What does the term "peer effects" mean in a school environment? It includes the effects of students' teaching one another, but that is only the most direct form of peer effects. Intelligent, hard-working students can affect their peers through knowledge spillovers and through their influence on academic and disciplinary standards in the classroom. Alternatively, misbehaving students may disrupt the classroom, thereby sapping their teacher's time and energy. The makeup of a classroom--its average family income, the number of children with disabilities, its racial and gender balance--can also create peer effects. Children with learning disabilities may draw disproportionately on their teacher's time; racial or gender tension in the classroom may interfere with learning; wealthier parents may purchase learning resources that get spread over a classroom. Peer effects may even operate through the ways in which teachers or administrators react to students. For instance, if teachers believe that less should be expected of minority children, they might lower their academic standards when confronted with a classroom that has a high share of black or Hispanic students. The other students in such a classroom would experience negative peer effects, not due to the minority students' influence but because of the teacher's assumptions. Peer effects, if they do indeed exist, have implications for a number of policy issues in education. For example, the literature on school finance and control is currently absorbed with the question of whether students are affected by the achievement of their schoolmates. If peer effects exist at school, a school-finance system that encourages an efficient distribution of peers among all schools will make society's investments in student learning more productive. The debate over" tracking," the system in which students are exposed only to peers with similar achievement, turns partly on the question of whether being concentrated in lower-level classrooms merely exacerbates the problems of low-achieving children. Desegregation plans that assign students to schools outside their neighborhood or school district also rest partly on the belief that one's peers can exercise enormous influence over one's performance. However, there are two principal difficulties for theories that rely on peer effects. First, however much sense the theory of peer effects makes, there are formidable obstacles to estimating them, Although some credible estimates of peer effects do exist, people often rely on evidence that is seriously biased by selection effects. For instance, if everyone in a group is high achieving, many observers assume that achievement is an effect of belonging to the group instead of a reason for belonging to it. Also, the most popular model used by researchers to estimate peer effects (the "baseline" model) assumes that peer effects are a zero-sum phenomenon--that is, in order to give one student a better peer, that peer must be taken away from another student; the two effects cancel one another out, According to the baseline model, a student's reading score would be affected linearly by the average reading score of his classmates, Regardless of how one allocates peers, total societal achievement remains the same under the baseline model. But many arguments assume that total societal achievement can be increased if peers are redistributed. For instance, the argument against "tracking" is based on the notion that both low- and high-achieving students benefit from being exposed to one another in the classroom. By contrast, the idea behind "gifted and talented" programs is that high-achieving students benefit from being among one another. Thus, although it is tempting to dismiss the baseline model as naive or restrictiv e, if one were able to show, empirically, that the baseline model adequately described peer effects, some interesting theories would fall by the wayside. …


Ukraine's intention to sign the European Association Agreement at the Vilnius summit in late November 2013 has raised a furor in the Kremlin, which wants it to join the Customs Union instead. In retaliation, Russia has imposed trade sanctions against Ukraine in clear violation of its obligations in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Aslund argues that Europe, Ukraine, and Russia all share the blame for creating the current impasse and must alter their policies to resolve the conflict. Ukraine should improve its macroeconomic policies to reduce its vulnerability and also comply with all EU demands, including releasing Yulia Tymoshenko. The European Union should support Ukraine but also make sure that Ukraine meets its conditions so that both parties can sign the agreement in November. The Association Agreement will bring substantial gains to Ukraine, whereas the Customs Union is smaller, less competitive, and does not offer Ukraine any significant benefits. Russia should realize that it is not in its national interest to force countries to join its Customs Union. It should obey the rules of the WTO and the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Agreement and end its trade sanctions against Ukraine. The United States and the European Union should defend Ukraine against Russian economic aggression in the WTO and through vocal and economic support.


Object manipulation from 3D visual inputs poses many challenges on building generalizable perception and policy models. However, 3D assets in existing benchmarks mostly lack the diversity of 3D shapes that align with real-world intra-class complexity in topology and geometry. Here we propose SAPIEN Manipulation Skill Benchmark (ManiSkill) to benchmark manipulation skills over diverse objects in a full-physics simulator. 3D assets in ManiSkill include large intra-class topological and geometric variations. Tasks are carefully chosen to cover distinct types of manipulation challenges. Latest progress in 3D vision also makes us believe that we should customize the benchmark so that the challenge is inviting to researchers working on 3D deep learning. To this end, we simulate a moving panoramic camera that returns ego-centric point clouds or RGB-D images. In addition, we would like ManiSkill to serve a broad set of researchers interested in manipulation research. Besides supporting the learning of policies from interactions, we also support learning-from-demonstrations (LfD) methods, by providing a large number of high-quality demonstrations (~36,000 successful trajectories, ~1.5M point cloud/RGB-D frames in total). We provide baselines using 3D deep learning and LfD algorithms. All code of our benchmark (simulator, environment, SDK, and baselines) is open-sourced, and a challenge facing interdisciplinary researchers will be held based on the benchmark.


This study was conducted to acquire how forest policy making process and implementation have been going on. The role of discourses, knowledge, actors and their networks determine effectiveness of policy debate to meet its goal. Forest policy making process and implementation was not occurred in a linear process as constructed in the rational framework. Imperfected knowledge creates dispute resolution. Effective interaction among actors to solve their diverse perception was determined by knowledge as well as discourses. The strength of actors and their networks and gap of their interest are significant factors to meet their agreed solution. The facts of forest policy process and implementation are expected to be understood by stakeholders and they should bear in mind that effort to improve performance of forestry development based on implementation of existing policy and policy reform remain unpredictable. This analysis are also expected to be used by stakeholders to get better policy intervention strategy.


The objective of this paper is to report our investigation demonstrating that the phase angle information of complex impedance could be a simple indicator of a breath cycle in chest Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). The study used clinical neonatal EIT data. The results show that measurement of the phase angle from complex EIT data can be used as a complementary information for improving the conventional breath detection algorithms.


Restrictions imposed by the Government of India on the emigration of women in 'unskilled' categories such as domestic work are framed as measures intended to protect women from exploitation. Special protection for certain categories of emigrant women workers makes way for gendered conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty through the use of gender to assert control over space in ways that curtail women's access to mobility and emigrant work opportunities. However, restrictions have directed potential migrants to the use of informal / illegal processes in connivance with state agencies. Whereas, intermediaries, including recruiting agents and government officials, profit from the use of informal / illegal processes by prospective emigrants and hence they have an interest in rendering these more effective than formal processes established by the state, we argue that the gender politics around movement provides an enabling condition for both state restrictions and the burgeoning of informal / illegal processes. To spell out the implications of state policy on emigrant women domestic workers, the paper compares their position and experience of migration with that of emigrant nurses on the one hand and outmigrant fish processing workers on the other. It also explores the nature of women's agency involved when domestic workers resist state policy and social norms to emigrate through informal / illegal means.


Given a sufficiently large amount of labeled data, the non-convex low-rank matrix recovery problem contains no spurious local minima, so a local optimization algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a global minimum starting from any initial guess. However, the actual amount of data needed by this theoretical guarantee is very pessimistic, as it must prevent spurious local minima from existing anywhere, including at adversarial locations. In contrast, prior work based on good initial guesses have more realistic data requirements, because they allow spurious local minima to exist outside of a neighborhood of the solution. In this paper, we quantify the relationship between the quality of the initial guess and the corresponding reduction in data requirements. Using the restricted isometry constant as a surrogate for sample complexity, we compute a sharp threshold number of samples needed to prevent each specific point on the optimization landscape from becoming a spurious local minima. Optimizing the threshold over regions of the landscape, we see that, for initial points not too close to the ground truth, a linear improvement in the quality of the initial guess amounts to a constant factor improvement in the sample complexity.


