The Constitution s 76(iii) enables the Parliament to make laws conferring original jurisdiction on the High Court in any matter "of Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction". This provision was copied directly from art 111 s 2(1) of the Constitution of the United States. One issue has been whether s 76(iii) is limited to what was within the jurisdiction in 1901. Another, however, has been whether it confers a substantive power in the power to confer jurisdiction – that is power to legislate on admiralty and maritime law generally. Cases on art 111 s 2(1), and the reasoning they adopt, suggest it does. But is such reasoning applicable to s 76(iii)? Are there countervailing considerations, indicating to the contrary, that s 76(iii) (even if implying a body of law) is no more than merely a power for "the conferment of jurisdiction in a particular class of controversies"? These are significant questions in Australian constitutional law.


Green roofs (GRs) have become a popular sustainable drainage system (SuDS) technology in urban areas. As many countries and regions experience political encouragement and substitution schemes in implementing GRs, there is a need for reliant models that can support designing purposes. The stormwater management model's (SWMM) Low Impact Development Green Roof (LIDGR) control is used to simulate the hydrological detention performance of two GRs, GR1 and GR2, with different drainage properties located in Oslo, Norway. This study uses event-based data to replicate GR runoff. Accordingly, four event-models were calibrated using the Shuffled Complex Evolution algorithm with the Nash-Sutcliffe criteria (NSE) as the objective function. Eight events were used for model validation. In addition, sensitivity to the model parameters was analysed in relation to model input (precipitation characteristics and roof initial saturation levels). Simulation results revealed that SWMM's LID module can capture response of the GRs even though the adequacy varies among events. Parameter sensitivity analysis exhibited significant correlation between conductivity slope and maximum precipitation intensity. During calibration two GR1 (0.55 and 0.72) and three GR2 (0.73, 0.88 and 0.51) event-models yielded NSE>0.5. However, only parameter sets of two GR2 event-models yielded NSE>0.5 when applied to the validation events. The study shows potential of SWMM as a design tool if supplemented with a calibration algorithm. However, calibration is required and some adjustments to the LID-GR module should be made in the future. This concerns particularly the module's drainage layer.


This thesis presents a professional/organisational analysis of popular music journalism in
the UK. It considers the conditions under which consumer music magazines are produced
(at the level of both the newsroom and the publishing organisation) and how music
journalists deal with their main point of informational contact, the press officer. Drawing
on original interview and participant observation research, the thesis considers: the
economic and bureaucratic forces within magazine publishing organisations; how titles
are positioned both individually and collectively as part of portfolio of niched titles; how
market forces condition how and why titles are launched, redesigned and folded; and,
ultimately, how all these factors impact upon and shape the socio-professional and
cultural conditions under which editors and their staff work. The thesis then considers the
music press officer (both in-house and independent and their office/departmental
hierarchies) in terms of how they exist and operate at the meeting point of three distinct
groups: the artists they are employed to represent; the artists' record companies; and the
press (and their attempts to reconcile these often divergent needs).
Having considered the music press and music journalists in isolation (in terms of power
structures as well as their collective and individual goals) and press officers in isolation
(in terms of their position within wider music industry promotional strategies and how
they build, develop and revise a roster of artists) the thesis then moves on to analyse how
these two distinct professional groups (journalists/editors and press officers) work
together, how they professionally and organisationally define their goals and objectives
and the steps they take to meet these goals and objectives, negotiating quantitatively and
qualitatively the coverage of artists. A complex relationship of conditional power and
mutual dependency links these two sets of professionals in both their formal activities
and their socio-cultural activities. Breaking from previous studies that have described a
uni-directional flow of power and influence of press officers over the press, the thesis
argues that the relationships that tie these groups together (in terms of gatekeeping within
the hierarchy of the newsroom and a tilting balance of power) are much more complex
that has previously been assumed.


This paper evaluates the performance of the Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) filter for tracking multiple targets in an intelligent vision system. A stereo vision camera is used to get the left and right image sequences in order to extract 3-D coordinates of the targets' positions in the real world scene. The 3-D trajectories of the targets are tracked by a GM-PHD filter. Moreover, the label continuity of the targets is guaranteed by a new method of labeling. Motion speed and angular velocity are proposed for the evaluation of the accuracy and label continuity of the filter in the implemented 3-D test motion model. The simulation results for two moving targets show that the proposed system not only robustly tracks them, but also maintains the label continuity of the two targets.


Obesity, a major social and health problem in many countries, is due to the accumulation of white adipose tissue in subcutaneous and visceral depots. The discovery of adipocytes capacity of synthesis of numerous adipocytokines and growth factors and the cross talk between adipocytes and cells of the adipose stromo-vascular fraction had highlighted the role of adipose tissue dysfunction in obesity. In visceral obesity the unbalanced synthesis of pro- and anti-inflammatory adipocytokines contributes to the development of the metabolic syndrome which cumulates the factors that increase the risk for ischemic heart disease and cerebral stroke. Adipose tissue accumulation is associated with a state of chronic inflammation, and local hypoxia is considered its underlying cause due to the hypertrophic or/and the hyperplasic growth of the fat pad. Adipose tissue hypoxia is one of the first pathophysiological changes and was placed as a missing link between obesity and low-grade inflammation present in the metabolic syndrome. Hypoxia is a major trigger for adipose tissue remodeling including adipocyte death, inflammation, tissue fibrosis, and angiogenesis. Recently, the role of hypoxia in brown adipose tissue dysfunction, a tissue presumed as the biologic counterbalance of the metabolic disturbances in human obesity, is discussed. dehydrogenase


Until recently, students and researchers in nonparametric and semiparametric statistics and econometrics have had to turn to the latest journal articles to keep pace with these emerging methods of economic analysis. Nonparametric Econometrics fills a major gap by gathering together the most up-to-date theory and techniques and presenting them in a remarkably straightforward and accessible format. The empirical tests, data, and exercises included in this textbook help make it the ideal introduction for graduate students and an indispensable resource for researchers. Nonparametric and semiparametric methods have attracted a great deal of attention from statisticians in recent decades. While the majority of existing books on the subject operate from the presumption that the underlying data is strictly continuous in nature, more often than not social scientists deal with categorical data--nominal and ordinal--in applied settings. The conventional nonparametric approach to dealing with the presence of discrete variables is acknowledged to be unsatisfactory. This book is tailored to the needs of applied econometricians and social scientists. Qi Li and Jeffrey Racine emphasize nonparametric techniques suited to the rich array of data types--continuous, nominal, and ordinal--within one coherent framework. They also emphasize the properties of nonparametric estimators in the presence of potentially irrelevant variables. Nonparametric Econometrics covers all the material necessary to understand and apply nonparametric methods for real-world problems.


It is often difficult for persons who are extremely overweight to find exercise systems that are accessible and safe to use. Seating is required to handle heavier loads of up to 500 lbs. and provide safe access to the exercise unit. Additionally, the exercise should not cause additional pain or possible damage if the person needs to suddenly stop. A multidisciplinary team of undergraduate engineers participated in a training course to interview a non-technical customer to determine design requirements and then underwent a rigorous design process to implement the best solution. Mechanical analysis was performed to determine the best solution for the concept, materials, and resistance. An exercise machine with a rotating chair was selected as the best solution. The chair rotates 90 degrees so that the user can sit down without having to step onto the machine. Once the user sits, the chair can then rotate 90 degrees until the chair is in the exercise position; in either position the chair locks into position for stability. This particular concept uses a bicyle exercise. This exercise minimizes impact on the knees, which is a safety issue for patients with knee problems. A sitting position for this exercise eliminates the stability issue raised with a standing exercise, where there is worry of falling. This exercise is beneficial for cardiovascular exercise. Resistance is implemented using a magnet. Fluid resistance and fly-wheel resistance would create too much momentum which was not desired by the customer. Electrical analysis was performed to determine the best method to sense heart rate, speed, and computer interface. Wired handles were selected to monitor the heart rate. These are hand held and are much easier to use than a chest strap. An optical sensor was used to sense speed. It was placed near the center of the wheel and rotations were indicated by a tab to break the connection in the sensor. This method was selected over a Hall effect sensor because it is a much simpler sensing method that does not require an addition magnetic component that is not too accurate a low speeds. The computer interface was a Motorola HC12s since it had the necessary I/O interfaces and was low cost. A custom interface was created with seven segment displays to show the heart rate and time of exercise. The system was then developed, tested, and delivered to the customer for use. This project was supported by Grant No. 0607883 from the National Science Foundation.


In problem domains for which an informed admissible heuristic function is not available, one attractive approach is hierarchical search. Hierarchical search uses search in an abstracted version of the problem to dynamically generate heuristic values. This paper makes two contributions to hierarchical search. First, we propose a simple modification to the state-of-the-art algorithm Switchback that reduces the number of expansions (and hence the running time) by approximately half, while maintaining its guarantee of optimality. Second, we propose a new algorithm for suboptimal hierarchical search, called Switch. Empirical results suggest that Switch yields faster search than straightforward modifications of Switchback, such as weighting the heuristic or greedy search. The success of Switch illustrates the potential for further research on specifically suboptimal hierarchical search.


