Developing and implementing engaging activities aligned with the learning outcomes of a module within a higher education programme is essential to successful teaching practice in the 21 st century. Substantial research evidence indicates that student engagement plays a pivotal role in the academic performance and success of the student. The aim of this research is to compare student performance after adopting an alternative pedagogic approach utilising digital photography as a tool to engage the student in an engineering discipline. The activity was designed to promote student engagement by integrating digital photography, replicating authentic construction professional practice and focusing on images as a key means of communication and to aid the learning. Such strategies can promote student inclusion by eliminating literacy challenges associated with the traditional lecturing approach. A questionnaire to students revealed that those from a construction background perceived that they gained a deeper understanding of the subject matter and a richer learning experience, and advocated that more teachers on their programme should adopt a similar teaching strategy. A comparison of assessment results from two previous student cohorts (n=36 students) found that the alternative approach yielded superior exam performance. The careful planning and implementation of combined teaching strategies in a single engaging activity can deliver improved student performance without the need for additional material or financial resources.


The most popular vampire story of all time, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), has been frequently adapted in several mediums in Judeo-Christian countries. However, when Dracula travelled to Turkey, only thirty years after Stoker wrote it, a new impulse was given to Dracula's story which has never been fully analysed either in Western Dracula studies or in Turkish literature studies. This paper discusses Ali Riza Seyfi's novel adaptation of Dracula, Vlad the Impaler (1928), in terms of its representation of Turkish national identity in the 1920's through the Gothic genre and the vampire figure. In the paper, I will specifically be referring to Stephen D. Arata's article "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization" (1990) and argue that the adaptation reflects Arata's idea of 'reverse-colonisation', but as two-sided. While Arata claims that Dracula is the face of the dangerous East which Britain tries to colonise, Seyfi sees Dracula as the embodiment of dangerous West who tries to colonise his lands in the World War I as well as the avenger of Wallachians who were once colonised by the Ottoman troops. Seyfi's novel serves not only as an inception point for the birth of the Gothic genre in Turkey but also as an embodiment of Turkish nationalism on which the fears and desires of Turkish people of the post-war era were depicted through the vampire figure.


The human chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are ostensibly disorders of innate immunity with an exaggerated inflammatory response and loss of tolerance to the normal enteric microbial flora. In this project, we have extensively characterized innate immune responses driven by Pathogen Associated Molecular Pattern Molecules (PAMPs) and the more recently recognized Damage Associated Molecular Pattern molecules (DAMPs). The prototype DAMP, a chromatin-associated protein, high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1), is released during cellular necrosis and is secreted from activated macrophages. Extracellularly, it binds the receptor for advanced glycation end products (RAGE), as well as toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 and TLR4, important in the recognition of PAMPs. PAMPs and DAMPs trigger inflammatory signaling pathways in neighboring cells through activation of the transcription factor family, NF-kappaB.Much attention has been given to the central role played by PAMPs in the form of the enteric bacterial flora in IBD pathogenesis. We hypothesize that DAMPs also play a pivotal role in this process. Accordingly, we have determined the significance of DAMPs and PAMPs in the mucosal inflammatory response in macrophages and in vivo in mouse models of IBD.We first investigated expression of TLRs in the gut to determine cell types in the intestinal epithelium that may respond to danger signals. TLR expression was most prominent on intestinal epithelial enteroendocrine cells (EEC). Using a murine EEC line, multiple functional consequences of TLR activation were demonstrated. Second, in IL-10 deficient (-/-) mice with chronic Th1-mediated enterocolitis, we demonstrate a role for HMGB1 in macrophage activation and IBD. Lastly, we examined an in vivo therapy targeted at inhibiting the prominent downstream effector of DAMP and PAMP signaling, NF-kappaB, in murine IBD. Inhibition of activated NF-kappaB with a short cell permeable peptide inhibited chronic enterocolitis in IL-10-/- mice.In summary, this dissertation provides new insight into our understanding of intestinal innate mucosal inflammatory responses. We demonstrate the relevance of TLRs on EECs and the contribution of DAMP and PAMP signaling in disease. These results also provide proof of concept for new therapeutic approaches in IBD.


This paper explores the complex story of a particular style of rock art in western Arnhem Land known as 'Painted Hands'. Using new evidence from recent fieldwork, we present a definition for their style, distribution and place in the stylistic chronologies of this region. We argue these motifs played an important cultural role in Aboriginal society during the period of European settlement in the region. We explore the complex messages embedded in the design features of the Painted Hands, arguing that they are more than simply hand stencils or markers of individuality. We suggest that these figures represent stylized and intensely encoded motifs with the power to communicate a high level of personal, clan and ceremonial identity at a time when all aspects of Aboriginal cultural identity were under threat.


This is the fifth in a series of papers being issued by the Association of Children's Residential Centers (ACRC) regarding key program and policy issues facing the field of residential treatment. ACRC is the longest standing national association focused exclusively on the needs of children who require residential treatment and their families. Over the past several years ACRC has engaged with national policy makers, family members, youth, and its membership in an effort to redefine the shape and scope of residential treatment as an intervention for youth with serious emotional and behavioral disorders and their families.


Low-power wireless devices suffer notoriously from Cross- Technology Interference (CTI). To enable co-existence, researchers have proposed a variety of interference mitigation strategies. Existing solutions, however, are designed to work with the limitations of currently available radio chips. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit physical layer properties of 802.15.4 signals to better address CTI. We present CrossZig, a cross-layer solution that takes advantage of physical layer information and processing to improve low-power communication under CTI. To this end, CrossZig utilizes physical layer information to detect presence of CTI in a corrupted packet and to apply an adaptive packet recovery which incorporates a novel cross-layer based packet merging and an adaptive FEC coding. We implement a prototype of CrossZig for the low-power IEEE 802.15.4 in a software-defined radio platform. We show the adaptability and the performance gain of CrossZig through experimental evaluation considering both micro-benchmarking and system performance under various interference patterns. Our results demonstrate that CrossZig can achieve a high accuracy in error localization (94.3% accuracy) and interference type identification (less than 5% error rate for SINR ranges below 3 dB). Moreover, our system shows consistent performance improvements under interference from various interfering technologies.


Introduction: Knowledge and acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine among health-care professionals (HCPs) are an important aspect in the success of the vaccination drive in India, as HCPs are the first group to receive the vaccine. Various factors affecting the attitude of getting COVID-19 vaccine and to better address those factors will help in widespread acceptance among the general public. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study which was conducted among HCPs by circulating Google form. The form was distributed among the medical students and physicians through social networking sites such as E-mail and WhatsApp. The questionnaire consisted of 18 questions focusing on the assessment of knowledge and acceptance about COVID-19 vaccine. It was a self-administered and pilot-validated questionnaire. Results: Out of total participants, 473 (78%) were willing to take vaccination and were in the opinion that getting vaccination is a good idea. Eighty-eight percent of the participants were worried about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. Fifty-five percent of the participants were anxious regarding getting vaccine and its efficacy. Conclusion: Knowledge and acceptance were moderate, but overall attitude of getting vaccination was positive. Majority of the HCPs are still anxious about the long-term efficacy; therefore, appropriate steps need to be taken to address the factors contributing to the low acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine.


ABSTRACTKandy is the second largest city in Sri Lanka and a major tourist destination. It is a fast growing city with continuous construction of buildings, roads and historical places. More than 100 samples of fine particulate matter (PM) were collected using a GENT stacked filter sampler from a fixed site at the regional sampling station of Department of Meteorology situated in Katugastota, Kandy over the period of 2012 to 2014. Black carbon (BC) in these filters were determined by reflectance measurements while their elemental compositions were determined using the X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Analysis of the elemental data suggests that the PM in Kandy originates largely from re-suspended soil and anthropogenic sources. The fine particulate matter data including BC and major elements (Na, Mg, Al, Si, Cl, Fe, Zn, Ni, Cu, V, S, Br, Pb, Cr, K, Ca and Ti) was analyzed using EPA-PMF version 5.0 (Positive Matrix Factorization) to explore the possible sources of the PM at the study site. Five factors were found and identified as soil, aged sea salt, vehicular emissions, biomass burning, and industrial sources.


The mechanism for ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of lactide catalyzed by Zn(C6F5)2–organic superbase Lewis pairs was investigated in the present work. Common organic superbases 4-dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP), 1,3-bis(2,4,6-trimethylphenyl)imidazol-2-ylidene (MesNHC), 1,8-diazabicyclo[5,4,0]undec-7-ene (DBU), and 7-methyl-1,5,7-triazabicyclo[4.4.0]decane-5-ene (MTBD) were selected as the Lewis bases to work cooperatively with Zn(C6F5)2. It was demonstrated that less sterically bulky DMAP could coordinate with the zinc atom and form classical Lewis acid–base adducts (CLA), whereas frustrated Lewis pairs (FLP) were obtained when bulky MTBD and DBU were used. Investigation into the polymerization behavior of lactide showed that the frustrated Lewis pair Zn(C6F5)2/MTBD exhibited much higher activity in the polymerization of lactide and much lower temperature dependence compared with the Lewis adduct Zn(C6F5)2/DMAP. Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between polymerization activity and the degree of "frustration". The initiation reaction was further explored by in situ NMR at variable temperature. The interactions between Zn(C6F5)2 and the organic base in both CLA and FLP would be impaired at high temperature, and lactide was activated electronically by coordination to the Lewis acid Zn(C6F5)2. In addition, NMR and MALDI-TOF analyses showed that the active species are zwitterionic species, in which each chain end bears one amine and one Zn(C6F5)2 moiety, respectively, and Zn(C6F5)2 associated with the amine closely. Based on these results, a possible mechanism involving bifunctional activation was proposed. Further kinetic studies showed that increasing the reaction temperature and solvent polarity can significantly enhance the chain initiation rate. These experimental results also demonstrated that the polymerization was initiated through the proposed mechanism.