. Two keystones of Industry 4.0 are the increased use of autonomous robots and advanced simulation software. Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) combines the strengths of humans and robots, opening up application areas that previously could not be automated. However, the realization of HRC on industrial shop floors is held back by several challenges: safety, trust, the need for intuitive interfaces, and design methods. This study investigates the automotive industry's perspective on relevant application areas and potential benefits of HRC. The data were collected through a survey of 185 participants from a variety of working roles in the automotive industry. The results of the study indicate that participants from the automotive industry consider that the areas best suited to the implementation of collaborative robots are material handling, assembly, and quality control, with potential benefits in ergonomics, efficiency, and quality. The results can be used for the development of a future virtual HRC simulation model. well as design methods including planning and allocation of work tasks. The literature shows that a few HRC


BACKGROUND
Hospital medicine groups (HMGs) typically receive financial support from hospitals. Determining a fair amount of financial support requires negotiation between HMG and hospital leaders. As the hospital medicine care model evolves, hospital leaders may regularly challenge HMGs to demonstrate the financial value of activities that do not directly generate revenue.

OBJECTIVE
To describe current attitudes and beliefs of hospital executives regarding the value of contributions made by HMGs.

DESIGN
Thematic content analysis of key informant interviews.

PARTICIPANTS
Twenty-four healthcare institutional leaders, including hospital presidents, chief medical officers, chief executive officers, and chief financial officers. Participants comprised a diverse sample from all regions in the United States, including rural, suburban, and urban locations, and academic and nonacademic institutions.

RESULTS
Executives highly valued hospitalist groups that demonstrate alignment with hospital priorities, and often used this concept to summarize the HMG's success across several value domains. Most executives evaluated only a few key HMG metrics, but almost no executives reported calculating the HMG return on investment by summing pertinent quantitative contributions. Respondents described an evolving concept of hospitalist value and believed that HMGs generate substantial value that is difficult to measure financially.

CONCLUSIONS
Hospital executives appear to make financial support decisions based on a small number of basic financial or care quality metrics combined with a subjective assessment of the HMG's broader alignment with hospital priorities. HMG leaders should focus on building relationships that facilitate dialog about alignment with hospital needs.


Waveguide terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is demonstrated to have the sensitivity to characterize nanometer-thick water layers on the surfaces of a parallel-plate metal waveguide. The measured far-infrared absorption and index of refraction of the 20-nm water layers are in reasonable self-consistent agreement with those of bulk water.


Synopsis A new fossil of the rare and little known arthropod group Chasmataspida (Chelicerata), is described as Achanarraspis reedi gen. et sp. nov. from the Middle Devonian (late Eifelian) of Achanarras Quarry, Caithness, Scotland. This is the first known occurrence of arthropod remains from this locality. Chasmataspids appear to be closely related to eurypterids and fossils of these groups have been confused with each other in the past. Achanarraspis resembles Lower Devonian chasmataspids from Germany, the Midland Valley of Scotland and the Severnya Zemlya Archipeligo, Siberia, but is distinguished from these taxa in possessing a carapace which is distinctly longer than the preabdomen, sharp lateral epimera on all postabdominal tergites, and a distinctive telson morphology. The Middle Devonian age makes Achanarraspis the youngest chasmataspid yet known and significantly extends the known stratigraphical range of the group. Other occurrences of arthropods from the Caithness Flags are reviewed and include conchostracan crustaceans, incomplete eurypterids and a now lost xiphosuran specimen collected in the late 1800s.


We address the task of joint training of transliteration models for multiple language pairs (multilingual transliteration). This is an instance of multitask learning, where individual tasks (language pairs) benefit from sharing knowledge with related tasks. We focus on transliteration involving related tasks i.e., languages sharing writing systems and phonetic properties (orthographically similar languages). We propose a modified neural encoder-decoder model that maximizes parameter sharing across language pairs in order to effectively leverage orthographic similarity. We show that multilingual transliteration significantly outperforms bilingual transliteration in different scenarios (average increase of 58% across a variety of languages we experimented with). We also show that multilingual transliteration models can generalize well to languages/language pairs not encountered during training and hence perform well on the zeroshot transliteration task. We show that further improvements can be achieved by using phonetic feature input.


Background—Epidemiological studies have shown that a large proportion of coronary heart disease and stroke events are explained by borderline or elevated risk factors and that adults with optimal risk factors greatly avoid these events. The degree to which this applies to heart failure incidence is not well documented. Methods and Results—We categorized baseline (1987–1989) risk factors in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study cohort (n=13 460, aged 45 to 64 years) into optimal, borderline, and elevated groups based on national guidelines, using a 4-factor score (blood pressure, plasma cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking) and a 5-factor score (which included body mass). Incidence of hospitalized heart failure (n=1344) was identified over a 16-year period. Only 4.9% of the cohort at baseline had all optimal risk factors based on the 4-factor score and 2.6% using the 5-factor score. Compared with participants with any elevated risk factor using the 4-factor score, the age-, sex-, and race-adjusted relative hazard for heart failure events was 0.18 (95% CI, 0.10 to 0.32) for those with all optimal risk factors and 0.35 (95% CI, 0.30 to 0.41) for those with only borderline risk factors. A population-attributable fraction estimate suggested that having at least 1 of the 4 risk factors, elevated or borderline, accounted for 77.1% of heart failure events. For the 5-factor score, that percentage was 88.8%. Conclusion—Middle-aged adults with optimal (low) risk factors have low incidence rates of heart failure, which supports redoubled efforts to prevent risk factor development in the first place.


In the middle of the XVII century, a scandalous case outraged the whole population of Madrid: the court alcalde don Martin Bautista de Lanuza, senior official of the judicial power and representative of the royal power, was accused of having committed several serious offences: the image of justice was defied. If it was necessary at first to restore this image by giving an exemplary judgment, the question arose as to whether certain favours had been granted to the accused. The silence about this affair is also a problem: is it a deliberate way to misinform people? Nevertheless, the impact of this case of corruption went far beyond Madrid. Moreover, this affair raises another problem: what has historiography been willing to learn and remember from this crime case?


ABSTRACT We produce a one‐year 2017 seismic‐hazard forecast for the central and eastern United States from induced and natural earthquakes that updates the 2016 one‐year forecast; this map is intended to provide information to the public and to facilitate the development of induced seismicity forecasting models, methods, and data. The 2017 hazard model applies the same methodology and input logic tree as the 2016 forecast, but with an updated earthquake catalog. We also evaluate the 2016 seismic‐hazard forecast to improve future assessments. The 2016 forecast indicated high seismic hazard (greater than 1% probability of potentially damaging ground shaking in one year) in five focus areas: Oklahoma–Kansas, the Raton basin (Colorado/New Mexico border), north Texas, north Arkansas, and the New Madrid Seismic Zone. During 2016, several damaging induced earthquakes occurred in Oklahoma within the highest hazard region of the 2016 forecast; all of the 21 moment magnitude ( M ) ≥4 and 3 M ≥5 earthquakes occurred within the highest hazard area in the 2016 forecast. Outside the Oklahoma–Kansas focus area, two earthquakes with M ≥4 occurred near Trinidad, Colorado (in the Raton basin focus area), but no earthquakes with M ≥2.7 were observed in the north Texas or north Arkansas focus areas. Several observations of damaging ground‐shaking levels were also recorded in the highest hazard region of Oklahoma. The 2017 forecasted seismic rates are lower in regions of induced activity due to lower rates of earthquakes in 2016 compared with 2015, which may be related to decreased wastewater injection caused by regulatory actions or by a decrease in unconventional oil and gas production. Nevertheless, the 2017 forecasted hazard is still significantly elevated in Oklahoma compared to the hazard calculated from seismicity before 2009.