Bt cotton remains one of the most widely grown biotech crops among smallholder farmers. Numerous studies, including those previously conducted in Pakistan, attest to its yield and cost advantages. However, the effectiveness of Bt toxin, which depends on many technical constraints, is heterogeneous. Furthermore, in Pakistan, the diffusion of Bt cotton varieties occurred despite a weak regulatory system and without seed quality control; evidence demonstrates that varieties sold as Bt may not contain the genes or express them effectively. We use data collected from a sample that is statistically representative of the nation's cotton growers to test the effects of Bt cotton use on productivity in a damage control framework. Unlike previous studies, we employ five measures of Bt identity: name, official approval status, farmer belief, laboratory tests of Bt presence in plant tissue, and biophysical assays measuring Bt effectiveness. Only farmers' belief that a variety is Bt affects cotton productivity. Although all measures reduce damage from pests, the biophysical indicators have the largest effect, and official approval has the weakest. For applied economists, findings highlight the importance of getting the data right concerning Bt. For policy makers, they suggest the need, on ethical if not productivity grounds, to monitor variety integrity closer to point of sale.


The visualization of time-dependent simulation data, such as data sets from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, is still a very challenging task. In this paper, we present a new approach for the interactive visual analysis of flow simulation data, which is especially targeted at the analysis of time-dependent data. This supports the flexible specification and visualization of flow features in an interactive setup of multiple linked views. Special emphasis is put on new mechanisms to capture time-dependent features (i.e. flow features that are inherently dependent on time). We propose the integration of attribute derivation into the process of interactive visual analysis to enable the subsequent user access to otherwise implicit properties of the unsteady data in our interactive feature specification framework. All views of this flow analysis setup are linked, in the sense that the features in focus are consistently emphasized in the visualization (more colorful, less transparent) whereas the rest of the data are only shown as context in reduced style. In addition to introducing our new approach, we also demonstrate its use in the context of several application examples.


The purpose of this study was to create strategy for developing Human Resource competency post unloading from Camara Nusantara Cattle Ship. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method were used for search the best alternative strategy for developing Human Resource competency post unloading from Camara Nusantara Cattle Ship. The expert selection was carried out to obtain priority weights or rankings in the AHP structure to determine post-unloading HR competency development strategies. Based on the results of the analysis that has been done that the most influential factor is facilities and infrastructure with a weight of 0.377. The actor who has the most role in determining the strategy to increase the competence of human resources after unloading from cattle ship is an expedition company with a weight of 0.269, with the primary objective being to maintain the quality of livestock (0.464). The most appropriate alternative strategy in the hierarchy with a weight of 0.324 is conducting competency-based training and development.


A helicopter had just taken off when there was a loud bang and the engine started to overspeed. After landing and inspection, the transmission was disassembled. It was discovered that the assembly containing the output shaft to the main rotor had failed. The output shaft assembly was made up of two parts: the output shaft with an integral 10 in. diam upper disc at approximately mid-section; and a 10 in. diam lower disc. During manufacture, the lower disc was attached to the output shaft by an electron beam weld. The fracture had a single fatigue initiation site, coincident with the annular zone of remelted material on the inner surface of the disc. In the lower disc, the fracture was also 80% fatigue, but high stress, low cycle in nature and contained multiple initiation sites coincident with an electron beam weld bead. It was concluded that fatigue in the upper disc resulted from the presence of a metallurgical stress concentration caused by the electron weld beam impingement on the inner surface of the upper disc. An Airworthiness Directive was issued, and the manufacturer issued a mandatory service bulletin outlining a periodic inspection for the output shaft assembly.


Selecting which blockchain participants can decide upon a new block is a difficult problem. Consortium blockchains need the participants to be predetermined while public blockchains incentivize all participants to waste their resources to decide every block. In this paper, we introduce the community blockchain that allows potentially all participants to decide upon "some" block while restricting the set of participants deciding upon "one" block. To this end, we propose a blockchain reconfiguration, a Byzantine consensus protocol that allows to dynamically change the set of blockchain participants deciding upon the upcoming blocks. The resulting blockchain, called ComChain, is resilience optimal and transitions through different configurations of participants recorded in dedicated blocks so that each configuration decides upon its subsequent transaction blocks. We evaluate an implementation that adds reconfiguration to the Red Belly Blockchain and demonstrates its practical performance in a distributed system.


This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature. www.hvs.com


Supernovae are some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe and they have throughout history fascinated people as they appeared as new stars in the sky. Supernova (SN) 1987A exploded in the nearby satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), at a distance of only 168,000 light years. The proximity of SN 1987A offers a unique opportunity to study the medium surrounding the supernova in great detail. Powered by the dynamical interaction of the ejecta with the inner circumstellar ring, SN 1987A is dramatically evolving at all wavelengths on time scales less than a year. This makes SN 1987A a great ``laboratory'' for studies of shock physics. Repeated observations of the ejecta-ring collision have been carried out using the UVES echelle spectrograph at VLT. This thesis covers seven epochs of high resolution spectra taken between October 1999 and November 2007. Three different emission line components are identified from the spectra. A narrow (~10 km/s) velocity component emerges from the unshocked ring. An intermediate (~250 km/s) component arises in the shocked ring, and a broad component extending to ~15,000 km/s comes from the reverse shock. Thanks to the high spectral resolution of UVES, it has been possible to separate the shocked from the unshocked ring emission. For the unshocked gas, ionization stages from neutral up to Ne V and Fe VII were found. The line fluxes of the low-ionization lines decline during the period of the observations. However, the fluxes of the [O III] and [Ne III] lines appear to increase and this is found to be consistent with the heating of the pre-shock gas by X-rays from the shock interactions. The line emission from the ejecta-ring collision increases rapidly as more gas is swept up by the shocks. This emission comes from ions with a range of ionization stages (e.g., Fe II-XIV). The low-ionization lines show an increase in their line widths which is consistent with that these lines originate from radiative shocks. The high-ionization line profiles (Fe X-XIV) initially show larger spectral widths, which indicates that at least a fraction of the emission comes from non-radiative shocks.


The objective of this paper is to discuss factors contributing to powered two wheeler (PTW) crashes. They are described under three main categories: road user (perception and awareness, atypical behaviour etc.), road environment (design, conditions), and vehicle. An exhaustive literature review of existing studies on powered two wheelers risk and contributory factors was carried out, in order to identify and quantify the impact of various factors on PTW crash and injury risk, with emphasis on the association of risk factors. The results reveal that human factors (e.g. driver and rider behaviour) are prevalent in PTW crashes, compared to vehicle and road factors. Road design and environment factors mostly influence accident severity (e.g. roadside obstacles and barriers, traffic calming installations) rather than accident occurrence. There is also a clear over-representation of perceptive problems in PTW crashes, which suggests a specific problem of detectability for these road users. Moreover, PTW are over-represented in impairment and speeding related crashes, and there appear to be specific PTW behaviours that may surprise other road users - although such behaviours are not necessarily traffic-law-violating. Male, young and inexperienced riders are at higher crash risk. A stronger correlation of crash contributory factor is identified among PTW riders, compared to other road users, often resulting in coexistence of several risk factors in PTW accidents, and in multiplication of the related risk in these cases.


Vehicular Ad-Hoc network mainly involves Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. This communication facilitates in reducing number of accidents, avoiding traffic congestion, enhancing the
transport facility with the aid of infotainment and
entertainment application. One of the major challenges of
VANET application is in routing the packet in efficient and
effective manner since the network topology is dynamic. In this paper we present Distance Based Routing (DBR) protocol
designed especially for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET).
The proposed algorithm adopts both position based and map
based routing technique. In DBR, a connectivity graph based
on the intervehicular distance, the duration of connectivity
between neighbouring vehicles and the information from the
digital map are collectively used to route the data. In proposed protocol the network traffic is reduced due to the relative position information of the neighbouring vehicle. The stability of the route path is high due to intervehicular distance based next hop selection technique as implemented in this protocol. The proposed routing protocol is simulated using NS2 simulator to analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of the protocol.


"Since the fall of the iron curtain in 1989, the migration deficit of the Eastern part of Germany has accumulated to 1.8 million people, which is over 10 percent of its initial population. Depending on their human capital endowment, these migrants might either - in the case of low-skilled migration - accelerate or - in high-skilled case - impede convergence. Due to the availability of detailed data on regional human capital, migration and productivity growth, we are able to test how geographic mobility affects convergence via the human capital selectivity of migration. With regard to the endogeneity of the migration flows and human capital, we apply a dynamic panel data model within the framework of s-convergence and account for spatial dependence. The regressions indicate a positive, robust, but modest effect of a migration surplus on regional productivity growth. After controlling for human capital, the effect of migration decreases; this decrease indicates that skill selectivity is one way that migration impacts growth." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))


We present an accurate and quantitative design scheme for erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) gain control systems. The proposed design scheme is demonstrated through the design of an eight-channel EDFA gain-clamping system with an all-optical self-tuning feedback loop. The effect of the time delay in the feedback loop and the selection of feedback wavelength are theoretically analyzed. Compared with existing electrical-optical EDFA gain schemes, the proposed design scheme is free from the feedback loop response speed limitation and does not need any predetermined information of the network traffic variation or operation point estimation. It can efficiently enhance the static and dynamic performance of the whole system. Furthermore, since the design can efficiently suppress the relaxation oscillation transient, it provides a cost-effective solution for the gain-clamping problem of a long EDFA chain by combining it with a fast-link control method.