For multimedia data message transmission with QoS requirement, reservation of capacity in advance is required. The labeling method is one of the most well-known heuristic methods for achieving the maximum capacity from a source node to a destination one provided in wired networks with limited link capacity. Here, capacity increasing routes are detected one-by-one and the method avoids the local-maximum problem by systematic reduction of already reserved link capacity. Different from in wired networks, capacity in each link is not independent of the others in wireless networks due to exposed-nodes and hidden-nodes caused by intrinsical broadcast property in wireless communications. This paper proposes an extended labeling method for wireless multihop networks. Here, capacity limitation is assigned not to wireless links but to wireless nodes though capacity is reserved in wireless links and extended conditions for capacity increasing routes in wireless multihop networks are induced. Same as the original labeling method, the extended method is applied in distributed manner, i.e., available and reserved capacity is managed in each wireless node without centralized server node. Brief simulation experiments show that without explicit additional time overhead, the method achieves higher capacity than the conventional one-route transmission method and the naive multiple-route transmission method.


Drumhead Quarry, situated a few kilometres north-east of Denny in the Central Belt of Scotland,
is one of several quarries in the Falkirk area which exploited the Cowie Rock, a pale-coloured
sandstone in the Upper Limestone Formation (Clackmannan Group). The quarry supplied
building stone from the very early 18th century, working fairly consistently until the late 19th
century.
Historical evidence indicates that the stone was primarily used locally in the Falkirk and Stirling
areas, until the opening of the Union Canal in 1822 which then allowed the sandstone to be
shipped to Glasgow, Linlithgow and Edinburgh, mainly for use as paving stone. Drumhead
sandstone was the first ever shipment along the Union Canal in 1822, landing in Edinburgh. The
quarry was worked under several different operators throughout the 19th century and often shared
the same operator as Thorneydyke Quarry (located c. 600m to the north) in the latter half of the
1800s. It was not uncommon for the quarry to be operated by local builders and architects, who
were most likely to use the stone they were extracting from their own quarry as the main source
of building material for their designed and built structures.
Drumhead Quarry exposes thick-bedded sandstone with some bedding lamination and wide joint
spacing, well-suited to extracting large blocks. The possibility that a unit of limestone - the
Calmy Limestone - encroaches near to the quarry's east and north boundaries (and might limit
the prospects for future expansion) has been recently tested by drilling boreholes. Limestone was
not encountered in the drilling exercise, but units of mudstone and shale interbedded with
sandstone to the east of the quarry indicate a change in the depositional environment of the
sedimentary rocks in this area, and suggest the limestone might be nearby. A borehole to the
north of the quarry encountered only sandstone in the bedrock, hence extending the quarry in this
direction would appear to offer the best prospect of encountering good reserves of sandstone.
Samples of Drumhead sandstone are quartz-rich, well compacted, and have a strong natural
mineral cement resulting in a strongly cohesive (difficult to disaggregate) stone. The stone is
therefore of good quality and likely to be durable. It has the potential to be a versatile building
stone, suited to a range of uses including rubble walling, high quality ashlar and carving. There
are two main varieties of the sandstone: a buff variety with faint-to-strong bedding lamination,
and an off-white, freestone (uniform) variety. All of these factors will enhance the commercial
viability of the stone.
The two varieties of Drumhead stone should provide a good substitute for a number of
sandstones that were formerly sourced and used widely in the Central Belt, but are now
unavailable. Sandstone of this type is in particular demand in the Stirling, Glasgow and
Linlithgow areas.


The E3 ubiquitin ligase Nedd4 contributes to both dendritic and axonal branching. Neurons form two kinds of processes—axons, the signal-sending processes, and dendrites, the signal-receiving processes. Branching of each of these types of neurite extensions is critical for the proper development of neuronal circuits. Two groups report that the E3 ubiquitin ligase Nedd4 contributes to both dendritic (Kawabe et al.) and axonal (Drinjakovic et al.) branching. Kawabe et al. examined the function of Nedd4-1 in mice, whereas Drinjakovic et al. investigated its function in Xenopus. In mice, Nedd4-1 was found to ubiquitylate the guanosine triphosphatase Rap1 to inhibit its activity and thereby promote dendritic arborization. In Xenopus, Nedd4 targeted the lipid and protein phosphatase PTEN to promote axonal branching. Knockout mice exhibited embryonic lethality; therefore, to examine Nedd4-1 in vivo, Kawabe et al. generated conditional knockout mice in cerebral and hippocampal glutamatergic neurons. The cerebrum was smaller than that of control mice, and dendritic branching of pyramidal cells of the hippocampus was also reduced. To understand the mechanism by which Nedd4-1 affected dendritic branching, Kawabe et al. examined the properties of cortical neurons cultured from wild-type or Nedd4-1–knockout embryos. Neurons lacking Nedd4-1 were smaller and exhibited decreased dendrite size and complexity. The Nedd4-1–deficient neurons exhibited smaller evoked excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC) amplitudes and reduced frequency of miniature EPSCs (mEPSCs) without any change in mEPSC amplitude and without any reduction in the density of glutamate receptors, consistent with a reduction in the number of synapses. Staining for markers of synapses confirmed that there were fewer synapses in the Nedd4-1–deficient neuronal cultures. The kinase TNIK, which influences actin dynamics through its interaction with the guanosine triphosphatase Rap1, was identified by affinity chromatography as a protein that interacted with the WW domain of Nedd4-1. TNIK, Nedd4-1, and Rap1 colocalized in neurons and coimmunoprecipitated, which suggests that they form a complex. This interaction promoted the ubiquitylation of Rap2A, which ubiquitin-linkage specific antibodies indicated was the K63-linked mono- or di-ubiquitin involved in regulation, not proteasome-mediated degradation. Overexpression of dominant-negative Rap1 in the Nedd4-1–deficient neurons rescued the synaptic density and dendritogenesis defects, whereas knockdown of TNIK phenocopied the neurite development defect seen with Nedd4-1 deficiency. Thus, in mice, Nedd4-1 appears to ubiquitylate Rap1 to inhibit its activity toward TNIK and thus promote dendritic arborization. Drinjakovic et al. examined the role of the ubiquitin-proteasome system in axonal branching of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Electroporation of a mutated form of ubiquitin that cannot form K48-linked polyubiquitin chains into the embryonic retina did not affect axonal pathfinding but inhibited terminal branching of RGCs upon reaching the tectum. Drinjakovic et al. found that Nedd4 and its substrate PTEN were present in the axons of the RGCs at the appropriate time to influence branching. Furthermore, introduction of a dominant-negative (catalytically inactive) Nedd4 mutant or knockdown of Nedd4 reduced RGCs' axonal branching, and both treatments also increased the abundance of PTEN in the RGCs. Overexpression of PTEN also reduced axonal branching of the RGCs, and knockdown of PTEN rescued the branching defects seen when Nedd4 was knocked down. Netrin-1 is an extracellular factor that affects terminal branching of retinal axons. Application of netrin-1 to cultured retinal ganglion cells decreased the abundance of PTEN and triggered growth cone collapse, both of which were blocked by coapplication of an inhibitor of the proteasome. Thus, in Xenopus retina, Nedd4 appears to mediate ubiquitination of PTEN that triggers its degradation and thus promotes axonal branching. H. Kawabe, A. Neeb, K. Dimova, S. M. Young Jr., M. Takeda, S. Katsurabayashi, M. Mitkovski, O. A. Malakhova, D.-E. Zhang, M. Umikawa, K.-i. Kariya, S. Goebbels, K.-A. Nave, C. Rosenmund, O. Jahn, J. Rhee, N. Brose, Regulation of Rap2A by the ubiquitin ligase Nedd4-1 controls neurite development. Neuron 65, 358–372 (2010). [Online Journal] J. Drinjakovic, H. Jung, D. S. Campbell, L. Strochlic, A. Dwivedy, C. E. Holt, E3 ligase Nedd4 promotes axon branching by downregulating PTEN. Neuron 65, 341–357 (2010). [Online Journal] A. DiAntonio, Nedd4 branches out. Neuron 65, 293–294 (2010). [Online Journal]


The evaluation of the impact of public policies to improve the performance of the small business sector has provoked a great deal of debate and research activity in recent years. The debate can be categorised in two broad ways. First, it can be seen in terms of the actual impact measures and schemes of small business support may have in terms of enhanced growth performance of SMEs. Second, the search for appropriate evaluation methodologies which reflect the range of problems associated with the accurate identification of the true effects of policy support. The much publicised "Six Steps to Heaven" paper by Storey (1998) provided a comprehensive overview of the problems associated with evaluation studies in the realm of the small business sector. Storey argued that the vast majority of assessments of the impact of policy support fall within the category of monitoring rather than true evaluation. The intention in this paper is to undertake an evaluation of Business Links in England adopting a methodology which seeks to avoid the methodological pitfalls articulated by Storey and in so doing achieve the approach. This paper describes the methodology employed in a tracker study of businesses that received advice and consultancy from the Business Link network in 1996. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of Business Link support on productivity compared to a matched comparison group. Using data from the specially constructed Business Link Impact Indicators Database for the period 1994-2000 together with a survey of assisted firms and non-assisted firms, and adopting an econometric approach designed to make allowance for both 'assistance' and 'selection' effects, this study concludes that: · First, we find no evidence that in 1996 BL assistance was being targeted effectively at faster growing firms. · Second, we find some, albeit tentative evidence, that BL assistance in 1996 was having a positive effect on productivity growth. · Third, we identify a positive but statistically insignificant effect of BL assistance on turnover and employment growth. · Fourth, our analysis has highlighted a number of other factors which contribute to productivity, turnover and employment growth. The range of these factors - embracing market conditions, business strategy, the characteristics of the owner-manager and the firm itself - emphasise the complexity of the process of business growth and the consequent difficulties in both modelling and assisting the process.