The obligate plant parasite fungi in the family Albuginaceae are responsible for causing white rust diseases on weeds and they are rather common worldwide. Weedy plants with characteristic symptoms have been collected in 2014 and 2015 on location Hajdú-Bihar and Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok counties in Hungary. The determination of the species were based on the morphological characters both pathogens and hosts. Albugo candida was determined on shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris). Common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is a host for Wilsoniana portulacae. The fungus Wilsonia bliti (syn.: Albugo bliti), the causal agent of white rust disease was found on redroot pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus).


Objective Summary of findings (SoF) tables present results of systematic reviews in a concise and explicit format. Adopted by many review groups including the Cochrane Collaboration and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), optimal understanding of SoF table may be influenced by the type of information being conveyed and objectives or preferences of the end user. This study aims to compare three SoF table formats in terms of understanding, accessibility, satisfaction and preference with systematic review users. Methods The primary objective of this three-arm randomised controlled non-inferiority trial is to investigate whether an alternative Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) SoF table or Evidence-based Practice Center SoF table is non-inferior to the current GRADE SoF table in the understanding of the information presented to systematic review users, particularly for descriptive findings. Researchers, clinical practice guideline developers, policy-makers or knowledge transfer professionals will be recruited. Data will be collected electronically at baseline and after randomisation. Non-inferiority would be declared if the difference in the proportion of participants who understand the information displayed in the alternative SoF table is 10% or less. Ethics and dissemination The Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board reviewed this protocol. The findings from this study will be disseminated through a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Trial registration number NCT02813941.


User errors while performing security-critical tasks can lead to undesirable or even disastrous consequences. One major factor influencing mistakes and failures is complexity of such tasks, which has been studied extensively in prior research. Another important issue which hardly received any attention is the impact of both accidental and intended distractions on users performing security-critical tasks. In particular, it is unclear whether, and to what extent, unexpected sensory cues (e.g., auditory or visual) can influence user behavior and/or trigger mistakes. Better understanding of the effects of intended distractions will help clarify their role in adversarial models. As part of the research effort described in this paper, we administered a range of naturally occurring – yet unexpected – sounds while study participants attempted to perform a securitycritical task. We found that, although these auditory cues lowered participants' failure rates, they had no discernable effect on their task completion times. To this end, we overview some relevant literature that explains these somewhat counter-intuitive findings. Conducting a thorough and meaningful study on user errors requires a large number of participants, since errors are typically infrequent and should not be instigated more than once per subject. To reduce the effort of running numerous subjects, we developed a novel experimental setup that was fully automated and unattended. We discuss our experience with this setup and highlight the pros and cons of generalizing its usage.


Catalysts based on extremely small (single atoms or pseudo single atoms) noble metals can lead to much more efficient use through enhanced reactivity and selectivity. However, fabrication of practical and stable (pseudo) single-atom catalysts on various supports remains a significant challenge. Herein, we report a facile co-precipitation and conversion strategy to fabricate a series of gold pseudo single-atom supported metal organic framework catalysts (PSAC Au/MOF) on a large scale. By well controlled synthesis of precursors, up to 1.0 wt% surface clean Au atoms can be atomically dispersed and stabilized on the support. The PSAC Au/MOF exhibited superior catalytic activity in hydrogenation of p-nitrophenol, exceeding the turnover frequency of most reported catalysts by more than one order of magnitude. No obvious decline in activity was observed after 5 cycles.


Objective: This study aimed to investigate and compare the effects of tubular gastroesophageal anastomosis and traditional gastroesophageal supra-arch anastomosis on the postoperative lung function of patients with esophageal carcinoma.
Methods: A total of 90 patients with middle-lower segmental esophageal cancer admitted in our hospital from August 2014 to August 2016 were recruited to our study. They were randomly divided into two groups. The observation group underwent tubular gastroesophageal anastomosis, whereas the control group underwent traditional gastroesophageal supra-arch anastomosis. Changes in the postoperative pulmonary function were compared between the two groups.
Results: The numbers of CD4 cells (27.45 ± 5.48), CD8 cells (35.97 ± 7.16), and natural killer cells (20.79 ± 2.49), as well as the CH4/CD8 ratio (0.69 ± 0.18), of the patients in the observation group were significantly higher than the (38.45 ± 5.98), (20.45 ± 6.41), (39.44 ± 3.49), and (1.31 ± 0.48), respectively, of the patients in the control group. The differences between the two groups were statistically significant (P 0.05). The FEV1 (1.76 ± 0.41 L), FVC (2.33 ± 0.32 L), and MVV (33.7 ± 5.2 L/min) of the observation group were significantly higher than those of the control group (P<0.05). Meanwhile, the complication rate of the observation group was 42.2%, which was significantly lower than that of the control group (75.6%) (P<0.05).
Conclusion: Tubular gastroesophageal anastomosis can benefit patients with esophageal cancer by significantly reducing the adverse effects on their postoperative pulmonary function and control the occurrence of postoperative complications.


BACKGROUND
Current guidelines recommend mammography every 1 or 2 years starting at age 40 or 50 years, regardless of individual risk for breast cancer.

OBJECTIVE
To estimate the cost-effectiveness of mammography by age, breast density, history of breast biopsy, family history of breast cancer, and screening interval.

DESIGN
Markov microsimulation model.

DATA SOURCES
Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program, Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, and the medical literature.

TARGET POPULATION
U.S. women aged 40 to 49, 50 to 59, 60 to 69, and 70 to 79 years with initial mammography at age 40 years and breast density of Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categories 1 to 4.

TIME HORIZON
Lifetime.

PERSPECTIVE
National health payer.

INTERVENTION
Mammography annually, biennially, or every 3 to 4 years or no mammography.

OUTCOME MEASURES
Costs per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gained and number of women screened over 10 years to prevent 1 death from breast cancer.

RESULTS OF BASE-CASE ANALYSIS
Biennial mammography cost less than $100,000 per QALY gained for women aged 40 to 79 years with BI-RADS category 3 or 4 breast density or aged 50 to 69 years with category 2 density; women aged 60 to 79 years with category 1 density and either a family history of breast cancer or a previous breast biopsy; and all women aged 40 to 79 years with both a family history of breast cancer and a previous breast biopsy, regardless of breast density. Biennial mammography cost less than $50,000 per QALY gained for women aged 40 to 49 years with category 3 or 4 breast density and either a previous breast biopsy or a family history of breast cancer. Annual mammography was not cost-effective for any group, regardless of age or breast density.

RESULTS OF SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS
Mammography is expensive if the disutility of false-positive mammography results and the costs of detecting nonprogressive and nonlethal invasive cancer are considered.

LIMITATION
Results are not applicable to carriers of BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations.

CONCLUSION
Mammography screening should be personalized on the basis of a woman's age, breast density, history of breast biopsy, family history of breast cancer, and beliefs about the potential benefit and harms of screening.

PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE
Eli Lilly, Da Costa Family Foundation for Research in Breast Cancer Prevention of the California Pacific Medical Center, and Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium.


While most quantitative studies find a negative relationship between economic interdependence and interstate disputes, research by Barbieri finds that interdependence precipitates conflict. Participants in the debate suggest several causes, but we show that alternative variable constructions are sufficient to account for the discrepant findings. A simple formal equivalence unites respective operationalizations of dyadic interdependence used by Oneal & Russett (trade dependence, trade ij /GDP i ) and Barbieri (trade share, trade i /trade i ) with the consensus construction of monadic trade openness (trade i /GDP i ). We also show that Barbieri's trade share is negatively correlated with openness. Arguments in the article are verified through large-sample quantitative regression analyses of the two competing dyadic variable constructions and trade openness on MID onset. The results of these dyadic regression analyses show that trade share increases the probability of MID onset, trade dependence decreases the probability of MID onset and, correspondingly, that trade openness is negatively correlated with MID onset.


Unfinished at Puccini's death in 1924, Turandot was not only his most ambitious work, but it became the last Italian opera to enter the international repertory. In this colorful study two renowned music scholars demonstrate that this work, despite the modern climate in which it was written, was a fitting finale for the centuries-old Great Tradition of Italian opera. Here they provide concrete instances of how a listener might encounter the dramatic and musical structures of Turandot in light of the Italian melodramma, and firmly establish Puccini's last work within the tradition of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. In a summary of the sounds, sights, and symbolism of Turandot, the authors touch on earlier treatments of the subject, outline the conception, birth, and reception of the work, and analyze its coordinated dramatic and musical design. Showing how the evolution of the libretto documents Puccini's reversion to large musical forms typical of the Great Tradition in the late nineteenth century, they give particular attention to his use of contrasting Romantic, modernist, and two kinds of orientalist coloration in the general musical structure. They suggest that Puccini's inability to complete the opera resulted mainly from inadequate dramatic buildup for Turandot's last-minute change of heart combined with an overly successful treatment of the secondary character.


The Enrica Lexie case, concerning the death of two Indian fishermen off the southern Indian coast of Kerala after they were shot by two Italian marines in an alleged anti-piracy action to protect the Italian oil tanker "M.V. Enrica Lexie", has given rise to an interesting question of international diplomatic law: are proceedings for contempt of court permissible against diplomatic agents?In February 2013, the Italian Ambassador to India submitted an affidavit to the Indian Supreme Court in the proceedings against the marines. A difficult situation arose when a few weeks later the Italian Government expressly announced that it would be acting contrary to the ambassador's affidavit. The Indian Supreme Court, in response, adopted an order restraining the ambassador from leaving India. Only a last minute decision of the Italian Government to act in line with the ambassador's sworn statement defused the situation. The Indian Supreme Court treated the announcement of the Italian Government that it would not act in accordance with the affidavit as a breach of an undertaking given to the Court by the Italian Ambassador giving rise to sanctions for contempt of court.The paper sets out the facts of the incident by way of a detailed diplomatic case study and examines whether the submission of an affidavit by diplomatic agents precludes them from invoking immunity from jurisdiction in respect of contempt proceedings connected with the affidavit and whether submission of an affidavit amounts to a valid waiver of diplomatic immunity. It shows that diplomatic immunity constitutes an absolute shield against contempt proceedings.The paper also probes the legality of the Indian Supreme Court's restraining order and concludes that, while the action of the Italian Government showed wanton disregard for the authority of India's highest court, this did not give the Indian Supreme Court or the Indian Government any right to prohibit the Italian Ambassador from leaving the country. The only remedy available in case of contempt of court is for the Indian Government to declare the diplomatic agent persona non grata.


We show state-of-the-art word representation learning methods maximize an objective function that is a lower bound on the mutual information between different parts of a word sequence (i.e., a sentence). Our formulation provides an alternative perspective that unifies classical word embedding models (e.g., Skip-gram) and modern contextual embeddings (e.g., BERT, XLNet). In addition to enhancing our theoretical understanding of these methods, our derivation leads to a principled framework that can be used to construct new self-supervised tasks. We provide an example by drawing inspirations from related methods based on mutual information maximization that have been successful in computer vision, and introduce a simple self-supervised objective that maximizes the mutual information between a global sentence representation and n-grams in the sentence. Our analysis offers a holistic view of representation learning methods to transfer knowledge and translate progress across multiple domains (e.g., natural language processing, computer vision, audio processing).


Gamification implies the application of methods and design patterns from gaming to non-gaming areas like learning or working. We applied an existing gamification design to production processes in an organization which provides sheltered employment for impaired persons. In contrast to existing work, we investigated not only a short period but a complete workday to measure the effects on the work performance. The study indicates that gamification has (1) a negative effect on workers with considerable cognitive impairments, (2) no significant effect on workers with medium cognitive impairments and (3) a positive effect on workers with mild cognitive impairments.


The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between organizational intelligence and organizational learning with Organizational Success in the Supreme Audit Court that Consists of 31 Directorate General of provinces' Supreme Audit Court in 2013. Research method is co relational descriptive method and in terms of target is applicable. The research populations are all employees of the Supreme Audit Court offices that are 2684 people. That 337 of them were selected as the sample size through the Cochran formula with the method of stratified random sampling. The data collection tools were questionnaires of organizational intelligence, organizational learning and organizational success. Results obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients) and SPSS 16 software. The results showed that there was a significant and positive relationship between organizational intelligence and its components and organizational learning and its components with the organizational success In the Supreme Audit Court. So it can be concluded Organizational intelligence and organizational learning, are factors that are selected as the most important factors affecting the success of an organization by the majority of employees directly and indirectly.


This thesis reports a detailed investigation of the micromechanics of agglomerate behaviour under free-fall impact, double (punch) impact and diametrical compression tests using the simulation software TRUBAL. The software is based on the discrete element method (DEM) which incorporates the Newtonian equations of motion and contact mechanics theory to model the interparticle interactions. Four agglomerates have been used: three dense (differing in interface energy and contact density) and one loose. Although the simulated agglomerates are relatively coarse-grained, the results obtained are in good agreement with laboratory test results reported in the literature. The computer simulation results show that, in all three types of test, the loose agglomerate cannot fracture as it is unable to store sufficient elastic energy. Instead, it becomes flattened for low loading-rates and shattered or crushed at higher loading-rates. In impact tests, the dense agglomerates experience only local damage at low impact velocities. Semi-brittle fracture and fragmentation are produced over a range of higher impact velocities and at very high impact velocities shattering occurs. The dense agglomerates fracture in two or three large fragments in the diametrical compression tests. Local damage at the agglomerate-platen interface always occurs prior to fracture and consists of local bond breakage (microcrack formation) and local dislocations (compaction). The fracture process is dynamic and much more complex than that suggested by continuum fracture mechanics theory. Cracks are always initiated from the contact zones and propagate towards the agglomerate centre. Fracture occurs a short time after the start of unloading when a fracture crack "selection" process takes place. The detailed investigation of the agglomerate damage processes includes an examination of the evolution of the fracture surface. Detailed comparisons of the behaviour of the same agglomerate in all three types of test are presented. The particle size distribution curves of the debris are also examined, for both free-fall and double impact tests.


