cash for resource-poor rural and peri-urban households. There are many potential candidate species for domestication that have commercial potential in local, regional or even international markets. Little or no formal research has been carried out on many of these hitherto wild species to assess potential for genetic improvement, reproductive biology or suitability for cultivation. With the participation of subsistence farmers a number of projects to bring candidate species into cultivation are in progress, however. This paper describes some tree domestication activities being carried out in southern Cameroon, especially with Irvingia gabonensis (bush mango; dika nut) and Dacryodes edulis (African plum; safoutier). As part of this, fruits and kernels from 300 D. edulis and 150 I. gabonensis trees in six villages of Cameroon and Nigeria have been quantitatively characterized for 11 traits to determine combinations defining multi-trait ideotypes for a genetic selection programme. I. gabonensis fruits are rich in vitamin A (67 mg 100 ml 71 ), while the kernels are rich in fat (51.3%) and contain a polysaccharide that is a food thickener. The fruits of D. edulis are also rich in oil (31.9%) and protein (25.9%). This poverty-reducing agroforestry strategy is at the same time linked to one in which perennial, biologically diverse and complex mature-stage agroecosystems are developed as sustainable alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture. To meet the objective of poverty reduction, however, it is crucial that market expansion and creation are possible. Hence, for example, it is important to determine which marketable traits are amenable to genetic improvement. While some traits (such as fruit and kernel mass) that benefit the farmer are relatively easy to identify, there are undoubtedly others that are important to the food, pharmaceutical or other industries which require more sophisticated chemical evaluation. There is a need, therefore, for better linkages between agroforesters and the private sector. The domestication activities described are relevant to the enrichment of smallholder cacao farms and agroforests. This diversification is seen as being important for the support of the cacao industry.


In order to overcome the problems of premature convergence and high dimension complex function optimization in conventional particle swarm optimization algorithm, the paper presents an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm and applies it to evaluate enterprise informatization maturity. First, the working principle and current problems of original particle swarm optimization algorithm are analyzed; Then, the methods of late random inertia weight and non-linear dynamic inertia weight are advanced to seek for proper inertia weight; Third, the calculation flows of the presented algorithm are redesigned to reduce iteration times; Finally, the evaluation indicators of enterprise informatization maturity are analyzed and the improved algorithm is realized. The simulation results illustrates that the algorithm has better self-adaptability and can simplify model structure, increase algorithm efficiency, and improve evaluation accuracy when used for evaluating enterprise informatization maturity.


This article describes research in progress as the development and practical implementations of the original analytic tool that forecasts the development process as a process of evolution of an area as related to time. While returning significant data such as a demand for utilities or infrastructure costs, it prepares and supports the decision process. The concept is to build a basis for a discourse between parties involved in the development, but particularly local authorities responsible for managing the space in wider context. The prognosis generated by the application delivers instant information on consequences of various factors behind the development process and basic simulation of spatial development as well as informing the members of the design process, namely planners, authorities, investors and other interested participants or parties, on how long certain organization, location constraints, existing facilities and infrastructure among others may affect the final result. The tool thus filters marketing information provided by the developer or the investor and allows for real effect assessment including time-related phenomena. While the development involved wide variety of research methods ( statistical, correlative, study of literature and documents, etc.), the core of the project is simulation studies. It is confronted with data collected from cooperating authorities of Rokietnica, Oborniki and Pniewy during the implementations in the spatial studies in master planning related decision-making.


Analysis DTU Orbit (28/10/2019) Obtaining DDF Curves of Extreme Rainfall Data Using Bivariate Copula and Frequency Analysis The traditional rainfall intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curve is a reliable approach for representing the variation of rainfall intensity with duration for a given return period. In reality rainfall variables intensity, depth and duration are dependent and therefore a bivariate analysis using copulas can give a more accurate IDF curve. We study IDF curves using a copula in a bivariate frequency analysis of extreme rainfall. To be able to choose the most suitable copula among candidate copulas (i.e., Gumbel, Clayton, and Frank) we demonstrated IDF curves based on variation of depth with duration for a given return period and name them DDF (depth-duration-frequency) curves. The copula approach does not assume the rainfall variables are independent or jointly normally distributed. Rainfall series are extracted in three ways: (1) by maximum mean intensity; (2) by depth and duration of individual rainfall events; and (3) by storage volume and duration. In each case we used partial duration series (PDS) to extract extreme rainfall variables. The DDF curves derived from each method are presented and compared. This study examines extreme rainfall data from catchment Vedbæ k Renseanlæ g, situated near Copenhagen in Denmark. For rainfall extracted using method 2, the marginal distribution of depth was found to fit the Generalized Pareto distribution while duration was found to fit the Gamma distribution, using the method of L-moments. The volume was fit with a generalized Pareto distribution and the duration was fit with a Pearson type III distribution for rainfall extracted using method 3. The Clayton copula was found to be appropriate for bivariate analysis of rainfall depth and duration for both methods 2 and 3. DDF curves derived using the Clayton copula for depth and duration of individual rainfall events (method 2) are in agreement with empirically derived DDF curves obtained from maximum mean intensity (method 1) for a 10-year return period. For a 100-year return period the estimates differ by 2.5 cm for a 5 hr duration. This difference diminishes to almost zero for a 50 hr duration. If rainfall series are extracted by storage volume and duration (method 3), the difference between DDF curves derived from the Clayton copula and the empirical DDF curves are more appreciable and in general, DDF curves derived from method 3 show a smaller depth for the same duration for any selected return period. The differences between DDF curves illustrates that the method of extracting extreme rainfall as well as the frequency analysis approach have a considerable effect on the resulting DDF curves.


Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) is the most widely used method in quantum chemistry. It has the potential to provide accurate results at low computational cost. The quality of a DFT calculation is determined by the exchange-correlation energy functional. Hybrid functionals, which contain a fraction of exact orbital exchange, are extensively used due to their accuracy in a variety of applications. However, as commonly implemented, these functionals are outside the Kohn-Sham scheme, since the exchange operator is not a local multiplicative potential. In order to handle orbital dependent functionals correctly, schemes which determine a local multiplicative potential must be employed. The implementation and application of several such methods is the focus of this thesis. In Chapter 1 we outline the Hartree-Fock scheme, which defines the exchange energy, and overview wavefunction based procedures that recover correlation energy. Alternative theories based on the electron density are then considered and the foundations of modern DFT are reviewed. The formalism of the optimized effective potential (OEP) method is introduced, which is the rigorous way to handle orbital dependent functionals. A number of approximations to the exchange only OEP method are outlined in Chapter 2 and their implementation is described. The methods are applied to the calculation of NMR shielding constants, highlighting differences between the approximations; their use in the construction of multiplicative hybrid functionals is also considered. In Chapter 3 these approximations are further investigated in the calculation of excited states and structural perturbations. In Chapter 4, the theory and implementation of a direct optimization procedure to determine OEPs is outlined, along with an implementation of the constrained search procedure, which allows the determination of the Kohn-Sham exchange-correlation potential from any input density. Chapter 5 compares the performance of the approximate exchange potentials with those of OEP, highlighting the presence of correlated character in some of the approximate methods. The OEP implementation is extended to include hybrid exchange-correlation functionals in Chapter 6. The performance of these methods for the calculation of NMR shielding constants, rotational g tensors and transition metal NMR chemical shifts is investigated. In all cases, substantial improvements over conventional results are obtained. In Chapter 7 DFT is used to investigate an interaction of relevance in organic chemistry. Concluding remarks are given in Chapter 8.


A significant consumer issue today concerns tobacco advertising and youth smoking behavior and what is being done in the interest of these young consumers to reduce smoking. Since the Master Settlement Agreement earmarked resources for consumer education, progress is being made researching the effectiveness of antismoking advertising and of school-based, antismoking interventions. This paper explores the effectiveness and potential or one such program to encourage additional interdisciplinary research attention and to provide direction in reducing smoking uptake behavior among youth. Readers delving into the literature on the relationship between tobacco advertising and youth smoking cannot help but be struck by the enormity of the research in the area, as well as the variety of methodological approaches. Even more striking is researchers' certitude in their conclusive statements based on their empirical findings, with some condemning advertising and others merely admonishing (if not forgiving) advertising. While virtually impossible to provide a totally inclusive review of this literature, a summary of important recent work in this area follows, including precisely-worded conclusions specified by the researchers cited, which they often times crafted to sustain the scrutiny of not only social scientists but also of cross-examination in litigation as well. BACKGROUND Causal Linkages between Cigarette Advertising and Youth Smoking Behavior A substantial body of research concludes that there are strong causal linkages between cigarette advertising and youth smoking behavior. For example, Pierce et al. (1998) concluded that "tobacco promotional activities are causally related to the onset of smoking"; Pierce et al. (1991) concluded that "our results suggest that tobacco advertising is causally related to young people becoming addicted to cigarettes" based on respondents' ability to recognize heavily advertised cigarettes brands which "target young people, particularly minors"; and Biener and Siegel (2000) concluded that "attending to cigarette advertising...precede(s) and reliably predict(s) progression to established smoking." In fact, Pollay et al. (1996, 13) went so far as to state, "Cigarette advertising is an important influence on the smoking behavior of the young. Scholars should treat the assertion that cigarette advertising has little or no effect on adolescents as naive and disingenuous." Other Linkages between Cigarette Advertising and Youth Smoking Behavior A number of other studies have assessed the impact of advertising on youth smoking and have drawn less pointed (or even contradictory) conclusions. For example, Armstrong et al. (1990, 123) concluded, "We believe that there is now no room for doubt, if there ever really was, that cigarette advertising has an important effect on the uptake of smoking by children." Aitken and Eadie (1990) surveyed youths aged eleven to fourteen and reported their awareness of cigarette advertising "reinforces underage smoking," and Aitken et al. (1991) noted a "predisposing effect on intentions to smoke," adding that "we are not saying that advertising is more important than other influences (in encouraging smoking)." Botvin et al. (1991, 926) studied eighth and ninth graders and acknowledged, "It would be difficult for behavioral researchers to show unequivocally that such (tobacco) advertising causes adolescents to smoke" in providing their correlational evidence linking advertising recognition to smoking behavior. Evans et al. (1995, 1545) concluded, "Our results support the hypothesis that tobacco marketing may be a stronger current influence in encouraging adolescents to initiate smoking uptake process than demographic characteristics, perceived school performance, or exposure to other smokers in the peer or family network." Altman et al. (1996) employed a nationally representative sample and added that, "there is a strong association between awareness of and involvement with tobacco promotions and being susceptible to tobacco use or a user of tobacco products. …


