Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution, as an environmental-friendly, energy-saving and simple process, has been widely reported. However, there are some important factors that prohibit practical application of photocatalytic hydrogen production, including the low efficiency of solar energy utilization, and the lack of response in the dark. Temperature fluctuation is a very common phenomenon in our daily life, which is rarely reported for use for hydrogen production. Here we demonstrate direct hydrogen evolution through the harvesting of cold–hot 298–323 K (25–50 °C) alternation energy by using pyroelectric nanomaterial Ba0.7Sr0.3TiO3 (BST). The yield of hydrogen achieved was 46.89 μmol per gram of catalyst after 36 thermal cycles and the rate of hydrogen generation was up to 1.30 μmol g−1 per thermal cycle. The minimum of the conduction band of BST is more negative than the conduction band level of H+/H2, enabling the reduction of water to form hydrogen. This efficient and eco-friendly pyro-catalytic method provides a promising future for hydrogen evolution utilizing natural cold–hot temperature fluctuation energy.


Organism counts from environmental quality control (QC) samples, such as indicators in water, will show variation even if they come from a single well mixed batch. This is due to random variation and there may be additional effects from organism behaviour. Thus the samples are not homogeneous in their content. Samples for chemistry will also be variable in their content but this may be at a level below the limit of detection and thus the observed measurements will show apparent homogeneity. Organism counts may take 24 hours to achieve and longer to confirm. A chemical result can often be obtained rapidly. Assessment of performance with microbiological counts usually requires the accumulation of evidence over several samples. A judgement can be attempted with each chemical QC result. QC in environmental microbiology is an important and growing field. The apparent imprecision and slowness in assessing performance is unavoidable. Sound quality assurance programmes will accommodate these factors.


This paper outlines an alternative test method to evaluate the energy consumption of frost-free refrigerators and freezers for residential applications. While the standardized methods require the refrigerating appliance to be kept running according to its onboard control system, which usually drives the refrigerator through an on-off cycling pattern, the proposed approach assesses the refrigerator energy performance in the steady-state regime, being therefore much faster and more reliable. In this procedure, the cooling capacity is matched to the cooling loads by PID-controlled electrical heaters installed within the refrigerated compartments, so that the compartment temperatures are kept at the desired standardized levels. Comparisons between the experimental results obtained using the steady-state energy (SSE) test and the standardized procedures showed that the former follows closely the trends observed for the latter.


The thesis includes three papers:
1. Limited Arbitrage Analysis of CDS Basis Trading
By modeling time-varying funding costs and demand pressure as the limits to arbitrage, the paper shows that assets with identical cash-flows have not only different expected returns, but also different expected returns in excess of funding costs. I solve the model in closed-form to show that the arbitrage on the CDS and corporate bond market is a risky arbitrage. The sign of the expected excess return of the arbitrage is decided by the sign and size of market frictions rather than the observed price discrepancy. The size and risk of the arbitrage excess return are increasing in market friction levels and assets' maturities. High levels of market frictions also destruct the positive predictability of credit spread term structure on credit spread changes. Results from the empirical section support the above-mentioned model predictions.
2. General Equilibrium Analysis of Stochastic Benchmarking
This paper applies a closed-form continuous-time consumption-based general equilibrium model to analyze the equilibrium implications when some agents in the economy promise to beat a stochastic benchmark at an intermediate date. For very risky benchmark, these agents increase volatility and risk premium in the equilibrium. On the other hand, when they promise to beat less risky benchmark, they decrease volatility and risk premium in the equilibrium. In both cases, the degree of effect is state-dependent and stock price rises.
3. Institutional Asset Pricing with Heterogenous Belief (Co-authored) We propose an equilibrium asset pricing model in which investors with heterogeneous beliefs care about relative performance. We find that the relative performance concern leads agents to trade more similarly, which has two effects. First, similar trading directly decreases volatility. Second, similar trading decreases the impact of the dominant agents. When the economy is extremely good or bad, the second effect is dominant so that the relative performance concern enlarges the excess volatility caused by heterogeneous beliefs. When the first effect is dominant, which corresponds to a normal economy, the volatility is lower than without the relative performance concern. Moreover, this paper shows that the relative performance concern also influences investors' holdings, stock prices and risk premia.


The performance gap is a measure of the difference between design assumptions and actual in field data. Estimating terms, specifically the operational hours of use, when making such design assumptions in order to predict the impact of lighting upgrades can potentially result in either an overestimate or underestimate of the savings to be made. In this paper, the background of performance gap measurement is outlined and field measurements are gathered and applied retrospectively to lighting upgrades in corridors. The lighting upgrade projects in three university buildings and their assumptions are explained in relation to the operational hours proposed using the industry 'Energy assessment and reporting method'. We then describe a simple and relatively inexpensive means of taking in field measurements using small unobtrusive environmental loggers to record the lighting use and occupancy. This method, which can be implemented prior to upgrade works or energy efficiency retrofits, reveals substantially different patterns of annual electricity consumption and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from those assumed by a priori estimates. Patterns of use emerge that include additional hours of use by cleaners, out of hours working, and weekend working not anticipated in original estimates. These results also suggest a valuable distinction between lighting on hours and occupancy hours not captured in the current 'Energy assessment and reporting method'. The results find the differences between predicted vs. actual data are considerably different, with lights on hours ranging from -67% lower to 25% and 138% higher when compared to predicted operational hours. We conclude that the estimates the industry uses in calculating energy efficiency upgrades should be accompanied by clear and adequate information about occupancy use. In our study, the consequence of reporting energy savings using assumptions and estimates in calculations resulted in a substantial overall underestimate of the savings achieved in practice.


Nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence are key factors in cost calculations underpinning decisions on war or peace between states. This paper combines deterrence and interdependence in a proposed theory of major power peace, with reference to a number of insightful works on the ongoing transition of power from the US to a rising China. The paper explores the hypothesis that as long as the US and China can deter each other with a combination of conventional and nuclear forces, and refrain from actions to drastically reduce their economic dependence on each other, there is little risk of war between them. Peace will be further secured if important third party countries, notably Japan, remain covered by US extended deterrence and integrated economically with both China and the USA through trade and transnational production chains. Only if the US, Chinese or Japanese governments take politically motivated actions to radically reduce their economic dependence on one another are they likely to engage in a security competition of sufficient intensity to generate an arms race and a substantial risk of war. This does not just hold for all-out war but for limited war as well, given the risk of escalation.


The effects of turbulence and flame instabilities on the flame front evolution at Lewis number (Le) 1.0 and 0.7 were computationally investigated using a sixth-order central difference scheme and nonreflective boundary conditions. The turbulence intensity varies from 1% to 50% and the resulting turbulent flames are in the thin wrinkled flame region. It is shown that when the turbulence intensity is weak (u′=1%–5%), hydrodynamic instability dominates the growth of the flame cells. However, when the turbulent intensity is large (u′=50%), the turbulent motion wrinkles the flame front and dominates the evolution process. It is also demonstrated that curvature stretch dominates the total stretch rate for flames with either weak or large turbulent intensities, and therefore plays a significant role in turbulent flame modeling.


In political science and in development cooperation, civic organisations (COs) under authoritarian rule are usually seen as supporters of processes that move towards democratisation. However, these organisations are sometimes criticised for their support of those in power. Within this context, critics refer to the fact that many COs have, for example, authoritarian intra-organisational structures. This characteristic clearly limits their potential to be supporters of democratisation processes. In this paper, we proceed from the assumption that Vietnamese COs can be both supporters of democracy and organisations that help to maintain authoritarian rule; they can sometimes even be both at the same time. COs are "polyvalent" (Kößler). More concretely, what COs are and which role(s) they play in the political system is mainly but not exclusively dependent on the impact the state has on them, and is at the same time dependent on the effects that those organisations have on the state. The results from an empirical survey, supported by the German Research Council (2013–2016) and carried out as a co-operation between the Institute of Asian Studies/GIGA Hamburg and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, suggest the following: ▪ Most Vietnamese COs are hierarchically structured, if not organised in an authoritarian way. They are not "schools of democracy", in the sense of Tocqueville. ▪ Most Vietnamese COs that have engaged in the welfare provision sector, either willingly or unwillingly, have helped to foster the foundations of authoritarianism. ▪ In the field of economic policies, the COs invited by the state to participate in and contribute to the formulation of policies do help, overall, to secure existing power structures, even though these organisations also help change various economic policies and even though their activities produce some democracy-promoting effects. ▪ In the policy field of gender equality, women's rights, and rights of sexual minorities, the mass organisation Vietnam Women's Union supports the state's respective discourse. Some NGOs active in this policy field are doing both: They support and criticise the state's discourse on gender norms and the rights of sexual minorities. In the conclusion, we answer the question of which Vietnamese COs can be seen as supporters of further democratisation and which can be classified as obstacles.


How does a profit-maximizing manager form teams and compensate workers in the presence of both adverse selection and moral hazard? Under complete information, it is well known that any complementarity in characteristics implies that positive assortative matching is productively efficent. But, under asymmetric information, we uncover the problem of disassortative incentives: incentive costs may increase in assortativity. Profit maximization thus prescribes either random or negative assortative matching, both productively inefficient, when complementarities are weak and eort costs are high enough. When this is the case, the manager may instead prefer to delegate matching, allowing workers to sort themselves into teams. Our results shed light on recent empirical work documenting patterns of non-assortative matching inside of firms.