Technology-mediated collaboration process has been extensively studied for over a decade. Most applications with collaboration concepts reported in the literature focus on enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making processes in objective and well-structured workflows. However, relatively few previous studies have investigated the applications of collaboration schemes to problems with subjective and unstructured nature. In this paper, we explore a new intelligent collaboration scheme for fashion design which, by nature, relies heavily on human judgment and creativity. Techniques such as multicriteria decision making, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural network (ANN) models are employed. Industrial data sets are used for the analysis. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed scheme exhibits significant improvement over the traditional method in terms of the time-cost effectiveness, and a company interview with design professionals has confirmed its effectiveness and significance.


"The Lost Estate" is Robin Buss' translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This "Penguin Classics" edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik. When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. Robin Buss' translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel. Henri Alban-Fournier (1886-1914), better known by the pseudonym Alain-Fournier, was born in La Chapelle d'Angillon, the son of a country school-master. He was educated at Brest and Paris, where he met the original Yvonne, who left a lasting impression on his life and work. Le Grand Meaulnes was published in 1912. Alan-Fournier joined the army as a Lieutenant in August 1914, and was killed in action on the Meuse less than a month later. Les Miracles, a volume of poems and essays, appeared posthumously in 1924. If you liked Le Grand Meaulnes, you might enjoy Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, also available in "Penguin Classics". "I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then." (Nick Hornby).


Depression includes many cognitive symptoms, such as attention issues that can harm school performance. In order to verify the relations between these variables, school grades were obtained together with the application of the Sustained Attention Test and Beck Depression Inventory among 62 high school students, from both genders, aging from 15 to 24 years old. From these, 33.8% presented depression symptoms distributed in mild and severe levels, while women present higher levels of symptoms than men do. The severity of depressive symptoms showed itself negatively correlated with school performance and the attention quality. Comparison between groups with and without depressive symptoms revealed that the first one presented lower school performance and attention quality. Such results corroborate the hypothesis of relation between depression, attention and school performance in high school students. Keyword: Depression; Attention; Academic achievement Síntomas de depresión, atención sostenida y desempeño escolar en estudiantes de educación secundaria.


Background: This project was about design and implementation of an audio digital
equalizer with digital control using computer as the controller. The equalizer had 2/3
octave band separation resulting into 15 bands across the entire audio spectrum
frequency and with left and right channel with total of 30 bands. The band separation
was based on the well-known standard defined by IEC 61260/1260 year 1995, ISO 266
year 1997 and ISO 3 year 1973. This specification also incorporated the filter ± 3dB
bandwidth for each filter band of the equalizer. The hardware to realize the equalizer
was a special purpose digital signal processing system from Texas Instruments. The
processor for the equalizer was the OMAP137 in the form of a development board. This
system had several features which were very essential for digital signal processing such
as fast central processing unit to process both integer and floating point numbers,
embedded analog to digital converter (ADC), digital to analog converter (DAC) and
universal asynchronous receiver/ transmitter (UART) to connect to a computer The
main part of this equalizer was the bandpass filters to manage the frequency response of
the digital equalizer based on the second order Butterworth with transfer function of
H(s) = (s2+1)-1. The transformation of the filter from the analog s-plane into the digital
z-plane used the bilinear Z-transform which had been shown to have stable cut-off
characteristics across all frequency with different sampling frequency. The filter
coefficients were computed and adjusted using sampling frequency of 48 kHz and 16-
bit-ADC. Computation of the filters was implemented in 32-bit integer formats to
expedite the results and ensure there is no overflow and then truncated back into 16-bit
integer to match the capability of the 16-bit-DAC. All of the 15 channels of the filters
were computed in parallel and checked for the characteristics of the filters as an
equalizer as opposed to single bandpass filter. DSP system was also checked for the
capability to perform all 15 channels of the equalizer and see if the resulting system
works as desired. This design approached was for both channels and then tested
together to ensure real-time performance for all filters with the sampling rate of 48 kHz.
Visual control of the equalizer was via UART port of the system connected to a
computer mimicking similar to the view of a graphic equalizer with few added buttons
such as bypass, duplicate left-right channel, and undo. The setting can be downloaded
into the DSP system and stored permanently so when the equalizer was turned on, it
would be at the condition of the last setting. The output of the DSP system was
observed and compared using controlled input and then observed to ensure the
performance was similar to the calculated value. The final test was to observe the
performance for each bandpass filter at each different audio channel with music using
auditory observation. The overall system performance was also evaluated using
common music and the audio output evaluated and compared with common equalizer
and the result was very similar.


Rhizobium, Bradyrhizobium, and Azorhizobium species are able to elicit the formation of unique structures, called nodules, on the roots or stems of the leguminous host. In these nodules, the rhizobia convert atmospheric N2 into ammonia for the plant. To establish this symbiosis, signals are produced early in the interaction between plant and rhizobia and they elicit discrete responses by the two symbiotic partners. First, transcription of the bacterial nodulation (nod) genes is under control of the NodD regulatory protein, which is activated by specific plant signals, flavonoids, present in the root exudates. In return, the nod-encoded enzymes are involved in the synthesis and excretion of specific lipooligosaccharides, which are able to trigger on the host plant the organogenic program leading to the formation of nodules. An overview of the organization, regulation, and function of the nod genes and their participation in the determination of the host specificity is presented.


Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the most common infections caused by Escherichia coli. Most recent research demonstrates that antibiotic resistance has reached a critical point throughout the world, as increased use of antibiotics among nonhospitalized patients encourages the growth of drug-resistant pathogens among that population. The goal of this study was to determine the antimicrobial drug resistance of E coli strains isolated from community-acquired UTIs in 5 different regions in Turkey. The minimum inhibitory concentrations of ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, sulfamethoxazole, trimethoprim, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, and ampicillin and for E coli were determined with the agar dilution method. Among the 480 strains isolated, 8.3% were resistant to ciprofloxacin, 3.3% to gentamicin, 35.4% to sulfamethoxazole, 33.3% to trimethoprim, 27.9% to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, and 40.8% to ampicillin. These results show that the antibiotics currently most effective against E coli are ciprofloxacin and gentamicin. Local epidemiologic trends should be considered when prescribing antibacterial therapy. More research in bacterial gene mapping will be necessary to elucidate the influence of regional antimicrobial drug use and resistance in epidemiologic trends among the general population.


An incremental, higher-order, non-recurrent neural-network combines two properties found to be useful for sequence learning in neural-networks: higher-order connections and the incremental introduction of new units. The incremental, higher-order neural-network adds higher orders when needed by adding new units that dynamically modify connection weights. The new units modify the weights at the next time-step with information from the previous step. Since a theoretically unlimited number of units can be added to the network, information from the arbitrarily distant past can be brought to bear on each prediction. Temporal tasks can thereby be learned without the use of feedback, in contrast to recurrent neural-networks. Because there are no recurrent connections, training is simple and fast. Experiments have demonstrated speedups of two orders of magnitude over recurrent networks.


A comprehensive overview is presented about optical fiber‐based tunable photonic delay lines, which have been steadily developed over the last decade for the realization of all‐optically controlled timing functions. The most widely used techniques, such as those based on slow & fast light and wavelength conversion associated to dispersion, are described and their physical limitations are discussed in terms of the maximal achievable delay, the associated signal distortion and signal bandwidth. Besides, an entirely different approach for all‐optical signal delaying is introduced. This technique is based on movable grating reflectors dynamically generated in highly birefringent optical fibers. This type of delay line has experimentally demonstrated large tunable delaying with a moderate signal distortion for high capacity optical data streams and even for wideband analog signals.