Real Time Strategy (RTS) games present a challenge for the field of artificial intelligence. The size of the state space often makes machine learning solutions intractable and as a result, developers turn towards hand-tailored solutions such as scripts. In this work, we present the Killer Bee Artificial Intelligence (KBAI) agent which uses a predictive nearest neighbor classifier to make decisions in real time. KBAI has a no-loss record against four hand tailored scripts in the RTS game Spring.


With 6% of Europe's freshwater resources, Switzerland is often considered the 'water tower of Europe'. Over 8 millions residents rely on more than 57'600 farms to provide meat, milk, or eggs, with 1.58 million cattle, 1.58 million swine or 9.39 million poultry. Livestock farming produce the manure, which is a mixture of urine, faeces and infrastructure washing water. Manure is stockpiled in over 100'000 pits in Switzerland (total capacity of 18 million m3), and then used as fertilizer. When manure enters aquatic environment, such pollution could be responsible of major health risks, contaminating drinkable water sources, or ecological disasters with the death of biota, including fishes. This kind of accident occurs frequently, and authors are in many cases not found by environmental law enforcement. This study aimed at exploring the possibilities of chemical markers to differentiate manures, with the purpose of estimating whether it would be possible to perform source inference in manure pollution cases in a chemical profiling approach. An exploratory market research was first conducted to understand practices of farming chemicals use, including antibiotics and detergents, in order to select potential chemical markers. Manure samples were analysed using ASE-SPE-UPLC-MS/MS (Accelerated Solvent Extraction – Solid Phase Extration – Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography - tandem Mass Spectrometry) to detect 17 selected chemical markers with Multiple Reaction Monitoring mode: 11 antibiotics (benzylpenicillin, cloxacillin, colistin, danofloxacin, enrofloxacin, neomycin, sufadoxin, sulfaguanidin, sulfamethoxazol, tetracycline and trimetroprim), 1 vermifuge (flubadenzol), 2 local anesthetics (lidocaine and procain), 1 detergent (dodecylbenzenesulfonic acid) and 2 manure/faecal chemical markers (skatole and indole). Analysis in scan mode, extraction of several m/z and statistical testing (PCA and hierarchical cluster analysis) permitted to differentiate manure from cattle and pig farms, and some markers may also be useful to identify a farm among others. Finally, analysis of few specimens collected during pollution events showed that some chemical markers can be found in the water. The results of this study suggest that the applied methodology could allow to identify some types of pollution (including faecal pollution such as manure or wastewater treatment plant malfunctioning), and may help to achieve source inference in environmental fraud cases.


Tort scholars have long been obsessed with the dichotomy between strict liability and liability based on fault or wrongdoing. We argue that this is a false dichotomy. Torts such as battery, libel, negligence, and nuisance are wrongs, yet all are "strictly" defined in the sense of setting objective and thus quite demanding standards of conduct. We explain this basic insight under the heading of "the strict liability in fault." We then turn to the special case of liability for abnormally dangerous activities, which at times really does involve liability without wrongdoing. Through an examination of this odd corner of tort law, we isolate "the fault in strict liability" — that is, the fault line between the wrongs-based form of strict liability that is frequently an aspect of tort liability and the wrongs-free form of strict liability that is found only within the very narrow domain of liability for abnormally dangerous activities. We conclude by defending these two features of the common law of tort: the strictness of the terms on which it defines wrongdoing and its begrudging willingness to recognize, in one special kind of case, liability without wrongdoing.


Music emotion plays an important role in music retrieval, mood detection and other music-related applications. Many issues for music emotion recognition have been addressed by different disciplines such as physiology, psychology, cognitive science and musicology. We present a support vector regression (SVR) based music emotion recognition system. The recognition process consists of three steps: (i) seven distinct features are ex- tracted from music; (ii) those features are mapped into eleven emotion categories on Thayer's two-dimensional emotion model; (iii) two regression functions are trained using SVR and then arousal and valence values are pre- dicted. We have tested our SVR-based emotion classifier in both Cartesian and polar coordinate system empirically. The result indicates the SVR classifier in the polar repre- sentation produces satisfactory result which reaches 94.55% accuracy superior to the SVR (in Cartesian) and other machine learning classification algorithms such as


The mixed siliciclastic-carbonate successions of Early Mesozoic age exposed in the Pseudoverrucano tectonic units, along the coast of southern Tuscany (Montebrandoli and Punta delle Rocchette, Early Liassic) and in the Monti dell'Uccellina (Porticciolo di Cala di Forno and Salto del Cervo, Late Triassic) are characterized by fossil
assemblages suggesting a close relationship with the coeval, mainly carbonate successions of the "Tuscan Series" while the depositional features are completely different. The composition of the mixed facies are similar, characterized by: i) recurring fining-upward sequences with well rounded but poorly selected white quartz-conglomerates,
ii) coarse quartz sand grading to lagoonal lime-muds, or iii) thin intercalations or isolated quartz pebbles enclosed together with shell debris, within open marine although shallow carbonates. The depositional environments correspond to alluvial-fan complexes on narrow coastal plains merging with sandy beaches and lagoonal to shallow marine settings where the carbonate micritic deposition
prevailed. This sedimentary style suggests that unsorted quartz debris was transported from an adjacent uplifted source area by gravity currents through very narrow coastal plains, and flowing into coastal lagoons or directly into the open sea, mixed coarse, land derived debris with open marine carbonate muds. The peculiar vertical evolution of the Pseudoverrucano facies suggests that the episodic input of siliciclastic materials was connected with storm events most probably triggered by tectonic pulses since no evidences of eustatic or climatic constrain on the sedimentation is apparent. The depositional features and fossil content of the mixed silicicla - stic-carbonate Pseudoverrucano successions argues for a coastal sedimentation on narrow shelves delimited by active, fault-bounded highs, representing the landward extension of the epicontinental/ pericontinental pelagic basins that from late Triassic in a regime of continental rifting, developed on the east-facing shelf of central Pangea.


Statistical evidence is the subject of a heated and ongoing debate. Courts and legal scholars often view statistical evidence with suspicion, treating it as inadmissible even when it is probabilistically equivalent to individualized evidence. But attempts to vindicate the suspicion or to dismantle it altogether have been largely unsuccessful. The aim of this Article is to provide a comprehensive answer to the statistical evidence debate. The Article offers a novel explanation for the suspicion toward statistical evidence, pointing to the epistemic inferiority of statistical evidence due to its lack of "Sensitivity" — namely, the requirement that a belief be counterfactually sensitive to the truth as a necessary condition of "Knowledge." After exposing the epistemic distinctions between statistical and individualized evidence, the Article turns to examining their implications for the legal arena. It claims that while the epistemic story provides an explanation for the suspicion toward statistical evidence, it does not provide a justification for this suspicion, for Sensitivity (like epistemology more generally) is not significant in the legal arena. Instead, this Article proposes an incentive-based vindication of the reluctance to use statistical evidence in court and points to the interesting interaction between the epistemic and the incentive-based approaches. After laying down the theoretical foundation, this Article demonstrates its descriptive potential. It demonstrates the proposed theory's capacity to explain the prevailing legal doctrine and the rules governing the admissibility and sufficiency of statistical evidence across various categories, including DNA evidence and propensity-for-crime evidence as well as incriminating versus exonerating statistical evidence. On the prescriptive front, the Article provides criteria for legal reform and suggests that the admissibility of statistical evidence should be contingent on the type of offense or misconduct alleged against the defendant.


This article discusses the shifting representations of control over and via ICTs on the cover of TIME magazine (1950‒2017). We focus on the subject positions and forms of agency the magazine ascribes to different social actors and on the solutions advanced for remaining in control of technological change. Informed by discourse analysis methodology, our analysis of the corpus ( N = 81 covers) identifies four central themes: the configuration of the relationship between humanity and technology; the construction of youth as both potentially powerful and vulnerable "others"; the identification of technocapitalists and creative visionaries as the ultimately powerful drivers of innovation and progress; and the disruptive effects of virtuality. Through these discourses, the magazine legitimizes an entrepreneurial approach to ICTs as the means to retain agency against the "inevitable" technological development, while also positioning the technocapitalist elite as the drivers of our common future.