Abstract Introduction: Cocaine abuse is a major worldwide health problem. Patients with acute cocaine toxicity presenting to the emergency department may require urgent treatment for tachycardia, dysrhythmia, hypertension, and coronary vasospasm, leading to pathological sequelae such as acute coronary syndrome, stroke, and death. Objective: The objective of this study is to review the current evidence for pharmacological treatment of cardiovascular toxicity resulting from cocaine abuse. Methods: MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), OpenGrey, Google Scholar, and the Cochrane Library were searched from inception to November 2015. Articles on pharmacological treatment involving human subjects and cocaine were selected and reviewed. Evidence was graded using Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine guidelines. Treatment recommendations were compared to current American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines. Special attention was given to adverse drug events or treatment failure. The search resulted in 2376 articles with 120 eligible involving 2358 human subjects. Benzodiazepines and other GABA-active agents: There were five high-quality (CEBM Level I/II) studies, three retrospective (Level III), and 25 case series/reports (Level IV/V) supporting the use of benzodiazepines and other GABA-active agents in 234 subjects with eight treatment failures. Benzodiazepines may not always effectively mitigate tachycardia, hypertension, and vasospasm from cocaine toxicity. Calcium channel blockers: There were seven Level I/II, one Level III, and seven Level IV/V studies involving 107 subjects and one treatment failure. Calcium channel blockers may decrease hypertension and coronary vasospasm, but not necessarily tachycardia. Nitric oxide-mediated vasodilators: There were six Level I/II, one Level III, and 25 Level IV/V studies conducted in 246 subjects with 11 treatment failures and two adverse drug events. Nitroglycerin may lead to severe hypotension and reflex tachycardia. Alpha-adrenoceptor blocking drugs: There were two Level I studies and three case reports. Alpha-1 blockers may improve hypertension and vasospasm, but not tachycardia, although evidence is limited. Alpha-2-adrenoceptor agonists: There were two high-quality studies and one case report detailing the successful use of dexmedetomidine. Beta-blockers and β/α-blockers: There were nine Level I/II, seven Level III, and 34 Level IV/V studies of β-blockers, with 1744 subjects, seven adverse drug events, and three treatment failures. No adverse events were reported for use of combined β/α-blockers such as labetalol and carvedilol, which were effective in attenuating both hypertension and tachycardia. Antipsychotics: Seven Level I/II studies, three Level III studies, and seven Level IV/V case series and reports involving 168 subjects have been published. Antipsychotics may improve agitation and psychosis, but with inconsistent reduction in tachycardia and hypertension and risk of extrapyramidal adverse effects. Other agents: There was only one high level study of morphine, which reversed cocaine-induced coronary vasoconstriction but increased heart rate. Other agents reviewed included lidocaine, sodium bicarbonate, amiodarone, procainamide, propofol, intravenous lipid emulsion, propofol, and ketamine. Conclusions: High-quality evidence for pharmacological treatment of cocaine cardiovascular toxicity is limited but can guide acute management of associated tachycardia, dysrhythmia, hypertension, and coronary vasospasm. Future randomized prospective trials are needed to evaluate new agents and further define optimal treatment of cocaine-toxic patients.


Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a very popular technique in machine learning because it automatically extracts meaningful features through a sparse and part-based representation. However, NMF has the drawback of being highly ill-posed, that is, there typically exist many different but equivalent factorizations. In this paper, we introduce a completely new way to obtaining more well-posed NMF problems whose solutions are sparser. Our technique is based on the preprocessing of the nonnegative input data matrix, and relies on the theory of M-matrices and the geometric interpretation of NMF. This approach provably leads to optimal and sparse solutions under the separability assumption of Donoho and Stodden (2003), and, for rank-three matrices, makes the number of exact factorizations finite. We illustrate the effectiveness of our technique on several image data sets.


The exponential distribution is a popular model in applications to real data. We propose a new extension of this distribution, called the Lomax-exponential distribution, which presents greater flexibility to the model. Also there is a simple relation between the Lomax-exponential distribution and the Lomax distribution. Results for moment, limit behavior, hazard function, Shannon entropy and order statistic are provided. To estimate the model parameters, the method of maximum likelihood and Bayse estimations are proposed. Two data sets are used to illustrate the applicability of the Lomax-exponential distribution.


Two accurate, precise, sensitive and economical procedures for simultaneous determination of aceclofenac and paracetamol in tablet dosage form have been developed. In the present investigation, mixture of 20 mL (2 M) urea, 30 mL of (5 M) sodium acetate (hydrotropic solubilizing agent) was used to solubilize aceclofenac and paracetamol and carried out spectrophotometric analysis. The methods employed were absorbance ratio method (method I), derivative method (method II).The result showed that Beer's law was obeyed in concentration range of 5-50 g/mL with good linearity (r 2 0.99) for both the drugs in both methods. The recoveries were within 99.67-101.33% for aceclofenac and 99.46-101.92% for paracetamol. Precision was good with acceptable limits of detection (LOD) and quantitation (LOQ) for both compounds. The optimized methods showed good reproducibility and recovery with standard deviation of < 1.0% and percent relative standard deviation less than 2.0%.


The purpose of this essay is to investigate the origin of the large amount of precipitation that is present in the northern Ethiopian Highlands. With Moisture transport into the Ethiopian Highlands by Ellen Viste and Asgeir Sorteberg as a base, this essays intents to compare the same data but by focusing on a much smaller time scale. This frame was chosen to see if the data would deviate (i.e. a small and specific time scale versus a large and general time scale). Whilst the investigation by Viste and Sorteberg focuses on the two most rain rich months, July and August during 1998-2008, this essay focuses on only July during 2008. To investigate where the precipitation originates from, this essay has analyzed different meteorological parameters such as horizontal and vertical winds at different altitudes and the moisture content of these winds. This essay has like Viste's and Sorteberg's paper used ERA-Interim data as a basis. However the course of action has differed. This essay has made conclusions by visually drawing conclusions by studying the data images while Viste and Asgeir have drawn their conclusions by backtracking the wind to its origin. This investigations results showed that great amounts of moisture were transported into the highlands from the south-west, and to some extent also from the north. While the moisture transport from the south-west was large due to the level of moist in the air, these winds where fairly small and at low altitudes. The winds from the north were visible at higher altitudes and were stronger, however they carried much less water vapor. However, exactly how much each of these winds actually contributed to producing rain is more difficult to say. The results from Viste and Asgeir (2011) showed that the amount of moist that was transported into the highlands were about 46 percent more from the north compared to from the south. The contribution to moisture release within the area was however almost equally great from north and south. Both investigations thus showed that the largest amount of moist was transported from the south and north. What this study did however not address was how large amount of the entire moist that had contributed to rain. One anomaly of large amounts of precipitation was registered on the 20th of July 2008. This study looked closer into this which showed that large winds were registered this date as well as an upwind cell. One can presume that these winds carried large amounts of moisture, which previous results has shown, and that this might be an explanation to the large amount of precipitation that was measured on the 20th of July.


Research has identified many characteristics of productive teams, e.g., initiative, helpfulness, time efficiency, work quality, etc. A metric for productivity that provides a measure of team productivity can help teams identify specific areas of improvement. Techniques disclosed herein identify different aspects of productivity that can be observed in online communication and document creation/management systems. For example, such aspects can include creation of documents, collaborative editing of documents, and communication between users. Further, these aspects are measured to compute a productivity metric. A multigraph is constructed with nodes representing users and edges representing the weight (quality) of creation, collaboration, and communication events. The productivity metric is computed based on the connectivity of the multigraph, the quality of the edges, and the individual nodes.


This paper examines the transformation of the local Uyghur concept of oy (house) in an environment of increasing mobility and monetization in the city of Kashgar in southwest Xinjiang, China. The paper identifies a shift in social practices related to the oy as a social unit and as a conceptual metaphor, which is taking on a stronger genealogical meaning and becoming somewhat de-localized. Departing from the local concept of oy and related local practices of social organization, this paper examines the utility of the analytical concept of the house, as proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss and later criticized and developed by others, as an approach to social organization and transformation in Kashgar. The organization into units that can analytically be grasped as houses often serves as a useful vehicle of adaptation in times of rapid social transformation and political instability. This is due to the concept's great flexibility, which is well-captured in theoretical discussions. Change and instability have frequently characterized the social environment of Kashgar in past centuries, which may account for the centrality of the oy (as a house) in Kashgar today.


In this paper Bayesian methods are used to analyze some of the properties of a special type of Markov chain. The forward transitions through the chain are followed by inverse transitions (using Bayes' theorem) backward through a copy of the same chain; this will be called a folded Markov chain. If an appropriately defined Euclidean error (between the original input and its reconstruction via Bayes' theorem) is minimized with respect to the choice of Markov chain transition probabilities, then the familiar theories of both vector quantizers and self-organizing maps emerge. This approach is also used to derive the theory of self-supervision, in which the higher layers of a multilayer network supervise the lower layers, even though overall there is no external teacher.


An ever-increasing world population and increasingly-volatile commodity prices have charged producers with the task of becoming more efficient. To combat this, precision agriculture technologies aimed at increasing production efficiency are continually being developed, but their adoption is not yet widespread. A survey regarding the usage of these technologies was distributed to a sample of row crop producers across the state of Nebraska and a Poisson regression was used to determine the factors influencing adoption. Results of the study indicate that larger, more techsavvy producers and those using irrigation are more likely to adopt a higher number of precision agriculture technologies, while operator age and gross farm income were found to be noninfluential factors.