The study of human evolution has been revolutionized by inferences from ancient DNA analyses. Key to these is the reliable estimation of the age of ancient specimens. The current best practice is radiocarbon dating, which relies on characterizing the decay of radioactive carbon isotope (14C), and is applicable for dating up to 50,000-year-old samples. Here, we introduce a new genetic method that uses recombination clock for dating. The key idea is that an ancient genome has evolved less than the genomes of extant individuals. Thus, given a molecular clock provided by the steady accumulation of recombination events, one can infer the age of the ancient genome based on the number of missing years of evolution. To implement this idea, we take advantage of the shared history of Neanderthal gene flow into non-Africans that occurred around 50,000 years ago. Using the Neanderthal ancestry decay patterns, we estimate the Neanderthal admixture time for both ancient and extant samples. The difference in these admixture dates then provides an estimate of the age of the ancient genome. We show that our method provides reliable results in simulations. We apply our method to date five ancient Eurasian genomes with radiocarbon dates ranging between 12,000 to 45,000 years and recover consistent age estimates. Our method provides a complementary approach for dating ancient human samples and is applicable to ancient non-African genomes with Neanderthal ancestry. Extensions of this methodology that use older shared events may be able to date ancient genomes that fall beyond the radiocarbon frontier. Significance We introduce a new genetic method for dating ancient human samples that uses the recombination clock. The main idea relies on the insight that an ancient genome lacks several thousand years of evolution compared to genomes of living individuals. To infer the age of ancient genomes, we take advantage of the shared history of Neanderthal gene flow into non-Africans that occurred around 50,000 years ago. By characterizing the dates of Neanderthal gene flow in ancient and extant genomes and quantifying the difference in these dates, we estimate the age of the ancient specimen. Our method is applicable for dating ancient samples more recent than the Neanderthal mixture event, so on par with radiocarbon dating, providing a complementary approach for dating.


This article analyses the social imaginary of 'networked feminism' as an ideological construct of legitimate political engagement, drawing on ethnographic study conducted with London-based women's organisations. For many women's groups, the desire to connect echoes libertarian visions of Web 2.0 as an 'open' and 'shared' space, and it is encouraged by widely circulating governmental narratives of digital inclusion. In the context of public services becoming digital by default, and severe funding cuts to volunteer organisations in the United Kingdom, feminist organisations are invited to revise the allocation of resources, in order to best accommodate the setting up of digital platforms, and at the same time, to maintain their political and social aims. It is argued that there are tensions between the imaginaries of a 'digital sisterhood' and the material realities of women's organisations: age, lack of resources and media literacy were found to be the three most important factors that modulate participation, and in many cases become new types of exclusions of access to publicity and recognition. By interrogating the circulation of dominant liberal narratives of digital engagement and digital inclusion that motivate new communicative practices between many feminist organisations today, the article offers a fuller understanding of networked media and activism for social justice.


Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be an overwhelming experience for the caregivers and families of those diagnosed. According to estimates from Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, about 1 in 88 children have been identified with an autism spectrum disorder. This is a small, qualitative study that explores the impact ASD has on siblings and their identity development. Previous research regarding this subject has focused primarily on the sibling's stress and experiences when growing up with a child diagnosed with ASD. However, there is little to no literature on ASD impact on a sibling's identity. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of siblings of individuals diagnosed with ASD and the potential impact this played on their identity development. Given the rate of ASD in children, it is a natural extension to explore how such diagnoses affect the siblings' and their own identity development. The goal of this study was to contribute to and expand upon the literature on the experiences of individuals who have a sibling with ASD and to hopefully develop a better understanding of the impact of ASD on siblings. In this study, qualitative research was used. Qualitative research includes data collection, data analysis, and drawing conclusions. There were five themes found in the sibling's interviews; 1) Definition of Self, 2) Family Dynamics, 3) Childhood, 4) Future Care, 5) and Reflection. This study is based on eight semi-structured interviews. The participants explored the sibling perspective and experience of having a sibling with ASD. The primary research question is the following: What is the impact on sibling's identity of a sibling diagnosed with autism? The research produced both strengths and limitations. The implications of this research will inform current and future social SIBLING IDENTITY FORMATION


