Street vending of goods and services is a common phenomenon in urban areas of Africa. Although such street based self-employment activities often lack legal recognition and are sometimes criminalized, significant share of the youth labor force in urban areas earn their livelihood from such activities. This study examines whether street based self-employment is a viable livelihood with a potential for transition or a poverty trap for youth migrants. The study is based on a survey of 445 youth who are engaged in shoe shining and coffee vending activities in two urban areas in Ethiopia. We found that street based self-employment is indeed dominated by migrant youth. In this sample, 96% of those engaged in the street based self-employment are youth and 98% are migrants from rural areas or smaller towns. We found that the average monthly earning of these self-employed youth is better than the minimum wage in public sector and much larger than the official poverty line. We found that most of the youth consider this as transitory employment and accumulate skill and capital with a view to establishing their own enterprise or joining skilled employment. While young women are in general found to be less likely than young men to seek exit out of street based self-employment, education increases the likelihood that young women aspire for a change in their employment situation. Youth with better-off parents back home and those with larger network in their new residence are more likely to change their current occupation.


We consider the use of fuel cells for powering data centers, based on benefits in reliability, capital and operational costs, and reduced environmental emissions. Using fuel cells effectively in data centers introduces several challenges and we highlight key research questions for designing a fuel cell based data center power distribution system. We analyze a specific configuration in the design space to quantify the cost benefits for a large scale data center, for the most mature and commonly deployed fuel cell technology, achieving over 20% reduction in costs using conservative projections.


We address a fundamental mismatch between the combinations of dynamics that occur in cyber-physical systems and the limited kinds of dynamics supported in analysis. Modern applications combine communication, computation, and control. They may even form dynamic distributed networks, where neither structure nor dimension stay the same while the system follows hybrid dynamics, i.e., mixed discrete and continuous dynamics. We provide the logical foundations for closing this analytic gap. We develop a formal model for distributed hybrid systems. It combines quantified differential equations with quantified assignments and dynamic dimensionality-changes. We introduce a dynamic logic for verifying distributed hybrid systems and present a proof calculus for this logic. This is the first formal verification approach for distributed hybrid systems. We prove that our calculus is a sound and complete axiomatization of the behavior of distributed hybrid systems relative to quantified differential equations. In our calculus we have proven collision freedom in distributed car control even when an unbounded number of new cars may appear dynamically on the road.


In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of fast food restaurants. An important aspect of the global and national success of these companies can be ascribed to the consumers' satisfaction regarding the products they offer, while media promotes the negative effects on the health of individuals. Satisfied consumers will repeatedly buy the respective products and will also recommend them to others; for the company this is reflected in economic and social efficiency. The government, consumers and other entities play a significant role in ensuring food quality and safety. The purpose of the research is to identify the attributes of fast food products and restaurants that contribute to consumers' satisfaction regarding the products and services offered by them.


Library authors often are faced with a design choice: should a function with preconditions be implemented as a partial function, or by returning a failure condition on incorrect use? Neither option is ideal. Partial functions lead to frustrating run-time errors. Failure conditions must be checked at the use-site, placing an unfair tax on the users who have ensured that the function's preconditions were correctly met. In this paper, we introduce an API design concept called ``ghosts of departed proofs'' based on the following observation: sophisticated preconditions can be encoded in Haskell's type system with no run-time overhead, by using proofs that inhabit phantom type parameters attached to newtype wrappers. The user expresses correctness arguments by constructing proofs to inhabit these phantom types. Critically, this technique allows the library user to decide when and how to validate that the API's preconditions are met. The ``ghosts of departed proofs'' approach to API design can achieve many of the benefits of dependent types and refinement types, yet only requires some minor and well-understood extensions to Haskell 2010. We demonstrate the utility of this approach through a series of case studies, showing how to enforce novel invariants for lists, maps, graphs, shared memory regions, and more.


Abstract. The interactions between biogenic volatile organic compounds
(BVOCs), like isoprene and monoterpenes, and anthropogenic emissions of
nitrogen and sulfur oxides lead to high concentrations of secondary organic
aerosol (SOA) in the southeastern United States. To improve our understanding
of SOA formation, we study the diurnal evolution of SOA in a land–atmosphere
coupling context based on comprehensive surface and upper air observations
from a characteristic day during the 2013 Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study
(SOAS) campaign. We use a mixed layer model (MXLCH-SOA) that is updated with
new chemical pathways and an interactive land surface scheme that describes
both biogeochemical and biogeophysical couplings between the land surface and
the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) to gain insight into the drivers of the
daytime evolution of biogenic SOA. MXLCH-SOA reproduces observed BVOC and surface heat fluxes, gas-phase
chemistry, and ABL dynamics well, with the exception of isoprene and
monoterpene mixing ratios measured close to the land surface. This is likely
due to the fact that these species do not have uniform profiles throughout
the atmospheric surface layer due to their fast reaction with OH and
incomplete mixing near the surface. The flat daytime evolution of the SOA
concentration is caused by the dampening of the increase due to locally
formed SOA by entrainment of SOA-depleted air from the residual layer. SOA
formation from isoprene through the intermediate species isoprene epoxydiols
(IEPOXs) and isoprene hydroxyhydroperoxides (ISOPOOHs) is in good agreement
with the observations, with a mean isoprene SOA yield of 1.8 %. However, SOA from monoterpenes, oxidised by OH and O3, dominates
the locally produced SOA (69 %), with a mean monoterpene SOA yield of
10.7 %. Isoprene SOA is produced primarily through OH oxidation via
ISOPOOH and IEPOX (31 %). Entrainment of aged SOA from the residual layer
likely contributes to the observed more oxidised oxygenated organic aerosol
(MO-OOA) factor. A sensitivity analysis of the coupled land surface–boundary layer–SOA
formation system to changing temperatures reveals that SOA concentrations are
buffered under increasing temperatures: a rise in BVOC emissions is offset
by decreases in OH concentrations and the efficiency with which SVOCs
partition into the aerosol phase.


Reinforcement learning algorithms are an important machine learning technique, which can be applied to the process of learning many tasks.

Much of the existing work on improving these algorithms, and analysis into the usefulness, only considers agents which have to perform one task. Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning algorithms require that an agent can cope with small variations in their given task, and the application of their learnt knowledge to those tasks.

I consider the application of reinforcement learning algorithms to several card games, and the process of transferring learnt knowledge between these card games. The two card games used, Cut-Throat Euchre and Sergent-Major, are similar in their rules and the strategies that are used to play the game. The differences between the two games are used to measure the effectiveness of transferring knowledge between them, using a common-state approach.

These simulations of playing card-games indicate that the tasks of playing these two games are similar enough that knowledge can effectively be shared between the two.

An improvement in the ability of an agent to play one of the games, results in a significant improvement in the ability of the agent to play the other game.


Background Uridine diphospho-glucuronocyltransferase 1A1 (UGT1A1) polymorphisms are a risk factor for unconjugated hyperbilirubinemia in neonates. UGT1A1 polymorphisms decrease bilirubin conjugation, thus causing hyperbilirubinemia. A variety of polymorphisms have been reported, with UGT1A1*60 and UGT1A1*6 especially prominent in the Asian population. Hyperbilirubinemia polymorphism studies are lacking in Indonesian populations.
Objective To identify UGT1A1*60 and UGT1A1*6 profiles in Indonesian populations of heterogeneous ethnicity.
Methods We enrolled 42 jaundiced neonates who were born from January to April 2017 and treated in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of our national referral center, Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, Jakarta, Indonesia. Genetic mutations *60 of exon 1 and *6 of the promoter region were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction – restriction fragment length polymorphism methods, with DraI and AvaII as restriction enzymes, respectively. Clinical data including total serum bilirubin and racial information were obtained by medical records and interviews with parents.
Results There were no homozygous mutations of UGT1A1*6, but 4.8% of subjects were heterozygous. As for UGT1A1*60, 4.8% were heterozygous and 95.2% were homozygous. Racial variations were not observed for UGT1A1*60, while Betawi descendents were found to have many heteroygous forms of UGT1A1*6.
Conclusion Polymorphisms of the UGT1A1 gene were found in Indonesian neonates. Some ethnicities also showed increased tendency towards its incidence, such as the heterozygous form of  UGT1A1*6.


Geo-locating BGP prefixes can help us understand routing anomalies, prefix aggregation, or reveal what regions are affected by an Internet outage. Our work shows that the naive approach to prefix geo-location—simply mapping each IP address to its corresponding geo-location—can be ambiguous because a prefix may contain another, separately-announced prefix that maps to a different geographical location. Should the containing prefix also map to the locations of the contained prefix? We show that this question is difficult to answer and characterize the scope of these ambiguities by geo-locating around 680,000 prefixes to countries, regions, and cities using both GeoLite and NetAcuity Edge. We find that 0.3% of prefixes are ambiguous with respect to countries but these prefixes constitute 8.5% of the IPv4 address space. In the second part of our work, we study the mappings from prefix to location. We find that most prefixes map to only a single city but the shorter a prefix, the more locations it maps to. Our dataset however contains outliers, e.g., a /23 that maps to as many as 127 (potentially spoofed) countries. Our work takes a first look at prefix geo-location and identifies issues one should be aware of, which paves the way towards more sophisticated applications such as the geo-location of autonomous systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available to facilitate further analysis.