This paper reports the preliminary findings of a study examining the role of connection in right decisionmaking of managers operating in Australia. The key aims of the study are to identify the influence of connectedness in the ethical outcomes of right decision-making, to identify barriers to right decision-making and lastly, to examine the nature of any relationship/s between connectedness and unbounded rationality in right decision-making. The study compares and contrasts eight case studies of middle and senior managers drawn from information technology, service and manufacturing sectors. The primary data for the study are indepth interviews. The findings suggest that connection has a significant influence on the ethical decisionmaking of participating Australian managers—in that a frame of reference based on a connection with self is likely to be a source of inspiration, guidance, and solace to managers' decision-making. The study further suggests that when managers make decisions within such a transcendent frame of reference, their ethical decision-making has potential for improvement. Disciplines Business | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication Details Fernando, M. & Burrows, S. (2005). Unbounded rationality: the role of connectedness in right decisionmaking. ANZAM 2005 Conference, Australia New Zealand Academy of Management. Canberra: Australia New Zealand Academy of Management. This conference paper is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/commpapers/158 Unbounded Rationality: The Role of Connectedness in Right Decision-making


Ensuing from the deteriorating conditions of road networks, traffic forecasting techniques with mathematical and computer-theory methods have been employed to address the real-time prediction of traffic conditions and their dynamic control, with the optimum use of the current infrastructure. The prediction of traffic conditions, acknowledging multiple regimes, its transitions and driver's behaviour parameters, is a highly desired attribute in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), as it could increase operational performance. The study in question aims to provide a framework to define the reasons that might preserve the conditions of recurrent and non-recurrent congestion occurrence in highways, so as to develop in long term an efficient dynamic traffic prediction model that would mitigate congestion emergence, before being triggered by interactive exogenous parameters, such as weather conditions, traffic composition, incident occurrence, traffic direction and seasonality. Contrary to currently existent prediction models, the challenge of the model to be developed is to capture traffic dynamics and enhance predictability upon multiregime (congestion, near-congestion, free flow) and transitional traffic behaviour, combining exogenous multi-dimensional determinants with real-time or near-real-time data, resulting to dynamic prediction models for highway traffic. Apart from the dynamic aspect, the transferability issue will be attempted to be addressed. Furthermore, active traffic management (ATM) highway management schemes will be formed in microscopic scale, with principal goal to control traffic by optimising the operation of an emergency lane as additional traffic lane.


This was prepared as a chapter for a forthcoming book on the 50th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1965 and as an original article for the IMMIGRATION & NATIONALITY REVIEW.In the celebratory wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress enacted the Immigration Act of 1965. Consistent with the emerging popularity of the extension of civil rights protections to racial minorities in the United States, the 1965 Act eliminated the discriminatory national origins quotas system from the U.S. immigration laws, which Congress had passed in 1924 when xenophobic sentiment was at one of its periodic highpoints in American history. In the 1965 Act, however, Congress went considerably further than simply removing the discriminatory quotas from the immigration laws. Affirmatively acting to eliminate various forms of bias that had been part and parcel of the American immigration laws for generations, Congress flatly prohibited a variety of considerations from influencing the U.S. government's decisions to issue immigrant visas: "No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence . . . ." This firm admonition imposes on the U.S. government the equivalent of what might be characterized as a color-blindness-plus requirement in the evaluation of immigrant visa applications, a fundamental transformation of the nation's previous approach to immigration admissions. Almost reflexively characterizing the law as a welcome by-product of the civil rights movement that fueled passage of a flurry of civil rights laws, most observers have in unqualified terms praised the 1965 Act as a progressive, if not revolutionary, measure. As Professor Bill Hing glowingly put it, the Immigration Act of 1965 reformed the American immigration laws in the spirit of the "new global egalitarianism." The elimination of the discriminatory quotas system benefited large numbers of prospective immigrants from Asia, who since the late nineteenth century had been denied lawful admission into the United States through the operation of the quotas system combined with an insidious and intricate web of "Chinese exclusion laws," born out of widespread racial animosity directed toward the Chinese. Over time, Congress had expanded the various exclusions to restrict immigration not only from China but from all of Asia, thus making them most appropriately termed "Asian exclusion laws."As racial sensibilities slowly but surely changed over the course of the twentieth century, the discriminatory quotas system increasingly became difficult to defend both at home and abroad. Criticism, including from prominent political leaders such as President Harry Truman and Senator (and later President) John F. Kennedy, grew over time as it became more difficult to square the systematic national origin quotas system with the burgeoning American ideal of non-discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. The blatant discrimination in the immigration laws became a foreign policy embarrassment that seriously handicapped the U.S. government in its ongoing Cold War efforts to persuade hearts and minds the world over of the righteousness of the American cause. Despite the significant anti-discriminatory improvements to the American immigration laws, the Immigration Act of 1965 also made less well-known changes to the law that are unworthy of celebration. They in fact deserve outright condemnation by precisely the same civil rights advocates who praise the law. Intentionally discriminatory at their core, the changes in fact are wholly inconsistent with the extension of civil rights to racial minorities in the United States and operate to deprive a discrete group of noncitizens of color – Latina/o immigrants – to equal treatment under the law. Specifically, the 1965 Act added a new, although considerably more sophisticated – and less visible – form of racial discrimination than the national origins quotas system, to the modern American immigration laws. Rather than unintentional, or reluctant, racial discrimination, Congress admitted its discriminatory goals and enthusiastically backed those reforms with an express hope of significantly restricting the number of Latina/o immigrants coming to the United States. Indeed, Congress collectively expressed the fear that, absent bold new restrictive steps in the Immigration Act of 1965, Latina/o immigrants might well overrun, and possibly even destroy, American society.Seeking to fill a serious gap in the scholarly literature, this chapter examines what might accurately be described as the anti-Latina/o underside of the Immigration Act of 1965. In doing so, it places into question the heretofore largely unchallenged myth that the 1965 Act represents one of the sterling achievements of the much-heralded civil rights movement, marking a positive reform of U.S. immigration law by bringing racial neutrality, objectivity, and equality to American immigrant admissions. The truth of the matter is that, despite its decidedly pro-civil rights reputation, the Immigration Act of 1965 represents one of the first major changes to the immigration laws in American history that demonstrates an unmistakable intent to cap immigration from Mexico, as well as all of Latin America, to the United States. In so doing, the law established a sturdy foundation from which the modern American immigration enforcement state has evolved, with its glaringly disparate racial impacts on Latina/os that is achieved through seemingly objective, facially neutral (i.e., color blind), and ostensibly fair means. Specifically, the Immigration Act of 1965 set the stage for the creation and implementation of a virtually unbroken series of restrictive U.S. immigration laws and enforcement measures directed primarily at Latina/os that remained in place for the last third of the twentieth century. With broad public support, those measures have been expanded dramatically in the early years of the new millennium and have resulted in record numbers of removals of immigrants from the United States – now running in the neighborhood of 400,000 a year, an increase of more than ten-fold in the last twenty years. Not coincidentally in light of the disparate focus and impacts of the modern removal machinery, the new enforcement measures year after year have yielded record numbers of removals of Latina/os. In the five decades since passage of the 1965 legislation, U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have slowly but surely built on the anti-Latina/o roots of the law. As a result, immigration enforcement has progressively focused – some would contend almost exclusively – on limiting migration from Mexico to the United States. The transformation of immigration law has been so complete that many Americans today firmly believe that curbing Mexican immigration is what U.S. immigration law and border enforcement should be all about. Some informed observers, especially critics of the status quo, would lament that that in fact is the case today. The chapter explains how the implementation of the Immigration Act of 1965 contributed to the subsequent growth of a series of interlocking laws and enforcement programs primarily targeting Latina/os, which, at the dawn of the new millennium, dominated modern American immigration law and enforcement. One might claim that, over the last 50 years, the United States replaced the Chinese exclusion laws of the 1800s with something akin to the Mexican exclusion laws of the twenty-first century. By re-allocating opportunities for lawful immigration from Latin America to Asia – and diminishing legal discrimination in admissions against Asian immigrants while expanding discrimination against Latina/os, the Immigration Act of 1965 transformed the relative mix of Asian and Latina/o immigrants legally coming to the United States. The Act, on the one hand, contributed to a surge in legal immigration from Asia, which historically had been stunted by discriminatory laws as well as the long travel distances from Asia to the United States. On the other hand, by placing an artificial ceiling on legal migration from Mexico wholly disconnected from the great (and increasingly unsatisfied) demand for immigration, the legislation simultaneously spurred the growth of a large – and consistently expanding – population of Mexican immigrants unauthorized by the U.S. immigration laws from being in, and subject to removal from, the country. These two dominant trends in immigration to the United States in turn contributed to noticeable changes in the racial demographics of American society in the post-1965 period, the public's view of immigration and the need for enforcement, and ultimately the overall direction of U.S. immigration law and its enforcement. Changes to the racial composition of the overall population helped to provoke the public's sporadic outbursts of venom directed at immigrants and frequent demands for reform, as well as heightened enforcement, of the U.S. immigration laws. The new racial demographics of modern immigration also fueled the demands for a variety of changes to the immigration laws that would transform – some observers might contend that the conscious intent was to "whiten" – the racial demographics of the flow of immigrants to the United States. One well-known (and rather blatant) example of such efforts is the "diversity" visa program that Congress added to the immigration laws in 1990, which at its core was designed to facilitate greater migration to the United States from Europe. In the end, those legal maneuvers in combination greatly limited legal immigration from Mexico to the United States.