About the book: How to provide appropriate feedback to students on their writing has long been an area of central significance to teachers and educators. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Context and Issues provides scholarly articles on the topic by leading researchers, who explore topics such as the socio-cultural assumptions that participants bring to the writing class; feedback delivery and negotiation systems; and the role of student and teacher identity in negotiating feedback and expectations. This text provides empirical data and an up-to-date analysis of the complex issues involved in offering appropriate feedback during the writing process.


DWARF14 is a strigolactone receptor that hydrolyzes its ligand but remains covalently bound to one of the reaction products. As a general rule, ligands bind to their cognate receptor noncovalently and induce a conformational change in the receptor that activates the receptor or enables it to interact with binding partners. Yao et al. and de Saint Germain et al. report that the α/β hydrolase DWARF14 (D14) is a strigolactone receptor, and this unusual receptor not only hydrolyzes its ligand but also forms a covalent attachment to the modified ligand. Strigolactones are carotenoid-derived plant hormones that regulate many developmental processes and trigger the germination of parasitic plants. One of the molecular processes triggered by strigolactones is the proteasomal degradation of D14. Orthologs of D14 from Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress, Yao et al.), Pisum sativum (pea, de Saint Germain et al.), and Oryza sativa (rice, de Saint Germain et al.) hydrolyzed biologically active strigolactones and became covalently bound to one of the hydrolysis products. Through structural analysis of Arabidopsis D14 (AtD14) in complex with two of the proteins that promote its degradation, Yao et al. found that becoming covalently attached to the strigolactone hydrolysis product elicited a conformational change in AtD14 that enabled AtD14 to interact with its binding partners. Arabidopsis d14-5 mutants display phenotypes characteristic of impaired strigolactone signaling and have a single amino acid substitution in AtD14 that was predicted to affect a structural feature that is involved in the strigolactone-induced conformational change. This mutation did not affect the enzymatic activity of AtD14 but prevented AtD14 from interacting with one of its binding partners. de Saint Germain et al. found that a strigolactone analog that was not biologically active was hydrolyzed by RMS3, the pea ortholog of D14, but the product failed to stably associate with the receptor, supporting the idea that covalent attachment of the hydrolysis product is important for strigolactone signaling. Results from kinetic analysis of the pea ortholog of D14 were consistent with each RMS3 molecule performing only a single round of catalysis. These findings present a new paradigm in ligand-receptor interaction and raise many additional questions, including how different strigolactones can elicit distinct responses and whether the receptors function as single-turnover enzyme in vivo (see Snowden and Janssen). R. Yao, Z. Ming, L. Yan, S. Li, F. Wang, S. Ma, C. Yu, M. Yang, L. Chen, L. Chen, Y. Li, C. Yan, D. Miao, Z. Sun, J. Yan, Y. Sun, L. Wang, J. Chu, S. Fan, W. He, H. Deng, F. Nan, J. Li, Z. Rao, Z. Lou, D. Xie, DWARF14 is a non-canonical hormone receptor for strigolactone. Nature 536, 469–473 (2016). [PubMed] A. de Saint Germain, G. Clavé, M.-A. Badet-Denisot, J. P. Pillot, D. Cornu, J.-P. Le Caer, M. Burger, F. Pelissier, P. Retailleau, C. Turnbull, S. Bonhomme, J. Chory, C. Rameau, F.-D. Boyer, An histidine covalent receptor and butenolide complex mediates strigolactone perception. Nat. Chem. Biol. 10.1038/nchembio.2147 (2016). [PubMed] K. C. Snowden, B. J. Janssen, Signal locked in. Nature 536, 402–404 (2016). [PubMed]


This study reports on various biological features in the life history of northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) on Flemish Cap. Northern shrimp on Flemish Cap are males for approximately their first three years. Then usually half change sex at age four years, and the rest at age five years, to become females from then on. Small shrimp are generally found at lesser depth than the larger ones so the size of shrimp increases with depth, especially that of males. Larger females seem to move to shallower waters in March when hatching starts. The size at sex change (L50) and the maximum length (Lmax) are studied within and between seasons. Both L50 and Lmax have decreased in recent years. L50 was 22.5 mm CL on average in the seasons 1996/1997–2003/2004, but has decreased from 23.2 mm CL in 1997/1998 to 22.4 mm CL in 2003/2004 (Icelandic commercial data) and from 24.3 mm CL in 1994 to 20.9 mm CL in 2003 (EU survey data). Also Lmax has decreased from 29.8 mm CL in 1996/1997 to 28.0 mm CL in 2003/2004 (Icelandic commercial data). In spite of this, there is an invariant relationship between L50 and Lmax, where L50 is about 80% of the average Lmax of northern shrimp on Flemish cap. This supports the theory of Charnov and Skuladottir (2000) on the invariant relationship between L50 and Lmax in sex changing organisms. The same is found in Icelandic offshore waters and the Denmark Strait. The decline in L50 could be related to the observed increase in temperature at 150 m in the last decade from 2.6°C in the years 1992–1996 to 3.5°C in 1997–2003. The sudden decline in the female biomass of shrimp on Flemish Cap between 1992 and 1994 appears to coincide with a drop in the age at sex change (A50) by one year in 1995 and 1996. Moreover, the increase in biomass of shrimp follows the disappearance of cod in the mid-1990s. As female shrimp biomass increased there was a delay in changing sex, showing the versatility of shrimp on Flemish Cap in adjusting to changes in sex-ratio. Growth of shrimp was fast in the earlier years and slower in later years indicating that food may be a limiting factor. The growth during the earlier years is faster than that of northern shrimp in the Barents Sea. Compared to other areas in the 1980s, the growth is slightly faster than that of the warm inshore waters of Iceland, but much slower than the growth of shrimp in the inshore waters of Sweden. The ovigerous period is studied for the first time on Flemish Cap and is estimated to be about eight months.


»Als erste am Südpol. Die Produktion geographischer Fakten während der norwegischen Antarktisexpedition, 1910-12«. This article seeks to open a so-called black box. It asks how the information that Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in December 1911 became accepted as a 'matter of fact' that found its way into most overviews of the 19th century. To open this black box, the article examines the techniques and strategies that the Norwegian Antarctic expedition of 1910 to 1912 applied to produce its data. It argues that the Norwegian expedition applied at least three different techniques: Optical instruments were used to come as close to the pole as possible and encircle it; landmarks were left around the pole to turn the British expedition that followed the Norwegians at the pole into eye-witnesses; in Europe, the tables of geographical data that Amundsen had noted in his journal were recalculated to affirm its accuracy. Two observations follow from the focus on the expedition's practices: Firstly, the Antarctic landscape and its climate were vital actors in the production of geographical data in the Antarctic. Secondly, the Norwegian strategy was markedly more defensive than the black-boxed sentence about its presence at the pole suggests: It relied on a combination of techniques to ascertain, and aimed at proximity rather than a claim to have been at


After a long history of development and improvement, recent transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) with various analytical functions have become important in material science and engineering. These functions include not only obtaining magnified images of specimens, but also electron-diffraction patterns, chemical analyses, and chemical-state analyses with spacial resolution far greater than other methodologies. It is impossible to cover all of these functions considering page limitations and, more importantly, considering the author's knowledge and ability even for topics limited to studies of mica. This chapter focuses on the investigations of mica using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). HRTEM is generally defined as a technique to obtain information about atomic structures in crystals from TEM images formed by phase contrast at high magnifications. Although HRTEM is just one of many functions in TEMs, several examples in sections below demonstrate that HRTEM often plays a decisive role in determining the local atomic arrangements in mica.

An early study of mica by HRTEM was reported by Buseck and Iijima (1974). They clearly observed three dark lines representing a mica layer (the lines correspond to the two tetrahedral sheets and one octahedral sheet) and that cleavage was formed at the interlayer. During a quarter century after this pioneering work, many HRTEM studies for mica and related phyllosilicates have been reported (for instance, see the references in Baronnet 1992). These included many studies of mica, e.g., polytypism, transformations, defects and interface research. In the following section, recent HRTEM and related techniques are briefly reviewed. Next, two topics of HRTEM investigation, polytype and defect analyses are presented based on studies, mainly by the author and his colleagues.

### Transmission electron microscopy

After the invention of TEM by E.E. Ruska in 1932, this apparatus was improved rapidly in response to requests from many fields of science. In the 1950s, lattice fringes in …


Open constraints were introduced to model the many industrial applications in which a task can be handled by several resources. Open constraints are unique because the set of variables over which the the constraint is defined is a set-variable. Regin and van Hoeve recently showed how to filter an open GCC constraint when the set variable use a subset-bound domain. This paper considers open constraints in which the set-variables use the richer length-lex domain of Gervet and Van Hentenryck which includes cardinality and lexicographic information, while enforcing bound-consistency for a variety of important constraints. The paper makes two orthogonal contributions. First, it shows how to derive a filtering algorithm for the length-lex open constraint from the cost-based version of the closed version. The key insight is that well chosen weights allow to map the total order of length-lex sets with the total order of set weights. Second, it shows how to derive a filtering algorithm for a length-lex open constraint from the filtering algorithm of the subset-bound open constraint. This technique is entirely generic and adds a factor n in complexity to the subset-bound open constraints. The key underlying insight is to recognize that a length-lex interval can be represented as the union of O(n) subset-bound intervals and their cardinalities. This result also allows to systematically lift filtering algorithms from subset-bound intervals to length-lex intervals.