Subsurface modeling is a key tool to describe, understand and quantify geological processes. As the subsurface is inaccessible and its observation is limited by acquisition methods, 3D models of the subsurface are usually built from the interpretation of sparse data with limited resolution. Therefore, uncertainties occur during the model building process, due to possible cognitive human biais, natural variability of geological objects and intrinsic uncertainties of data. In such context, the predictibility of models is limited by uncertainties, which must be assessed in order to reduce economical and human risks linked to the use of models. This work focuses more specifically on uncertainties about geological structures. In this context, a stochastic method is developed for generating structural models with various fault and horizon geometries as well as fault connections. Realistic geological objects are obtained using implicit modeling that represents a surface by an equipotential of a volumetric scalar field. Faults have also been described by a reduced set of uncertain parameters, which opens the way to the inversion of structural objects using geophysical or fluid flow data by baysian methods.


Background In 2011 the Belgian Obstetric Surveillance System (B.OSS) was set up to monitor severe maternal morbidity in Belgium. Aim The aim of B.OSS is to get an accurate picture of the obstetric complications under investigation and secondly, to improve the quality and safety of obstetric care in Belgium by practical recommendations based on the results. Methodology Data are obtained through prospective active collection of cases by a monthly call according to the principle of nothing-to-report, along with data collection forms that confirm the diagnosis and gather detailed information. Data-collection occurs web-based since August 2013 through www.b-oss.be. Results B.OSS achieves excellent participation rates and response rates. The results of the first registration round are gradually brought out by means of scientific publications and presentations, biennial reports, newsletters and the website. The international comparison of results within the International Network of Obstetric Survey Systems (INOSS) gives important added value. No alternative mandatory data sources are appropriate to check for underreporting. Conclusions B.OSS is successful in monitoring severe maternal morbidity thanks to the willingness of the Belgian OB-GYNs. The results of the first studies suggest the need to develop nationally adopted guidelines. Furthermore, the results invite to critically evaluate the current organisation of obstetric health care in Belgium. B.OSS aims to monitor the impact on patient safety in future surveys, when guidelines and recommendations are put into practice.


Ammonia oxidizing archaea (AOA) of the phylum Thaumarchaeota are widespread in moderate environments but their occurrence and activity has also been demonstrated in hot springs. Here we present the first cultivated thermophilic representative with a sequenced genome, which allows to search for adaptive strategies and for traits that shape the evolution of Thaumarchaeota. Candidatus Nitrosocaldus cavascurensis has been cultivated from a hot spring in Ischia, Italy. It grows optimally at 68°C under chemolithoautotrophic conditions on ammonia or urea converting ammonia stoichiometrically into nitrite with a generation time of approximately 25h. Phylogenetic analyses based on ribosomal proteins place the organism as a sister group to all known mesophilic AOA. The 1.58 Mb genome of Ca. N. cavascurensis harbors an amoAXCB gene cluster encoding ammonia monooxygenase, genes for a 3-hydroxypropionate/4-hydroxybutyrate pathway for autotrophic carbon fixation, but also genes that indicate potential alternative energy metabolisms. Although a bona fide gene for nitrite reductase is missing, the organism is sensitive to NO-scavenging, underlining the importance of this compound for AOA metabolism. Ca. N. cavascurensis is distinct from all other AOA in its gene repertoire for replication, cell division and repair. Its genome has an impressive array of mobile genetic elements and other recently acquired gene sets, including conjugative systems, a provirus, transposons and cell appendages. Some of these elements indicate recent exchange with the environment, whereas others seem to have been domesticated and might convey crucial metabolic traits.


The 'new legal history' has flourished in Canada over the last three decades, ever since Andre Morel and John Brierley began their pioneering work in the history of Quebec law in the 1960s and R.C.B. Risk published his 'Prospectus for the Study of Canadian Legal History' in 1973. A recent survey of the field describes this body of scholarship as "striking in its diversity in substance, theoretical context and methodology, ...a far cry from the concerns of traditional English history focused primarily, as it was, on the evolution of the common law, the Royal courts, and the cast of characters who administered them and made decisions or practiced in them... [T]he focus of contemporary legal historical scholarship in Canada...extend[s] well beyond the courts and their denizens to law and legal culture in all its complexity."Legal history in Canada is a thriving branch of 'law and society' scholarship, one that has the power to enrich contemporary legal scholarship and legal education, to inform research in Canadian studies, and to provide a new dimension to the writing of Canadian history.


We extended our garbage collecting memory allocator to provide good performance for multi-threaded applications on multiprocessors. The basic design is similar to the approach previously pursued in [12]. However, we concentrate on issues important to more common small-scale multiprocessors, and on speci c issues not reported elsewhere. We argue that a reasonable level of garbage collector scalability can be achieved with relatively minor additions to the underlying collector code. Furthermore the scalable collector does not need to be appreciably slower on a uniprocessor. Since our collector can serve as a plug-in replacement for malloc/free, we have the opportunity to compare it to scalable malloc-free implementations, notably Hoard [3]. Somewhat surprisingly, our collector signi cantly outperforms Hoard in some tests, a property that is mostly shared by the garbage collecting allocator in [ETY97]. We argue that garbage collectors currently require signi cantly less synchronization than explicit allocators, but that it may be possible to derive signi cantly faster explicit allocators from this observation. Speedy access to thread-local storage is a signi cant issue in the design of allocators that must conform to standard calling conventions. We present empirical evidence that at least in the presence of a garbage collector, this can often be accomplished faster in a thread-independent way than through the standard thread library facilities, casting some doubt on the utility of the latter.


Managers of street-level organizations play an important role in the successful implementation of public reforms. A prevailing view within the public administration literature is that this work involves the adaptation between reforms and local contexts, where divergence is viewed as a form of resistance to change. The paper challenges this prevalent reform-centric view by introducing a situation-centric perspective and coining the concept of situational work as a significant form of managerial work during implementation. Situational work encompasses managerial actions that ensure functional and well-ordered service delivery in local street-level organizations by accomodating everyday situational contingencies, including reform objectives, but also the interests and expectations of workers, clients, and local service partners. The concept of situational work, then, broadens the recognized scope of managerial activities that contribute to successful reform implementation, reconceptualizing divergence from reform design as constructive rather than as resistance to change. The paper draws on an extensive multi-wave study of a major organizational reform in Norway, based on observations of meetings as well as qualitative interviews of managers, union representatives, frontline workers and collaborating partners in six welfare service offices at three points in time (altogether 23 observation sessions and 173 interviews).


There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical Archimedean copulae (HAC) that allow for non-exchangeable and non-Gaussian dependency structures with a small number of parameters. In this paper we develop a novel adaptive estimation technique of the parameters and of the structure of HAC for time-series. The approach relies on a local change point detection procedure and a locally constant HAC approximation. Typical applications are in the financial area but also recently in the spatial analysis of weather parameters. We analyse the time varying dependency structure of stock indices and exchange rates. We find that for stock indices the copula parameter changes dynam- ically but the hierarchical structure is constant over time. Interestingly in our exchange rate example both structure and parameters vary dynamically.


This corpus-based study explores some of the linguistic and discursive aspects of framing positive and negative information – mainly modals, evaluative adjectives, and mitigation strategies – in recommendation letters. The corpus is comprised of 114 letters of recommendation spanning three years of applications to an English Ph.D. program, approximately 46,000 words. The results reveal consistent patterns in the way different types of modals and their associated collocates are used to hedge predictions, and the analysis identifies the discursive frames of the most common mitigation strategies in presenting potentially negative information about applicants. The study illustrates the need to combine both corpus-based quantitative and qualitative methods for a more robust and fine-grained analysis of evaluative language in this occluded genre. Keywords: Recommendation letters; evaluative language; modals; negative presentation; mitigation strategies; occluded genres


A stable train of compressed Stokes pulses (to ~10 nsec) is obtained in a stimulated Brillouin fiber ring laser (of length L = 83 m) by periodically interrupting the argon-ion cw pump beam with an intraring cavity acousto-optic modulator. Interruption of the pump action, at each round-trip time tr ≃ Ln/c, permits damping of the excited sound waves that accumulate at the entry of the fiber owing to the inertial response of the material, well described by the coherent three-wave stimulated Brillouin scattering model (C3W-SBS equations). Amplification and compression of the backscattered Stokes pulse are limited by nonlinear optical Kerr effect, which is incorporated into the C3W-SBS equations.