The OECD's Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) project has taken a powerful and welcome look at many of the tax avoidance strategies that proliferate in a world where multinational enterprises are in the business of exploiting gaps in the tax laws of different countries to minimize their ultimate tax bills. The focus on international consensus and prescriptions for reform has not been an unqualified good for the nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, which find themselves in the position of reacting to standards and taking on compliance burdens set without sufficient consideration of their special circumstances. Because the path for the BEPS project was chosen before receiving meaningful input from these nations, the initiatives offer little support for revenue-raising strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa and require an administrative infrastructure currently beyond the capacity of many nations in the region. With an eye toward integrating achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2030) (SDGs) with the BEPS project, this article urges three reforms: implementation of treaty-based regional tax incentives mindful of the SDGs in the OECD's Multilateral Instrument to Implement Tax Treaty Related Matters to Prevent BEPS; development of a fund by high-income countries to assist Sub-Saharan African nations in building tax administrative capacity; and reconsideration of some of the BEPS reform proposals, particularly the Digital Economy two-pillar proposals, with the aim of according agency to Sub-Saharan Africa as it constructs a blueprint for solid emergence from economic hardship heightened by the pandemic


Soil compaction can impair the productivity of permanent grassland. A way to ameliorate compaction in the topsoil (0–30 cm), without destroying the sward, is soil loosening by sward lifting. To explore the potential of this form of non-inversion tillage, we applied this treatment once, either in spring or in autumn, to a moderately compacted grassland on a sandy soil and measured the effects on soil structure, grass rooting and productivity for up to two growing seasons. We also explored whether complementary overseeding with Lolium multiflorum Lam. would extend the duration of soil loosening effects. Our results show that sward lifting improved soil structure and rooting for at least 10–12 months, but did not result in a consistent or lasting increase in herbage yield or nitrogen (N) uptake. Loosening in spring decreased herbage yield (−27%) and N uptake (−16%) in the following growth period, but these decreases were largely compensated for (herbage yield) or more than compensated for (N uptake) by increases in the next three growth periods. The increase in N uptake in the first growing season (+13 kg N ha) was reversed in the second season (−14 kg N ha). Loosening in autumn increased herbage yield (+8%) and N uptake (+15%) in the first growth period (after winter), but not in the four growth periods thereafter. Cumulative yield tended to be higher (+4%), which supports the view that soil loosening should be carried out in autumn rather than in spring. The initial positive effects of loosening on herbage yield and N uptake were explained by a temporary increased soil N mineralization; initial negative effects by mechanical damage to sward and roots. Finally, complementary overseeding did not extend the duration of soil loosening effects; apparently, new root growth from the existing sward was effective enough to stabilize these effects.


Player transgressions have become an increasingly common part of the Australian sporting landscape and can lead to serious reputational and financial damage for sporting organisations, if not managed properly. Using a series of in-depth interviews with media and communication managers across the Hyundai A-League, this study explores how football (soccer) clubs in Australia use public relations strategies and tactics when managing player transgressions. Based on its findings, the study delivers recommendations for public relations practice.


'Policy analysis is one activity for which there can be no fixed
program, for policy analysis is synonymous with creativity, which may
be stimulated by theory and sharpened by practice.'
(Wildavsky 1979: 3)
This study is concerned with analyzing the tourism public policy process within the
framework of institutional arrangements, power arrangements, values, interests, and
motivations of the principal actors involved in the process. It aims to explain and
analyze the development process of the North West Coast (NWC) region of Egypt
which experienced the implementation of a tourism public policy that was employed
to assist with the resolution of Egypt's human settlement and economic problems.
Accordingly, it examines the national development challenges, the policies adopted to
address them and the coherent history of the tourism policy process executed in the
NWC region.
The study evaluates the tourism policy in terms of how far it achieved its promises.
The findings of the research support the research hypothesis, which postulates that
short-term political expediency constrained the implementation of national and
regional policy objectives. Political expediency was examined in both the policy
formulation and policy implementation stages of the policy process and was
manifested when the actors involved were found seeking special advantage through
public policy. In addition, it was manifested when institutions (each with its own
preferences) struggled to control resources and implement their agendas. Furthermore,
it was manifested when certain concessions to a powerful clan or a kin were awarded
to gain more political powers.
Accordingly, the theoretical framework is based on analyzing three dynamic and
interrelated fields: First, the politics of public policy implementation, with particular
reference to tourism as an instrument for development. Second, the concept of
sustainable tourism which is utilized as an analytical tool and as an idealized model
against which tourism development in the NWC region has been evaluated,
particularly because it was an overall objective for the region's tourism policy. Third:
the extent of government activity in formulating tourism public policy and managing
tourism development.
The research shows that much of the deviations from achieving the national and
regional policy objectives can be explained through the interactions, variations and
relationships between institutional structures, power arrangements and the differences
in values, motivations, and interests of the actors and institutions involved in
formulating and implementing the tourism policy in the NWC region.


Vasopressin and oxytocin are made and released by neurons of the hypothalamo-neurohypophysial system. Pulse labeling these neurons with radioactive amino acid indicates that the two hormones and their respective neurophysin carrier proteins are synthesized as parts of separate precursor proteins. The precursors seem to be processed into smaller, biologically active molecules while they are being transported along the axon.


This paper proposes a novel model and dataset for 3D scene flow estimation with an application to autonomous driving. Taking advantage of the fact that outdoor scenes often decompose into a small number of independently moving objects, we represent each element in the scene by its rigid motion parameters and each superpixel by a 3D plane as well as an index to the corresponding object. This minimal representation increases robustness and leads to a discrete-continuous CRF where the data term decomposes into pairwise potentials between superpixels and objects. Moreover, our model intrinsically segments the scene into its constituting dynamic components. We demonstrate the performance of our model on existing benchmarks as well as a novel realistic dataset with scene flow ground truth. We obtain this dataset by annotating 400 dynamic scenes from the KITTI raw data collection using detailed 3D CAD models for all vehicles in motion. Our experiments also reveal novel challenges which cannot be handled by existing methods.


Background: Expert human resources have a key role in development of the community; among the multiple factors influencing this development, the community leaders who are organizing the resources have the most prominent role. This study aimed to investigate the relationship of leadership style with job satisfaction and happiness among the health personnel of the Oil Industry Health Organization. Methods: The present applied study is a descriptive-analytical one which was implemented cross- sectionally on all 290 health personnel of the Oil Industry working in the Provinces of Markazi and Lorestan. The Fiedler Leadership Style questionnaire, Chrome's Job Satisfaction questionnaire, and Oxford Happiness questionnaire were used to gather the data. The data were then analyzed by Pierson's correlation test. Results: The correlation-oriented leadership (66.15 ± 22.04) was the dominant leadership style which had a significant association with job satisfaction (176.58 ± 32.49) of the rehabilitation, treatment, and care staffs of oil industry in Markazi and Lorestan provinces, (r = 0.579, p < 0.01). Conclusion: The relationship-oriented leadership style has a significant association with job satisfaction. So, designing and implementing interventions to promote relationship – oriented style of leadership is recommended. More extended studies in the similar contexts could be helpful.


Shape memory materials are increasingly sought after to enable the design of unconventional structures, particularly in the aerospace community where deployable space structures and morphing aircraft have become important. These materials allow significant shape changes and spontaneously return to their original shape when triggered to do so. Shape memory polymer (SMP) is a well known class of these materials. A natural extension of shape memory polymer is elastic memory composite (EMC) which is, simply, SMP with fiber reinforcement. This material is very promising in that it inherits the very high strain capability and shape memory characteristics of the SMP and inherits high structural performance from the fiber reinforcement. When EMC is taken to elevated temperatures, where the shape-change and shape-recovery occurs, the SMP matrix behaves very elastomeric and linear. In this state, the fibers are slender columns on a compliant elastic foundation and buckle into highly uniform sinusoids when on the compression side of a bent EMC laminate. The buckling has a small characteristic wavelength (~1mm) and is, therefore, termed microbuckling in the tradition of Walt Rosen. This is a fully elastic and recoverable deformation mode which allows fibers that normally fail at 1.5% compression strain to accommodate more than 10% composite compression strain. The seemingly iv obvious step of reinforcing shape memory polymer with fibers, therefore, results in a not-so-obvious synergistic relationship allowing a structurally efficient composite material, EMC, to endure very large deformations without degradation. The use of EMC is not yet wide-spread due, in part, to a lack of a fundamental understanding of its somewhat complex behavior in the elevatedtemperature compliant-matrix state. However, the benefits of EMC would not be possible with a simple linear-elastic material and we must, therefore, increase our understanding. While the behavior of EMC in the rigid-matrix, straight-fiber state is understood with existing models; its highly nonlinear and somewhat complex behavior in the compliant-matrix post-microbuckled state cannot be understood with existing models. The following thesis is thus presented on the mechanics of postmicrobuckled compliant-matrix composites.


Summary The imGoats project ('small ruminant value chains to increase income and food security in India and Mozambique') was designed to increase incomes and food security in a sustainable manner by enhancing pro-poor small ruminant value chains in the two countries. This brief shares experiences of the project in using outcome mapping (OM) to improve planning, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of a goat value chain development project in the two countries. Results show that OM was very useful to monitor behavioural changes among value chain actors. It also contributed to effective management of the project. The approach suited both a relatively small project area in Mozambique (>500 households), with a strong emphasis on qualitative data, as well as a larger project area in India (>2500 households) where it helped improve data collection and analysis, and stimulate feedback mechanisms.