This unique handbook to Reformation theologies provides an accurate and easily grasped entry into the main terms and issues that made this period so important theologically. A variety of Reformation experts succinctly summarize the ideas that led to such explosive changes throughout Europe and the New World. No other volume provides such an easy entry into the key concepts that motivated the main streams of the Protestant Reformation- Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist. This is a welcome addition to the Westminster Handbooks to Christian Theology series. The Westminster Handbook to Christian Theology series provides a set of resources for the study of historic and contemporary theological movements and Christian theologians. These books are intended to help students and scholars find concise and accurate treatments of important theological terms.


Wine is a complex product. Preferences for it are not only highly heterogeneous throughout the population, but also amply susceptible to context. The objective of this study is to discover and measure these preferences, focusing on a set of non-sensory attributes of wine. To identify the most relevant non-sensory attributes of wine, from the consumers' standpoint we considered four sources: existing literature, a Delphi survey (applied to wine marketing experts), in- depth interviews and a web-page survey answered by fairly large sample of wine consumers. Not all sources were consistent on which attributes were the most important. Notably, consumers did not select price as a relevant attribute on the web survey, even though it had been considered relevant in the in-depth interviews. Finally, six wine attributes were selected for inclusion in a stated choice (SC) experiment: grape variety, alcohol level, label design, product recommendations, price and discounts. An efficient experimental design was then developed and a web based SC survey was applied to 274 regular wine consumers (who had already answered the previous web survey). These consumers have high income (among the richest 20% of the Chilean population), only 28% of them are female and 33% are 35 years old or younger. The SC experiment simulated a purchase, at a retail store, for a casual meal with friends. A fixed fictional brand was used for all the wines presented on the experiment. With this data we estimated various discrete choice models, including mixed logit and hybrid choice models. Grape variety was found to be the main driver of preferences. Evidence of preference for higher alcohol levels was also discovered. Price proved to be highly endogenous, as it is strongly related to wine's expected quality. Recommendation by a friend and critics were equally valued, except in the case of (self-declared) expert consumers. Preferences over label designs showed high variability. The results also suggest that price is a key attribute in the construction of expected quality by the consumer before tasting the product.


The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of direct intra-arterial Urokinase infusions prior to anticipated adjunctive reconstructive vascular procedures in 16 patients with 24 acutely or subacutely occluded lower extremity grafts (22 femoropopliteal, 2 femorotibial). Complete thrombolysis was achieved angiographically in 18 (75%) of 24 graft occlusions. Neither age, gender, current smoking, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, nor coronary arterial disease were significantly associated with complete thrombolysis. The only significant factor related to complete thrombolysis was the duration of the occlusion prior to lytic treatment (p < 0.05). Adjunctive reconstructive procedures were performed for eleven of 18 cases in which complete thrombolysis was achieved. These included nine percutaneous transluminal balloon angioplasties (at eight distal and one proximal anastomotic stenoses) and two bypass operations (femoropopliteal). The remaining seven cases had no adjunctive procedure. These 18 cases were examined for patency rates during nine months of follow-up. Six (54%) of 11 cases with adjunctive reconstructive vascular procedures remained patent, while one (14%) of seven cases with no adjunctive procedure remained patent (p = 0.1). Six (25%) of 24 cases resulted in incomplete thrombolysis. Vascular procedures following these cases included two bypass operations, three amputations and one sympathectomy. This study suggests that complete thrombolysis of acutely occluded grafts might have minimized subsequent reconstructive procedures. Identification of correctable lesions and adjunctive reconstructive procedures performed following complete thrombolysis may be the important factors related to long-term patency.


This chapter investigates eight discourse-pragmatic markers in a corpus ofNorthern Irish English, some of which are interesting on account of theirabsence or rarity and others because they appear to index social categorieslike age and sex.1 Although some of these (particularly like) have already beensubject to considerable scholarly debate, others (such as och) have never beenaddressed. The account examines their origins drawing on the corpus as wellas other data from Celtic and non-Celtic Englishes globally. The analysis alsore-examines and elaborates on the functions each of these discourse-pragmaticmarkers are thought to perform, with respect to both their roles in interpersonalcommunication and in organizing discourse.


Vital tools for implementing Lean Six Sigma - what they are, how they work, and which to use. The "Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook" is today's most complete and results-based reference to the tools and concepts needed to understand, implement, and leverage Lean Six Sigma. The only guide that groups tools by purpose and use, this hands-on reference provides: analyses of nearly 100 tools and methodologies - from DMAIC and Pull Systems to Control Charts and Pareto Charts; Detailed explanations of each tool to help you know how, when, and why to use it for maximum efficacy; sections for each tool explaining how to create it, how to interpret what you find, and expert tips. "Lean Six Sigma" is today's leading technique to maximize production efficiency and maintain control over each step in the managerial process. With "The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook", you'll discover how to propel your organization to new levels of competitive success - one tool at a time.