BIM has recently gained ground in developed countries. However, the use of BIM in developing countries including Cameroon is not well-known. In this study, BIM implementation in Cameroon is explored. The research methods used are a pilot study, electronic email surveys and in-depth phone interviews. Altogether, 179 professionals having at least a Master's Degree in Civil Engineering from the National Advanced School of Engineering Yaounde I-Cameroon, a leading engineering institution in Francophone Africa, were sampled. Forty six provided feedback yielding a response rate of 25.7%. It emerged that some BIM software are already being used in Cameroon. However, major barriers hindering BIM uptake are high license fee and lack of huge projects that can pay off the cost of investment in BIM. Perhaps, partly because the respondents were highly skilled, it emerged that the lack of expertise was/is not a major problem to use BIM in projects. Although this study is limited to Cameroon, many recommendations could be relevant to other African countries.


Building information modeling offers a huge potential for increasing the productivity and quality of construction planning processes. Despite its promising concept, this approach has not found widespread use. One of the reasons is the insufficient coupling of the structural models with the general building model. Instead, structural engineers usually set up a structural model that is independent from the building model and consists of mechanical models of reduced dimension. An automatic model generation, which would be valuable in case of model revisions is therefore not possible. This can be overcome by a volumetric formulation of the problem. A recent approach employed the p-version of the finite element method to this problem. This method, in conjunction with a volumetric formulation is suited to simulate the structural behaviour of both "thick" solid bodies and thin-walled structures. However, there remains a notable discretization error in the numerical models. This paper therefore proposes a new approach for overcoming this situation. It sugggests the combination of the Isogeometric analysis together with the volumetric models in order to integrate the structural design into the digital, building model-centered planning process and reduce the discretization error. The concept of the isogeometric analysis consists, roughly, in the application of NURBS functions to represent the geometry and the shape functions of the elements. These functions possess some beneficial properties regarding numerical simulation. Their use, however, leads to some intricacies related to the setup of the stiffness matrix. This paper describes some of these properties.


Tony DeRose is currently a Senior Scientist and lead of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. He received a BS in Physics in from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1986 to 1995 Dr. DeRose was a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In 1998, he was a major contributor to the Oscar (c) winning short film "Geri's game", in 1999 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and in 2006 he received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award (c) for his work on surface representations. In addition to his research interests, Tony is also involved in a number of initiatives to help make math, science, and engineering education more inspiring and relevant for middle and high school students. One such initiative is the Young Makers Program (youngmakers.org) that supports youth in building ambitious hands-on projects of their own choosing.


During the past forty years, the simultaneous, symbiotic growth of financial innovation, disintermediation and deregulation has created an environment with extremely complex, opaque investment instruments. That system has now collapsed. At the very center of the crisis are a small group of shadowy but very powerful private corporations, the so-called "credit rating organizations" (CROs) such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's. Their very purpose was predict risks like those that have now caused systemic collapse. There is currently no significant regulatory oversight of CROs, notwithstanding the literally de jure regulatory power they possess and the systemic repercussions of credit ratings. There also happens to be surprisingly little theoretical justification for their very existence or for the hope that they would produce valuable and otherwise unavailable information. Even if there were such a basis, it so happens that an extensive empirical literature studies the CROs, and it has failed to find evidence of such value sufficient to justify the CROs' significant costs.But the problem inherent in the nature of informational intermediation is basically one of industrial organization, and, as we will explain at length, it seems very thorny. No policy tool currently in force and none of those with any serious political feasibility would come close to dealing with it, and those more abstract proposals that might are both fairly politically implausible and raise serious problems of cost and uncertainty. In short, our purpose is to argue that capital markets currently contain a much more serious institutional flaw than has been recognized.


 Abstract — In the field of machine learning, the ensemble has been employed as a common methodology to improve the performance upon multiple base classifiers. However, the true predictions are often canceled out by the false ones during consensus due to a phenomenon called "curse of correlation" which is represented as the strong interferences among the predictions produced by the base classifiers. In addition, the existing practices are still not able to effectively mitigate the problem of imbalanced classification. Based on the analysis on our experiment results, we conclude that the two problems are caused by some inherent deficiencies in the approach of consensus. Therefore, we create an enhanced ensemble algorithm which adopts a designed rank-based chain-mode consensus to overcome the two problems. In order to evaluate the proposed ensemble algorithm, we employ a well-known benchmark data set NSL-KDD (the improved version of dataset KDDCup99 produced by University of New Brunswick) to make comparisons between the proposed and 8 common ensemble algorithms. Particularly, each compared ensemble classifier uses the same 22 base classifiers, so that the differences in terms of the improvements toward the accuracy and reliability upon the base classifiers can be truly revealed. As a result, the proposed rank-based chain-mode consensus is proved to be a more effective ensemble solution than the traditional consensus approach, which outperforms the 8 ensemble algorithms by 20% on almost all compared metrices which include accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score and area under receiver operating characteristic curve.


Since the early 1990s, the Japanese economy has been trapped in a long-term recession signified by zerobound interest rate, little or no inflation, and imperceptible growth. The most visible outcome is, strangely enough, a significant drop in foreign direct investment. One would have thought intuitively that if they cannot spend money internally, at least they should be able to enhance foreign direct investment in search of better interest rates. It is not happening yet. This is bound to have some effect on Japanese subsidiaries. In terms of marketing, survival should mean innovation in products and services, integration with local economies, and more vigorous search for exports. In terms of management, it may mean enhanced quality, more supply chains, more integration and more adaptive globalisation. By using an old Japanese subsidiary in London and re-examining the literature, we hope to provide a more balanced view of the Japanese subsidiaries abroad. The company we have studied is one of the oldest cases of Japanese direct investment anywhere in the world. Its emergence as a Greenfield investment and survival is quite interesting, and compares well to the flood of subsidiaries and joint stock companies that came to life during the pre-crisis optimism. With the help of an Ramp;D-oriented sister-company in Sweden, and a vigorous pursuit of quality, the old entity in Old Woking is hobbling on into the 21st century faced with many challenges.


Background: Red blood cells (RBCs) undergo biochemical and morphologic alterations during storage that are known as the storage lesions causing decreased RBC quality and are correlated with transfusion reactions in certain groups especially in infants and critically ill patients. Microvesicles (MVs) as one of storage lesions may be derived from various cell types and have key roles in several biological processes. The aim of the study was to evaluate various storage quality measures in RBC concentrates during storage under blood bank condition. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, twenty leuko-depleted packed RBCs bags from healthy donors were prepared and stored at 4°C for up to 42 days. Samples were withdrawn at seven different times and evaluated for various hematological, biochemical, and hemolysis measures. In addition, red blood cell microvesicles (RBC-MVs) were separated and characterized based on the expression of Glycophorin A (Gly.A) antigen. Results: The assessment of RBCs during cold storage showed significant increase in hemolysis rate, hematocrit (Hct), free hemoglobin, plasma potassium, and plasma lactate (p<0.0001), while a significant decrease in plasma sodium and glucose (p<0.0001) was observed. Significant increase was also identified in the RBC osmotic fragility (p<0.001). During the storage of RBCs in SalineAdenineGlucoseMannitol (SAGM), the MVs count increased significantly. The majority of MVs had positive staining for Gly.A (74%) and it correlated with the changes in hemolysis rate (r= 0.77; p<0.001). Conclusion: Storage of RBC was associated with important changes which influence biochemical parameters, hemolysis, and microvesiculation process that generally affected the product quality and may contribute to the negative post-transfusion outcome.


Issues relating to land are specifically referred to in five of the United Nations' (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat's Global Land Tools Network views access to land and tenure security as key to achieving sustainable, inclusive and efficient cities. The African continent is growing in importance, with climate change and population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, and identifies recent advances in geo-spatial technology relevant to land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It discusses historical legacies of colonialism that affect the culture of its land administration institutions, through three levels of governance: international/regional, national and sub-national. Short narratives on land law are discussed for four Anglophone former British colonies of SSA. A wide range of sources are drawn upon: academic research across disciplines, and official publications of various actors, including land professions (particularly surveyors, lawyers and planners), government and wider society. The findings are that African countries have carried forward colonial land governance structures into the post-independence political settlement, and that a gulf exists between the institutions, language and cultures of land governance, and the mass of its peoples struggling with basic issues of survival. This gulf may be addressed by recent approaches to land administration and technological advances in geo-spatial technology, and by new knowledge networks and interactions.


We investigate escape processes from metastable states that are driven by non-Gaussian noise. Using a path integral approach, we define a weak-noise scaling limit that identifies optimal escape paths as minima of a stochastic action, while retaining the infinite hierarchy of noise cumulants. This enables us to investigate the effect of different noise amplitude distributions. We find generically a reduced effective potential barrier but also fundamental differences, particularly for the limit when the non-Gaussian noise pulses are relatively slow. Here we identify a class of amplitude distributions that can induce a single-jump escape from the potential well. Our results highlight that higher-order noise cumulants crucially influence escape behaviour even in the weak-noise limit.