Background and Purpose— Atheroma vulnerability to rupture is increased in the presence of a large lipid core. Factors associated with a lipid core in the general population have not been studied. Methods— The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) is a multicenter cohort study of individuals free of clinical cardiovascular disease designed to include a high proportion of ethnic minorities. We selected MESA participants from the top 15th percentile of maximum carotid intima media thickness by ultrasound and acquired high-resolution black blood MRI images through their carotid plaque before and after the intravenous administration of gadodiamide (0.1 mmol/kg). Lumen and outer wall contours were defined using semiautomated analysis software. We analyzed only plaques with a maximum thickness ≥1.5 mm by MRI (n=214) and assessed cross-sectional risk factor associations with lipid core presence by multivariable logistic regression. Results— A lipid core was present in 151 (71%) of the plaques. After controlling for age, ethnicity, sex, maximum arterial wall thickness, hypertension, cigarette smoking, diabetes, and C-reactive protein, compared with participants in the lowest tertile of total plasma cholesterol, the ORs of having a lipid core for participants in the middle and highest tertiles were 2.76 (95% CI: 1.01 to 7.51) and 4.63 (95% CI: 1.56 to 13.75), respectively. None of the other risk factors was associated with lipid core. Conclusions— In persons with thickened carotid walls, plasma total cholesterol, but not other established coronary heart disease risk factors, is strongly associated with lipid core presence by MRI. High total cholesterol may be associated with rupture proneness of atherosclerotic lesions in the general population.


Abstract As a concept stemming from practice, business development has received scarce academic attention. In this paper, we explore core business development activities of micro-firms and the challenges they perceive in conducting them. Based on interviews with 30 micro-firms, we identify three core business development activities that leverage the firm's resource base, complemented by three support activities that secure and organize the firm's resources. We find the business development activities to be tightly related to the three practices of leveraging, securing and organizing resources. We also identify three important contextual influences on business development in micro-firms: industry, age and if the firm is in an incubator. Our findings contribute to developing a conceptualization and theorization of business development for micro-firms, which is relevant as the vast majority of companies worldwide are micro-firms, but many never embark on a growth path. Based on our results, we outline practical implications, for example, how companies could overcome their perceived lack of time and an agenda for future research encouraging further studies comprising micro-firms with different qualities.


Malcolm is in all ways an ordinary ten-year-old. This is a perfectly ordinary story featuring one perfectly ordinary ten year old, his very bossy uncle, some baked beans, a school which tries to make interesting things BORING, the famed Italian city of Ponky, and a genie who appears when you rub your nose. It also includes lots of very useful facts, many of which are untrue.


Low-temperature waste heat is abundant in the process industries, and large amounts of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) cold energy are discarded without being recovered properly in LNG terminals. Power generation is an effective way to utilize low-temperature waste heat and LNG cold energy simultaneously. Organic Rankine Cycles (ORCs) and CO2 power cycles are promising technologies to convert low-temperature waste heat and LNG cold energy into electricity. If waste heat and LNG cold energy are utilized simultaneously in one system, the performance may outperform separate systems utilizing low-temperature waste heat and LNG cold energy, respectively. Low-temperature waste heat acts as the heat source and LNG regasification acts as the heat sink in the combined system. Due to the large temperature difference between the heat source and the heat sink, cascaded power cycle configurations are proposed in this paper. Cascaded power cycles can improve the energy efficiency of the system considerably. The cycle operating at a higher temperature to recover waste heat is called top cycle and the cycle operating at a lower temperature to utilize LNG cold energy is called bottom cycle in this study. The top cycle condensation heat is used as the heat source in the bottom cycle. The top cycle can be an ORC, transcritical CO2 (tCO2) cycle or supercritical CO2 (sCO2) cycle, while the bottom cycle only can be an ORC due to the low-temperature range of the bottom cycle. However, the thermodynamic path of the tCO2 cycle and sCO2 cycle are different from that of an ORC. The tCO2 cycle and the sCO2 cycle perform better than an ORC for sensible waste heat recovery due to a better temperature match with the waste heat source. Different combinations of the tCO2 cycle, sCO2 cycle and ORC are compared to screen the best configurations of the cascaded power cycles. The influence of the working fluid and the operating conditions are also investigated in this study. Each configuration is modeled and optimized in Aspen HYSYS. The results show that cascaded tCO2/ORC performs better compared with cascaded ORC/ORC and cascaded sCO2/ORC for the case study. Keywords—LNG cold energy, low-temperature waste heat, organic Rankine cycle, supercritical CO2 cycle, transcritical CO2 cycle.


Enhanced mechanical and barrier properties are of special interest in food packaging industries, in which uniform dispersion of nanoparticles in polymers confers considerable improvement in these properties. In this study, maleic anhydride grafted polyethylene (MAPE) and ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) compatibilised low density polyethylene/montmorillonite (LDPE/MMT) nanocomposite films were prepared with different concentrations of the compatibilisers by melt mixing technique. The delamination of MMT layers was evidenced from X-ray diffraction results that suggested an increase in the interlayer distance with the addition of compatibilisers, where MAPE is the better compatibiliser in delaminating MMT platelets in LDPE/MMT nanocomposites compared to EVA. The mechanical and barrier properties of compatibilised LDPE/MMT nanocomposites were better than uncompatibilised nanocomposites. The best improvement in tensile strength, tear strength and oxygen barrier were observed for LDPE/MMT/MAPE nanocomposites. However, the best improvements in elongation at break were seen for the LDPE/MMT nanocomposites compatibilised with EVA. Conclusively, MAPE compatibiliser is more effective in delaminating MMT platelets in LDPE/MMT nanocomposites, enhancing the mechanical and barrier properties of the nanocomposites. Results revealed that the optimum content of MAPE in terms of mechanical and barrier properties is 3 phc. The enhanced tensile and barrier properties of LDPE/MMT films with the incorporation of MAPE suggest a great potential of these nanocomposite films in food packaging.


Bioclimatology deals with the interrelation between climate and living organisms, in particular, plants and plant communities, considering the main climate variables that are relevant for species distribution. In this context spatial interpolation of monthly temperature and precipitation data using 203 rain gauges and 68 temperature gauges for Sardinia (Italy) was undertaken. As interpolation technique, we used regression kriging which combines multiple linear regression (MLR) with ordinary kriging of the residuals. MLR procedures include as independent variables: altitude, latitude, longitude, coast distance and a topographic factor of relative elevation. Elevation data were obtained from digital elevation model at 40 m resolution. Following the approach of the Worldwide Bioclimatic Classification System, a bioclimatic diagnosis of the entire territory was derived using map algebra calculations of the bioclimatic indices proposed by Rivas-Martínez et al. [(2011). Worldwide Bioclimatic classification system. Global Geobotany, 1, 1–638]. Two macrobioclimates (Mediterranean pluviseasonal oceanic and Temperate oceanic), one macrobioclimatic variant (Submediterranean), and four classes of continentality (from weak semihyperoceanic to weak semicontinental), eight thermotypic horizons (from lower thermomediterranean to upper supratemperate) and seven ombrotypic horizons (from lower dry to lower hyperhumid) were identified, resulting in a combination of 43 isobioclimates. The resulting map represents a useful environmental stratum, for regional planning, ecological modeling and biodiversity conservation.