The present article reports the results of cross-cultural research on the role of sociocultural factors that develop attitudes toward extremism in school students of Moscow, Russia, and Riga, Latvia. Equally, it analyzes various aspects of social activity of adolescents: their attitude to legislative sanctions against extremist activities, a tendency to express various ways of political protest, etc. Special attention is paid to the role of social and cultural factors that determine the specific features of adolescents' attitude to extremism. We consider such factors as the degree of social distance from extremist organizations or membership of a national majority or minority, etc. The article reports on the relationship between adoption of extremist behaviour and attitudes of aggressive behaviour in various social situations, and in the situation of bullying in particular. In addition, the article presents the results of factor analysis to identify a set of features that determine not only those ones related to extremism, but also the position of the teenagers in the propensity for violence and aggressive behaviour as a way to solve their own conflicts. Also, based on the selected factors, the averaged profiles of teenagers in Moscow (Russia) and Riga (Latvia), who claimed their own relationship with extremist organizations, are shown. The main conclusions of the article can be briefly presented in the following points. In general, negative attitude towards extremism dominates in schoolchildren. It is expressed in personal non-acceptance of extremism. Social environment of teenager affects assessment of various kinds of extremist manifestations. The study revealed significant differences in attitudes toward extremism, depending on the membership of a national minority or titular nation.


We report a case in which a "false" aneurysm of the basilar artery developed after an assault on a patient resulting in head injuries. Diagnostic imaging and endovascular treatment are described. Formation mechanisms of traumatic intracranial aneurysms are discussed and the literature is reviewed.


Article 82 is traditionally analysed as a tool to integrate and liberalise the European Single Market and to protect competition from distortion. As such there is no comprehensive discussion of the tensions that lie at the centre of the objective of protecting competition in the current rethinking of Article 82. With regard to exclusionary abuses, DG Competition has articulated that the main objective of Article 82 is the protection of competition in the market as a means of enhancing consumer welfare and of ensuring an efficient allocation of resources. This statement may conflict with some of the case law protecting the economic freedom of the market players derived from ordoliberalism. The latter is a well respected German legal tradition that holds both that government needs to be restrained from abuse of power, and that the free market has its limits. Economic rights deserve protection and vigilance is needed to ensure economic power is not misused or abused, not only in the interests of consumer welfare, but also in the interests of the economic liberty of the individual. This thesis considers the tension between the goals of protecting economic freedom and the promotion of consumer welfare in the application of Article 82. Presupposing that economic freedom and consumer welfare are in opposition to one another, such tension is only set to intensify and must be given appropriate weight in considering the extent to which DG Competition can or should try to move to a consumer welfare standard. Changing the interpretation of protection of competition from economic freedom to consumer welfare within Article 82 can undermine a fundamental right if economic freedom is considered a fundamental right in the Community legal order. However, consumer welfare can also be seen as an opportunity, if properly debated or agreed to by the ECJ, to adopt a more economics-based approach to Article 82.


Book synopsis: In the wake of the American and French revolutions, European culture saw the evolution of a new leisure regime never previously enjoyed. Now we speak of modern leisure societies, but the history of leisure, its experiences and expectations, its scope and variability, still remains largely a matter of conjecture. One message that has emerged from a multiplicity of disciplines is that research on leisure and consumption opens up a hitherto untapped mine of information on the broader issues of politics, society, culture and economics. How have leisure regimes in Europe evolved since the eighteenth century? Why has leisure culture crystallized around particular practices, sites and objects? Above all, what sorts of connections and meanings have been inscribed in leisure practices, and how might these be compared across time and space? This book is the first to provide an historical overview of modern leisure in a wide range of manifestations: travel, entertainment, sports, fashion, 'taste' and much more. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to know more about European history and culture or simply how people spent their free time before the age of television and the internet.


Introduction Chronic diseases associated with aging, such as arthritis, frequently cause reduced mobility, pain and diminished quality of life. To date, research on the association between mobility and quality of life has primarily focused in the elderly; hence, much less is known about this association in the near elderly. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the association between mobility and quality of life measures in the near elderly. Methods A prospective observational study of persons aged 50–69 years was conducted. The primary endpoint was quality of life measured by EQ-5D-5L, and the primary explanatory variable was observed mobility assessed using the 6-minute walk distance (6MWD). We applied regression models controlling for demographic, health status and other factors to evaluate the association between 6MWD and EQ-5D-5L. Results Of the 183 participants analyzed in the study, 37% were male and the average age was 59.8 years. After adjusting for differences in demographic characteristics and health status, EQ-5D-5L-based utility values were 0.046 points (p<0.001), or 5.2% (95% CI: 2.7% to 7.8%), higher on average for individuals with 100 meters longer 6MWD. Holding constant the mobility-specific component of EQ-5D-5L, we still found that walking an additional 100 meters was associated with an EQ-5D-5L utility value that was 0.029 points (p<0.001), or 3.5% (95% CI: 1.7% to 5.5%), higher than the average participant. Among persons with arthritis, the association between 6MWD and EQ-5D-5L was slightly stronger. Conclusions Near elderly persons with better mobility had higher quality of life. Diseases that decrease mobility, such as arthritis, are likely to have a significant impact on quality of life.