We report here the properties of LiCl aqueous solutions at various concentrations confined inside the pores of the ZIF-8 metal–organic framework, based on classical molecular dynamics simulations. This system has been proposed for applications in the storage or dissipation of mechanical energy, using the liquid-phase intrusion of concentrated electrolytes in the hydrophobic framework. We describe the structure of the liquids and the influence of confinement, their dynamics, the mechanical properties of ZIF-8 and the impact of liquid intrusion on them. We show that the presence of the electrolyte has a moderate impact on the ZIF-8 framework, while the presence of the ZIF-8 matrix strongly influences the behavior of the confined aqueous solution, affecting the overall properties of the system. We also computed the free energy profile for the entry of water molecules and ions into the nanopores, showing a difference between anions and cations.


Regulation of ECT has generally focused on whether the patient or his representative effectively consented to the treatment. The highly intrusive nature of ECT and the unique circumstances of those patients who are likely to receive it create particularly difficult legal issues concerning the validity of the patient's consent. This Note will examine the various methods that are available to protect the rights of patients for whom ECT is proposed. After briefly explaining the nature of the therapy, the Note will discuss the efficacy of judicial remedies with respect to both competent and incompetent patients. It will argue that, because of the peculiar nature of ECT, special procedures that ensure the existence of consent to state-administered ECT may be constitutionally required. It will then address specific procedures legislatively enacted by several states for the regulation of ECT and will assess their constitutional limitations, with emphasis upon the problem that a regulatory scheme, in its effort to protect patients from unconsented therapy, may interfere with the right of patients to consent to privately administered ECT.


1 Keysers, C. & Gazzola, V. (2014). Hebbian learning and predictive mirror neurons for actions, sensations and emotions. Philos.Trans.R.Soc.Lond B Biol.Sci., 369, 20130175. Notes: Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is considered the neurophysiological basis of Hebbian learning and has been shown to be sensitive to both contingency and contiguity between preand postsynaptic activity. Here, we will examine how applying this Hebbian learning rule to a system of interconnected neurons in the presence of direct or indirect re-afference (e.g. seeing/hearing one's own actions) predicts the emergence of mirror neurons with predictive properties. In this framework, we analyse how mirror neurons become a dynamic system that performs active inferences about the actions of others and allows joint actions despite sensorimotor delays. We explore how this system performs a projection of the self onto others, with egocentric biases to contribute to mind-reading. Finally, we argue that Hebbian learning predicts mirror-like neurons for sensations and emotions and review evidence for the presence of such vicarious activations outside the motor system


When English speakers successively pile-sort colors, their sorting recapitulates an independently proposed hierarchy of color category evolution during language change (Boster, 1986). Here we extend that finding to the semantic domain of spatial relations. Levinson et al. (2003) have proposed a hierarchy of spatial category evolution, and we show that English speakers successively pile-sort spatial scenes in a manner that recapitulates that proposed evolutionary hierarchy. Thus, in the spatial domain, as in color, proposed universal patterns of language change based on crosslanguage observations appear to reflect general cognitive forces that are available in the minds of speakers of a single language.


Wireless technologies, especially those deployed by municipalities, have been offered as one way to enhance access to society at large, including people with disabilities and others on the wrong side of the digital divide. One of the promises of municipal WiFi, is free or low-cost service promised in the public interest of citizens. This paper presents research on the current state of municipal wireless network design and policies with regard to people with disabilities in the United States. A comparative analysis was undertaken of a sample of 48 municipalities to ascertain the degree of accessibility to, or sensitivity of, municipal wireless systems, and three case studies were examined for the unforeseen effects of deploying municipal WiFi in different locations. Secondly, the effectiveness of goals toward eradicating the "disability divide" are analyzed to see if policies toward people with disabilities fair well as systems are deployed, and we discuss legal implications of municipal WiFi models. Because many people with disabilities are already affected by disparities in education and income, further marginalization of their communication and information access creates a greater barrier to their access to critical information needs, and participation in a community.


Fault‐related folds of variable structural styles and assemblages commonly coexist in orogenic belts with competent‐incompetent interlayered sequences. Despite their commonality, the kinematic evolution of these structural styles and assemblages are often loosely constrained because multiple solutions exist in their structural progression during tectonic restoration. We use a sandbox modeling instrument with a particle image velocimetry monitor to test four designed sandbox models with multilayer competent‐incompetent materials. Test results reveal that decollement folds initiate along selected incompetent layers with decreasing velocity difference and constant vorticity difference between the hanging wall and footwall of the initial fault tips. The decollement folds are progressively converted to fault‐propagation folds and fault‐bend folds through development of fault ramps breaking across competent layers and are followed by propagation into fault flats within an upper incompetent layer. Thick‐skinned thrust is produced by initiating a decollement fault within the metamorphic basement. Progressive thrusting and uplifting of the thick‐skinned thrust trigger initiation of the uppermost incompetent decollement with formation of a decollement fold and subsequent converting to fault‐propagation and fault‐bend folds, which combine together to form imbricate thrust. Breakouts at the base of the early formed fault ramps along the lowest incompetent layers, which may correspond to basement‐cover contacts, domes the upmost decollement and imbricate thrusts to form passive roof duplexes and constitute the thin‐skinned thrust belt. Structural styles and assemblages in each of tectonic stages are similar to that in the representative orogenic belts in the South China, Southern Appalachians, and Alpine orogenic belts.


Food, temptation, body, animality and femininity represent Louise's abjection. She has started a never-ending quest for the Nothing; nothing in her mouth, nothing in her body. She is following a mystical path: the Nothing that makes her go through a « dark night » like St. John of the Cross. Temptations and sins are tests of the soul for the mystic. Louise faces a similar fight against herself on her path to anorexia. How can the modalities of her scenario, wherein hallucinatory satisfaction denies her vital need, be understood ? The primary erogenous masochism, preserver of life, will become destructive masochism. Louise's regression leads her to a linking/unlinking work and a drive diffusion. The prevalence of sight that comes from the pictogram has promoted access to the mystical path of the Nothing. The Nothing is her attempt to heal, which leads her to her death.


The sponsoring company for this Engineering Doctorate is a manufacturer of
passive fire protection materials with about 80 employees. Its primary
products are specialist coatings that provide protection from the heat of a fire.
Since it is essentially a chemical blending company its core technical skills
have been in the chemical formulation of these products. The company
employed the Research Engineer (R. E.) to help find new applications for its
materials and widen its product range. It identified that domestic Liquid
Petroleum Gas cylinders are potentially dangerous because they may explode
when exposed to the heat of a fire. It determined to develop an enclosure to
protect them from fire for 30 minutes using its fire resistant coatings.
This project was conceived as a simple diversification, transferring existing
company technology to a new market area. However, LPG cylinders are very
sensitive to fire and require highly effective insulation from heat to make them
safe. To meet the company specification, the R. E. developed a new
composite fire insulation eight times as effective as the original solution, by
combining one of the company's products with other materials. The
effectiveness of the insulation and the enclosure design were proven by
completely engulfing it in flame from a burning pool of aviation fuel. A series
of these tests showed that the R. E.'s design reliably keeps LPG cylinders cool
and safe for more than 30 minutes. This experimental work was assessed by
the Loss Prevention Council who have based a new fire test standard on it.
During the development process it became apparent that the capabilities
required to manufacture an engineered product are quite different from those
needed for the creation of new coatings and materials. This new product
required a revolutionary advance in the company's approach to design, test
methods and production technology. The R. E. has developed a new method
of fire testing to provide heat flow data for use in computer models. This is
now used to reduce the number of prototypes needed for testing and so
compress development time. In order to manufacture the new product the
R. E. has had to develop new ways of processing the company's materials.
These new moulding techniques have delivered substantial improvements in
finish and reduction in material wastage. The capability of the company to
produce complex shapes from materials that are difficult to process has been
greatly enhanced.
Although the Gas Safe product itself has not yet achieved commercial
success, the Engineering Doctorate programme has made a positive
contribution to the company. In the last two years a number of interesting
new projects have been undertaken that would have been impossible without
the new engineering approach and production techniques. These are now
beginning to show a return and several new products based on this work are
under development.


NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 takes a critical-thinking approach to teaching Windows 7 concepts and skills. In addition to in-depth coverage of essential topics, this book also covers some of the coolest new features to the Windows Operating System including Live TV and Windows Touch. The New Perspectives Series has also added new pedagogical elements to help students with all learning styles absorb key information. The Visual Overview at the beginning of each tutorial gives you a visual look at the content, as well as a study guide for later use. ProSkill Boxes and Exercises provide you with information and practice on Professional Skills that relate to that tutorial's content.