Background: Cancer survivorship presents unique medical, psychosocial, and logistical challenges for survivors, their caregivers, and clinicians. NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers (CCCs) serve a unique role in the delivery of cancer care because they not only provide care but also serve as a model for community oncologists and clinics through the development and dissemination of standards of care. Survivors, their caregivers, and clinicians look to CCCs to provide information about how to navigate the transition from active to posttreatment care. However, there is wide variability in the types of resources CCCs make available on their websites. The goal of our assessment was to understand the types of posttreatment survivor-specific resources CCCs are providing on their website. Methods: We analyzed the websites of the 47 CCCs to evaluate survivor-specific resources around the 4 components of survivorship care described by the Institute of Medicine guidelines for survivorship care plans: surveillance, prevention, intervention, and coordination. Results: Of the 47 CCCs, 74.5% (n=35) had discoverable survivor-specific services on their websites. Despite our inclusive approach to coding, few websites contained extensive information targeted at survivors, their caregivers, or clinicians. Only the coordination and intervention elements were discussed by at least half of the CCCs. From the vantage point of cancer survivors, their lay caregivers, loved ones, or clinicians, there is limited information about survivor-specific services on the websites of the 47 CCCs. This dearth of information translates into substantial work for these groups to find the resources they may need. Conclusions: The CCCs have an opportunity to serve as information hubs and to lessen the amount of work associated with survivorship. As models of cancer care delivery, the CCCs can also set the standard for community oncologists and clinics for delivery of care that improves the quality of life for survivors.


People enact democracy when they undermine their customary speech forms. This is evident in a small municipality in rural northeastern Brazil, where village-dwelling cultivators and town activists are abandoning the practice of displaying electoral propaganda on their private homes because it evokes the shrill voices of domineering politicians and haranguing neighbors. An analysis of local associations among propaganda images, unpleasant voices, and broader genres of political communication finds that the widespread abandonment of propaganda images dramatizes the tension between liberal and illiberal imaginings of democracy in contemporary Brazil.


The pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) algorithm is implemented to numerically solve Maxwell's equations to obtain the optical properties of millimeter-scale random media consisting of hundreds of micron-scale dielectric scatterers. Our methodology accounts for near-field interactions and coherent interference effects that are not easily modeled using other techniques. In this paper, we show that the total scattering cross-section (TSCS) of a cluster of closely packed scatterers exhibits a high-frequency oscillation structure, similar to noise. Furthermore, the characteristics and origin of such noise-like oscillation structure have been analyzed and determined based on first-principles.


This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words "porn" and "pornographic" are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as "torture porn" and "misery porn," Hester's argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particular—transgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticity—can be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.


This paper describes a new program, correct, which takes words rejected by the Unix® spell program, proposes a list of candidate corrections, and sorts them by probability. The probability scores are the novel contribution of this work. Probabilities are based on a noisy channel model. It is assumed that the typist knows what words he or she wants to type but some noise is added on the way to the keyboard (in the form of typos and spelling errors). Using a classic Bayesian argument of the kind that is popular in the speech recognition literature (Jelinek, 1985), one can often recover the intended correction, c, from a typo, t, by finding the correction c that maximizes Pr(c) Pr(t/c). The first factor, Pr(c), is a prior model of word probabilities; the second factor, Pr(t/c), is a model of the noisy channel that accounts for spelling transformations on letter sequences (e.g., insertions, delections, substitutions and reversals). Both sets of probabilities were trained on data collected from the Associated Press (AP) newswire. This text is ideally suited for this purpose since it contains a large number of typos (about two thousand per month).


Background and Purpose: Mobile health (mHealth) apps hold potential to transform healthcare, but their adoption in clinical settings takes time and how providers and families use them is unknown. Three clinics at Riley Hospital for Children are preparing to implement BabyNoggin, an app that collects developmental screening tools typically collected via paper forms. The purpose of this study was two-fold: 1) to understand pre-implementation processes and provider perspectives of integrating BabyNoggin into clinic workflow; and 2) to examine parental attitudes towards the use of apps for child development.
Project Methods: Pre-implementation clinical observations of workflow were performed in participating clinics. Semi-structured interviews informed by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) were conducted with each clinical team to understand perceived implementation facilitators and barriers. Lastly, parents with children aged 0-5 were recruited from study clinics and social media to participate in a 26-item survey to gauge their attitudes towards using apps in place of paper screening forms and for tracking their child's development.
Results: Implementation workflows were co-created with each clinical team that should not increase visit length. Five CFIR interviews highlighted facilitators and barriers towards implementation of BabyNoggin to be considered during implementation. Out of 199 parents who completed the survey, 72.9% (n=145) reported a higher likelihood of downloading a child health app that was recommended by their pediatrician.
Conclusion and Future Steps: This study constituted the pre-implementation phase of a larger project involving the implementation of BabyNoggin. Future research will use these findings as a guide during implementation.


In contrast to the PASTOR model by Kalisch et al. we point to the potential negative long-term effects of positive (re)appraisals of events for resilience. This perspective posits that emotional reactions to events provide important guidelines as to which events, environments, or social relations should be sought out and which ones should be avoided in the


In the Ethiopian government five year Growth and Transformation Plan, it has been clearly stated that efforts will be geared towards promoting compliance and equipping tax collection institutions with adequate enforcement power which will further boost revenue mobilization at federal and regional levels. The country's tax mobilization was also the lowest among most African countries and thus, identifying the factors that determine tax compliance behavior has been open for empirical investigation. Accordingly, using one-way ANOVA, two samples and one sample T- test, this study examined the determinants of tax compliance behavior in Ethiopia particularly in Bahir Dar city administration. The data was collected using structured questionnaire. The results revealed that perception on government spending; perception on equity and fairness of the tax system; penalties; personal financial constraint; changes on current government policies; and referral group (friends, relatives etc.) are factors that significantly affect tax compliance behavior. However, gender and probability of being audited have no significant impact on tax compliance behavior. Finally, the findings show that older people will comply less if there is no equity and fairness in the tax system and any changes in government policy on fuel prices, electricity and water rates are not favorable. Key w ords: Compliance behavior, Tax payers, Ethiopia.