Objective To estimate the incidence of hospitalization for reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (RCVS), we identified RCVS-related hospital admissions across 11 US states in 2016. Methods We tested the validity of ICD-10 code I67.841 in 79 patients with hospital admissions for RCVS or other cerebrovascular diseases at 1 academic and 1 community hospital. After determining that this code had a sensitivity of 100% (95% confidence interval [CI], 82%–100%) and a specificity of 90% (95% CI, 79%–96%), we applied it to administrative data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project on all hospital admissions across 11 states. Age- and sex-standardized RCVS incidence was calculated using census data. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze associated diagnoses. Results Across 5,067,250 hospital admissions in our administrative data, we identified 222 patients with a discharge diagnosis of RCVS in 2016. The estimated annual age- and sex-standardized incidence of RCVS hospitalization was 2.7 (95% CI, 2.4–3.1) cases per million adults. Many patients had concomitant neurologic diagnoses, including subarachnoid hemorrhage (37%), ischemic stroke (16%), and intracerebral hemorrhage (10%). In the 90 days before the index admission, 97 patients had an emergency department (ED) visit and 34 patients a hospital admission, most commonly for neurologic, psychiatric, and pregnancy-related diagnoses. Following discharge from the RCVS hospital admission, 58 patients had an ED visit and 31 had a hospital admission, most commonly for neurologic diagnoses. Conclusions Using population-wide data, we estimated the age- and sex-standardized incidence of hospitalization for RCVS in US adults as approximately 3 per million per year.


In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it. Nicholas Mirzoeff is a leading figure in the field of visual culture, which aims to make sense of this extraordinary explosion of visual experiences. As Mirzoeff reminds us, this is not the first visual revolution; the 19th century saw the invention of film, photography and x-rays, and the development of maps, microscopes and telescopes made the 17th century an era of visual discovery. But the sheer quantity of images produced on the internet today has no parallels. In the first book to define visual culture for the general reader, Mirzoeff draws on art history, theory and everyday experience to provide an engaging and accessible overview of how visual materials shape and define our lives.


We consider in this paper the dictionary learning problem when the observations are normalized histograms of features. This problem can be tackled using non-negative matrix factorization approaches, using typically Euclidean or Kullback-Leibler fitting errors. Because these fitting errors are separable and treat each feature on equal footing, they are blind to any similarity the features may share. We assume in this work that we have prior knowledge on these features. To leverage this side-information, we propose to use the Wasserstein (a.k.a. earth mover's or optimal transport) distance as the fitting error between each original point and its reconstruction, and we propose scalable algorithms to to so. Our methods build upon Fenchel duality and entropic regularization of Wasserstein distances, which improves not only speed but also computational stability. We apply these techniques on face images and text documents. We show in particular that we can learn dictionaries (topics) for bagof-word representations of texts using words that may not have appeared in the original texts, or even words that come from a different language than that used in the texts.


Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by chronic motor and vocal tics, which fluctuate over time. The molecular genetics of TS is supported by genetic epidemiology studies, which strongly suggest the presence of susceptibility genes for TS. Epidemiologic family, segregation and linkage studies, as well as candidate gene studies, have yielded limited specific results to date, however, pathophysiology models that support a molecular genetics approach in TS are emerging. Whole-genome approaches, including genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and whole-genome sequencing, may yield more definitive genomic findings. Uncovering the biological substrate of TS will spur the development of novel, more precisely targeted, treatments for this disabling disorder.

Keywords:

Tourette Syndrome;
molecular genetics;
candidate genes;
linkage;
association;
dopamine;
glutamate


"he rate of division of lysogenic bacteria in infected animals can be estimated by superinfecting the bacteria with a suitable mutant of the prophage before inoculation. Since, as shown by other workers, the mutant phage is usually stable and does not multiply during bacterial growth, the proportion of bacteria carrying the mutant steadily falls in a predictable manner in each bacterial generation. Comparison of the proportions of superinfected bacteria present at the star t and at the end of a known period therefore gives the number of bacterial generations occurring in a known time. It is assumed that there is no selection either for or against superinfected bacteria. Mice were inoculated with Escherichia co2i strain K12, lysogenized by phage hb and superinfected by phage Ahc. The proportion of superinfected bacteria in the spleen did not usually change in the 30 hr. following inoculation. Hence, this strain of bacteria cannot produce viable progeny in the spleen. The behaviour of the superinfecting phage differed in two ways from that described by previous workers. First, only part of the adsorbed phage was recovered after induction by ultraviolet radiation. Second, the proportion of bacteria which yielded superinfecting phage sometimes fell very rapidly when superinfekted overnight cultures were diluted in a medium which allowed bacterial multiplication. This phenomenon is referred to as 'unstable superinfection'.