Background and Aim: Candida spp can colonize in oral cavity in immunocompromised patients and can lead to candidiasis. Because of immunocompromised condition in patients with Down syndrome, this study aimed at the colonization rate of candida spp in the mouths of such patients. Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross–sectional study was carried out on 53 patients with Down syndrome (29 males and 24 females) within the age range of 4-31 years (mean age: 11.1 years) and supported by the welfare organization, Tabriz branch. The samples were taken from the dorsal and buccal parts of tongues using sterile swabs, and were cultured on Sabouraud Dextrose Agar (SDA+ Chloramphenicol) and corm candida agar. Determination of candida species was based on phenotype characteristics and chlamydoconidia production in Corn Meal Agar containing Tween 80. Results: Altogether 60 isolates of candida spp were isolated from 46 positive patients [26 males (56.52%) and 20 females (43.48%)]. C.albicans with 35 cases (66.03%) were the most frequent isolate and C.dubliniensis with 9 cases (16.98%), C.krusei with 7 cases (13.20%), C.globrata with 5 cases (9.43%) and C.tropicalis with 4 cases (7.54%) were the following ranks. In 12 patients (22.4%), there were more than one species of candida in their oral cavity. Conclusion: Due to the immunocompromised condition in patients with Down syndrome caused by a decrease in IgA and the activity of H 2 O 2 (main destructive agent of C.albicans), the necessity of colonization rate of Candida in such patients is recommended.


How are you learning about the most important, essential, and current concepts of information technology? Computing Essentials 2017 Complete allows you to Make IT Work for You by presenting the effect of information technology on people, privacy, ethics, and our environment. Current examples, references and exercises allow students to be successful in understanding today's role of Computer Information Technology. This definitive approach provides the essentials students need while bringing them a full digital solution through Connect. Connect is a teaching and learning platform that is proven to deliver better results for students and instructors. Connect empowers students by continually adapting to deliver precisely what they need, when they need it, and how they need it, so class time is more engaging and effective. O'Leary; Computing Essentials 2017: Make IT Work for You!


Job descriptions are one of the major mechanisms that organizations use to convey job and company information to job applicants. Consequently, job descriptions play a major role in the recruitment process to attract job candidates. However, it is unclear whether the quality of a job description influences a job applicant's decision making. It is in the organizations' interest to understand this phenomenon to make better decisions on how to present job descriptions in order to achieve qualified applicants and a desirable applicant pool size. The purpose of this thesis is to determine the impact of the quality of information of job descriptions on a job applicant's decision to pursue a job. A model is developed to quantify job descriptions. The developed model contains three axes: i) x-axis – job description components, ii) y-axis – information quality dimensions, and iii) z-axis – job industries. This investigation analyzed 127 job descriptions for students majoring in accounting at the University of Waterloo to determine the relationship between the qualities of different components of the job descriptions with the corresponding number of applications. The results of this investigation suggest that information quality has a positive impact on job applicants' decision to pursue a job. In addition, information quality has different magnitudes of impact for jobs that have similar organization reputation or geographic location. Future research is recommended to analyze other information quality dimensions by using a similar experimental approach as the one used in this thesis.


Abstract The following pages are taken from a long interview (more than eight hours of footage in total) that Viviane Reding granted us in 2015 in connection with the "Pierre Werner and Europe" research project. Drawing on more than 40 years' experience in politics, Viviane Reding spoke about her career, the role of Luxembourg and Luxembourgers in the European integration process, and various key events in which she played a part. In these extracts, she discusses her role as a member of the first and second Barroso Commissions (2004-2009 and 2010-2014) and her efforts to help build an information and knowledge society in Europe, one that serves citizens and protects their rights and fundamental freedoms. Her achievements in this respect include capping mobile phone roaming charges (they were subsequently abolished in 2017), advocating for the introduction of a single emergency number (112) in all EU countries, launching the Europeana digital library, and spearheading a programme to use technological innovation for climate and energy solutions. She also describes the process of developing a Digital Agenda for Europe to improve the continent's digital competitiveness compared with the United States, China and Japan – a complex and challenging task given the context of globalisation and the divergent interests of the various stakeholders (research, industry, consumers, etc.). Finally, she mentions the reform of personal data protection that she initiated (leading to the GDPR, adopted in April 2016).


Optical and electron-energy-loss data for evaporated-aluminum films have been critically analyzed and used in an iterative, self-consistent algorithm that represents a combination of the Kramers-Kronig analysis and the semiquantum-model application. The novel values of the intrinsic optical functions of aluminum have been determined in a wide spectral range from 200 µm (6.2 meV) to 0.12 nm (10 keV). These functions are in accordance with recent calculations by Lee and Chang [Phys. Rev. B 49, 2362 (1994)], with dc conductivity measurements, and are in good agreement with both peak positions and line widths obtained from electron-energy-loss experiments. The results are examined for internal consistency by inertial and f-sum rules.


ð Lipases catalyze the hydrolysis of fats to form glycerol and fatty acids. Secreted lipases have been implicated as virulence factors in some pathogens. Previously a gene encoding a secretory lipase from the human protozoan pathogen Leishmania donovani was identified and characterized however, experimental evidence to support the biological role of secreted lipases in Leishmania sp. remains to be elucidated. The goal of this project was to express the secretory lipase gene, LdLIP3, from L. donovani and characterize its lipolytic activity. Culture supernatants of L. donovani over-expressing the secretory LdLIP3 enzyme were used to characterize lipolytic activity at several different pHs and temperatures that are biologically relevant in the life cycle of the parasite. At 26°C the optimal lipolytic activity was determined to be pH5.0 with palmitate as the substrate. Similarly, at 37°C the optimal activity was at pH 6.5 with palmitate, and at 42°C, pH 6.0 using stearate as substrate. These results indicate that LdLIP3 has lypolytic activity that could be significant throughout the parasite life cycle. Characterization of the optimal lipolytic activity for the LdLIP3 enzyme should allow further analysis of the physical and biochemical properties of the secreted lipase and to define its possible role in the life cycle of Leishmania sp. ð


For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.


This article presents an experiment in time series analysis, specifically the Rayleigh Test, applied to the ancient Egyptian calendars of lucky and unlucky days recorded in papyri P. Cairo 86637, P. BM 10474 and P. Sallier IV. The Rayleigh Test is used to determine whether the lucky and unlucky days are distributed randomly within the year, or whether they exhibit periodicity. The results of the analysis show beyond doubt that some of the lucky days were distributed according to a lunar calendar. The cycles of the moon thus played an important role in the religious thinking of the Egyptians. Other periods found using the Rayleigh Test are connected to the civil calendar, the mythological symbolism of the twelfth hour of the day and possibly the period of variation of the star Algol.


This article introduces apparent feminism, which is a new approach urgently required by modern technical rhetorics. Apparent feminism provides a new kind of response that addresses current political trends that render misogyny unapparent, the ubiquity of uncritically negative responses to the term feminism, and a decline in centralized feminist work in technical communication. More specifically, it suggests that the manifestation of these trends in technical spheres requires intervention into notions of objectivity and the regimes of truth they support. Apparent feminism is a methodology that seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique of contemporary politics and technical rhetorics. It encourages a response to social justice exigencies, invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals, and makes apparent the ways in which efficient work actually depends on the existence and input of diverse audiences.


Computer risk exposures and security in general are reviewed, and factors suggesting that expert system security is a unique problem are examined. Security requirements associated with the unique characteristics of expert systems are investigated. They include technical aspects of knowledge (certainty factors, symbolic information and special fixes), structure (user interface, knowledge base, inference engine and database), design methodology (prototyping) and the current delivery environment (e.g., PCs and expert system shells). The security of working expert systems as discussed in the literature is examined. Rationales for the current apparent lack of expert system security are analyzed and the impact of possible security controls on expert system users and developers is assessed.<<ETX>>


The largest geomagnetic storms of solar cycle 24 so far occurred on 2015 March 17 and June 22 with D st ?> minima of − 223 ?> and − 195 ?> nT, respectively. Both of the geomagnetic storms show a multi-step development. We examine the plasma and magnetic field characteristics of the driving coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in connection with the development of the geomagnetic storms. A particular effort is to reconstruct the in situ structure using a Grad–Shafranov technique and compare the reconstruction results with solar observations, which gives a larger spatial perspective of the source conditions than one-dimensional in situ measurements. Key results are obtained concerning how the plasma and magnetic field characteristics of CMEs control the geomagnetic storm intensity and variability: (1) a sheath-ejecta-ejecta mechanism and a sheath-sheath-ejecta scenario are proposed for the multi-step development of the 2015 March 17 and June 22 geomagnetic storms, respectively; (2) two contrasting cases of how the CME flux-rope characteristics generate intense geomagnetic storms are found, which indicates that a southward flux-rope orientation is not a necessity for a strong geomagnetic storm; and (3) the unexpected 2015 March 17 intense geomagnetic storm resulted from the interaction between two successive CMEs plus the compression by a high-speed stream from behind, which is essentially the "perfect storm" scenario proposed by Liu et al. (i.e., a combination of circumstances results in an event of unusual magnitude), so the "perfect storm" scenario may not be as rare as the phrase implies.


Automatic speech quality assessment remains challenging, as we lack complete models of human auditory perception. Many existing full-reference models correlate well with human perception, but cannot be used in real-world scenarios where ground truth clean reference recordings are not available. On the other hand no-reference metrics typically suffer from several shortcomings, such as lack of robustness to unseen perturbations and reliance on (limited) labeled data for training. Moreover, noise or large variance among the labels makes it difficult to learn generalizable representations, especially for recordings with subtle differences. This paper proposes a learning framework for estimating the quality of a recording without any reference, and without any human judgments. The main component of this framework is a pairwise quality-preference strategy that reduces label noise, thereby making learning more robust. From pairwise preferences, we first learn a content invariant quality ordering; and then we re-target the model to predict quality on an absolute scale. We show that the resulting learned metric is well-calibrated with human judgments. Since it is a deep network, the metric is differentiable, making it suitable as a loss function for downstream tasks. For example, we show that adding this metric to an existing speech enhancement method yields significant improvement.