It is poorly understood how membrane proteins destined for the inner nuclear membrane pass the crowded environment of the Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC). For the Saccharomyces cerevisiae proteins Src1/Heh1 and Heh2, a transport mechanism was proposed where the transmembrane domains diffuse through the membrane while the extralumenal domains encoding a nuclear localization signal (NLS) and intrinsically disordered linker (L) are accompanied by transport factors and travel through the NPC. Here, we validate the proposed mechanism and explore and discuss alternative interpretations of the data. First, to disprove an interpretation where the membrane proteins become membrane embedded only after nuclear import, we present biochemical and localization data to support that the previously used, as well as newly designed reporter proteins are membrane-embedded irrespective of the presence of the sorting signals, the specific transmembrane domain (multipass or tail anchored), independent of GET, and also under conditions that the proteins are trapped in the NPC. Second, using the recently established size limit for passive diffusion of membrane proteins in yeast, and using an improved assay, we confirm active import of polytopic membrane protein with extralumenal soluble domains larger than those that can pass by diffusion on similar timescales. This reinforces that NLS-L dependent active transport is distinct from passive diffusion. Thirdly, we revisit the proposed route through the center of the NPC and conclude that the previously used trapping assay is, unfortunately, poorly suited to address the route through the NPC, and the route thus remains unresolved. Apart from the uncertainty about the route through the NPC, the data confirm active, transport factor dependent, nuclear transport of membrane-embedded mono- and polytopic membrane proteins in baker's yeast.


Inborn errors of metabolism underlying some cases of autism present possibilities for prevention and treatment. Autism has attracted enormous attention in recent years primarily because of the high incidence and the impact it has on patients' lives and their families, given its medical, social, financial, and emotional burdens (1, 2). There is growing acceptance that the incidence and prevalence of autism have dramatically increased over the past 20 years (3), although some of the increase relates to changing diagnostic terminology and criteria. The use of DNA microarrays and exome sequencing to detect pathological copy number variants (CNVs) and point mutations, respectively, is making progress in identifying genetic causes of autism. The recent confirmation that paternal age is a risk factor for autism relates to the occurrence of de novo point mutations that can now be discovered through next-generation sequencing (4). However, for virtually all of the pathological CNVs and point mutations causing autism, there is no definitive or curative therapy, although CNVs can be detected using invasive prenatal diagnosis. On page 394 of this issue, Novarino et al. (5) use exome sequencing in consanguineous families to discover an inborn metabolic error associated with autism, epilepsy, and intellectual disability, in which the clinical manifestations are likely to be treatable or, even better, preventable.


We consider testing marginal independence versus conditional independence in a trivariate Gaussian setting. The two models are non-nested and their intersection is a union of two marginal independences. We consider two sequences of such models, one from each type of independence, that are closest to each other in the Kullback-Leibler sense as they approach the intersection. They become indistinguishable if the signal strength, as measured by the product of two correlation parameters, decreases faster than the standard parametric rate. Under local alternatives at such rate, we show that the asymptotic distribution of the likelihood ratio depends on where and how the local alternatives approach the intersection. To deal with this non-uniformity, we study a class of "envelope" distributions by taking pointwise suprema over asymptotic cumulative distribution functions. We show that these envelope distributions are well-behaved and lead to model selection procedures with rate-free uniform error guarantees and near-optimal power. To control the error even when the two models are indistinguishable, rather than insist on a dichotomous choice, the proposed procedure will choose either or both models.


Double-sided high-sloped structured surfaces such as V-groove surfaces and Fresnel lenses are widely used in optical fibre positioning, retro-reflection, grating, light guiding and light concentration for solar power installation. Both the surface finish as well as the dimensions of the structured surfaces play important roles in the quality of the final products. Numerous efforts have been put into the study of characterisation of these types of surfaces. However, only part of the parameters can be acquired and analyzed. It is still impossible to measure and generate the whole topography of these types of structured surfaces. This results in the manufacturing process suffering from high scrap rates. In this paper, an orthogonally placed dual probing system based on Wavelength Scanning Interferometry (WSI) aiming to measure the whole topography of the double-sided high-sloped structured surfaces simultaneously is presented. Each of the probes form an interferometer, and measures the facets of the double-sided high-sloped surfaces in one direction and acquires part of the topography. The whole topography is then stitched together using the two datasets based on the relationship between the coordinate systems of the two probes. The relationship between the two probes is acquired through the calibration of a specially designed 3D artefact. The artefact contains geometric features on each of the facets and is calibrated by a combination of several measurement methods to establish the space coordinates of the features. By matching the corresponding features on the measurement results acquired with each of the probes of the new setup to the reference topography using a 3D registration algorithm such as ICP (Iterative Closest Points) and its variants, the relationship between the coordinate system of each probe and the coordinate system of the reference topography can be calculated. Then the relationship between the coordinate systems of 2 probes can be determined, which can then be used to stitch the whole topography. The setup and the math model has been built and some initial results have been acquired.


Aim Winter snow has been suggested to regulate terrestrial carbon (C) cycling by modifying microclimate, but the impacts of change in snow cover on the annual C budget at a large scale are poorly understood. Our aim is to quantify the C balance under changing snow depth.

Location Non-permafrost region of the northern forest area.

Methods Here, we used site-based eddy covariance flux data to investigate the relationship between depth of snow cover and ecosystem respiration (Reco) during winter. We then used the Biome-BGC model to estimate the effect of reductions in winter snow cover on the C balance of northern forests in the non-permafrost region.

Results According to site observations, winter net ecosystem C exchange (NEE) ranged from 0.028 to 1.53 gC·m−2·day−1, accounting for 44 ± 123% of the annual C budget. Model simulation showed that over the past 30 years, snow-driven change in winter C fluxes reduced non-growing season CO2 emissions, enhancing the annual C sink of northern forests. Over the entire study area, simulated winter Reco significantly decreased by 0.33 gC·m−2·day−1·year−1 in response to decreasing depth of snow cover, which accounts for approximately 25% of the simulated annual C sink trend from 1982 to 2009.

Main conclusion Soil temperature is primarily controlled by snow cover rather than by air temperature as snow serves as an insulator to prevent chilling impacts. A shallow snow cover has less insulation potential, causing colder soil temperatures and potentially lower respiration rates. Both eddy covariance analysis and model-simulated results show that both Reco and NEE are significantly and positively correlated with variation in soil temperature controlled by variation in snow depth. Overall, our results highlight that a decrease in winter snow cover restrains global warming as less C is emitted to the atmosphere.


This thesis consists of three essays on sovereign risk and banking.

In the first essay, we examine the determinants of sovereign risk in the Eurozone focusing on the recent crisis episode and search for a self-fulfilling contagion link by using an exogenous ECB policy announcement for identification. our principal components analysis reveals that the perceived commonality in default risk among peripheral and core Eurozone countries increased after the announcement. An event study detects significant pre-announcement news transmission from Spain to Italy, Belgium, France and Austria that clearly dissipates post-announcement. Country-specific regressions of CDS spreads on systematic risk factors illustrate frequent days of large adverse shocks affecting simultaneously those same Eurozone countries during the pre-announcement period; but not afterwards. Altogether these findings support the view that market expectations during Eurozone crisis were at least partially self-fulfilling and ECB policy helped to contain such adverse dynamics.

In the second essay we focus on European banks' sovereign bond exposures. By using a novel bank-level dataset covering the entire timeline of the Eurozone crisis, we first reconfirm that the crisi led to the reallocation of sovereign debt from foreign to domestic banks. This reallocation was only visible for banks as opposed to other domestic private agents and it cannot be explained by the banks' risk-shifting tendency. In contrast to the recent literature focusing only on sovereign debt. We show that the bank's private sector exposures were (at least) equally affected by a rise in home bias. Finally, we propose a new debt reallocation channel based on informational frictions and show that crisi-country debt was not only reallocated to domestic banks, but also to the informationally closer foreign banks. Our results imply that informational asymmetries among banks played a key role in the recent fragmentation across Eurozone debt markets.

In the third essay, our investigation shifts towards political economy aspects of the relationship between sovereigns and domestic banks. We use date on the universe of credit extended over a 14 year period in Turkey to document a strong political lending cycle. We find that state-owned banks systemically adjust their provincial lending around local elections relative to the private banks in the same province. there is considerable tactical redistribution: state-pwned banks increase loans in politically competitive provinces with a current mayor aligned with the ruling party but reduce it in similar provinces with a current mayor from opposition.this effect only exists in corporate lending as opposed to consumer loans, suggesting that tactical redistribution targets job creation to increase electoral success. Such political lending also seems to influence real outcomes as the credit constrained opposition areas suffer a drop in economic output as measured by local construction activity.