In this paper we try to explain the concepts of contractual, regulatory, tortious and criminal liability, issues that each of these liabilities give rise to, as well as the principles and rules applicable for determining the responsibilities of the company and of those persons concerned with the company in relation to the criminal liability. We will consider and try to answer questions like: whose acts or omissions, for the purpose of determining the corporate regulatory, contractual, tortious and criminal liability, should be deemed as those of, or should be imputed to the company? When is the knowledge and state of mind of the company's employees and agents imputed to the company? Can a company kill? We will concentrate on the issue of corporate criminal liability where the courts face major difficulties when determining whose acts or omissions, for the purpose of holding the company liable for crimes requiring mens rea, should be imputed to the company.


Background Drowning is the second leading cause of death for Filipino children 1–14-years-old. It kills more children than tuberculosis, malnutrition, diarrhoea, cancer or meningitis. 31% of all injury deaths among children 14-years-old and below are caused by drowning. Aims/Objectives/Purpose To be able to get data from local and national sources that will help develop widespread drowning prevention programmes and interventions in the country. Methods Safe Kids Philippines conducted a survey questionnaire on children to show their attitudes and perceptions on swimming and playing in Cutcut Creek, considered a dangerous waterway by the community. Results/Outcomes Children admitted to swimming in the creek without their parents' knowledge and permission. 59% disclosed that they would swim in the creek when it would swell after it rained. Data showed that 11 or 85% were males while only two (2) or 15% were females whose ages ranged from 5 to 14-years-old. Of those who did not swim in the creek, four (4) were males and four (4) were females; six belonged to ages 5 to 9 and only two (2) were 10 to 14 years of age. To prevent the children from going into the creek, SKP put permanent barriers and donated warning signs to the community. Significance/Contribution to the Field The endeavour of Safe Kids Philippines is a contribution in compliance to the Regional Framework for Action on Injury and Violence Prevention of 2008–2013 initiated by the DOH which has identified drowning prevention as a priority issue.


Objectives & Background Trying to establish an alternative e-learning tool to provide medical education to a country in need of support for the slowly growing medical community at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Following a devastating civil war in 1991, Somaliland is suffering a shortage of healthcare workers. King's College London has been working in partnership with educational institutions and healthcare providers in Somaliland since 2000. Methods 6 sessions over a period of 8 weeks were arranged to deliver teaching on topics such as clinical examination or discussion of various clinical ETAT/APLS/NLS scenarios trying to focus on clinical reasoning and emergency management skills. The London based participants were a paediatric emergency department registrar, present in all sessions, and occasionally paediatric FY1 doctors and one medical student. The participants on the Somaliland side were paediatric lecturers and occasionally several final year medical students and intern doctors. It was decided to use Skype and compare whether its audiovisual and text functions would bring additional benefits compared with an already established instant messenger type web-based portal. Results The initial feedback was positive and all participants agreed that Skype added a useful alternative to the still limited repertoire of distant learning opportunities. 100% of participants felt Skype with its audiovisual functions to be a very useful alternative to the existing teaching tool. 2 sessions had to be cancelled due to network problems. There were also connection issues in more than half of the other sessions. Over 80% of the participants would like more teaching in the form of Skype sessions. All participants identified network issues as a disadvantage and limiting factor. Conclusion Delivering distant online teaching sessions via Skype with its audiovisual functionality instead of purely text based online services clearly offers more advantages especially during clinical examination based or simulation sessions. It can currently only serve as an occasional teaching adjunct due to network instabilities and limited wifi availabilities in clinical areas mainly on the Somaliland teaching sites. Providing written and video materials in advance of Skype sessions will be tested in the future in order to use available time online more effectively.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the effect a novel formulation of fluocinonide cream on skin barrier function in subjects with atopic dermatitis.

DESIGN
The authors performed an open-label, investigator-blinded, side-by-side, controlled trial examining skin barrier function before and after a two-week course of a class I, super-potent topical steroid.

SETTING
Outpatient university-based dermatology clinic in Portland, OR.

SUBJECTS
Twenty-five subjects aged 12 or older with a diagnosis of moderate, severe, or very severe AD were recruited for this study.

INTERVENTION
Fluocinonide 0.1% cream, a novel formulation of a class I super-potent topical steroid was applied to all affected areas, except a control site, once daily for two weeks or until clear. The control target site was treated with the vehicle once daily.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S)
The study's primary outcome was change in skin barrier function as measured by basal transepidermal water loss (TEWL) in acute lesional skin from baseline as measured at two weeks.