This document describes an extension to Generalized MPLS (Multi-
Protocol Label Switching) signaling to support communication of alarm
information. GMPLS signaling already supports the control of alarm
reporting, but not the communication of alarm information. This
document presents both a functional description and GMPLS-RSVP
specifics of such an extension. This document also proposes
modification of the RSVP ERROR_SPEC object. This document updates RFC
3473, "Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) Signaling
Resource ReserVation Protocol-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE)
Extensions", through the addition of new, optional protocol elements.
It does not change, and is fully backward compatible with, the
procedures specified in RFC 3473. [STANDARDS-TRACK]


In this paper, we present a new Photothermal Deflection Technique (PTD) to determine thermal properties of bulk doped or undoped semiconductor such as GaAs, GaSb, InAs, etc. The method proposed here consists in covering the sample with a thin graphite layer in order to increase the photothermal signal and to ovoid any reflection on the sample surface. This method deals with the analysis of the logarithm of amplitude and phase variation of the photothermal signal versus square root modulation frequency where the sample placed in air is heated by a modulated light beam coming from a halogen lamp. So the best coincidence between experimental curves and corresponding theoretical ones gives simultaneously the best values of thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity of the sample. These obtained values are in good agreement with those found in literature. The advantage of applying this method in this way lies in its simplicity and its sensibility to both thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity.


ABSTRACT Gold and silver mining activities in the Central City District, Colorado, caused severe disruption of the landscape. Central City is typical of mountain mining towns with clearly defined periods of discovery and settlement, bonanza, investment, development, and, finally, decline. Arroyos and gullies developed on many valley floors as responses to increases in channel tractive force from 1 dyne before settlement to 8 dynes during the mining period. The spatial distribution of energy and force has been substantially altered by human activities. Threshold values of erosive force were surpassed in response to changes in general basin vegetation cover, valley floor vegetation, channel slope, width, and roughness. Landscape stability, which depends on the relationship of the distribution of energy to the material landscape, has been reestablished in some basins in the Central City area. In other cases, several decades may be required before a balance between force and resistance is reached.


Depression and anxiety are the two most common forms of mental illness that affect people in the U.S. Great strides have been made over the years in improving the mental health of persons with these and other forms of mental illness. Although newer medications such as SSRls can greatly enhance one's quality of life, there are lifestyle behaviors such as exercise and meaningful engagement in activities that have also purported similar positive outcomes. A challenge for health care providers is how to motivate mental health patients to change their behaviors, especially considering the apathy and passivity, typically associated with the illness, may have affected one's ability to initiate such activities. A novel approach to encourage physical activity could be the use of active video games (AVGs) such as the Xbox Kinect. The advantages of applying video game technology are that it allows active participation on an inpatient unit, and allows portability once a patient is discharged to the community. In addition; if the movement were also associated with a meaningful activity that provides intrinsic satisfaction, then there would be a greater motivation to continue the behavior beyond the institutional setting. This paper is a summary of related research to the use of active video games in the treatment of people with depression and anxiety. Suggestions for the future application of active video games are also provided. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis Department Health Sciences First Advisor David Thomas


This paper presents an overview of the advancement in our knowledge of California's earthquake history since ~ 1800, and especially during the last 30 years. We first review the basic statewide research on earthquake occurrences that was published from 1928 through 2002, to show how the current catalogs and their levels of completeness have evolved with time. Then we review some of the significant new results in specific regions of California, and some of what remains to be done. Since 1850, 167 potentially damaging earthquakes of M ~ 6 or larger have been identified in California and its border regions, indicating an average rate of 1.1 such events per year. Table I lists the earthquakes of M ~ 6 to 6.5 that were also destructive since 1812 in California and its border regions, indicating an average rate of one such event every ~ 5 years. Many of these occurred before 1932 when epicenters and magnitudes started to be determined routinely using seismographs in California. The number of these early earthquakes is probably incomplete in sparsely populated remote parts of California before ~ 1870. For example, 6 of the 7 pre-1873 events in table I are of M ≥ 7, suggesting that other earthquakes of M 6.5 to 6.9 occurred but were not properly identified, or were not destructive. The epicenters and magnitudes (M) of the pre-instrumental earthquakes were determined from isoseismal maps that were based on the Modified Mercalli Intensity of shaking (MMI) at the communities that reported feeling the earthquakes. The epicenters were estimated to be in the regions of most intense shaking, and values of M were estimated from the extent of the areas shaken at various MMI levels. MMI VII or greater shaking is the threshold of damage to weak buildings. Certain areas in the regions of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Eureka were each shaken repeatedly at MMI VII or greater at least six times since ~ 1812, as depicted by Toppozada and Branum (2002, fig. 19).


Antibiotic resistance is an increasing threat to human health. In the case of Aspergillus fumigatus, which is both an environmental saprobe and an opportunistic human fungal pathogen, resistance is suggested to arise from fungicide use in agriculture, as the azoles used for plant protection are almost identical to the frontline antifungals used clinically. However, limiting azole fungicide use on crop fields to preserve their activity for clinical use could threaten the global food supply via a reduction in yield. In this study we clarify the link between fungicide use on crop fields and resistance in a prototypical human pathogen through systematic soil sampling on farms in Germany and surveying fields before and after azole application. We observe a reduction in the abundance of A. fumigatus on fields following azole treatment - a finding that was not observed on an organic control field not applying azoles. However, the overall resistance frequency among agricultural isolates is low, with only 1-3% of isolates from 2016-2018 displaying resistance to medical azoles. Isolates collected after the growing season and azole exposure show a subtle, but consistent decrease in susceptibility to medical and agricultural azoles. Whole genome sequencing indicates that, despite the decrease in fungal abundance, azole application does not significantly affect the population structure and genetic diversity of A. fumigatus in fields. Given the low observed resistance rate among agricultural isolates, as well the lack of genomic impact following azole application, we do not find evidence that azole use on crops is significantly driving resistance in A. fumigatus.


This work was presented at the EAGE workshop in Grenoble. Its purpose was to illustrate a stratigraphic modelling approach on a single schematic 2D case and to discuss which sedimentary features are imaged on synthetic seismic sections at different frequencies. The Vercors plateau carbonate sequence, deposited during the Barremian to Early Aptian, was considered. Modelling hypotheses constrained mainly the depositional time length and the geometry of each sequence. In addition, it was assumed that most of the carbonates were produced in situ. The stratigraphic modelling approach and lessons from the simulation results are presented, followed by a discussion of how stratigraphic modelling can be a helpful tool to validate or question the geological model. In order to reproduce the sequence geometries, rates of carbonate production needed to be changed between regressive and transgressive periods. Simulated sea-level changes do not match the geological estimations from field interpretation but they are in agreement with the magnitude of sea-level curve variations, with the exception of the early Barremian sequences. Qualitative and quantitative results from the model simulations help to question or validate the geological model. Stratigraphic modelling provides some insight into the way the carbonate system may have worked. Secondly, for a smaller 2D geological model, several synthetic seismic sections were computed using wavelets of different dominant frequencies. The seismic sections are compared to underline what is imaged mainly at the different frequencies. The presence of two characteristic facies were also analysed. Results show the importance of some thin beds inside thick sequences and that certain sequence boundaries may not be visible at all.


In some countries, summer over-heating is a big problem in a building's energy balance. Ventilated façades are a useful tool when applied to building design, especially in bioclimatic building design. A ventilated façade is a complex, multi-layer structural solution that enables dry installation of the covering elements. The objective of this paper is to quantify of the improvement in the efficiency of the thermal behaviour of buildings when this sort of façade is installed. These improvements are related to the ventilation capacity of the additional structure to the shield mainly for saving cooling power in summer in warm countries. This effect is due to convection produced in the air gap of the façade. This convection depends on the air movement inside the gap and the heat transmission in this motion. These quantities are mathematically modelled by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques using a commercial code: STAR CCM+. The proposed method allows an assessment of the energy potential of the ventilated façade and its capacity for cooling.


After predominantly US and Australian universities recognised and actively embraced globalisation more than a decade ago, the 1999 "Bologna Process" has now led most European universities and governments to actively promote the internationalisation of the university system. By doing so, they have recognised that a Europe of culture and education, which must develop alongside a Europe of trade, industry and currency – if the unification process is to succeed – can only be brought about if future graduates as the top performers of European societies, experience the European concept of "unity in diversity" as a significant component of their education, and thus develop to both sensibly and productively use this diversity as a unique resource. Great productivity potential lies in the exchange between European cultures, and appropriate structures and forms of co-operation are being developed within the framework of Campus Europae to exploit this potential in a university context.


E-learning has come of age in South African higher education but scepticism, caution and an inadequate reward system for innovative teaching methods have resulted in a slow uptake by academics. Within this milieu the author pioneered a course in the ACE School Librarianship programme. The study describes the e-learning experiences of the course participants gleaned from questionnaire responses to questions related to experiences of ICTs, the Internet and online learning, ability to navigate the e-learning environment, utilization of elements of the learning management system and implementation of course ideas in their respective schools and personal lives. The study also provides an opportunity for the author to reflect on her pioneering experiences with e-learning and how she would approach it differently next time. The main lessons learned were that 1) the e-learning environment is not necessarily intuitive and participants need opportunities to digest novel features such as the discussion forum; 2) several of the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning that appear in the research literature are identified in this study; and 3) setting up an e-learning course is best achieved incrementally.


Most power electronics circuits are packaged using two or more power electronics packaging technologies. To optimally select and use several technologies that meet performance requirements at minimum cost requires a strategic partitioning of the circuit. Presented is a structured technique for optimally selecting technologies based on a relative cost diagram. Other factors, such as performance, product volume and modularity are included.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the items (question topics) for a subjective instrument to assess degenerative joint disease (DJD)-associated chronic pain in cats and determine the instrument design most appropriate for use by cat owners.