Most studies of plant hybridisation are concerned with documenting its occurrence in different plant groups. Many flowering plants are polyploids and seeds developed from crosses between individuals of different ploidies usually show abnormal features and often abort. The success or failure of interploidy crosses is very important to understanding the evolution of plants as well as to agriculture, but much remains to be learned about the nature of hybridisation barriers. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain postzygotic barriers, including negative interactions between diverged sequences, global genome rearrangements, and widespread epigenetic reprogramming. Some recent advances in our understanding of the process of hybridisation are derived from different experimental studies on a series of A. thaliana ecotypes. Crosses between diploid (2x) and tetraploid (4x) individuals of the same ecotype can result in F1 lethality, and this dosage-sensitive incompatibility plays a major role in polyploidy speciation research. We have performed interploidy crosses between different diploid maternal A. thaliana ecotypes and tetraploid paternal Col-0 ecotype and identified a genetic variation in F1 lethality. We also found that maternal parents of some ecotypes such as Tsu-1 suppressed the F1 lethality caused by paternal-excess interploidy cross of Col-0 ecotype. A preliminary mapping exercise produced advanced backcross populations that are suitable for mapping maternal modifiers and for the identification of modifier genes. Furthermore, we studied the killer effect caused by Col-0 and identified three additive QTL that affect the rate of postzygotic lethality in F1 during interploidy crosses. This information will facilitate the identification of paternal genes that cause F1 lethality and contribute to reproductive isolation. The moa-1 (mosaic aneuploidy 1) mutant of A. thaliana was obtained in a screen of chemically (EMS) mutagenised seeds of Landsberg erecta (Ler). moa-1 has various phenotypic differences to wild type; the preliminary karyotype analysis showed that the cells of individual moa-1 mutant plants have a variable number of chromosomes (usually between 11-18). In contrast, the cells of wild type Arabidopsis plants and conventional aneuploids have a fixed number of chromosomes in each somatic cell. This data showed that all moa-1 plants have an abnormal number of chromosomes and thus they were termed as mosaic aneuploids.


Modern agriculture practices have been great promise for economic development of nation. Farm productivity is directly proportional to use of agrochemicals as observed from the first green revolution. Improper and unsafe use of these agrochemicals, especially pesticides is not only harmful to environment but also human health. Pesticides cause 14 per cent of all known occupational injuries in agriculture and 10 per cent of all fatal injuries. The relationship between the extent of pesticide-use and signs and symptoms of illnesses due to exposure among agricultural labourers of one of the high cash crop zones of Maharashtra State (Western Maharashtra) was assessed. Total 100 agricultural labourers were interviewed with pre-tested interview schedules by using accidental sampling procedure. It is found that more than 75 per cent of labourers used either "moderately hazardous" or "highly hazardous" pesticides as classified by World Health Organisation (WHO). However, 88 per cent did not use any form of protection, while handling pesticides. Poverty and Illiteracy are greatly responsible for improper handling of pesticides.The study also found that there is ample scope for reducing pesticide exposure through training, agricultural extension and community mobilisation.


The roles of hormones, second messengers and pH in triggering or potentiating biochemical responses to anaerobiosis were evaluated using in vitro incubations of isolated muscle tissues (foot, radular retractor, ventricle) from the marine whelk Busycon canaliculatum (L.). Incubating tissues in vitro under anoxic conditions stimulated changes in muscle fmctose-2,6-bisphosphate levels and pyruvate kinase kinetics ( K m values for phosphoenolpyruvate, I 50 values for L-alanine) that were virtually equivalent to those that occur in vivo . Additions of hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine, octopamine, serotonin, glucagon, insulin) or inhibitors of prostaglandin synthesis (dexamethasone, aspirin) had no effect on these metabolic responses to anoxia. The second messenger compounds, dibutyryl cyclic AMP and Ca2+ + ionophore A23187 + phorbol myristate acetate, produced isolated and tissue-specific responses in muscles incubated under aerobic conditions, but the magnitude and pattern of these responses differed from those seen in anoxia. Second messengers also had no effect on the development of biochemical responses in anoxic muscles. Tissue pH was artificially altered in order to evaluate the role of pH change (acidification occurs during anoxia in vivo ) in the control of metabolic responses to anoxia. In all cases, the changes in the kinetic properties of pyruvate kinase (PK) correlated with the state of oxygenation of the tissue and not with the measured tissue pH value; higher tissue pH did not prevent anoxiainduced phosphorylation of PK and lower tissue pH did not alter the kinetic patterns of the aerobic enzyme. Overall, the study indicates that cells and tissues of the whelk respond individually to anoxia and that coordination of the action of protein kinases during anoxia is not mediated by pH or by common secondmessenger mechanisms.


Denoising is an essential ingredient of any data processing task because real data are usually contaminated by some amount of uncertainty, error or noise. The ultimate objective in this study is to handle the multiresolution denoising of an arbitrarily spaced multidimensional data set contaminated with arbitrary noise. Denoising is closely related to function estimation from noisy samples, which is best achieved by complexity control in a structured function space. Multiresolution analysis and wavelets provide a suitable structured space for function estimation. However, conventional wavelet decompositions, such as the fast wavelet transform, are designed for regularly spaced data. Furthermore, the projection and lifting scheme approaches for dealing with irregular data cannot be easily extended to higher dimensions and their application to denoising is not straightforward. In contrast, the least squares wavelet decomposition offers a method for direct decomposition and denoising of multidimensional irregularly spaced data. We show that the frequently applied level by level multiresolution least squares wavelet decomposition suffers from gross interpolation error in the case of irregularly spaced data. The simultaneous least squares wavelet decomposition, with careful wavelet selection, is proposed to overcome this problem. Conventional wavelet domain denoising techniques, such as global and level dependent thresholding, work well for regularly spaced data but more sophisticated coefficient dependent thresholding is required for irregularly spaced data. We propose a new data domain denoising method for Gaussian noise, referred to as the Local Goodness of Fit (LGF) algorithm, which is based on the local application of the conventional goodness of fit measure in a multiresolution structure. We show that the combination of the simultaneous least squares wavelet decomposition and the LGF denoising algorithm is superior to the projection and coefficient dependent thresholding and can handle arbitrarily spaced multidimensional data contaminated with independent, but not necessarily identically distributed, Gaussian noise. For denoising of data contaminated with outliers and/or non-Gaussian long tail noise, the decomposition methods based on mean estimation are not robust. We develop a new robust multiresolution decomposition, based on median estimation in a dyadic multiresolution structure, referred to as the Interpolated Block Median Decomposition (IBMD). The IBMD method overcomes the limitations of existing median preserving transforms and can handle multidimensional irregularly spaced data of arbitrary size. Thresholding methods for the coefficients of robust median preserving decompositions are currently limited to regular data contaminated with noise drawn independently and identically from a known symmetric distribution. To overcome these serious limitations, we develop a fundamentally new data domain robust multiresolution denoising procedure, called the Local Balance of Fit (LBF) algorithm, which is based on local balancing of the data points above and below the denoised function in a dyadic multiresolution structure. The LBF algorithm, which was inspired by the intuitive denoising style carried out by a human operator, is a distribution free method that can handle any arbitrary noise without a priori knowledge or estimation of the noise distribution. The combination of the robust IBMD decomposition and the LBF denoising algorithm can effectively handle a wide spectrum of denoising applications involving multidimensional arbitrarily spaced data contaminated with arbitrary and unknown noise. The only limitation is that the noise samples must be independent or uncorrelated.


Background: Staphylococcus aureus's carriers have an important role for spreading many diseases caused by Staphylococcus aureus. In Semarang, there is no publication about prevalence of Staphylococcus aureus's carriers among young healthy individu. Some demographic and economic factors associate with Staphylococcus aureus's nasal carriage.
Objective : To know and to analyze the prevalence of Staphylococcus aureus's carriers and economyc demographyc factors that associate with Staphylococcus aureus's nasal carriage among the young healthy individu in the community.
Methods : The research design was cross sectional. Samples consist of 102 students, were obtained with simple random sampling. Nasal swabs were cultured in human blood agar at 37o C. Data were analyzed with descriptive methode.
Result : Prevalence of S. aureus's carriers among the students of SMA 3 Semarang is 30,39 % and proportionally, boy has higher prevalence (36 %) than girls (25 %). 29 carriers were Moslem and 21( 72,41% ) doesn't have usual behaviour to inhale water to the nostrils when they 'wudhu'. Carriers parent's income is higher than 2010's Regional Minimum Income of Semarang City.
Conclusion : Prevalence of Staphylococcus aureus's carriers in the young healthhy community in Semarang City is 30,39 % with the number of incidence is higher in boy and individu who does not have usual behaviour to inhale water to the nostrils when they 'wudhu'. Parent's income higher than Regional Minimum Income (UMR) does not decrease the incidence of S. aureus's carriers.

Keywords : Staphylococcus aureus's carriers, students of SMA 3 Semarang


Several active flow control helicopter applications aimed at improving aerodynamic performance have been studied at Onera and are presented in this paper. The distinction between applications for non-rotating or non-lifting parts and for rotating parts is presented. A first part deals with the application of steady/unsteady blowing to simplified rotor hub and fuselage shapes. The objective is to achieve significant drag reduction by suppressing the flow separation occurring in these areas. Numerical and experimental investigations are jointly performed to identify the best control strategies. The numerical efforts take into account the experimental constraints in the simulations. Significant work is done on the simplified fuselage drag reduction using various blowing actuations: synthetic jets, pulsed jets and steady blowing. The second part of the paper is dedicated to active flow control on rotor blades. A first application of deployable vortex generators for dynamic stall control is discussed. Then, more general active technologies aimed not only at improving the aerodynamic performance but also at reducing the vibratory loads or the noise radiation, are presented. Among the several active blade technologies that have been studied at Onera, both experimentally and numerically, this paper focuses on the active flap blade and the active twist blade concepts. The paper highlights the diversity of flow problems occurring on a rotorcraft and the various flow control strategies that must be considered to handle them. The numerical challenges to account for flow control in an unsteady environment are discussed for each flow control application.