The case of informal cross border livestock trade in Ethiopia-Kenya border areas is examined with the intention to clear some doubts on conventional perceptions and broadly explore the implied effects of restrictive official interventions on the welfare of the peripheral population. The informal channel accounts for an estimated 71% of total value of live animal exports and 78% of consumer goods and productive inputs imported into the area. It is found that cross border livestock trade restrictions could lead to substantial drops in pastoral household welfare. In the case of Ethio-Kenyan borderlands, the informal traded livestock flows rather appear to be mutually beneficial, and should be guided by bilateral cross border co-operation of free flows. Keywords: Cross border trade, village SAM, pastoralism, Borana, Ethiopia


Scholars have written volumes about Justice Scalia's decision in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and other private-party standing cases. But another line of opinions may prove, in the long run, to be equally significant. Justice Scalia was also (indeed, perhaps more) skeptical about a different type of litigant: government institutions. Today, that skepticism has a great deal to teach us, because intergovernmental litigation is on the rise. States have sued the federal government over environmental and immigration policy; the House of Representatives has taken on the federal executive over health care and same-sex marriage; and a state legislature sued another state institution over control of electoral districts. This Essay argues that Justice Scalia was right to be concerned about such intergovernmental litigation, albeit for somewhat different reasons than the Justice articulated. The rise of "government v. government" lawsuits reflects two related (and troubling) developments in our constitutional scheme of separated powers: a decline in faith in the political process, and a corresponding increase in reliance on the federal judiciary to resolve controversial issues. The Essay further suggests that, to the extent these trends continue, there may be troubling long-term implications for the federal courts.


Seed deterioration is loss of seed quality, viability and vigor due to effect of adverse environmental factors. Many of our crops are reproduced through seeds, and throughout the world large quantities are produced, stored and transported. Seed ageing during storage may cause retardation of field establishment, and may eventually result in seedling abnormalities or even failure of emergence. During storage in gene banks, seed ageing may result in loss of genetic diversity. Extending and predicting the longevity of stored seeds is therefore highly relevant from a biodiversity as well as from an economic and social point of view. Seed rich in lipids has limited longevity due to its specific chemical composition. During storage of oily species declining trend of total oil content and seed germination can be observed. A fatty acid composition is the most important factor which determines oils susceptibility to oxidation Regardless of the problems which can be encountered due to the lack of space with favourable conditions, one must always keep in mind that seed is a living organism in which many biological processes, which can damage the seed and reduce its quality, take place, especially when the oily seed is in question


Visitors to events attach great importance to the range of artists and their performances and the quality of their stay and services. To create a staging and, consequently, an emotionalization of the visitor, many action areas simultaneously take effect at an event. In this context, the customer satisfaction of visitors plays a major role for event organizers, which aims to generate a competitive advantage over other providers and be attractive for artists simultaneously. This article aims to analyse the perceived functional quality of service (QoS) during various events in a multi-purpose event venue. The analysis was based on 563 primary data samples. On the off chance, selected visitors were during the events recruited and interviewed using a standardized questionnaire. The data were collected during the break of five events. These events took place in the period from mid-November to mid-December 2019. This was supplemented by an online survey of enthusiastic fan club visitors who regularly watch handball matches within the event venue. The online survey was conducted in parallel with the surveys during November 2019. Overall, the results showed a high level of satisfaction among visitors regarding the QoS. In addition to services, exploratory factor analysis identified cleanliness as a satisfaction factor that significantly accounted for overall service satisfaction. Differences in the perception of both factors could be detected between the fan club visitors on the one hand and all other visitors of various events (comedy, music, sports) on the other. Based upon the results of this analysis, the event managers of this venue are enabled to employ target group-oriented improvements of individual services to consolidate and increase customer satisfaction.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


Underachiever student is a student who has a high level of intelligence but acquire learning achievement below average (low). Underachiever is caused by the way the teacher chooses a model for delivering mathematic materials and treats student during the teaching and learning activities. In addition, lack of motivation and low self-perception of student on the ability to obtain high achievement also becomes the factor causing the student tobe an underachiever. Thus, the teacher's understanding to the underachiever student's character and the implementation of the mathematic learning process to the evaluation and following-up study should be concerned in order to achieve a successful learning. One of the efforts to increase the underachiever student's mathematical achievement and motivation is through quantum learning. Quantum Learning is fun learning that is expected to increase student interest so at last their learning outcomes can be improved overall. Fun learning environment can also create motivation on student that directly affects student learning.


Despite the existence of programs that are able to generate so-called conditional plans, there has yet to emerge a clear and general specification of what it is these programs are looking for: what exactly is a plan in this setting, and when is it correct? In this paper, we develop and motivate a specification within the situation calculus of conditional and iterative plans over domains that include binary sensing actions. The account is built on an existing theory of action which includes a solution to the frame problem, and an extension to it that handles sensing actions and the effect they have on the knowledge of a robot. Plans are taken to be programs in a new simple robot program language, and the planning task is to find a program that would be known by the robot at the outset to lead to a final situation where the goal is satisfied. This specification is used to analyze the correctness of a small example plan, as well as variants that have redundant or missing sensing actions. We also investigate whether the proposed robot program language is powerful enough to serve for any intuitively achievable goal.


The spf/ash mouse model of ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency, a severe urea cycle disorder, is caused by a mutation (c.386G>A; p.R129H) in the last nucleotide of exon 4 of the Otc gene, affecting the 5' splice site and resulting in partial use of a cryptic splice site 48 bp into the adjacent intron. The equivalent nucleotide change and predicted amino acid change is found in OTC deficient patients. Here we have used liver tissue and minigene assays to dissect the transcriptional profile resulting from the "spf/ash" mutation in mice and man. For the mutant mouse, we confirmed liver transcripts corresponding to partial intron 4 retention by the use of the c.386+48 cryptic site and to normally spliced transcripts, with exon 4 always containing the c.386G>A (p.R129H) variant. In contrast, the OTC patient exhibited exon 4 skipping or c.386G>A (p.R129H)-variant exon 4 retention by using the natural or a cryptic splice site at nucleotide position c.386+4. The corresponding OTC tissue enzyme activities were between 3-6% of normal control in mouse and human liver. The use of the cryptic splice sites was reproduced in minigenes carrying murine or human mutant sequences. Some normally spliced transcripts could be detected in minigenes in both cases. Antisense oligonucleotides designed to block the murine cryptic +48 site were used in minigenes in an attempt to redirect splicing to the natural site. The results highlight the relevance of in depth investigations of the molecular mechanisms of splicing mutations and potential therapeutic approaches. Notably, they emphasize the fact that findings in animal models may not be applicable for human patients due to the different genomic context of the mutations.


Lawyer abuse in class action settlements is a widely recognized problem. One approach to lawyer abuse in class actions has received insufficient attention: suing the lawyers. Lawyers involved in class actions may engage in conduct that constitutes a civil or criminal wrong under state or federal law. The difference between these lawyers and other lawyers is that judges approve class action settlements after making findings on the adequacy of class counsel, the lack of collusion between class counsel and defendants, and the fairness of the settlement terms, including lawyers' fees. We argue that this judicial approval does not, and should not, immunize lawyer misconduct from the reach of state tort law, consumer protection law, criminal law, or state or federal antitrust law. Class action lawyers seem to assume that judicial approval cloaks their settlements in protection from these actions. We argue that this assumption is erroneous. First, collateral estoppel does not apply to bar suits aimed at lawyer misconduct because there is no full and fair opportunity to litigate these issues in the fairness hearing. Second, the doctrines that exempt state action, federal regulatory activity, and petitioning the government from the antitrust laws do not apply to the conduct of class action lawyers in negotiating a settlement or to the terms of the settlement approved by the court. We provide case examples to demonstrate the types of actions that could be brought against class action lawyers.


In the past few decades, scientists of human nature - including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioural economists - have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel? In "Experiments in Ethics", the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics.Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of "experimental philosophy," provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.


This is a case study of a large US general contractor's efforts to rethink and implement a new behavior-based approach to quality to achieve zero errors, zero defects, zero rework, and zero surprises. This GC has a long history of building a culture of Behavior-Based Safety and has approached quality the same way. Recognition of upstream behaviors that resulted in quality issues and unpredictable results during construction led to a focus on changing the mindset and behaviors of all project stakeholders to enable the team to achieve the intended results. While owners and designers have an indirect connection to safety results, their behavior and actions directly affect quality outcomes. Although developed independently of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), this GC's approach is similar. Its approach focuses on understanding the customer's expectations and what is required technically in detail from suppliers to achieve them. It focuses on understanding and describing in technical terms what are the 'distinguishing' features of the work from each stakeholder's perspective, and on aligning its teams on measurable acceptance criteria to achieve customer expectations. This process for making knowledge explicit in order to agree on what quality means to the customer allows the team to fabricate and install its products correctly in such a way as to close the 'knowing-doing' gap that plagues most companies and projects.