ANIMALS
100 randomly selected client-owned cats from 6 months to 20 years old.

PROCEDURES
Cats were evaluated to determine degree of radiographic DJD and signs of pain throughout the skeletal system. Two groups were identified: high DJD pain and low DJD pain. Owner-answered questions about activity and signs of pain were compared between the 2 groups to define items relating to chronic DJD pain. Interviews with 45 cat owners were performed to generate items. Fifty-three cat owners who had not been involved in any other part of the study, 19 veterinarians, and 2 statisticians assessed 6 preliminary instrument designs.

RESULTS
22 cats were selected for each group; 19 important items were identified, resulting in 12 potential items for the instrument; and 3 additional items were identified from owner interviews. Owners and veterinarians selected a 5-point descriptive instrument design over 11-point or visual analogue scale formats.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Behaviors relating to activity were substantially different between healthy cats and cats with signs of DJD-associated pain. Fifteen items were identified as being potentially useful, and the preferred instrument design was identified. This information could be used to construct an owner-based questionnaire to assess feline DJD-associated pain. Once validated, such a questionnaire would assist in evaluating potential analgesic treatments for these patients.


For the most part, school discipline law is a matter of local and state level regulation. In North Carolina, as in most states, the state statutes set out the broad principles of public school discipline, and the local boards of education are authorized to develop their own policies. The state statutes, as well as all local district policies, must, of course, comport with the United States Constitution and the state Constitution. In addition, to obtain federal educational dollars, local school districts must abide by federal legislation that affects school discipline.


Rapidly expanding aging populations and a concomitant increase in the prevalence of age-related diseases are global health problems today. Over the past three decades, a large body of work has led to the identification of genes and regulatory networks that affect longevity and health span, often benefiting from the tremendous power of genetics in vertebrate and invertebrate model organisms. Interestingly, many of these factors appear linked to lipids, important molecules that participate in cellular signaling, energy metabolism, and structural compartmentalization. Despite the putative link between lipids and longevity, the role of lipids in aging remains poorly understood. Emerging data from the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans suggest that lipid composition may change during aging, as several pathways that influence aging also regulate lipid metabolism enzymes; moreover, some of these enzymes apparently play key roles in the pathways that affect the rate of aging. By understanding how lipid biology is regulated during C. elegans aging, and how it impacts molecular, cellular, and organismal function, we may gain insight into novel ways to delay aging using genetic or pharmacological interventions. In the present review we discuss recent insights into the roles of lipids in C. elegans aging, including regulatory roles played by lipids themselves, the regulation of lipid metabolic enzymes, and the roles of lipid metabolism genes in the pathways that affect aging.


Abstract Context: Preliminary study results suggest that osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) may reduce pain, improve ambulation, and increase rehabilitation efficiency in patients undergoing knee or hip arthroplasty. Objective: To determine the efficacy of OMT in patients who recently underwent surgery for knee or hip osteoarthritis or for a hip fracture. Design: Randomized controlled trial involving hospital and postdischarge phases. Setting: Hospital-based acute rehabilitation unit. Patients: A total of 42 women and 18 men who were hospitalized between October 1998 and August 1999. Intervention: Patients were randomly assigned to groups that received either OMT or sham treatment in addition to standard care. Manipulation was individualized and performed according to study guidelines regarding frequency, duration, and technique. Main Outcome Measures: Changes in Functional Independence Measure (FIM) scores and in daily analgesic use during the rehabilitation unit stay; length of stay; rehabilitation efficiency—defined as the FIM total score change per rehabilitation unit day; and changes in Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-36 scores from rehabilitation unit admission to 4 weeks after discharge. Results: Of 19 primary outcome measures, the only significant difference between groups was decreased rehabilitation efficiency with OMT (2.0 vs 2.6 FIM total score points per day; P = .01). Stratified analyses demonstrated that poorer OMT outcomes were confined to patients with osteoarthritis who underwent total knee arthroplasty (length of stay, 15.0 vs 8.3 days; P = .004; rehabilitation efficiency, 2.1 vs 3.4 FIM total score points per day; P = .001). Conclusion: The OMT protocol used does not appear to be efficacious in this hospital rehabilitation population.


Using tannic acid (TA) as a biopolymer, poly(tannic Acid) (p(TA)) microgels were obtained by cross-linking TA with trimethylolpropane triglycidyl ether (TMPGDE) as cross-linker in a water-in-oil micro emulsion system. Ionic liquid forms of p(TA) micro particles were prepared as Ionic Liquid Colloids (ILC) by post chemical modification of p(TA) particles using quaternization agents such as 3-chloro-2-hydroxypropyl trimethyl ammonium chloride (CHPACl) and ammonia (NH3) in aqueous solution to generate positively-charged ammonium salts on the network. Then the modified p(TA) micro particles were used as template for Co, Ni, and Cu metal nanoparticle preparation in situ after loading of metal salts such as CoCl2, NiCl2, and CuCl2 from ethyl alcohol solution into the p(TA) network, and consequent reduction with sodium borohydride (NaBH4). The prepared metal nanoparticle-containing ILCs of p(TA) microgel composites were used as catalysts in the reduction of toxic organic compounds such as 4-nitrophenol (4-NP), eosin Y (EY), and methylene blue (MB). Various parameters affecting the 4-NP and MB reduction were investigated. The activation energy, enthalpy, and entropy for the reduction of 4-NP to 4-AP catalyzed by ILC p(TA)-co composite catalyst system were calculated as 26.19 kJ mol−1, 23.12 kJ mol−1, and −182.35 J mol−1 K−1, respectively.


3D physical and computational fluid dynamics models have been developed to describe the rotating zigzag bed (RZB). The pressure distribution in a RZB was investigated first. It was found that the simulations agreed well with experiments, so the reliability of the models was proved. The simulations suggest that the pressure drop decreases with the rotating bed thickness (H, the height between the rotating and stationary disks) within certain limits, particularly under a high gas flow rate. Also, the dead zones in the flow field are obviously reduced when we enlarge the rotor in the radial dimension. The optimal rotating bed thickness of 96 mm obtained by the principle of equal area was verified in the simulations. So, the principle can be used in the structural design of a RZB.


Early childhood educators currently provide content focused learning opportunities for children in the areas of well-being and environmental education. However, these are usually seen as discrete content areas and educators are challenged with responding to children's interests in popular-culture inspired food products given these influence their consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor and highly packaged food in the early childhood setting. This paper reports preliminary findings from a pilot randomised trial examining the interconnectedness of sustainability, well-being and popular-culture in early childhood education. Planning, assessment documentation and summaries from twenty-four learning experiences implemented by six educators over a six-week period were analysed using a deductive approach. Twenty well-being and environmental education topics were identified and shown to be generated by the educators when considering the children's 'funds of knowledge' on popular-culture inspired food products. We argue that topics derived from children's engagement with popular-culture may help educators to create an integrated approach to curriculum provision. This may impact child weight and facilitate obesity prevention and environmental sustainability as children create stronger connections between these content areas and their everyday choices and practices.


Iron cyclopentadienyl carbonyl-halide and -chalcogenolate complexes CpFe(CO)2X (X = Cl, Br, I, TePh, SPh) readily afford cocrystals with the bidentate halogen bond donor 1,4-diiodotetrafluorobenzene (p-DITFB) under slow evaporation or vapor diffusion conditions. The same microcrystalline [CpFe(CO)2TePh](p-DITFB) product instantly precipitates upon mixing p-DITFB and CpFe(CO)2TePh in hexane solution. Supramolecular [CpFe(CO)2X(p-DITFB)]n chains in the cocrystals are assembled by halogen bonds (XB) between the electrophilic area of iodine atoms of p-DITFB and the nucleophilic area of X in CpFe(CO)nX. The 5–10 cm−1 hypsochromic shift of the CO stretching bands in the IR spectra of [CpFe(CO)2X(p-DITFB)] cocrystals is explained by the pronounced electron-withdrawing effect of halogen bonding (XB), as supported by DFT calculations. The observed influence of the nature of the XB acceptor (X) on the XB geometry is described in terms of hybridization and electrostatic surface potential (ESP) mapping.


This is a studio-based inquiry into the importance and necessity of ambiguity and improvisation in creative processes. The research and literature reviewed for this essay considers artists working in different mediums, such as film, music, writing, and the visual arts, who describe the thinking behind these aspects of process, as well as their potential in creating room for artistic discovery and interpretation. The studio work proposed for this thesis was a site-specific work that was to consist of several hundred small boats cast in ice. The boats were to be launched on a river adjoining the campus where the author teaches, during the winter month of February. The process of making these boats is described and documented, as well as the complications that unfolded in completing the work as initially planned. The challenges of working in a new medium, as well as the variability and flux of temperatures and river conditions, led to a smaller scale launch at an alternative location. This thesis also discusses the links between art and teaching, and the influence of process on these practices. Connections and realizations garnered from the research and experience of the studio work, reflect the author's desire to remain open and implicated as both an artist and teacher


This paper presents a novel framework for 3-D object content-based search and retrieval, appropriate for both partial and global matching applications. The framework is based on a graph representation of a 3-D object which is enhanced by local geometric features. The 3-D object is decomposed into meaningful parts and an attributed graph is constructed based on the connectivity of the parts. Every 3-D part is approximated with a suitable superellipsoid and a novel 3-D shape descriptor, called a 3-D distance field descriptor, is computed and associated to the corresponding graph nodes. The matching process used is based on attributed graph matching algorithm appropriate for this application. The proposed method not only provides successful retrieval results in terms of geometric similarity but also is invariant to rotation, translation and scaling of an object as well as to the different poses of articulated objects. Finally, it can be effectively used for partial and global 3-D object retrieval.