The body, for a host of reasons, has been left out of the "talking cure." Psychotherapists who have been trained in models of psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, or cognitive therapeutic approaches are skilled at listening to the language and affect of the client. They track the clients' associations, fantasies, and signs of psychic conflict, distress, and defenses. Yet while the majority of therapists are trained to notice the appearance and even the movements of the client's body, thoughtful engagement with the client's embodied experience has remained peripheral to traditional therapeutic interventions. Trauma and the Body is a detailed review of research in neuroscience, trauma, dissociation, and attachment theory that points to the need for an integrative mind-body approach to trauma. The premise of this book is that, by adding body-oriented interventions to their repertoire, traditionally trained therapists can increase the depth and efficacy of their clinical work. Sensorimotor psychotherapy is an approach that builds on traditional psychotherapeutic understanding but includes the body as central in the therapeutic field of awareness, using observational skills, theories, and interventions not usually practiced in psychodynamic psychotherapy. By synthesizing bottom-up and top down interventions, the authors combine the best of both worlds to help chronically traumatized clients find resolution and meaning in their lives and develop a new, somatically integrated sense of self.


The electrical impedance behavior of gellan gum (GG), GG–carbon nanotube, and GG–carbon nanofiber hydrogel composites is reported. It is demonstrated that the impedance behavior of these gels can be modeled using a Warburg element in series with a resistor. Sonolysis (required to disperse the carbon fillers) does not affect GG hydrogel electrical conductivity (1.2 ± 0.1 mS/cm), but has a detrimental effect on the gel's mechanical characteristics. It was found that the electrical conductivity (evaluated using impedance analysis) increases with increasing volume fraction of the carbon fillers and decreasing water content. For example, carbon nanotube containing hydrogels exhibited a six- to sevenfold increase in electrical conductivity (to 7 ± 2 mS/cm) at water content of 82%. It is demonstrated that at water content of 95 ± 2% the electrical behavior of multiwalled nanotube containing hydrogels transitions (percolates) from transport dominated by ions (owing to GG) to transport dominated by electrons (owing to the carbon nanotube network). © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2014, 52, 864–871


Assessment has become a persistently hot topic in the library world, particularly when it comes to establishing value for academic library services. In an effort to assess performance and develop training tools to improve text/SMS reference services for an academic library, we used the Reference and User Services Association's Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers as the framework for an analytic rubric. We then used the rubric to assess academic librarian responses collected over a three-year period as part of text/SMS reference service. Results include implications for librarian friendliness, response time, attentiveness, and follow-up, as well as patron return rates. Comparative trends in text reference and the physical reference desk response times are also examined.


In 2008, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law conducted the most comprehensive study to date on startup companies and the patent system. The study consisted of a survey, which led to primarily quantitative data, as well as more in-depth pre- and post-survey interviews and case studies. Following upon articles broadly reporting the quantitative survey results, this chapter recounts the qualitative interviews and case studies in order to provide a richer overall account. Like the quantitative results, the qualitative results vary widely depending upon company industry, age, sophistication, and a variety of other factors. As such, this chapter reinforces the study's original finding that there is no overriding characterization of how startups use and are affected by the patent system.


Any scheme to legalize marijuana that has a chance of enactment will tax the stuff. But how? Like tobacco, based on weight? Like alcohol, by measuring the intoxicating chemical? Like shoes or hotel rooms, as a percentage of price? Or, as one city in California taxes medical marijuana, by counting plants or square footage of cultivated area? What about license fees, or a state monopoly? This article looks at those questions. And it looks more deeply: How high should the tax rate be, and how might governments adjust it to win the inevitable price war against bootleggers? How might a state allocate revenue when localities opt into or out of legalization? Where in the supply chain should governments collect tax? How could they fight non-tax-paid contraband? Should there be tax breaks for hemp, home grown, small growers, environmentally friendly operations, or medical marijuana? Early answers to some of these questions are already coming from 16 states and 11 California cities that are collecting revenue from medical marijuana. If recreational use is legalized, the answers might change. As a completely new source of revenue opens up, this article aims to prepare the reader for a time of new ideas (well, new applications of old ideas) and experimentation.


This report aims to improve understanding of the true cost of inadequate housing to EU Member States and to suggest policy initiatives that might help address its social and financial consequences. The full impact of poor housing tends to be evident only in the longer term, and the savings to publicly funded services, the economy and society that investment in good quality accommodation can deliver are not always obvious. While housing policies are the prerogative of national governments, many Member States face similar challenges in this field. In some, projects to improve inadequate housing have already provided valuable practical experience that can usefully be shared, and this report presents eight such case studies. While improving poor living conditions would be costly, the report suggests the outlay could be recouped quite quickly from savings on healthcare and a range of publicly funded services – in the EU as a whole, for every €3 invested in improving housing conditions, €2 would come back in savings in one year. An executive summary is available - see Related content.


Abstract. Permafrost thawing is likely to change the flow pathways taken by water as it moves through arctic and sub-arctic landscapes. The location and distribution of these pathways directly influence the carbon and other biogeochemical cycling in northern latitude catchments. While permafrost thawing due to climate change has been observed in the arctic and sub-arctic, direct observations of permafrost depth are difficult to perform at scales larger than a local scale. Using recession flow analysis, it may be possible to detect and estimate the rate of permafrost thawing based on a long-term streamflow record. We demonstrate the application of this approach to the sub-arctic Abiskojokken catchment in northern Sweden. Based on recession flow analysis, we estimate that permafrost in this catchment may be thawing at an average rate of about 0.9 cm/yr during the past 90 years. This estimated thawing rate is consistent with direct observations of permafrost thawing rates, ranging from 0.7 to 1.3 cm/yr over the past 30 years in the region.


Research has suggested that rapid, serial, visual presentation of text (RSVP) may be an effective way to scan and search through lists of text strings in search of words, names, etc. The Alphaslider widget employs RSVP as a method for rapidly scanning and searching lists or menus in a graphical user interface environment. The Alphaslider only uses an area less than 7 cm x 2.5 cm. The tiny size of the Alphaslider allows it to be placed on a credit card, on a control panel for a VCR, or as a widget in a direct manipulation based database interface. An experiment was conducted with four Alphaslider designs which showed that novice Alphaslider users could locate one item in a list of 10,000 film titles in 24 seconds on average, an expert user in about 13 seconds.


The strong heterogeneity and the anisotropy of composite materials require a rigorous and precise analysis as a result of their impact on local properties. First, mechanical tests are performed to determine the macroscopical behavior of a polyamid glass fiber composite. Then we focus on the influence of the heterogeneities of the microstructure on thermal and mechanical properties from finite element calculations on the real microstructure, after plane strain assumptions. 100 images in 10 different sizes (50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 600 pixels) are analysed. The influence of the area fraction and the spatial arrangement of fibers is then established. For the thermal conductivity and the bulk modulus the fiber area fraction is the most important factor. These properties are improved by increasing the area fraction. On the other hand, for the shear modulus, the fibers spatial arrangement plays the paramount role if the size of the microstructure is smaller than the RVE. Therefore, to make a good prediction from a multi-scale approach the knowledge of the RVE is fundamental. By a statistical approach and a numerical homogenization method, we determine the RVE of the composite for the elastic behavior (shear and bulk moduli), the thermal behavior (thermal conductivity), and for the area fraction. There is a relatively good agreement between the effective properties of this RVE and the experimental macroscopical behavior. These effective properties are estimated by the Hashin-Shtrikman lower bound.


A political scientist discusses the content and sources of Russian elite perspectives on international affairs. The "color revolutions," the perceived specter of Islamic radicalism, contestation over Russian identity, and evolving perceptions of Russia's international leverage are examined for their impact on elite attitudes. Discussion of the crisis in relations between Russia and Georgia illustrates the article's theme about the relationship between insecurity and assertiveness.


Understanding the stance and bias reflected in the text is an essential part of achieving machine intelligence. Successful detection of them will not only provide us with a huge amount of insights about public opinion and sentiment but also lay the foundation for serving the most reliable and accurate information to meet people's needs. Traditionally, this problem is often modeled merely as a text classification task. However, it is highly challenging due to the huge variation involved in opinion expressions as well as the need for background knowledge and commonsense reasoning. Meanwhile, just as we want to understand a word based on its context, we also have social contexts for a piece of text, including its author, its sharing pattern online, and its narrative about notable entities and events. These important factors have been largely ignored in previous work. In this dissertation, we tackle this problem by proposing three novel neural network models. Each of them capturing one important social context that can provide rich signals for the detection of stance and bias. The first model aims at predicting the stance of posts from online debate forums. We proposed a structured representation learning model that can make use of the authorship relation and conversational structure in debates. It takes advantage of both collective relational classification methods and distributed representation learning. The performance boost after the inference that is defined over the embedding space. The second model focuses on bias detection in news articles. We identify the social context available for many news articles, which is the engagement pattern over social media. We construct the social information graph involving news articles and apply GCN to aggregate local neighborhood information when generating graph representations. A joint text and graph model is then used to propagate information from both directions. Experimental results show even little social signals can lead to significant improvement. Last but not least, we explore the situation where we cannot obtain context information for test articles. In this case, we designed pre-training strategies that can inject external knowledge about entities, frames, and sharing users into the text model so that it can better identify relevant text spans for bias classification. We also show larger performance gains can be achieved when the supervision is limited, demonstrating the advantage of our model in such cases. Empirical results demonstrate that our models significantly outperform competitive baseline methods, by more accurately regularize the text representation given additional signals available in the social context and by identifying the portion of the text where stance and bias are most readily perceptible.