RESULTS
TEWL readings significantly decreased (reflecting improved barrier function) in both the active and control target sites. The active target site decreased 14.35+/-16 mg/cm2 per hour; 95 percent confidence interval, P<0.001. The control target site decreased 8.75+/-11.80 mg/cm2 per hour in 25 subjects; 95 percent confidence interval, P<0.001. Skin electrical capacitance also improved significantly, reflecting improved stratum corneum hydration with therapy. Pruritus, clinical severity, and quality of life scores all showed significant improvement by the end of the study.

CONCLUSION
The authors have shown that short-term treatment with a novel formulation of 0.1% fluocinonide led to significantly improved barrier function as measured by basal TEWL in subjects with active moderate to severe AD. These data suggest short-term treatment with AD with a super-potent corticosteroid improves skin barrier function.


The arguments in favour of the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia are no longer focussed on unbearable suffering. Instead there is a rising demand for choice and control over the time and manner of our death, coupled with fears about the social and economic consequences of increasing numbers of elderly and dependent individuals. But there are strong medical, legal, social and theological reasons to oppose this new drive for suicide and euthanasia. The potent modern myth of the autonomous individual fails to match with the inescapable reality of human dependence and relationality. The increasing public support for the legalisation of medical killing provides an urgent challenge to the medical and legal professions and to the Christian community as a whole. Are Christians capable of living out a practical and countercultural demonstration of the preciousness of human life expressed in human interdependence, personal commitment and burden-sharing?


MODERN MEDICAL LABORATORY JOURNAL Vol.1 No.1, Winter & Spring 2017 Currently, different highly sensitive nucleic acid detection-based protocols used in medical diagnostic laboratories need specific working conditions, and if no optimization is performed, misleading results can be obtained. Limitations of each protocol is different in obtaining an appropriate result. Awareness of these limitations plays an important role in providing a reliable result for physicians and patients. The present study aims to investigate these limitations.


Literary scholars have recently become increasingly interested in the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in reading, and have incorporated scientific research in this area into their critical approaches to texts. This article argues that such an approach is particularly appropriate when authors explicitly engage with the way in which their texts are visually taken in and processed. This is the case with Guillaume Apollinaire, whose calligrammes are informed by a theory of visual-verbal simultaneity stipulating that the reader should be simultaneously aware of both textual and pictorial aspects of the poem. Experimental research in the psychology of reading and picture perception is used to assess this theory of simultaneity, and specifically to challenge Michel Foucault's claim that reading and viewing are mutually exclusive processes. The article concludes by considering further applications of psychological research to word and image studies.


This study investigates the appropriateness of the Action Pack Textbook Series (APTS) currently taught in the first four primary stage classes in Jordanian public schools. An evaluation checklist, compiled from the literature, and a semi-structured interview were used to evaluate the content, layout, assessment tasks, teacher's book and the availability of supplementary materials. The findings support the following conclusions: Poor ratings were minimal; APTS is adaptable to the needs of both teachers and pupils and provides a broad range of resources that can be selectively integrated into the curriculum; APTS contains modes of instruction that are developmentally appropriate for a wide range of learners; APTS instructional materials are interesting, engaging and effective for the target learners; the format of the teacher's book is easy to follow, the directions for implementing activities are clear, and the teacher's book itself is flexible and allows teachers to choose from a variety of activities to use with their pupils; for the most part, non-text materials are used appropriately to promote learning; and, overall, the materials for the pupils are well written, age-appropriate and compelling in content.


Background Changes in the anatomical structures and function of the ear can result in ear diseases, and may affect all age groups including the elderly as a result of aging Objective To identify the frequency and types of ear diseases among the elderly attending Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz bin Musa'ed Al Saud hospital, Arar city, in the Northern Province of KSA, and factors associated with ear infections among them. Methods This cross-sectional hospital based study conducted from December 2016 through May 2017 included 138 elderly participants. A questionnaire was designed for collecting data about socio-demographic variables, the frequency and types of ear diseases among participants, and factors associated with ear infections among them. Data were analyzed by SPSS version 15, using descriptive statistics and Chi-Square test. Results Findings showed that 49.3% of the participants were suffering from ear disease. Hearing impairment was detected in 37% of the elderly people studied. In addition, 9.4% and 2.9 % of the participants suffered from otitis media and otitis interna, respectively. None of the studied factors had a significant effect on the development and pattern of ear infection among the studied population. Conclusion Ear diseases were found among the participants with variable rates. More than one third of respondents suffered from hearing impairment. Ear infections were detected in lower rates. Although these problems are not life threating, they negatively impact the quality of life, and measures are needed for prevention and control.


This paper shows that bank runs can be modeled as an equilibrium phenomenon. We demonstrate that some aspects of the intuitive "story" that bank runs start with fears of insolvency of banks can be rigorously modeled. If individuals observe long "lines" at the bank, they correctly infer that there is a possibility that the bank is about to fail and precipitate a bank run. However, bank runs occur even when no one has any adverse information. Extra market constraints such as suspension of convertibility can prevent bank runs and result in superior allocations.