With the continuous exposure of environmental pollutants in organisms, determination of abundance variation and spatial distribution of lipids might expand our understanding of toxicological mechanisms occurring in the kidney. Herein, an integrated method involving mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomics and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-MS imaging (MALDI-MSI) was developed for the study of nephrotoxicity in mice exposed to 10 and 100 μg bisphenol S (BPS)/kg body weight/day. The BPS exposure remarkable perturbed abundances of 91 potential markers that mainly involved in five metabolic pathways. We elucidated the lipids spatial heterogeneity by using morphological analysis, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, and coregistered multimodal three-dimensional (3D)-MSI. In morphological analysis, both 10 and 100 μg BPS induced significant nephrotoxicity to mice, including glomerular necrosis in renal cortex, cloudy swelling in renal medulla, and interstitial collapsing in renal pelvis. Significant differential signaling lipids such as sphingomyelin (SM) (d22:0/20:4), ceramide (Cer) (d18:2/24:1), and sphingosine (d18:0) related to inflammation were found to be up-regulated and colocalized in the renal cortex, medulla, and pelvis, respectively. Also, seven significant differential lipids, which are considered to be involved in membrane homeostasis and cellular function, were found to be colocalized in the renal cortex. The observed significant variations of morphology, lipid accumulation, and metabolism in the renal cortex implicated that lipids in the renal cortex were more sensitive to BPS exposure than those in the renal medulla and pelvis. Moreover, we reconstructed a 3D-MSI model of kidney and identified two heterogeneous-related substructures in the renal cortex and pelvis upon 100 μg BPS exposure. It might be used in novel specificity evaluation and early diagnosis for environmental pollutant-induced kidney diseases.


Using data from exploratory surveys conducted in parallel in the United States and France among two different socioeconomic groups, this article examines why certain couples continue to share the same home after their relationship has broken down. The authors explore how the specific features of these contemporary living arrangements differ from similar situations in the past, and propose several hypotheses about the current signification of cohabitation and the family bond (as a combination of conjugal and parenting ties). Despite very different conceptions of marriage and cohabitation in the two countries, these situations of "living together apart" (LTA) and the meaning of such LTA relationships for the persons concerned are quite similar on both sides of the Atlantic. The testimonies of LTA couples show how their conjugal trajectories are shaped by financial and material constraints, limiting access to marriage or to divorce. The respondents consider that living together apart enables both partners to fulfil their parenting role, the father especially, and protects the children from the financial consequences of divorce, especially in a social context of economic crisis.


The organizational theory of the multinational firm holds that foreignness is a liability, and specifically that lack of embeddedness in host-country social networks is a source of competitive disadvantage; meanwhile the literature on labor market discrimination suggests that exploiting the bigotry of others can be a source of competitive advantage. We seek to turn the former literature somewhat on its head by building on insights from the latter. Specifically, we argue that multinationals wield a particularly significant competitive weapon: as outsiders, they can identify social schisms in host labor markets and exploit them for their own competitive advantage. Using two unique data sets from South Korea, we show that in the 2000s multinationals have derived significant advantage in the form of improved profitability by aggressively hiring an excluded group, women, in the local managerial labor market. Our results are economically meaningful, realistic in size, and robust to the inclusion of firm fixed effects. Multinationals, even those whose home markets discriminate against women, often show signs of having seen the strategic opportunity. Though the host market is moving toward a new equilibrium freer of discrimination, that movement is relatively slow, presenting a multiyear competitive opportunity for multinationals.


Various hydrothermal processes have been suggested as important
in the formation of porphyry coppers, e.g. orthomagmatic evolution of
salt-rich liquid, condensation of salt-rich liquid from magmatic
vapour, convection of groundwater driven by magmatic heat, boiling of
groundwater. A fluid inclusion study based on detailed two-dimensional
sampling indicates that all of these processes appear to have contributed
to the evolution of the Panguna deposit, but suggests that copper
was deposited mainly by salt-rich liquid expelled direct from the magma.
The deposit formed at the southern contact of the Kaverong Quartz
Diorite with the Panguna Andesite. Three smaller porphyritic stocks,
the Biotite Granodiorite, the Leucocratic Quartz Diorite and the Biuro
Granodiorite, were emplaced in the deposit during mineralisation, which
comprised three phases of hydrothermal activity. The·first, phase A,
took place when the southern part of the Kaverong Quartz Diorite was at
0 temperatures over 700 c. The Panguna Andesite was pervasively altered
to an amphibole-magnetite-plagioclase assemblage, upon which was superimposed
copper mineralisation and associated K-silicate alteration. The
limit of copper deposition and quartz veining to the southwest coincides
closely with a zone in which salt-rich liquid was cooled and diluted.
A pyritic halo parallels this zone. The system cooled below 400°C before
undergoing renewed mineralisation at temperatures over 400°C in two
approximately concurrent but separate phases B and c. These phases were
accompanied by the intrusion of porphyritic stocks. Phase B formed a
well-defined cell bounded by a pyritic halo and centred on the
Leucocratic Quartz Diorite. Phase C was expressed as veining of the
Biotite Granodiorite, the Biuro Granodiorite and the area between them. Copper mineralisation took place at a pressure near 300 bars and
at temperatures between 350°C and 700°c or higher. Cu,Fe sulphides,
quartz, anhydrite and hematite in veins, and potassium silicate alteration
were formed from boiling salt-rich liquid, of density 1.2 - 1.5
g/cm3, mostly of magmatic origin. The composition of these liquids
(which nucleated both KCl and NaCl in fluid inclusions) in terms of the
system NaCl-KCl-H2o varied between 76% salts (60% NaCl, 16% KCl) and
46% salts (30% NaCl, 16% KCl) by weight. Other liquids, apparently
more dilute, nucleated only NaCl. The salt-rich liquids also contained
Fe, Ca and S, and minor quantities of Mg, Cu, Mn and zn. A Cu concentration
tration of 1900 ppm has been estimated in one liquid. The atomic K/Na
ratios of salt-rich liquids from three principal phases of vein
mineralisation and from quartz phenocrysts conformed to a single trend,
increasing from 0.17 to 0.46 as the NaCl content decreased.
Groundwater, mainly of less than 5% salinity, inundated the orebody
between phase A and phases B and c, and again after phases B and c, at
temperatures below 400 c. Groundwater deposited quartz-pyrite and
probably pyrite-clay and sphalerite-pyrite veins at temperatures near
300°C and caused local phyllic alteration. Given a hydrostatic pressure
regime in the groundwater system, the depth of formation was near 3 km.
Fluids of groundwater composition, trapped as inclusions at or
above their critical points, seem to bound the. regions in which two
fluids coexisted during phases A and B, and possibly c. The evolution
of fluid compositions and phase properties across the two-phase region is
consistent with the predicted evolution of boiling salt-rich liquid
expelled unsaturated from the magma, cooled to saturation and supersaturation
by 500°c, then cooled and diluted by mixing with salt-rich
liquid formed by the concentration of groundwater (as high as 45% salts) by boiling. The salt-rich liquids were unsaturated near 430°C, and at
lower temperatures the liquid and gas compositions converged to the
critical composition at the boundary. Pressures fell sharply from
lithostatic between the magma and the zone of supersaturated liquids
of the ore-zone, and were hydrostatic in the lower-temperature
unsaturated fluids. In the zone of supersaturation, pressures may have
been lower than in the groundwater. Salt-rich liquid was pumped into
the ore-zone by the lithostatic-hydrostatic pressure difference, then
descended through the ore-zone because of its density.
The transport of Fe and possibly CU in the vapour is insignificant
under porphyry copper conditions, but Zn and Mo may undergo signific·ant
vapour transport. This may explain the separation of zn and Mo from Fe
and Cu in porphyry copper systems.
The absence of major sericite alteration (as opposed to the
K-feldspar commonly associated with the salt-rich liquid) suggests that
boiling removed excess HCl formed during the alteration of plagioclase
and amphibole to biotite. The sulphate in anhydrite deposited by saltrich
liquid probably originated from the decomposition of SOz. This
mechanism does not account for increased sulphide deposition below 500°C
because the liquid maintained a constant S0z:H2S ratio but the reduction
of SOz by Fe 2+ may have become important at lower temperatures. The high
oxidation state of magmatic fluids during copper mineralisation was due
to the loss of H2 from the magma in those early-evolved volatiles that
formed the amphibole-bearing assemblage.
Chalcopyrites have a .834s range of -1.6 to 1.5%., pyrites +0.5 to
3.l%and anhydrites +7.6 to 16.0%. The salt-rich liquid that deposited
anhydrite and chalcopyrite had o34s = +1%.The complexity of the hydrothermal
processes indicates that there was not a simple relationship
between these values and the 834s values of sulphur in the magma.