This work presents a horizontal velocity controller for the unmanned helicopter APID MK-III developed by Scandicraft AB in Sweden. We use a novel approach to the design consisting of two steps: 1) Mamdani-type of fuzzy rules to compute each of the desired horizontal velocity corresponding to the desired values for the attitude angles and the main rotor collective pitch; and 2) a Takagi-Sugeno controller is used to regulate the attitude angles so that the helicopter achieves its desired horizontal velocities at a desired altitude. The performance of the combined linguistic/model-based controller is evaluated in simulation and shows that the proposed design method achieves its intended purpose.


Success in written academic communication depends on the presence of elementsrelated to author-reader interactions which supplement propositionalinformation in the text, help readers reach the intended interpretation andshape the author's identity. But is this claim equally valid for online genres?This new environment demands an adaptation of the role of authors, texts, andreaders concerning (a) a re-structuring of texts to fit the margins of the screen;(b) a new type of non-linear structure, with no specific reading sequence, whichoften blurs authorial intention; (c) a new type of reader that does not read ina linear way, but often engages in multi-tasking, is used to processing smallchunks of text and often browses without a predictable reading sequence; and(d) a new context of text processing. This chapter addresses these qualities ofelectronic genres and their implications. For that purpose, 4 different academictexts will be analysed: (1) an academic printed journal uploaded online withoutvariations, Computers in Human Behavior; (2) an online journal, First Monday;(3) several entries of a specialised native discourse on the Internet: Second LifeNew World Notes; and (4) a popular native online discourse, the technology blogby The Guardian.


ObjectiveTo apply human performance concepts in an attempt to understand the causes of and prevent laparoscopic bile duct injury. Summary Background DataPowerful conceptual advances have been made in understanding the nature and limits of human performance. Applying these findings in high-risk activities, such as commercial aviation, has allowed the work environment to be restructured to substantially reduce human error. MethodsThe authors analyzed 252 laparoscopic bile duct injuries according to the principles of the cognitive science of visual perception, judgment, and human error. The injury distribution was class I, 7%; class II, 22%; class III, 61%; and class IV, 10%. The data included operative radiographs, clinical records, and 22 videotapes of original operations. ResultsThe primary cause of error in 97% of cases was a visual perceptual illusion. Faults in technical skill were present in only 3% of injuries. Knowledge and judgment errors were contributory but not primary. Sixty-four injuries (25%) were recognized at the index operation; the surgeon identified the problem early enough to limit the injury in only 15 (6%). In class III injuries the common duct, erroneously believed to be the cystic duct, was deliberately cut. This stemmed from an illusion of object form due to a specific uncommon configuration of the structures and the heuristic nature (unconscious assumptions) of human visual perception. The videotapes showed the persuasiveness of the illusion, and many operative reports described the operation as routine. Class II injuries resulted from a dissection too close to the common hepatic duct. Fundamentally an illusion, it was contributed to in some instances by working too deep in the triangle of Calot. ConclusionsThese data show that errors leading to laparoscopic bile duct injuries stem principally from misperception, not errors of skill, knowledge, or judgment. The misperception was so compelling that in most cases the surgeon did not recognize a problem. Even when irregularities were identified, corrective feedback did not occur, which is characteristic of human thinking under firmly held assumptions. These findings illustrate the complexity of human error in surgery while simultaneously providing insights. They demonstrate that automatically attributing technical complications to behavioral factors that rely on the assumption of control is likely to be wrong. Finally, this study shows that there are only a few points within laparoscopic cholecystectomy where the complication-causing errors occur, which suggests that focused training to heighten vigilance might be able to decrease the incidence of bile duct injury.


The few eighteenth-century and Romantic labouring-class poems that have been recuperated within recent efforts at canon revision appear to have attracted critical attention primarily because they represent the authentic hardships of the working poor, thereby suggesting a nascent effort toward solidarity. However, while these direct expressions of a more familiarly class-based politics are important, they are also relatively rare within the broader tradition of labouring-class poetry, a tradition made up of countless poems written by over 1300 poets who published in Great Britain and Ireland between 1700 and 1900. This essay proposes that a queer reading might productively undermine the usual critical practices for evaluating and valorizing labouring-class writing. It begins by questioning the current logic for determining whether to include a labouring-class poet within mainstream literary history, a logic which proceeds from the assumption that, as John Guillory describes, "the noncanonical author's experience as a marginalized social identity necessarily reasserts the transparency of the text to the experience it represents" (Cultural Capital 10). A queer reading complicates such representational reductionism. Furthermore, it may also contribute to a broader queer history of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, which although it has certainly been sensitive to the class issues, has heretofore focused predominantly on tensions between bourgeois and aristocratic subjects. The essay focuses in particular on conventional pastoral poetry as a paradoxically felicitous site from which to launch a queer reading of labouring-class poetry. Through Moe Meyer's concept of queer camp, the essay explores what happens when labouring-class pastoral is read as queer camp expression. Through a close reading of poems by John Clare, Janet Little and Samuel Thomson, the essay also considers to what extent these poems question representations of what is "natural" for a particular rank of society and, more broadly, opens up the discussion of what is "natural" in other categories of identity, including sexuality.


This paper highlighB the extent and the emerging role of economic reform in determining the
level of farm and non-farm employment in rural India by reviewing the past performance and
pstulating the conditions for employment generation and the predictted sustainable growth thereby.
It attempts a diachronic and synchronic study of the problems associated with unemployment, and
disguised unemployment,since the year of Reform. In the first section, attention is drawn to the
conditions impacting onite pace and paftern of employment growth in rural India and rural Tiamil
Nadu, bth in qualiative and guantitative aspcts. Further, the performance of rural sector in
emplogment generation is reviewed on well-established parameters, bringing out the pattern of
employment growth witnessed during the last decade of reforms by discussing the exogenous and
endogenous factors for changes in the sector.)
Moreover, the paper documents trends in employment generation in rural sector of the country
and the State of Timil Nadu in the pre-reform and post-reform period. Though Thmil Nadu even
as a late comer, has eaned the reputation of being at the forefront of Economic Reforms in the
country by implementing initiative in fiscal correction and restucturing of the state economy, there
remains, still significant uncovered areas in rural front, more particularly in ntral employment
generation. It is imperative that the Sate needs to address these problems, if it is to derive full
bnefits of reforms already launched and to make development more balanced, broad-based and
sustainable. In the final section, key issues and Government initiatives, which have wider
ramifications for achieuing npid employment generation and sustainable growth are outlined.


From the Publisher:
About the Author:

Bob Baxley has a broad range of design experiences acquired during a 14-year career as a lead designer and independent consultant for more than 20 organizations and has led the design of user interfaces of consumer, enterprise, and scientific applications across a range of platforms and applications. He has worked as a senior designer for Claris Coporation where he lead the design teams for nearly all of Claris' desktop applications including FileMaker pro, ClarisWorks 2.0 and MacDraw Pro. He led design teams as an independent consultant for companies such as Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Ameritrade, NetObjects, E.piphany, Fukitsu, Evolve Software, Noosh, Illuminate, and Claris Corporation. The last three years he has served as the Director of User Experience for myCFO, Inc. where he oversees all aspects of design and usability for the web site as well as a variety of client facing and internal web-based applications.


In the present paper, I will discuss the semantic structure of nouns and nominal number markers. In particular, I will discuss the question if it is possible to account for the syntactic and semantic formation of nominals in a parallel way, that is I will try to give a compositional account of nominal semantics. The framework that I will use is "twolevel semantics". The semantic representations and their type-theoretical basis will account for general cross-linguistic characteristics of nouns and nominal number and will show interdependencies between noun classes, number marking and cardinal constructions. While the analysis will give a unified account of bare nouns (like dog / water ), it will distinguish between the different kinds of nominal terms (like a dog / dogs / water). Following the proposal, the semantic operations underlying the formation of the SR are basically the same for DPs as for CPs. Hence, from such an analysis, independent semantic arguments can be derived for a structural parallelism of nominals and sentences - that is, for the "sentential aspect" of noun phrases. I will first give a sketch of the theoretical background. I will then discuss the cross-linguistic combinatorial potential of nominal constructions, that is, the potential of nouns and number markers to combine with other elements and form complex expressions. This will lead to a general type-theoretical classification for the elements in question. In the next step, I will model the referential potential of nominal constructions. Together with the combinatorial potential, this will give us semantic representations for the basic elements involved in nominal constructions. In an overview, I will summarize our modeling of nouns and nominal number. I will then discuss in an outlook the "sentential aspect" of noun phrases.