The primary objective of Leg 138 was to provide detailed information about the ocean's response to global climate change during the Neogene. Two north-south transects were drilled (95° and 110°W) within the region of equatorial divergence-driven upwelling (and thus high accumulation rates and resolution) and spanning the major equatorial ocean current boundaries (and thus recording a high-amplitude signal of the response of the sediment to climatically and/or tectonically driven changes in ocean circulation). The Neogene is marked by a number of well-known climatic and tectonic events (the closing of the Isthmus of Panama, the onset of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), the rapid uplift of the Himalayas, the major intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation), and the response of the ocean before and after these events was a key focus of Leg 138 drilling. To address these objectives at the highest resolution possible, the Leg 138 scientific staff developed a number of new shipboard strategies and analytical procedures. These included the real-time analysis of the near-continuous gamma ray attenuation porosity evaluator (GRAPE) and susceptibility profiles produced by the multisensor track (MST) on unsplit cores to monitor core recovery and, if necessary, to modify the drilling strategy to ensure proper offset of coring gaps; the collection of near-continuous color reflectance data on split cores; the logging of the first hole drilled at each site to optimize drilling and sampling strategies for subsequent holes; and the use of multiple continuous records to unambiguously construct complete composite sections for each site. The complete, continuous records provided by the GRAPE (with a temporal resolution of often yr), in conjunction with an excellent microfossil stratigraphy and often excellent magnetostratigraphy, allowed for astronomical tuning of the stratigraphic record and resulted in a set of internally consistent, high-resolution age models that provide a secure, absolute time scale for the past 6 m.y. For the period before 6 m.y., the absolute time calibration is less secure, but it is still better than any previously offered. The high-resolution stratigraphic framework of Leg 138 provided new insight into the previously ambiguous tectonic history of the region. By assuming that maximum sedimentation rates along the north-south transect would be expected at the equator, the Leg 138 stratigraphy supports the 1985 work of Cox and Engerbretson, which calls for two different poles of rotation of the Pacific Plate during the interval 0-20 Ma. The Leg 138 plate reconstructions also support several previously hypothesized ridge crest jumps and a slowing of the absolute motion of the Nazca Plate at about 5 Ma. Although Leg 138 data that predates about 13 Ma is limited, the impression that one can gain from these data is that the eastern equatorial Pacific was characterized by relatively high carbonate concentrations and accumulation rates before about 11 Ma. This pattern was interrupted occasionally by rapid massive outpourings of near-monospecific laminated diatom oozes that probably represent the formation of massive mats along strong surface-water fronts. The laminated diatom oozes (LDO) continue to be present in the Leg 138 record (many of them being expressed as seismic reflections) until about 4.4 Ma. Carbonate accumulation rates begin to decline slowly between 11 and 9.8 Ma, when, at about 9.5 Ma, a near-complete loss of carbonate (the "carbonate crash") takes place everywhere in the Leg 138 region (and beyond), except at the westernmost sites close to the equator. The "carbonate crash" was a time of fundamental change for the eastern equatorial Pacific, and perhaps for most of the ocean basins. Unlike many of the carbonate variations that precede and postdate it, this "crash" represents a major dissolution event whose effects can be traced seismically in the central and western Pacific. The changes in bottom-water chemistry associated with this event (or series of events) appear to be related to the early phases of the closing of the Panama Gateway. The role of NADW initiation and intensification for controlling carbonate accumulation in the eastern equatorial Pacific is still not resolved; however, ocean modeling demonstrates that the closing of the Panama Gateway may also have a direct influence on NADW production. Therefore, the effects of changes in the Panama Gateway sill depth and the production of NADW may be manifested in the history of eastern equatorial Pacific sedimentation. The "carbonate crash" was followed by a recovery of the carbonate system (except in the Guatemala and Peru basins, which never recovered) that led up to the late Miocene/early Pliocene sedimentation rate maxima, during which equatorial sedimentation rates are as much as five times greater than those of the late Pliocene or Pleistocene. Examination of modern productivity/preservation relationships implies that the sedimentation rate maximum was the result of enhanced productivity. The distribution of eolian sediments and isotopic gradients, along with an analysis of the modes of variance in carbonate deposition over the last 6 m.y., suggest a more northerly position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a stronger north-south gradient across the equator, and a more zonal circulation focused along the equator during the time of maximum sedimentation. The mechanisms suggested for these changes in circulation patterns include the response of the eastern equatorial Pacific to the closing of the Isthmus of Panama, as well as a global increase in the flux of Ca and Si into the oceans, a possible response to evolution of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. In an effort to understand the response of the climate system to external (orbital) forcing, 6-m.y.-long, continuous records of carbonate (derived from GRAPE), δ 1 8 θ and insolation were analyzed and compared. Evolutionary spectral calculations of the variance and coherence among these records indicate that the insolation record is dominated by precessional frequencies, but that the relative importance of the two precessional frequencies has changed significantly over the last 6 m.y. In general, precessional forcing is not found in the carbonate or isotopic records. In the tilt band, however, a linear response is present between solar forcing Pisias, N.G., Mayer, L.A., Janecek, T.R., Palmer-Julson, A., and van Andel, T.H. (Eds.), 1995. Proc. ODP, Sci. Results, 138: College Station, TX (Ocean Drilling Program). College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography Admininstration Building 104, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331-5503, U.S.A. 3 Ocean Mapping Group, Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada E3B 5A3. N.G. PISIAS, L.A. MAYER, A.C. MIX and the carbonate and isotope records over some intervals. The carbonate record appears to be tightly coupled to the tilt component of insolation before about 1.9 Ma; however, the isotope record does not begin to show sensitivity to orbital tilt until about 4.5 Ma, the time of significant changes in sedimentation patterns in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Only during the last 500,000 yr do all frequencies respond in a similar manner; we also see a marked increase in the response of the isotopic record to orbital forcing (including 100,000and 400,000-yr periods).


The long historical record and extensive modern observations for the Vernagtferner make the glacier a prime object for modelling of its present state and past fluctuations. Historically, the glacier appears to have passed through two radically different phases, characterized by cyclic surging and by shrinkage back into higher accumulation-favorable regions, respectively. A unified computer simulation of this bimodal behavior on a highly complex bedrock topography remains beyond the power of existing glacier models. However, the essentials of the two phases have been reproduced. It appears that the surging mode of flow could operate only as long as the glacier remained large enough to create substantial basal melting through the combination of high base stresses and rapid flow rates. The velocity and thickness profiles observed during the retreat phase are shown to be well simulated by a deformational flow model including parameterizations of the most essential three-dimensional features. The great retreat of the glacier since 1848 appears to have resulted from a climatic mass balance decrease over its entire surface of order 0.2 rna - I superimposed on an enlarged post-surge ablation region. This interpretation holds the potential for future readvance, and perhaps an eventual return to the surging mode, foreshadowed by the recent general thickening of the Vernagtferner.


Background: Most previous publications on echocardiography use in Nigeria emanate from public hospitals and academic settings. This study aims to elucidate the peculiarities of echocardiography use in an urban, private hospital study in pediatric patients.
Methods: Prospective and cross-sectional, involving a review of consecutive echocardiogram done at the Pediatric Cardiology unit of the Reddington multi-specialist hospital between February 2005 to January 2009. Data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Level of significance set at p<0.05.
Results: The age range of the subjects was three days to 256 months of age, with a mean age of 59.4 +/- 64months and a male to female ratio of 1: 1.1. Approximately thirty-seven percent of all the echocardiographs done were normal. The most common indication for echocardiography was heart murmurs. Ventricular septal defect was the most prevalent finding based on murmurs. All Patients whose indication for echocardiography was chest pain had normal findings. Congenital heart diseases constituted 108 (85%) of all the abnormal echocardiographic findings.
Conclusion: Our findings in this study generally seem to fall in line with the appropriate use of heart murmur as an indication for echocardiography. There is a high incidence of LVH in patients evaluated via echocardiogram for obesity. There is a similar distribution in congenital heart diseases as compared to other studies both in private and public settings, as well as developed countries compared to developing nations.


Introduction: Spinal cord injuries (SCI) lead to permanent irreversible functional deficits. Poor prognosis of patients is the motivation of searching a treatment for the chronic injury. Planting stem cells provides us with a promising strategy. In the meanwhile, the use of olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) has shown very good results. This study aims at evaluating the effect of transplanted OECs on functional recovery of acute SCI in rats. Materials and methods: In this study, eighteen adult male Wistar rats weighting approximately 210 ± 10 gr were used to study spinal cord injury. They were randomly divided into four groups: Sham (n = 3), Control (n = 6), Vehicle (n=3) and Treatment (n=6). In the Sham Group, only laminectomy was performed in the area of T9 spinal cord. In three groups of Control, vehicle and Treatment, after laminectomy, spinal cord contusion model was performed using the Weight drop technique. Immediately after the injury, 10μl Dulbecco's Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM) alone or with 10 cells were injected to vehicle and Treatment Group animals. For culturing cells, the olfactory mucosa of 7-day-old male Wistar rats was used. Motor function of animals in all groups, was evaluated in the first 48 hours daily and then weekly for eight weeks. Results: Comparing the results of the second to eighth week of the study showed significant differences in the group receiving the OECs with the control group (P<0.05). Conclusion: The results indicate a positive influence of the olfactory ensheathing cells in functional improvement of spinal cord injury in the acute phase of injury.


Abstract α-Thalassemia (α-thal) is the most common autosomal recessive hemoglobinopathy. There is a vast diversity and geographical variability in underlying genotypes in Hb H (β4) patients. Herein, we describe the genotypes found in the largest report of Omani Hb H patients. Moreover, we reviewed and summarized the literature published from the Eastern Mediterranean region. A retrospective review of all genetically confirmed Hb H disease patients diagnosed between 2007 and 2017 at Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, Muscat, Oman, was performed. Hematological parameters and clinical presentations were assessed. Both α-globin genes were screened for deletional and nondeletional mutations using a stepwise diagnostic strategy as described before. A total of 52 patients (27 females and 25 males) with a mean age of 20.6 years (range 0.23–80.0) were molecularly confirmed to carry Hb H disease. The patients had a hemoglobin (Hb) level of 9.3 g/dL (range 5.7–13.0) and mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of 58.4 fL (range 48.2–82.1). A total of eight genotype combinations were identified, with α2 polyadenylation signal mutation (polyA1) (AATAAA>AATAAG (αPA1α/αPA1α), often cited as αT-Saudiα/αT-Saudiα, being the most common (53.8%) followed by –α3.7/– –MED I (28.8%). Our cohort also included patients with combinations of αPA1 with other Hb variants: αPA1α/αPA1α with Hb S (HBB: c.20A>T) trait (n = 2), –α3.7/αPA1α (n = 2) and αcodon 19α (HBA2: c.56delG)/αPA1α (n = 1). Nondeletional Hb H disease due to the αPA1 mutation is the most common in Omanis. Molecular diagnosis is necessary for accurate confirmation of the diagnosis of α-thal, determination of underlying genotypes, follow-up and counseling.