Electrocardiogram signal analysis is based on detecting a fiducial point consisting of the onset, offset, and peak of each waveform. The accurate diagnosis of arrhythmias depends on the accuracy of fiducial point detection. Detecting the onset and offset fiducial points is ambiguous because the feature values are similar to those of the surrounding sample. To improve the accuracy of this paper's fiducial point detection, the signal is represented by a small number of vertices through a curvature-based vertex selection technique using polygonal approximation. The proposed method minimizes the number of candidate samples for fiducial point detection and emphasizes these sample's feature values to enable reliable detection. It is also sensitive to the morphological changes of various QRS complexes by generating an accumulated signal of the amplitude change rate between vertices as an auxiliary signal. To verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm, error distribution is measured through comparison with the QT-DB annotation provided by Physionet. The mean and standard deviation of the onset and the offset were stable as −4.02±7.99 ms and −5.45±8.04 ms, respectively. The results show that proposed method using small number of vertices is acceptable in practical applications. We also confirmed that the proposed method is effective through the clustering of the QRS complex. Experiments on the arrhythmia data of MIT-BIH ADB confirmed reliable fiducial point detection results for various types of QRS complexes.


This thesis focuses on the dynamic proxy framework named the Chek Proxy
Framework (CPF). The main objectives are to scale the existing Internet architecture
by conserving the backbone bandwidth, reducing server loads, and improving the
overall networking system performance, particularly the client receiving rate. These
were achieved by deploying application-level proxy services within the network, to
accelerate and customise the delivery of contents.
The CPF is based on the 3-tier distributed computing architecture with the client and
server residing at the ends of the respective networks. A dynamically appointed
middle-tier system, the Dynamic Application Proxy Server (DAPS) is created ondemand
and resides at the client-side network based on the designed clustering
policy. The uniqueness of CPF lies on the use of voluntary client machines, instead
of static and dedicated machines to host DAPS services created at runtime.


A novel optical spatial quantized analog-to-digital conversion scheme for real-time conversion at ultrahigh sampling frequencies is presented. At each sampling instant, the analog input voltage deflects an optical sampling pulse onto an array of photodetectos. The output code is derived from the output voltages of the photodetectors on which the optical beam lands. Particular benefits of the proposed architecture are significant reduction in jitter through the use of a mode-locked laser to generate the sampling pulses, high quantization bandwidth through a fully optical quantization scheme, and the system simplicity through the use of just one phase modulator and an embedded binary encoder in the binary-connected photodetector arrays. We experimentally demonstrate an eight-level quantization consuming only 7.2 pJ per quantization with 18-GHz bandwidth, projected to an estimated bandwidth of 30 GHz. Measured 8-ps full-width half-maximum photodetectors output voltages promise the potential of realizing a 3-bit 125-GS/s analog-to-digital converter.


The Ulu Rompin iron deposits are located in an area of rugged topography in the State of Pahang, Malaya. There are several high grade primary ore bodies and superficial sheets of lateritic ore. The area is underlain by sheared alkalic rhyolite lavas and tuffs in which there are small lenses of sedimentary rocks, carbonates being the most important. There are several small stocks of hornblende granodiorite which probably merge into one larger parental mass at depth. The Bt Ibam ore body, which is the largest, is a tabular mass of magnetite in a highly magnesian gangue, originally chlorite and actinolite but now largely altered to talc. Underneath the ore there is a thin intermittent layer of calcic skarn, while massive chlorite appears along parts of the hanging wall. A short distance below the footwall there is granodiorite. The Bt. Batu Puteh deposit is magnetite associated with calcite marble, and at Bt. Hitam magnetite is found just above granodiorite. At Bt. Pesagi and BT. Sanlong the primary ore is haematite with very little magnetite. These bodies are located in shear zones in the volcanic rocks, and are not associated with calcic or magnesian minerals. All the ore bodies and country rocks have been pyritized, and other sulphides and sulphosalts have impregnated the Bt. Ibam body. These have produced zones, contaminated by copper and zinc, and to a lesser degree bismuth and lead. Hypogene and supergene alteration have extensively affected the iron ores and rocks and caused some redistribution of the impurity elements. The iron ores probably originated in the cooling granodiorite magma and were transported as chlorides or chloride complexes. The control over the loci of mineralization was partly lithological - magnetite bodies in calcic and magnesian rocks, and partly structural - haematite bodies in shear zones.


Abstract. The novelty of this study is to evaluate the univariate and the combined effects of including both precipitation and temperature forecasts in the preprocessing together with the postprocessing of streamflow for forecasting of floods as well as all streamflow values for a large sample of catchments. A hydrometeorological forecasting chain in an operational flood forecasting setting with 119 Norwegian catchments was used. This study evaluates the added value of pre- and postprocessing methods for ensemble forecasts in a hydrometeorological forecasting chain in an operational flood forecasting setting with 119 Norwegian catchments. Two years of ECMWF ensemble forecasts of temperature (T) and precipitation (P) with a lead-time up to 9 days were used to force the operational hydrological HBV model to establish streamflow forecasts. Two approaches to preprocess the temperature and precipitation forecasts were tested. 1) An existing approach applied to the gridded forecasts using quantile mapping for temperature and a Bernoulli-gamma distribution for precipitation. 2) Bayesian model averaging (BMA) applied to catchment average values of temperature and precipitation. BMA was also used for postprocessing catchment streamflow forecasts. Ensemble forecasts of streamflow were generated for a total of fourteen schemes based on combinations of raw, preprocessed, and postprocessed forecasts in the hydrometeorological forecasting chain. The aim of this study is to assess which pre- and postprocessing approaches should be used to improve streamflow and flood forecasts and look for regional or seasonal patterns in preferred approaches. The forecasts were evaluated for two datasets: i) all streamflows and ii) flood events with streamflow above mean annual flood. Evaluations were based on reliability, continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and -skill score (CRPSS). For the flood dataset, the critical success index (CSI) was used. Evaluations based on all streamflow data showed that postprocessing improved the forecasts only up to a lead-time of two to three days, whereas preprocessing T and P using BMA improved the forecasts for 50 %–90 % of the catchments beyond three days lead-time. However, for flood events, the added value of pre- and postprocessing is smaller. Preprocessing of P and T gave better CRPS for marginally more catchments compared to the other schemes. Based on CSI, we found that many of the forecast schemes perform equally well. Further, we found large differences in the ability to issue warnings between spring and autumn floods. There was almost no ability to predict autumn floods beyond 3 days, whereas the spring floods had predictability up to 9 days for many events and catchments. The results indicate that the ensemble forecasts have problems in predicting correct autumn precipitation, and the uncertainty is larger for heavy autumn precipitation compared to spring events when temperature driven snow melt is important. To summarize we find that the flood forecasts benefit from most pre-and postprocessing schemes, although the best processing approaches depend on region, catchment, and season, and that the processing scheme should be tailored to each catchment, lead time, season and the purpose of the forecasting.


Background: The purpose of the study was to assess the effect of changes in male and female's body with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) on the state of the bone mineral density and the metabolic rate, and to determinate the direction of changes in serum markers of bone remodeling and bone mineral density in both sexes due to this disease. Methods: Bone mineral density (with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)) and serum bone remodeling markers (alkaline phosphatase (ALP), procollagen type 1 intact N-terminal propeptide (P1NP) and C-terminal cross-linking telopeptide of type I collagen (b-CTx)) were measured in 57 female and 41 male with T1DM (n = 98) and in a group control, consisting of 43 female and 39 male (n = 82). Results: Analysis of the obtained results showed lower values in all the surveyed areas of patients with diabetes, in comparison with the control group. It was found that the studied bone formation markers (ALP, P1NP) behave differently. While the P1NP level is significantly reduced in female with T1DM vs. control group patients (P 0.05). B-CTx showed a significant negative correlation with the T-score of lumbar spine (r = -0.431, P = 0.000). Conclusions: Based on the results of studying the T-score it was found that in male and female with diabetes, in comparison with the control group, the bone density in the vertebrae was reduced. In men with T1DM changes in the T-score in the spine were found less intense than those in female. J Endocrinol Metab. 2018;8(1):2-5 doi: https://doi.org/10.14740/jem483w


In 1974, Institut de Pedagogie Appliquee a Vocation Rurale
(I.P.A.R) Buea was set up to collect and collate information, carry
out research, and prepare a report with proposals to the Cameroon
Government suggesting what curricular and other related reforms
should be introduced into the primary school system to give it a
greater environmental and rural orientation. In 1977 I.P.A.R
produced its Report on the Reform of Primary Education which called
for some major and radical changes in curricular, structures,
organisation, examination process, teaching methods, and other
pedagogical practices of primary teachers.
This study is concerned with the proposed reform and with the
attitudes of primary school teachers towards some of the major and
radical proposals in the report. Specifically an attempt is made
to ascertain how favourable or negative primary teachers are to
some of the proposals. A further objective is to improve the
understanding of the sources of different attitudes by relating
positive attitudes (or reform-mindedness) to a series of 'explanatory'
variables which include a set of biographical background; characteristics
of the teachers' pedagogical background; and aspects of the
teachers' orientation towards their occupational role.
A broad hypothesis was adopted that 'primary teachers' attitudes
towards the different reform issues will be correlated to reflect a
common attitudinal dimension of general reform-mindedness'. Statistical
analysis confirmed this hypothesis. Other minor hypotheses which
were adopted were either confirmed or rejected depending upon the
'explanatory' variable used to analyse the teachers' responses.
The thesis is divided into five parts. The first part (Chapters
One and Two) consists of the conceptualisation of the problem and
analyses the framework within which the proposed reform has to
operate. Part two (Chapters Three and Four) describes the primary
school system, its curriculum, its historical genesis, its present
nature and the pressure for change. Part three (Chapters Five and
Six) outlines the major reform proposals, indicating items chosen
for the questionnaire and describes the characteristics of the primary
school teachers. In part four (Chapters Seven and Eight) the survey
design is described and hypotheses adopted. The last, part five
(Chapters Nine and Ten) analyses the results, discusses these results
and considers some of the implications deriving from them leading to
certain suggestions on the way future policy may evolve.