By placing an atom into a cavity, the electromagnetic mode structure of the cavity is modified. In Cavity QED, one manifestation of this phenomenon is the appearance of a gauge-dependent diamagnetic term, known as the $A^2$ contribution. Although in atomic Cavity QED, the resulting modification in the eigenmodes is negligible, in recent superconducting circuit realizations, such corrections can be observable and may have qualitative implications. We revisit the canonical quantization procedure of a circuit QED system consisting of a single superconducting transmon qubit coupled to a multimode superconducting microwave resonator. A complete derivation of the quantum Hamiltonian of an open circuit QED system consisting of a transmon qubit coupled to a leaky transmission line cavity is presented. We introduce a complete set of modes that properly conserves the current in the entire structure and present a sum rule for the dipole transition matrix elements of a multi-level transmon qubit coupled to a multi-mode cavity. Finally, an effective multi-mode Rabi model is derived with coefficients that are given in terms of circuit parameters.


Vocal fold scarring remains a therapeutic challenge. Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) has strong antifibrotic activity and has proved to have therapeutic potential in restoration of scar tissues such as liver cirrhosis and lung fibrosis. The present study aimed to clarify the effects of HGF injection into scarred vocal folds in a canine model. Canine vocal folds were stripped unilaterally and treated with intracordal injection of saline solution (sham group), HGF (HGF group), or HGF with cultured autologous normal vocal fold fibroblasts (Fb/HGF group) 1 month after injury. The larynges were harvested 6 months after the initial injury and then subjected to vibratory and histologic examination. The results of vibratory examinations in the excised larynx setup revealed that phonation threshold pressure significantly increased and vocal efficiency was significantly reduced in all treated groups as compared to normal data obtained from normal canine larynges. However, the HGF group presented much better results than both the sham and Fb/HGF groups in terms of mucosal wave amplitude and incidence of vocal fold bowing, glottal incompetence, and phase asymmetry. The histologic data indicated a significant increase of collagen in both the sham and Fb/HGF groups, while normal levels of collagen were found in the HGF group. Tissue contraction of the lamina propria was also observed in both the sham and Fb/HGF groups, but was barely detectable in the HGF group. Although the HGF-treated vocal folds appeared to require more driving forces for vibration, HGF might prevent excessive collagen deposition and tissue contraction and thus reduce the effects of scarring on the vibratory properties of the vocal folds. From these data it is concluded that HGF has considerable potential in the treatment of vocal fold scarring.


This work presents a complete model for the design and optimization of multiwavelength distributed Fabry-Pe/spl acute/rot (DFP) fiber lasers that are made by superimposing two chirped fiber Bragg gratings in a photosensitive codoped erbium-ytterbium (Er-Yb) fiber. The model is based on a matrix formulation of coupled-mode equations taking into account the chirped grating superstructure and including a spectrally resolved gain medium. The performed analysis reveals that the signal power of each channel is strongly localized near a minimum of the superstructured-grating envelope. As a consequence, the overlap between the power distributions in neighboring cavities is small, thus reducing the effect of cross-gain saturation and allowing a high number of channels in a short piece of fiber. The simulations also show how the saturation of the cross-relaxation mechanism between ytterbium and erbium leads to flat output spectra without the need for an additional equalization scheme such as a complex grating apodization profile. Furthermore, to validate the theoretical model, we present the experimental realization and characterization of a multiwavelength laser emitting in a single-mode and single-polarization over 16 wavelengths spaced by 50 GHz and with a total output power of 52 mW.


Abstract. The world is facing the second year of the Covid-19 global pandemic that has affected many around the world. Despite the challenges, ISPRS is organizing its second consecutive virtual Congress to motivate, inspire and connect geospatial researchers around the globe to share the knowledge and communicate their research results. This year Commission IV shares the successful research endeavours of many members of working groups and their graduate students and research teams.In the years since the XXIII ISPRS congress, 2016, there have been many important developments. Managing the social and economic challenges brought by increased complexity and interconnectivity of activities in human society requires new dimensions of analysing information and specifically spatial information. The increased pressure on the usage of geographic space, maintaining sustainable development and creating liveable community environments increases the requirements for spatial decision-making tools. The last years of Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns pose a range of new challenges to spatial information such as occupancy estimations, efficient use of building space and safe navigation within buildings. The focus on dynamic changes and analysing real-time sensor data is increasing. The developments of Spatial Digital Twins are maturing in the context of providing tools and methods for high density human settlements to be more resilient, sustainable, liveable, and safe.Commission IV Spatial Information Science (2016–2022) is dedicated to advance research activities in spatial information sciences for modelling, structuring, management, analysis, visualization and simulation of (big) data with focus on the third spatial dimension and taking into consideration dynamic changes. Special attention is given to linking information about real-world physical phenomena with societal, governmental, organizational and legal information in order to address the complexity of issues in their entirety. The Commission has contributed to advancements in data modelling, data fusion and management, visualization (web-based, VR and AR), simulation and city analytics, and 3D applications. The work had largely been implemented in cooperation with international organizations such as FIG, UDMS, 3DGeoinfo, ICA, OGC, ISO and Web3D.The Commission consists of 10 scientific areas of research that is coordinated by 10 working groups (WG) and one inter commission working group (ICWG) as follows – WG1: Multidimensional spatial models; WG2: Ontologies, semantics and knowledge representation for geospatial information; WG3: Spatial data analysis, statistic and uncertainty modelling; WG4: Collaborative crowdsourced cloud mapping (C3M); WG5: Indoor/outdoor seamless modelling, LBS and mobility; WG6: SDI: Internet of things and spatial decision support; WG7: Geo-data management; WG8: Geo-computation and geo-simulation; WG9: Geovisualisation, augmented and virtual reality; WG10: Advanced geospatial applications for smart cities and regions; ICWG IV/III: Global mapping: updating, verification and interoperability.The papers received for the ISPRS virtual event reflect the above-mentioned scientific research areas. The reported research ranges from advancements in new and emerging theories, through experiments and analysis to demonstration of technologies in different applications. The research was captured through papers and abstracts published in the collection of ISPRS Annals and ISPRS Archives. The ISPRS Annals contain 24 papers and the ISPRS Archives contain 56 papers. The diversity of the research presented in the published papers clearly indicates the wide range of topics within the field of Spatial Information Science. A rigorous peer-review process by the ISPRS TC IV Scientific Committee contributed to high quality proceedings.In closing we would like to note the commission's plans for the upcoming year. Because the pandemic has forced many to work remotely, we have been motivated to find new ways to remain informed of changes in the work of the commission and working groups. The commission plans to host monthly webinars at which working groups can showcase their activities and achievements. We hope that this will generate greater interest in the work of the commission and enhance the profile of the commission's working groups.


The Jamming of soft spheres at zero temperature, the J-point, has been extensively studied both numerically and theoretically and can now be considered as a safe location in the space of models, where a street lamp has been lit up. However, a recent work by Ikeda et al [1] reveals that, in the Temperature/Packing fraction parameter space, experiments on colloids are actually rather far away from the scaling regime illuminated by this lamp. Is it that the J-point has little to say about real system? What about granular media? Such a-thermal, frictional, systems are a-priori even further away from the idealized case of thermal soft spheres. In the past ten years, we have systematically investigated horizontally shaken grains in the vicinity of the Jamming transition. We discuss the above issue in the light of very recent experimental results. First, we demonstrate that the contact network exhibits a remarkable dynamics, with strong heterogeneities, which are maximum at a packing fraction φ, distinct and smaller than the packing fraction φ, where the average number of contact per particle starts to increase. The two crossovers converge at point J in the zero mechanical excitation limit. Second, a careful analysis of the dynamics on time scales ranging from a minute fraction of the vibration cycle to several thousands of cycles allows us to map the behaviors of this shaken granular system onto those observed for thermal soft spheres and demonstrate that some light of the J-point street-lamp indeed reaches the granular universe.


Environmental and health issues are two of the most pressing issues society faces today. People often view both environmental and health issues as psychologically distant: they believe that the problems will occur in the future, to other people, in other places and that the exact outcomes are uncertain. This paper provides an overview of studies that have investigated how the different psychological distance dimensions (viz., temporal, spatial, social and hypothetical) influence perceptions, intentions, and decision making in the environmental and health domains. This overview suggests that psychological distance indeed matters in both domains. There are indications that threat perceptions are mostly heightened when communicated or perceived as being psychologically close. However, the studies also show that a mere increase in perceived threat does not necessarily alter intentions or behavior. Moreover, with regard to the effects of psychological distance, there are neither clear differences between the environmental and the health domain nor between the four psychological distance dimensions. We discuss possible moderators that may explain the range of findings. Finally, we conclude with discussing the current stance of the literature and discuss specific research topics that are yet to be studied. As environmental and health behavior involve more than just one decision or one behavior, we suggest, for example, that future studies should investigate how psychological distance influences not only the target behavior, but related behavior as well.


When war broke out between the United States and Great Britain in 1812, neither side was prepared for the conflict, as evidenced by their respective fortifications. The most sophisticated and modern fortifications were those built by the US Corps of Engineers to protect some of the main port cities. These included Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia, Fort McHenry in Baltimore and Castle William in New York. The British also heavily fortified their main harbor at Halifax and their main center of power at Quebec. However, elsewhere, especially in the interior, fortifications were old, neglected or only hastily erected. The forts at Detroit and Mackinac were much as the British had left them in 1796. This book covers all of the main fortifications of the conflict, those that faced the crashing of guns and those whose intimidation played a part in the grand strategy of the war.