Abstract The ability of point kinetics to describe dynamic processes in accelerator-driven systems (ADSs) is investigated. Full three-dimensional energy-space-time-dependent calculations, coupled with thermal and hydraulic feedback effects, are performed and used as a standard of comparison. Various transient accident sequences are studied. Calculations are performed in the range of keff = 0.9594 to 0.9987 to provide insight into the dependence of the performance on the subcritical level. Numerical experiments are carried out on a minor-actinide–loaded and lead-bismuth–cooled ADS. It is shown that the point kinetics approximation is capable of providing highly accurate calculations in such systems. The results suggest better precision at lower keff levels. It is found that subcritical operation provides features that are favorable from a point kinetics view of application. For example, reduced sensitivity to system reactivity perturbations effectively mitigates any spatial distortions. If a subcritical reactor is subject to a change in the strength of the external source, or a change in reactivity within the subcritical range, the neutron population will adjust to a new stationary level. Therefore, within the normal range of operation, the power predicted by the point kinetics method and the associated error in comparison with the exact solution tends to approach an essentially bounded value. It was found that the point kinetics model is likely to underestimate the power rise following a positive reactivity insertion in an ADS, which is similar to the behavior in critical systems. However, the effect is characteristically lowered in subcritical versus critical or near-critical reactor operation.


IMPROVING UPON A GIS-BASED SPATIALLY DISTRIBUTED RAINFALL-RUNOFF MODEL James Emerick, M.S.University of Pittsburgh, 2003 The modeling of small dendritic watersheds has always been a difficult undertaking. The lack of streamflow data and reliable rainfall data, and the inability to model distributed properties have all been reasons for this difficulty. With improvements in computer technology, advancements in radar rainfall measurement, and the innovations in Geographical Information Systems (GIS), it is possible to make improvements to existing modeling techniques. This, along with increasing environmental concerns, has sparked new interests in the development of watershed models. This goal of this research has been to improve upon a Geographical Information System based rainfall-runoff model. A major improvement to the model has been the implementation of spatially distributed incremental rainfall data obtained from gage adjusted radar measurements. The significance of the radar data is the representation of highly defined spatial and temporal distribution in the rainfall measurements. The current model also makes use of distributed properties of the watershed such as elevations, slopes, soil types, land cover, and stream networks. The direct runoff is calculated using a distributed Curve Number Method. The hydrograph is then developed by the use of a distributed map of isochrones. The model was tested for a small watershed where streamflow data was available. The goal is to test and calibrate the model so that it can be used in watersheds where there is no streamflow data available. DESCRIPTORSCurve NumberDEMDistributedGISHydrographIDRISI RunoffSCSWatershed


Synopsis The Shetland ophiolite was derived from an intra-continental, ocean-floored basin that opened shortly after 600 Ma on the eastern edge of Laurentia, during the tensional opening of the Iapetus Ocean. The precursor sedimentary and volcanic extensional basin is exposed in the south of Shetland and can be followed northeastwards by offshore geophysical anomalies. Eastward subduction of the floor of the basin led to hydration of the descending slab and the overlying mantle wedge. At about 500 Ma pressure from the east caused westward obduction of part of the subducting slab. The obduction thrust originated in the overlying mantle wedge and cut through the descending slab from above into underlying mantle. The result is a nappe cutting steeply through the sub-ocean-floor layers. The obducted nappe over-rode highly metamorphosed Shetland–Dalradian schists and gneisses and now forms the Lower Nappe of the Shetland Ophiolite Complex. The exposed pseudo-stratigraphic succession extends from several kilometres deep in the mantle, as exposed in the west, through the lower crust to the base of the sheeted dykes in the east, before passing beneath the sea; a surface distance of some 6 km. The ophiolitic pseudo-stratigraphy occurs as steeply dipping layers within the nappe, which gravity modelling shows to be about 3 km thick. The section through the ophiolite is lying on its side. After its obduction, erosion of the nappe and nearby metamorphic basement led to deposition of fine-grained, laminated siliceous sediments, locally graphitic and conglomeratic. Resumed pressure from the east during the Scandian orogeny telescoped the Lower Nappe, thereby emplacing an Upper Nappe over the Lower Nappe. The two nappes are separated by an imbricate zone incorporating siliceous sediments, ophiolitic hornblende schist and slices of the ophiolite nappes. The Skaw granite was intruded at about 425.6 Ma during this phase.


YouTube is the most popular website for videos nowadays. Its business model is based on advertisement: ads are introduced in the videos and uploaders are paid based on the number of views of their videos. For this reason, it is imporant for YouTube to be able to check that views are real, and discard those that are faked.
The main purpose of this paper is to understand the mech-
anisms implemented by YouTube to detect and discard faked
views. To this aim, we have developed a robot that performs
faked views; by building on a thorough study of the patterns and the most common traffic sources of videos, and emulating this patterns, our robot shows a very similar behavior to real users. From the results obtained from our experiments, we observe that: (i) we are able to overcome the 301 limit, which corresponds to the first thorough analysis YouTube performs to detect faked views, (ii) we are capable of pushing the total number of views to an unlimited large number, but at a limited growth rate, (iii)
YouTube appears to be insensitive to many behaviors that show that views are faked, except for the IP address used by the client, and (iv) regardless of how sophisticated the robot is, YouTube only counts a fraction of the views realized (around one half).
In order to compare the behavior observed by our robot to
other behaviours, we have considered (i) an experiment with real people watching the video, and (ii) services offered in the Internet that sell views for YouTube videos. We have observed from the first experiment that even with real views, YouTube only seems to be counting about half of them as real views. Furthermore, the second experiment confirms that even some basic tools are able to increase the number of views (e.g., in some cases we found that the average view duration was 0 but still for those cases YouTube counted a large number of views).
The experiments conducted seem to show that YouTube
implements a very basic scheme to detect fake views that is
easily tricked by simple tools, and that YouTube discards a
subsantial number of the views performed even for real views. Such results seem to point to the need for revisting the algorithms implemented by YouTube to detect fake views.


How do people tell of experiences, things and events that mean a lot to them and are unforgettable? Eight Nordic folklorists here examine personal experience stories and the way they are narrated in an attempt to gain an understanding of the people behind them and to reveal how these people handle their history, their lives and their cultural memory. All the articles are based on interviews and narrator-researcher collaboration. The stories tell about birth, sickness and miraculous cures, intergenerational relations, war, and matters not normally talked about. The analyses complement one another and the work may be used as a university course book.


Abstract Introduction: Professional work is an extremely important aspect of the life of an adult. Probably we all want to be satisfied with this, and not just financially. It can be a source of positive experiences, but also a huge negative burden. It often generates and provides us with many adverse reactions, strains or stresses. The aim of the study was to determine the current status of psychological support to Medical Rescue Teams, and the opinions of medical rescuers on the need for psychological help in their work. Materials and methods: A questionnaire was addressed to medical rescuers across the country; 115 respondents participated in the study. It was conducted in April 2016. A statistical analysis of results was performed using the statistical package PQStat ver. 1.6. Analyses of dependences were carried out with χ2 tests. Significance was considered at p < 0.05, and highly significant was taken at p < 0.01. Results: Almost 90% of respondents had never taken part in a psychological workshop. About 80% of medical rescuers had never participated in training courses on the techniques of relieving tension. In the workplaces of 98 (85.2%) of the medical rescuers, there had never been any group meetings held in which stress was relieved via conversation. Sometimes such meetings were held in the workplaces of 17 (14.8%) of the medical rescuers. More than the half of respondents, 72 (62.6%) people, believe that such meetings are definitely needed and could be effective. Conclusions: 1. The current level of psychological support for Medical Rescue Teams is negligible. Only in a few workplaces it is offered to the medical rescuers. The majority of the study group were not provided access to a psychologist. 2. Medical rescuers believe that the profession requires working with a psychologist, and this cooperation should be ensured by the employer. 3. In 85.2% of cases there were no conversational meetings after difficult actions, with analysis and relieving of emotional tensions. If such meetings were held, almost 90% of respondents would participate. 4. The current ways of reducing stress for medical rescuers are not always safe for their health and can lead to addictions. A possible cause is non-attendance by the majority in workshops on the techniques of relieving tension and psychological training.


In September 2000 Birbhum, Murshidabad, and Nadia Districts of West Bengal suffered a sudden and massive flood, together with other districts of the state. The scale of damage can be judged from the fact that 20 million people lost their homes or had them severely damaged, and many of these people also lost most of their farming and domestic possessions. A �lake� 150 kms by 60 kms submerged the countryside, and then moved south and slightly eastwards, doing further damage. The basic cause was a tropical depression sitting over Jharkhand, Bihar and Bengal for several days, at the end of the monsoon season, when the ground had already reached field capacity. But the disastrous impact of this meteorological event on the population was undoubtedly amplified by the road, rail and flood-protection embankments which criss-cross the countryside. As they were randomly breached, the floods struck villages with little warning and with great rapidity. Examination of the historical records shows that the problems created by the embankments have been recognised for more than a hundred years. Suggestions are made as to how a new style of development can occur in the future.