"Live" (stained) and dead macrofaunal (>300 ?m fraction) foraminifera in multicorer samples (0-1 cm and 0-5 cm layers) were analysed at six stations along a transect (100-3400 m water depth) across the Oman margin (Arabian Sea) oxygen minimum zone (OMZ). Very high abundances (2858 per 25.5 cm2), dominated by Uvigerina ex. gr. semiornata, were found in the upper 100 m. The 850 m site also had elevated abundances. These peaks probably represented upper and lower OMZ boundary edge effects, respectively. A total of 199 live species was recognized. Diversity was depressed between 100 m and 850 m and relatively higher at the 1250 m and 3400 m sites. Vertical distribution in the sediment reflected responses found across the horizontal gradient, with species concentrated in the top sediment where bottom-water oxygen concentration was low and distributed more evenly through the sediment where concentration was higher. In general foraminifera and metazoan responded similarly to oxygen and food availability, except that the lower boundary of edge effect was located at a shallower depth (700 m) for the metazoans. Live:dead ratios of foraminifera increased with water depth. The second part of the thesis concerns Gromia, a large marine protist with filose pseudopodia and an organic test that is abundant in the bathyal Arabian Sea. Deep-water Gromia-like morphospecies were discovered in the 1990's but their relation to shallow-water species was not established. Little is known about gromiid diversity, reflecting the fact that these relatively featureless protists have few characters useful for species identification. Consequently, ultrastructural and molecular techniques were used to examine gromiid diversity on the Oman and Pakistan margins of the Arabian Sea (water depths 1000-2000 m). In total, 27 deep-sea gromiid sequences of the SSU rDNA gene and 6 sequences of the ITS rDNA region were obtained. The data confirmed that Gromia-like protists from the bathyal deep sea are related to shallow-water gromiids. Among Arabian Sea Gromia, seven lineages were identified based on molecular evidence. Five of them form a monophyletic group branching as a sister group to shallow-water species. Four lineages can be defined morphologically, while grape-like morphotypes include 3 lineages that cannot be distinguished morphologically. Each lineage probably represents a separate species, implying that deep-sea gromiid diversity is higher than indicated by their simple morphology. Morphological analysis adds 2 more species, giving a total of 9 deep-sea gromiid species, adding considerably to the number of known marine gromiids, only three of which are currently described.


Adversarial training (AT) with imperfect supervision is significant but receives limited attention. To push AT towards more practical scenarios, we explore a brand new yet challenging setting, i.e., AT with complementary labels (CLs), which specify a class that a data sample does not belong to. However, the direct combination of AT with existing methods for CLs results in consistent failure, but not on a simple baseline of two-stage training. In this paper, we further explore the phenomenon and identify the underlying challenges of AT with CLs as intractable adversarial optimization and low-quality adversarial examples. To address the above problems, we propose a new learning strategy using gradually informative attacks, which consists of two critical components: 1) Warm-up Attack (Warm-up) gently raises the adversarial perturbation budgets to ease the adversarial optimization with CLs; 2) Pseudo-Label Attack (PLA) incorporates the progressively informative model predictions into a corrected complementary loss. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a range of benchmarked datasets. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/RoyalSkye/ATCL.


The 2014 Annual Conference of the European China Law Studies Association (ECLS) was hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) on the 15th and 16th of November. The two-day conference gathered the intellectual acumen of many academic and professional leaders from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Macau, mainland China, Netherlands, Singapore, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States, to name but a few. With reference to China's ongoing reform, the conference brought together academics, professionals, members of the judiciary, policy makers, and the like, with their collective knowledge and expertise to engage open communication with the themes of "making, enforcing and accessing the law". Founded in 2006, the ECLS seeks to establish a forum for the global exchange of ideas and academic collaboration in Chinese legal studies. As the first ECLS annual conference held outside Europe, this year's gathering not only benefited from geographic proximity to China, but was also enhanced by the cultural richness of Hong Kong, one of the world's greatest cosmopolitan cities.


We propose an integral geometric approach for computing dual distributions for the parameter distributions of multilinear models. The dual distributions can be computed from, for example, the parameter distributions of conics, multiple view tensors, homographies, or as simple entities as points, lines, and planes. The dual distributions have analytical forms that follow from the asymptotic normality property of the maximum likelihood estimator and an application of integral transforms, fundamentally the generalised Radon transforms, on the probability density of the parameters. The approach allows us, for instance, to look at the uncertainty distributions in feature distributions, which are essentially tied to the distribution of training data, and helps us to derive conditional distributions for interesting variables and characterise confidence intervals of the estimates.


Despite Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide victory, few elections have held more lasting significance for political scientists, historians, and communication scholars than the presidential election of 1932. Never before had one issue--the Great Depression--so dominated an election. Herbert Hoover went from a landslide victory in 1928 to a humiliating defeat just four years later. The transformation of the national government from Hoover's brand of "rugged individualism" to Roosevelt's "New Deal" changed American politics forever. The election of 1932 also had a significant effect on the concept of the rhetorical presidency.(1) The campaign gave the nation a very clear choice: a traditional administrative president or a modern rhetorical one. Overwhelmingly, the electorate chose the latter. The success of Roosevelt's fireside chats and emotional leadership, compared with Hoover's quiet behind-the-scenes workmanship, solidified the rhetorical presidency as the norm for every president thereafter. The 1932 election was also a turning point in the field of political campaign communications. Hoover was the first incumbent president to go "out on the stump" and campaign actively for the presidency, "paving the way" for the presidents that followed him.(2) Hoover's stumping efforts helped make the campaign of 1932 one in which the amount of public speaking far exceeded the norm for the era: Roosevelt gave "some 113 prepared speeches and Hoover almost as many."(3) Radio, which had been used to a smaller extent in previous campaigns but was now a major aspect of national campaigns, was present in more than 12 million homes by 1932.(4) Thus, the common practice of candidates giving the same speech with slight variations at each campaign stop had to be changed due to a nationwide audience that was now able to listen to every word of every major speech.(5) Finally, Roosevelt ran "the first truly modem, well-organized presidential campaign,"(6) which included a then unprecedented, but now standard, personal appearance at the national convention to accept his party's nomination. The study of presidential oratory has traditionally focused on a handful of presidents whose rhetoric has been analyzed and critiqued throughout the years.(7) Unlike his opponent in the election, the study of Hoover's rhetoric is severely limited: not a single journal article deals specifically with the presidential rhetoric of Herbert Hoover.(8) This seems particularly unfortunate considering Hoover failed as a rhetorical president during a national crisis, the Great Depression--a unique situation that seems to warrant study. In addition, Hoover's presidency continues to be "reassessed" and the notion that perhaps he was not as apathetic and inept as popularly believed is gaining support.(9) Thus, the election of 1932, and specifically the role of Hoover's communication during the campaign, certainly justifies examination. This article is a study of the nine major radio addresses Hoover gave during the 1932 campaign. I argue that Hoover waged his entire campaign not to win, for he knew he had no chance to win, but rather to defend his administration, his character, and his view of government. The genre of self-defense, what classical rhetoricians termed apologia, will be applied not only to reveal the motives and strategies that Hoover incorporated into his campaign speeches but also to explain how his misuse of apologia contributed to his failure. Hoover's Presidential Years, 1928-32 Hoover won the presidency in 1928 after many years of service to his country. He followed two Republican presidents, Harding and Coolidge, who had collectively steered the country through the prosperous 1920s. Hoover was considered the best candidate to "symbolize the tranquillity, prosperity, and purity"(10) of the times. The Republican's optimism was exemplified by the infamous "a chicken in every pot" campaign slogan. …


Keypoint matching is a standard tool to solve the correspondence problem in vision applications. However, in 3D face tracking, this approach is often deficient because the human face complexities, together with its rich viewpoint, non-rigid expression, and lighting variations in typical applications, can cause many variations impossible to handle by existing keypoint detectors and descriptors. In this paper, we propose a new approach to tailor keypoint matching to track the 3D pose of the user head in a video stream. The core idea is to learn keypoints that are explicitly invariant to these challenging transformations. First, we select keypoints that are stable under randomly drawn small viewpoints, non-rigid deformations and illumination changes. Then, we treat keypoint descriptor learning at different large angles as an incremental scheme to learn discriminative descriptors. At matching time, to reduce the ratio of outlier correspondences, we use secondorder color information to prune keypoints unlikely to lie on the. Moreover, we integrate optical flow correspondences in an adaptive way to remove motion jitter efficiently. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach can lead to fast, robust, and accurate 3D head tracking results even under very challenging scenarios.