Many of the causes of poor project performance which result in cost and time overruns, and poor quality can be traced to some types of errors during the design process. It is discovered that design errors add 5.9% of the contract value and rework, which is a corrective work, has been estimated to be as high as 20% of the design consultant's fee for a given project. These errors should be eliminated to allow sound project performance. The aim of this research is to develop a framework supported with guidelines for the minimisation of errors in construction documents in Nigeria. The study was carried out by means of literature survey, questionnaire survey and semi structured interviews. Literature survey was used to discover the various definitions of errors and the general types, causes and effects of errors in construction documents. Semi structured interviews were made use of, to elicit the definitions of document error from the respondents. Questionnaires were distributed to construction professionals in south western states and the federal capital territory of Nigeria to determine the types and causes of errors specific to Nigeria and also the effects of document errors on construction cost, time, quality and building occupants. Content analysis, relative importance index, kendall's coefficient of concordance, severity index, and percentages were used to analyse the data collected. The study showed the causes of errors in construction documents to be: non – availability of information, poor communication, inadequate project brief, poor salaries of professionals, non – identification of project risks, inadequate consultant professional education, inadequate consultant professional experience, inadequate project manager experience, time scheduled pressure, inadequate project planning, complexity of project, concurrent documentation, heavy work load of consultant, poor consultancy fees, inadequate document preparation time and inadequate document manager experience. The study also identified the various types of error in construction documents specific to Nigeria which are: unnecessary additions, non – conformance to client requirement, non – conformance to design code/ SMM, absence of specifications, dimensional error, miscalculation, scanty specification, wrong specification, omission of necessary item and incorrect details. Documentation error added 20.39% to the original contract sum and 11.07% to the original contract period and within seven years in Nigeria 411 people lost their lives as a result of building collapse initiated by documentation error. The developed construction documentation error minimisation framework was captioned by a flow chart.


Climate information is recognized as a powerful tool to reduce the effect of climate risk and uncertainty on crop production and increase the resilience and the adaptive capacity of farmers in semi-arid zones. This paper estimates farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for climate information within cowpea and sesame value chains in Northern Burkina Faso. The study used the contingent valuation method for a monetary valuation of farmers' preferences for climate information. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 170 farmers. The study found that 63% of respondents were willing to pay for climate information services (CIS) such as seasonal climate forecast (SCF), decadal climate information (10-DCI), daily climate information (1-DCI) and agro-advisories. The predicted value for the WTP was XOF 3496 for SCF, XOF 1066 for 10-DCI, XOF 1985 for 1-DCI and XOF 1628 for agro-advisories. The study also showed that several socioeconomic and motivation factors have greater influence on farmers' WTP for CIS. These included the gender, age, education of the farm head and the awareness of farm head to climate information. The outcomes of this paper should support policy makers to better design an efficient mechanism for the dissemination of climate information to improve the adaptive capacity of farmers to climate risks in Burkina Faso.


We construct an explicit family of linear rank-metric codes over any field F that enables efficient list decoding up to a fraction rho of errors in the rank metric with a rate of 1-rho-eps, for any desired rho in (0,1) and eps > 0. Previously, a Monte Carlo construction of such codes was known, but this is in fact the first explicit construction of positive rate rank-metric codes for list decoding beyond the unique decoding radius.

Our codes are explicit subcodes of the well-known Gabidulin codes, which encode linearized polynomials of low degree via their values at a collection of linearly independent points. The subcode is picked by restricting the message polynomials to an F-subspace that evades certain structured subspaces over an extension field of F. These structured spaces arise from the linear-algebraic list decoder for Gabidulin codes due to Guruswami and Xing (STOC'13). Our construction is obtained by combining subspace designs constructed by Guruswami and Kopparty (FOCS'13) with subspace-evasive varieties due to Dvir and Lovett (STOC'12).

We establish a similar result for subspace codes, which are a collection of subspaces, every pair of which have low-dimensional intersection, and which have received much attention recently in the context of network coding. We also give explicit subcodes of folded Reed-Solomon (RS) codes with small folding order that are list-decodable (in the Hamming metric) with optimal redundancy, motivated by the fact that list decoding RS codes reduces to list decoding such folded RS codes. However, as we only list decode a subcode of these codes, the Johnson radius continues to be the best known error fraction for list decoding RS codes.


Structural equation model (LISREL 8) was applied to test the causal relationships between tourist travel motivations and tourist destination. A survey containing Likert scale questions was conducted to collect data from 100 tourists who had travelled to Greece's tourist destination. With the help of factor analysis, four dimensions were identified for scales used in the study: travel cost satisfaction, tourism product, tourism product attributes, and tourism product management. Results indicated that the travel cost satisfaction of tourists has a positive influence on tourism product, tourism product attributes and tourism product management. Moreover, our results suggested that the tourist demographics has a positive influence on tourism product and tourism product attributes and has an insignificant relationship with tourism product management. Based on our findings the tourist demographics has not influence on tourism product management. However, these findings suggest that both the private tourism and the governmental tourism sector should develop a better management of tourist destinations so as to develop a stronger attraction of tourism, better amenities, a better accessibility, an appropriate image, to make tourism competitive and to keep tourism product prices at a reasonable level. The implications of the tourism demand model can be used for the public environmental policy-making process based mainly on reasons of interest, ideology or understanding.


ABSTRACT The songs of 175 yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella males were recorded in an area of 10 km2 in 1977–1981, 1983 and 1996. Each male had a repertoire of 1–3 song types (mean: 2.1), being categorized mainly by the first part of the song, which is a repetition of a sound pattern (the a-element). Comparisons of population repertoires of a-elements between years showed that a-elements had an annual survival rate of about 95%. In a computer simulation all 373 a-elements from the study years (the summed male repertoires) were pooled (distributed among 80 a-element types). From this pool samples of a-elements were drawn, corresponding to the sample size of each study year, and the number of types per year and shared types between years were calculated. Both measures fitted well to the actual findings in the population. Thus the recorded songs might have been drawn from a stable song type population, suggesting that yellowhammer song elements are transmitted culturally through a considerable number of gener...


Hepatitis C (HCV) infection is associated with high rates of mortality and morbidity. Interferon alpha based treatment for HCV offers a good rate of viral clearance, however the associated neuropsychiatric side effects increase the risk of treatment interruption and disease progression. The HIV/HCV coinfection is of particular interest due to association with higher rates of HCV treatment side effects and earlier treatment discontinuation when compared with HCV mono-infection. Therefore, the aim of the thesis was to further explore the effect of coinfection on mood and cognition and how HCV interferon based treatment influences neuropsychiatric side effects in mono and co-infected samples. Firstly a meta-analysis was performed to explore cognitive impairment and depression in HIV HCV co-infection. The results suggested that there was consistent literature indicating that the coinfected group were more cognitively impaired and more likely to be depressed than the HCV and HIV monoinfected groups. Secondly empirical studies were conducted to analyse the profile of depression during interferon-based treatment, and explore potential risk factors, such as gender and immune profile. Co-infected patients appeared less vulnerable to the emergence of depressive symptoms during HCV treatment than HCV mono-infected patients. Additionally, neither female gender nor immune response were associated with increased vulnerability to depression. Finally, a longitudinal study investigating cognitive performance during interferon-based treatment was conducted. A significant effect of treatment on information processing speed level of executive function was observed. Overall the research reported in this thesis further clarifies the nature of interferon induced depression and cognitive effects differences between mono and coinfected groups. Having identified a neurovegetative symptom profile and speed of processing impairment of executive function during HCV treatment, the discussion considers the potential of targeted interventions via psychotropic medication and cognitive interventions to minimise the impact of these treatment effects and optimise outcomes in this clinical group.


Two years after their flight from Nigeria, 14-yr-old Sade, her younger brother Femi and her father are living in a council flat in London, waiting for their claim for asylum to be approved. Sade is upset when Femi is drawn into a violent possibly drug-dealing gang, and even more upset when their father doesn't seem to notice. He's too taken up with his new friend Mrs Wallace, a refugee from Sierra Leone. But when Femi is arrested for murder, and the gang set fire to their flat, the family has to pull together to get through this most difficult time.


Delegation is the practice of sharing authority with another individual to enable them to complete a specific task as a proxy. Practices to permit delegation can range from formal to informal arrangements and can involve spontaneous yet finely balanced notions of trust between people. This paper argues that delegation is a ubiquitous yet an unsupported feature of socio-technical computer systems and that this lack of support illustrates a particular neglect to the everyday financial practices of the more vulnerable people in society. Our contribution is to provide a first exploration of the domain of person-to-person delegation in digital payments, a particularly pressing context. We first report qualitative data collected across several studies concerning banking practices of individuals over 80 years of age. We then use analytical techniques centred upon identification of stakeholders, their concerns and interactions, to characterize the delegation practices we observed. We propose a Concerns Matrix as a suitable representation to capture conflicts in the needs of individuals in such complex socio-technical systems, and finally propose a putative design response in the form of a Helper Card.