One key to providing intelligent assistance to workstation users is to construct machine-understandable descriptions of the user's ongoing projects, or activities, (e.g., their committee memberships, writing projects, conference organization activities), and indices describing which emails, meetings, and colleagues relate to which activity. This paper presents a program, ActivityExtractor, which examines the user's workstation contents to infer such activity descriptions. In earlier work [Huang, et al., 2004] we described an algorithm which infers activities by clustering the user's emails based on their word distributions. Here we extend this approach in several ways: (1) by incorporating a social network analysis of email senders and recipients, (2) by considering workstation contents beyond email, including contents accessible via Google Desktop Search, and (3) by allowing simple user input in the form of a list of activity/proj ect names. We describe the ActivityExtractor algorithms and report on experiments applying these to several users' workstations.


Given multiple data sets of relational data that share a number of dimensions, how can we efficiently decompose our data into the latent factors? Factorization of a single matrix or tensor has attracted much attention, as, e.g., in the Netflix challenge, with users rating movies. However, we often have additional, side, information, like, e.g., demographic data about the users, in the Netflix example above. Incorporating the additional information leads to the coupled factorization problem. So far, it has been solved for relatively small datasets. We provide a distributed, scalable method for decomposing matrices, tensors, and coupled data sets through stochastic gradient descent on a variety of objective functions. We offer the following contributions: (1) Versatility: Our algorithm can perform matrix, tensor, and coupled factorization, with flexible objective functions including the Frobenius norm, Frobenius norm with an `1 induced sparsity, and non-negative factorization. (2) Scalability: FlexiFaCT scales to unprecedented sizes in both the data and model, with up to billions of parameters. FlexiFaCT runs on standard Hadoop. (3) Convergence proofs showing that FlexiFaCT converges on the variety of objective functions, even with projections.


This study presents a small scale energy system modelling tool which can be used to plan a secure and economical hourly generation schedule, for a day ahead commitment process in a power system with conventional and wind generation units. The problem solves a unit commitment problem (UC) with operational and transmission system constraints. Simple energy balances or UC solutions obtained without considering power flow constraints are not practical due to secure operation of the power network. With the increasing inclusion of wind generators and other renewable generation, line flows can be altered that may lead to expensive schedules and may not be even feasible at worst. Thus the need for a modelling tool in this context is apparent.
The unit commitment problem is formulated to run the optimal power flow dispatch as an integral part of the solution. A forward dynamic programming approach is used to solve for the unit commitment optimization. The unit commitment model is validated using a standard text book case study and the optimal power flow solution using "MatPOWER", a tool for power flow analysis. A case study is carried out on the island of Corvo in Azores-Portugal to analyse an existing power network operation along with its future expansion plans in wind power integration. The results are compared with the actual data from Corvo and a HOMER simulation of the same.
The algorithms are implemented through a Matlab simulation environment, and the results obtained are quite encouraging.
The unit commitment solution was developed in collaboration with a colleague, Abhishek Shivakumar who is working on developing a demand response algorithm in alignment with the larger scope of the same project.


Since 2001, there are more than 50 national border barriers around the globe — proposed, under construction, or finished. My dissertation considers this new infrastructure inside larger questions of sovereignty, governance, immigration, and security in the "borderless" age of globalization. To approach this work I used an epistemological framework of border thinking, a "third space" hermeneutics that locates the border as a central place to theorize the complex geopolitical and postcolonial relationships. I conducted two case studies of this fortress infrastructure, one along the U.S.-Mexico border and another along the Costa Rican border with Nicaragua, considering how new border walls are material manifestations of inchoate sovereignty, occupying claims in the borderlands — one of the latest frontier zones of global capital. Broadly, this project calls for us to consider the global proliferation of national border walls and fences in a way that invokes collective action against the persisting operative logic of race/culture thinking that underpins securitization as both a form of governance and an ideology. It situates the urgency of this intellectual work inside the expanding sovereign jurisdictions of capital and opens up new sets of questions about how national border barriers are integral structures inside the changing ideo-political frameworks of war, sovereignty, and governance in the age of the drone.


The Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) test is a commonly used test of intelligence. The literature suggests a variety of problem-solving methods for addressing RPM problems. For a graduate-level artificial intelligence class in Fall 2014, we asked students to develop intelligent agents that could address 123 RPM-inspired problems, essentially crowdsourcing RPM problem solving. The students in the class submitted 224 agents that used a wide variety of problem-solving methods. In this paper, we first report on the aggregate results of those 224 agents on the 123 problems, then focus specifically on four of the most creative, novel, and effective agents in the class. We find that the four agents, using four very different problem-solving methods, were all able to achieve significant success. This suggests the RPM test may be amenable to a wider range of problem-solving methods than previously reported. It also suggests that human computation might be an effective strategy for collecting a wide variety of methods for creative tasks.


Urban traffic optimization using traffic cameras as sensors is driving the need to advance state-of-the-art multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) tracking. This work introduces CityFlow, a city-scale traffic camera dataset consisting of more than 3 hours of synchronized HD videos from 40 cameras across 10 intersections, with the longest distance between two simultaneous cameras being 2.5 km. To the best of our knowledge, CityFlow is the largest-scale dataset in terms of spatial coverage and the number of cameras/videos in an urban environment. The dataset contains more than 200K annotated bounding boxes covering a wide range of scenes, viewing angles, vehicle models, and urban traffic flow conditions. Camera geometry and calibration information are provided to aid spatio-temporal analysis. In addition, a subset of the benchmark is made available for the task of image-based vehicle re-identification (ReID). We conducted an extensive experimental evaluation of baselines/state-of-the-art approaches in MTMC tracking, multi-target single-camera (MTSC) tracking, object detection, and image-based ReID on this dataset, analyzing the impact of different network architectures, loss functions, spatio-temporal models and their combinations on task effectiveness. An evaluation server is launched with the release of our benchmark at the 2019 AI City Challenge (https://www.aicitychallenge.org/) that allows researchers to compare the performance of their newest techniques. We expect this dataset to catalyze research in this field, propel the state-of-the-art forward, and lead to deployed traffic optimization(s) in the real world.


Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) and electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) etching were used in the development of silica layers for planar waveguide applications. The addition of GeH4 to silica was used to control the refractive index of core layers with core-to-clad index differences in the range of 0.2%-1.3%. Refractive index uniformity variance of ±0.0003 was achieved after annealing for 4-inch Si 〈100〉 wafers. The core layers with thickness up to 6 μm were etched by ECR with optimized recipe and mask material. Low-loss silica-on-silicon waveguides whose propagation loss is approximately 0.07 dB/cm at 1550 nm are fabricated.


Digital technologies are increasingly pervading our everyday lives. Many of our everyday practices involve the appropriation of digital technologies. The aim of this piece is to discuss two central issues surrounding this digitalisation of everyday life: (i) what constitutes digital culture?; and, (ii) how do digital technologies transform ownership? These questions are considered in this work with the intention of creating a benchmark from which future explorative (empirical) case studies can be developed. The central argument of the piece is that the study of digital technologies should be framed within everyday life. In other words, the study of digital technologies should be redefined as the study of the digitalisation of everyday life.


There is growing recognition of the benefits and increasing need for volunteers
providing in-home support to individuals and families in the community. This is
particularly the case in the domains of hospice palliative care, due to the impacts of an
ageing population, and supporting families with children, due to the challenges
presented in the early years of life especially in rural areas. The development of these
services in rural areas often entails urban-based volunteer services extending services
to rural communities through urban-based management of local, rural-based
volunteers. The limited research in this area suggests that rural communities face
distinctive complexities in the provision of volunteer in-home support, which are yet
to be fully explored and are likely to be unaccounted for in urban-centric models. This
highlights the need for new research to guide the reorientation of urban strategies to
meet the particular challenges and opportunities associated with rural volunteer inhome
health provision.
The aim of this research study has been to explore the experience of rural volunteer
in-home support, through urban-based management of rural-based volunteers, in order
to further the understanding of this form of service delivery in rural communities.
Specifically, it sought to identify factors that facilitate and/or hinder its provision and
how their impact may be fostered or ameliorated. The study focused on the domains
of hospice palliative care and supporting families with children through the multiple
perspectives of urban-based volunteer coordinators, rural and urban specialist service
providers and rural volunteers. A qualitative research study design involving 27
predominantly rural participants was undertaken utilising volunteer demographic
information, semi-structured, in-depth interviews, a focus group, and thematic
analysis of qualitative data.
The findings identified multiple complex and interrelated factors which may facilitate
and/or hinder rural volunteer in-home support. The overriding themes which emerged
were the crucial importance of a community development approach which inherently
considers the local rural context, and some manner of a locally based coordinating
presence in facilitating the development of rural volunteer in-home support services
which are appropriate to the specific rural setting. A synthesis of findings from the
study and issues identified in the literature led to the development of a table of 'flags'
or reference points, which provide insight into discerning and responding to particular
rural socioeconomic and cultural factors which may facilitate and/or hinder rural
volunteer in-home support: precedence of family support; self-reliance; multiple
overlapping relationships; intermittent need; fragmented and under-resourced nature
of the rural health system; and rural volunteers' strong sense of connection to their
local community and volunteer organisation. This study contributes to an
understanding of the nature of volunteer in-home support in the rural context, and
how urban-based volunteer services seeking to provide services in rural areas may
work with rural communities to meet rural exigencies.