Labor informality, associated with low productivity and lack of access to social security services, dogs developing countries around the world. Rates of labor (in)formality, however, vary widely within countries. This paper presents a new stylized fact, namely the systematic positive relationship between the rate of labor formality and the working age population in cities. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs through the emergence of complex economic activities: as cities become larger, labor is allocated into increasingly complex industries as firms combine complementary capabilities derived from a more diverse pool of workers. Using data from Colombia, we use a network-based model to show that the technological proximity (derived from worker transitions between industry pairs) of current industries in a city to potential new complex industries governs the growth of the formal sector in the city. The mechanism proposed has robust strong predictive power, and fares better than alternative explanations of (in)formality.


Abstract. We quantify the contribution of land transport and shipping emissions to tropospheric ozone for the first time with a chemistry–climate model including an advanced tagging method (also known as source apportionment), which considers not only the emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx, NO, and NO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and volatile organic compounds (VOC) separately, but also their non-linear interaction in producing ozone. For summer conditions a contribution of land transport emissions to ground-level ozone of up to 18 % in North America and Southern Europe is estimated, which corresponds to 12 and 10 nmol mol−1, respectively. The simulation results indicate a contribution of shipping emissions to ground-level ozone during summer on the order of up to 30 % in the North Pacific Ocean (up to 12 nmol mol−1) and 20 % in the North Atlantic Ocean (12 nmol mol−1). With respect to the contribution to the tropospheric ozone burden, we quantified values of 8 and 6 % for land transport and shipping emissions, respectively. Overall, the emissions from land transport contribute around 20 % to the net ozone production near the source regions, while shipping emissions contribute up to 52 % to the net ozone production in the North Pacific Ocean. To put these estimates in the context of literature values, we review previous studies. Most of them used the perturbation approach, in which the results for two simulations, one with all emissions and one with changed emissions for the source of interest, are compared. For a better comparability with these studies, we also performed additional perturbation simulations, which allow for a consistent comparison of results using the perturbation and the tagging approach. The comparison shows that the results strongly depend on the chosen methodology (tagging or perturbation approach) and on the strength of the perturbation. A more in-depth analysis for the land transport emissions reveals that the two approaches give different results, particularly in regions with large emissions (up to a factor of 4 for Europe). Our estimates of the ozone radiative forcing due to land transport and shipping emissions are, based on the tagging method, 92 and 62 mW m−2, respectively. Compared to our best estimates, previously reported values using the perturbation approach are almost a factor of 2 lower, while previous estimates using NOx-only tagging are almost a factor of 2 larger. Overall our results highlight the importance of differentiating between the perturbation and the tagging approach, as they answer two different questions. In line with previous studies, we argue that only the tagging approach (or source apportionment approaches in general) can estimate the contribution of emissions, which is important to attribute emission sources to climate change and/or extreme ozone events. The perturbation approach, however, is important to investigate the effect of an emission change. To effectively assess mitigation options, both approaches should be combined. This combination allows us to track changes in the ozone production efficiency of emissions from sources which are not mitigated and shows how the ozone share caused by these unmitigated emission sources subsequently increases.


Generalized ray tracing equations are derived to include special cases in optics such as uncentered spherical interfaces, prisms, mirrors, and centered aspheric surfaces. These equations were constructed for use with the IBM Card Programmed Electronic Calculator. The method has been applied to complicated optical systems involving uncentered lenses in addition to reflecting and refracting prisms. A method is given for the design of an aspheric surface, and a design curve of an aspheric optical system is given as an example.


The aim of this study was to determine the difference in disinfection between aggregated and dispersed virus. Bacteriophage MS2 was chosen as a surrogate for enteric virus. The first part of this project consisted of characterizing the aggregation of MS2 and the second part examined differences in the disinfection of aggregated and dispersed virus solutions. It was shown that MS2 only aggregated at a pH below its isoelectric point when the solution ionic strength was below 50 mM. At neutral pH, high ionic strength and CaCl2 did not cause aggregation. High ionic strength showed inhibition of aggregation at low pH. Aggregation was also influenced by the choice of buffer. The effect of the solution chemistry on the extent of aggregation at pH 3 was the following: acetic acid (20 mM)>sodium chloride (20 mM)> phosphate buffer (5 mM PO42-, 10 mM NaCl). Disinfection of the virus was thus tested at a pH above and under the isoelectric point at low ionic strength (phosphate buffer and 20 mM NaCl) in order to have dispersed and aggregated MS2 virus, respectively. Ultraviolet light (UV) and peracetic acid (PAA) were the chosen disinfection techniques as they are generally regarded as pH independent. UV showed greater disinfection capacity for the aggregated system than for the mono- dispersed system. Both disinfection curves showed first order kinetics. This observed difference in disinfection rates may not be due to the aggregation state of the virus but to other mechanisms, including the effect of pH on direct and indirect oxidation (by ROS) of amino acids in the virus capsid proteins. This is supported by the fact that UV can penetrate within the virus unlike a chemical disinfectant which must be in physical contact with a virus component for a reaction to take place. In order to test the effect of direct contact by chemical disinfectants, an aggregated and a dispersed solution were spiked with PAA. A difference in the behavior of the disinfection curves in phosphate buffer was observed after an inactivation of 6 logs. The disinfection rate of the aggregated system slowed down (tailing) after some initial amount of disinfection, while the dispersed system was completely disinfected with one disinfection rate. This implies a solution with some large aggregates and many single viruses in the solution. In 20 mM NaCl the disinfection rate of the aggregated virus was much slower than for the dispersed system (kaggregated= 0.0224; kdispersed= 0.0747). Both inactivation curves showed first order kinetics. By applying Grant's model (1995) an aggregation factor was calculated (b= 1.413). This indicates a very aggregated state with large aggregates.


Abstract. Although speculative ideas of an expanding Earth can be found before World War II, it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the theory attracted serious attention among a minority of earth scientists. While some of the proponents of the expanding Earth adopted an empiricist attitude by disregarding the physical cause of the assumed expansion, others argued that the cause, either fully or in part, was of cosmological origin. They referred to the possibility that the gravitational constant was slowly decreasing in time, as first suggested by P. Dirac in 1937. As a result of a stronger gravitation in the past, the ancient Earth would have been smaller than today. The gravitational argument for an expanding Earth was proposed by P. Jordan and L. Egyed in the 1950s and during the next 2 decades it was discussed by several physicists, astronomers and earth scientists. Among those who for a period felt attracted by "gravitational expansionism" were A. Holmes, J. Tuzo Wilson and F. Hoyle. The paper examines the idea of a varying gravitational constant and its impact on geophysics in the period from about 1955 to the mid-1970s.


Recent extreme events show that Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is emerging as the dominant social reporting tool to spread information on social crises. It is elevating the online public community to the status of first responders who can collectively cope with social crises. However, at the same time, many warnings have been raised about the reliability of community intelligence obtained through social reporting by the amateur online community. Using rumor theory, this paper studies citizen-driven information processing through Twitter services using data from three social crises: the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, the Toyota recall in 2010, and the Seattle cafe shooting incident in 2012. We approach social crises as communal efforts for community intelligence gathering and collective information processing to cope with and adapt to uncertain external situations. We explore two issues: (1) collective social reporting as an information processing mechanism to address crisis problems and gather community intelligence, and (2) the degeneration of social reporting into collective rumor mills. Our analysis reveals that information with no clear source provided was the most important, personal involvement next in importance, and anxiety the least yet still important rumor causing factor on Twitter under social crisis situations.


The Galileo Probe Mass Spectrometer provided the first data on the noble gas mixing and isotope ratios in the Jovian atmosphere. These measurements and the comparison with solar values constrain models of Jupiter's formation• Significant refinements to the initially reported abundances of argon, krypton, and xenon have been enabled through post-encounter laboratory calibrations using a refurbished engineering unit mass spectrometer nearly identical to the flight unit. The abundances relative to hydrogen for argon, krypton, and xenon are respectively 2.5 + 0.5, 2.7 + 0.5, and 2.6 + 0.5 times the solar ratios. The mixing ratios of He and Ne found in these studies are consistent with previously reported values of 0.8 and 0.1 times solar respectively. The Jovian 36Ar/3aAr ratio is 5.6 + 0.25 and the 2øNe/22Ne ratio is 13 _+ 2, consistent with the solar values of 5.77 and 13.81, respectively, that are derived from lunar mineral grain analysis. The distribution of xenon isotopes at Jupiter also resembles the solar distribution.


Lord Roberts, who was the British commander-in-chief in the field in South Africa from January to November 1900, believed that the war would end once he had captured the capital cities of the two Boer republics. However, long before he handed over the supreme command to Lord Kitchener in November 1900, it was already clear that the Boers were determined to continue their struggle by means of guerrilla warfare after the fall of their capitals. Consequently the war escalated geographically, the British supply lines were threatened and sometimes cut, and completely new demands were made on the conventionally-trained British soldiers. In an effort to corner the Boer commandos, the British in due course built some 8 000 blockhouses of various sizes over the length and breadth of the war zone. These blockhouses were manned by about 85 000 soldiers, including about 25 000 black and coloured blockhouse guards. In this article life in the blockhouses is described and evaluated. Attention is paid to the composition of the blockhouse garrisons, arrangements in the blockhouses, the provision of water and food, the daily routine, relaxation, as well as other aspects of life in the blockhouses.