The paper highlights four tendencies in the media reporting of teachers and education: (a) recurring patterns of defining education in crisis, (b) mantling responsibility as exterior spokespersons for education and teachers, (c) excluding teachers' and educational researchers' knowledge and experiences in the media and (d) simplifying the notion of a good and bad teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity. In this paper, I explore how the simplifications of teachers and education that are often presented in the media can be interpreted as structural violence. In the light of these tendencies, research on structural violence helps to remind us that: (a) teachers are unwillingly forced into a paradoxical (in)visibility, (b) they are squeezed in-between two pressuring external demands, namely the complexities in their professional assignment that are politically steered and stereotypes of the good and bad teacher produced by, in this case, the media, (c) they risk wasting time and energy on addressing prejudices that have nothing to do with the specific work they are expected to do and (d) the logic of binary stereotypes is a power issue that brands teachers into a position of permanent failure.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the frequency of different types of tumours associated with cord compression, their mode of presentation and treatment outcome.

DESIGN
Retrospective study.

SETTING
Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), a teaching and referral hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, from January 1985 to December 1994.

SUBJECTS
Thirty eight patients.

RESULTS
There were twenty one males and seventeen females with a male/female ratio of 1.3:1 and a mean age of 36.9 years. Primary spinal cord tumours were more common (65.8%) than metastatic tumours (34.2%). The commonest spinal cord tumour was meningioma (23.7%) followed by neurofibroma (15.8%). Most of the patients (70%) did not show any clinical improvement after surgery.

CONCLUSION
Spinal cord tumours accounted for about 15% of all CNS tumours treated at the Kenyatta National Hospital. Most of the patients had total paralysis of the limbs at the time of presentation. Meningiomas and neurofibromas were the commonest cause of cord compression at KNH. Greater effort is needed to detect these tumours early when the signs and symptoms may be reversible following surgery.


manually search for clues that allow unbilled charges to be correctly charged before the state regulated time period expires. In order to recover billable revenue Pacific Bell elected to bring additional automated support to the problem. As a result, Pacific Bell chose to implement an expert system, the Expert Message Correction System (EMCS). EMCS was deployed in November 1993, and is currently processing thousands of unidentified calls each day. The EMCS architecture involves access to multiple mainframe applications and databases, and incorporates a multi-process architecture that automatically selects and schedules multiple expert system processes to execute within a single workstation. This design provides a high degree of parallelism to enable processing the large volumes of calls and their associated mainframe data. In addition to this multi-process architecture, EMCS provides new uses of Al technology in the telecommunications industry, particularly in the areas of billing and investigative procedures.


Starting from a 1,3-phenylene-linked diporphyrin zinc(II) complex 2ZA, repeated stepwise Ag(I)-promoted coupling reactions provided linear oligomers 4ZA, 6ZA, 8ZA, and 12ZA. The intramolecular cyclization reaction of 12ZA under dilute conditions (1x10(-6) M) gave porphyrin ring C12ZA with a diameter of approximately 35 A in 60% yield. This synthetic strategy has been applied to a 1,3-phenylene-linked tetraporphyrin 4ZB to provide 8ZB, 12ZB, 16ZB, 24ZB, and 32ZB. The intramolecular coupling reaction of 24ZB gave a larger 24-mer porphyrin ring C24ZB with a diameter of approximately 70 A in 34% yield. These two large porphyrin rings were characterized by means of 1H NMR spectroscopy, matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectroscopy, UV-visible spectroscopy, gel permeation chromatography (GPC) analysis, and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) techniques. The STM images of C12ZA reveal largely circular structures, whereas those of C24ZB exhibit mostly ellipsoidal shapes, indicating more conformational flexibility of C24ZB. Similar to the case of C12ZA, the efficient excitation energy transfer along the ring has been confirmed for C24ZB by using the time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) and picosecond transient absorption anisotropy (TAA) measurements, and occurs with a rate of (35 ps)(-1) for energy hops between neighboring tetraporphyrin subunits. Collectively, the present work provides an important step for the construction of large cyclic-arranged porphyrin arrays with ample electronic interactions as a model of light-harvesting antenna.


Australia's misuse of market power provision has been the subject of debate throughout its 40-year existence. It is presently in the spotlight again, receiving consideration as part of the "Root and Branch Review" of the competition law. Despite consideration by numerous earlier reviews, the prevailing view has been that little (if any) amendment of the provision is needed. This article examines the legislative origins of the three most distinctive features of the provision, namely that it does not permit an efficiency defence (or authorisation); it does not incorporate an effects-based test; and it relies on a firm making use of its market power.The analysis reveals that these elements were shaped in significant respects by superseded theories and apparent inattention to their implications, giving rise to weaknesses in the reach and operation of s 46(1). There is good reason to question the protected status which these elements have enjoyed in Australia's unilateral conduct law.


Through-the-wall radar imaging is an electromagnetic wave sensing technology capable of detecting targets behind walls, doors, and opaque obstacles. Identification of stationary targets is often achieved by first forming an image of the scene, and then segmenting and classifying the targets of interest. In order to provide prompt and reliable situational awareness, this paper proposes a radar signal classification approach that does not rely on image formation. Here, a dictionary learning based method is employed to classify targets behind a wall using the signals received from individual antennas. The cepstrum coefficients of the high resolution range profile are first extracted as features. Then, the latent consistent K-SVD algorithm is used to learn a discriminative dictionary and a linear classifier simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed method can classify individual radar signals with high accuracy, without having recourse to image formation.


Water pipe failures can not only have a great impact on people's daily life but also cause significant waste of water which is an essential and precious resource to human beings. As a result, preventative maintenance for water pipes, particularly in urban-scale networks, is of great importance for a sustainable society. To achieve effective replacement and rehabilitation, failure prediction aims to proactively find those 'most-likely-to-fail' pipes becomes vital and has been attracting more attention from both academia and industry, especially from the civil engineering field. This paper presents an already-deployed industrial computational system for pipe failure prediction. As an alternative to risk matrix methods often depending on ad-hoc domain heuristics, learning based methods are adopted using the attributes with respect to physical, environmental, operational conditions and etc. Further challenge arises in practice when lacking of profile attributes. A dive into the failure records shows that the failure event sequences typically exhibit temporal clustering patterns, which motivates us to use the stochastic process to tackle the failure prediction task. Specifically, the failure sequence is formulated as a self-exciting stochastic process which is, to our best knowledge, a novel formulation for pipe failure prediction. And we show that it outperforms a baseline assuming the failure risk grows linearly with aging. Broad new problems and research points for the machine learning community are also introduced for future work.


In this study, the relative growth, feeding, reproduction,
absolute growth and population structure of the Indo-Pacific sandy shore crab, Matuta lunaris(Forskal)(Brachyura: Calappidae) were investigated, using samples collected in monthly intervals from Pallarenda beach, Townsville, Australia, between April, 1984 and May, 1985.
The relative growth patterns of 15 morphological characters
were determined using direct plots, log regressions and relative proportions. Three functional units were recognized, namely, the carapace, the chela and the abdomen and its associated structures.
There were no marked changes in the relative growth patterns of the carapace dimensions with size, sex or sexual maturity. However, there were variations in the growth patterns of the chela characters and those of the abdomen and its associated structures, i.e. the thoracic plate and the pleopods. These variations appeared to be associated with the feeding and reproduction. Those of the chela were primarily related to size during ontogeny and were discussed in relation to changes in its mechanical capabilities. Those of the abdomen, the thoracic plate and the pleopods were related to sex and sexual maturity and were discussed in relation to the differences in the specific reproductive functions of these structures.
Analysis of the stomach contents using the percent occurrence and percent point methods indicated that M. lunaris is a facultative scavenger and a predator of small crustaceans and molluscs. In addition, there were marked changes in the composition of its diet during ontogeny with small individuals primarily feeding on small
crustaceans such as sergestids and copepods, and large individuals
primarily feeding on hermit crabs, gastropods and bivalves.
The reproductive biology was investigated using gonad indices,
histological analysis of the gonads and field and laboratory
observations of sexually mature individuals. Reproductive activity
in terms of gamete production, mating behaviour and brood incubation
was continuous throughout the year with marked asynchrony between
individuals and no apparent seasonality. The mating behaviour
involves a prolonged precopulatory grasping between a postpuberty
male and a prepuberty female, after which the female undergoes a
puberty moult and copulation occurs. Ovulation and oviposition were
found to occur several weeks after copulation. Adult females were
found to be capable of producing more than one egg batch from a
single copulatory event with each batch containing approximately
65,000 eggs.
The absolute growth pattern was determined based on the
analysis of moult increment data. Both sexes were found to exhibit a determinate growth pattern with the puberty moult being the terminal moult. However, marked differences in the growth strategies of the two sexes were found. Male absolute growth is characterized by constant but relatively small (24.7%) moult increments and an unknown and possibly variable number of instars, each with a wide size range. Female absolute growth is characterized by relatively large (41-85%) but variable moult increments, and at least 5 distinct instars, each with restricted size ranges.

The population biology of M. lunaris in Pallarenda beach was assessed in terms of relative abundance, sex ratio, population structure and growth. M. lunaris was found to be abundant throughout the year, and although the population was dominated by large individuals (30-50 m carapace width) most size classes were consistently present. The sex ratio remained constant at 1:l. The estimated time between settlement and maturity was approximately 119 days in males and 148 days in females.


The aim of this research is to explore the relationship of corporate governance with firm risk. This study establishes a link between corporate governance variables and firm risk for a sample of 106 Pakistani firms over a time of six years (2005-2010). Based on the estimation results, family control and bank control have negative impact on the firm risk whereas ownership structure and chairman/CEO duality posit positive relationship with risk. This provides a direction for firms to introduce more non-family control to the board of directors and not allow banks to have majority shareholding in their stocks. Also, directors should be asked to have a reasonable ownership in the stocks of the firm so that they can decide in the best interest of the firm and for the increase of their stock value. Chief executive should also hold the chair in order to have unity of command and a better decision-making influence.