Resume: Bien qu'il soit devenu presque impossible de considerer la bande annonce de Citizen Kane hors du discours critique qui entoure le film et de son statut de chefd'oeuvre ultime du cinema americain, il demeure important de l'examiner en detail pour comprendre ses strategies rhetoriques manipulatrices. Une lecture attentive de la bande annonce demontre que Welles souhaitait rejoindre un large public, qu'il ne voulait pas risquer d'aliener les foules et etait ambivalent au sujet du caractere collectif de cette entreprise artistique. In Citizen Welles. his biography of Orson Welles, Frank Brady begins his brief discussion of the trailer for Citizen Kane as follows: A few weeks prior to the anticipated opening of Citizen Kane, RKO released a "Coming Attractions" trailer to promote it. Since the film promised to be unlike any other made in Hollywood, Orson wanted the trailer also to be unlike any other. He spent weeks on scripting, shooting and editing it and emerged with a punchy and intriguing look at the behind-the-scenes life of the film. It was a highly effective advertisement and stood out from all the other trailers coming from Hollywood, clarifying that Citizen Kane was going to be something special. Shot as a documentary, the trailer was longer than average-it ran five minutes-and followed none of the rules that most trailers adhered to: a brief synopsis, sensational copy, a glimpse at the most dramatic and actionpacked scenes.1 Despite the suggestion here of Wellesian authorship in the creation of "something special," the trailer for Citizen Kane is not a work that has provoked sustained critical attention. It remains absent from the filmographies of all of Welles's biographers (including Brady) and is also not mentioned in Robert Carringer's otherwise indispensable The Making of "Citizen Kane" (1985; rev. ed. 1996). While the trailer is mentioned in Joseph McBride's Orson Welles (1972; rev. ed. 1996) and in the exhaustive chronology of his career in Welles's This Is Orson Vielles (1992), it does not arise as a subject of discussion in either work. In many ways, critical neglect of the trailer is entirely understandable. Although Brady indicates that Welles shot the trailer as a documentary, a trailer is not originally intended as a work of intrinsic artistic interest. By definition, a trailer is a short prelude meant to anticipate and advertise a coming film and is initially intended to function in a subordinate role to a primary text, not as an attraction in its own right. Even today, when preview trailers for current films are not only an inevitable part of the cinema-going experience, but also widely available on the Web, they do not often generate critical commentary in and of themselves.2 Any scholarly attempt to historically recontextualize the trailer for Citizen Kane is fraught with intriguing challenges, many of which concern the apparent absence of any contemporary accounts of the trailer. How widely was the trailer distributed upon its initial release? What kinds of responses did it provoke among those who had yet to see Citizen Kane? Such questions are probably impossible to answer, and the trailer must now be looked at through an historical prism shaped not only by our knowledge of Citizen Kane, but also by the cumulative influence of almost seven decades of Welles scholarship. Indeed, it is the very fact of Citizen Kane's entrenched canonical status that tempts us to valorize a text such as this trailer as privileged rather than marginal, as something Wellesian and therefore "special." Something of this attitude of retrospective valorization is implicit in Simon Callow's discussion of the trailer in Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu: "The trailer...has great playful charm. Welles never appears, but is omnipresent as the narrator: a joke-a rather knowing one-in itself. Shot by Toland at the same time as the film, it is a miniature documentary, almost an introduction to the cinema, in the manner of the opening section of the unfilmed Heart of Darkness. …


This comprehensive work examines the fundamentals required for reclaimed water schemes to deliver sustainable farming operations that achieve the yield and quality of produce necessary for acceptance in the market.

Growing Crops with Reclaimed Wastewater reviews the historical background of water treatment, its use and disposal from Australian wastewater treatment facilities and the technologies now utilised to treat our wastewater for reuse. The major concerns of chemical, physical and pathological qualities of reclaimed water are addressed, ensuring that the environmental, economic and social requirements of today's society are met.

It reviews the state and national regulatory requirements and guidelines that have made Australia a world leader in the management of reclaimed water and also examines the guidance in the United States of America (Federal) and in California, the World Health Organization guidance and the situation in Israel.

This is the first time such a definitive review has been produced on the use of wastewater for horticulture and it will be a key tool for decision makers, researchers and practitioners to understand the main issues and constraints. It will be of particular interest to agricultural scientists, waste and horticulture consultants, engineers, planners, state agencies, environmental officers and students.


On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for the New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called "the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria" (62)--the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the so-called atom spies: "Rosenbergs are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror" (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since the copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and the friend Neal Cassady, the letter witnesses a precise intersection of the dominant narrative action of early Cold War America and its dissident counternarrative as represented by key figures in the emergent Beat movement. However, in context of the exemplary character of Beat cultural politics, Ginsberg's telegram of public protest is not just atyp ical--his friends were shocked at him for "doing anything outright about his political complaints" (Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road 222)--but anomalous. What's important is not the intersecting of narratives, personal and political, dominant and dissenting, but their correspondence. Defining the relation between Cold War and Beat generation along the double axis private/public and personal/political, Ginsberg's letter turns out to be a key document, and this unlikely point of departure brings to light a scene that is central to what might be termed the political economy of Beat letters. The Rosenberg case was one of a series of national and highly public trials stamped by the paranoid style of American politics, a style that responded to global stalemate by waging domestic war on enemies within. This was a total conflict fought on microscopic scale and through inflated symbolic dramas, so that the early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and by the conscription of private life in the name of national security. The key to political containment abroad was, then, personal self-containment at home, and the Cold War penetration of the private by the public was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. In context of this disciplinary and demonizing feature of Cold War culture, the hyperbolic escalation of the Rosenbergs into evil "atom spies"--condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman for a "diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation" (qtd. in Caute 67)--represented a definitive es calation of the local. The Rosenberg case did not prove that scientific secrets vital to national security had been betrayed. Rather, it proved the assumption that an absolute secret existed in the first place--what Caute called the Myth of the Vital Secret--and that it might be given away by what passed for ordinary men and women. Absolute secrets demand absolute secrecy. The Secret therefore motivates all the secrets of everyday life and equals their apocalyptically scaled-up master narrative: it symbolized the total implications of mundane acts in a war whose front line was, ideally, not just here or there but everywhere and implicating everyone. What turned the Rosenberg case into a central document in this politicized field of Cold War culture was its transformation into a particular kind of text-an epistolary text. I refer to Death House Letters, the correspondence between Ethel and Julius from their cells in Sing Sing. This notorious exchange served as vital political propaganda for the Rosenbergs at the time and was then used as an essential text against their intellectual sympathizers in the aftermath of their deaths. Here I refer to the articles in Commentary and Encounter by Robert Warshaw and Leslie Fiedler respectively, two cultural critics who took it upon themselves to subject the Rosenbergs to a second trial, this time by New Critical close readings of their letters. …


Concurrent data structures can be used to communicate between parallel processes in a system. The challenge in manipulating these objects arises from the many possible ways in which the processes can interleave. To ensure correct executions, the system should fulfill linearizability. Verifying linearizability consists of checking that every concurrent execution is equivalent to some sequential execution that respects the runtime ordering of methods. This work proposes building two process specifications of the object using the mCRL2 language. The concrete specification is built according to the implementation of the concurrent data structure, while the abstract specification is linearizable by construction. Then, linearizability can be tested by checking that their respective labeled transition systems, generated from the mCRL2 tool, are equivalent. This approach was applied on a number of concurrent data structures, and it detected both correct and faulty implementations. Modeling and Verifying Concurrent Data Structures i


Arsenic is a worldwide environmental pollutant that generates public health concerns. Various types of cancers and other diseases, including neurological disorders, have been associated with human consumption of arsenic in drinking water. At the molecular level, arsenic and its metabolites have the capacity to provoke genome instability, causing altered expression of genes. One such target of arsenic is the Pax6 gene that encodes a transcription factor in neuronal cells. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of two antioxidants, α-tocopheryl succinate (α-TOS) and sodium selenite, on Pax6 gene expression levels in the forebrain and cerebellum of Golden Syrian hamsters chronically exposed to arsenic in drinking water. Animals were divided into six groups. Using quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR analysis, we confirmed that arsenic downregulates Pax6 expression in nervous tissues by 53 ± 21% and 32 ± 7% in the forebrain and cerebellum, respectively. In the presence of arsenic, treatment with α-TOS did not modify Pax6 expression in nervous tissues; however, sodium selenite completely restored Pax6 expression in the arsenic-exposed hamster forebrain, but not the cerebellum. Although our results suggest the use of selenite to restore the expression of a neuronal gene in arsenic-exposed animals, its use and efficacy in the human population require further studies.


Es gibt Kein andere Philosophie, als die Philosophie des Spinoza. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and Spinoza's. Henri Bergson In the last few decades, French philosophers have been particularly interested in Spinoza's thought, to the point that it is possible to speak today of the emergence of a "French Spinozism," and even of a "French Spinozist school" that has accompanied the philosophical and political debates of the last thirty years.1 This "school," which is in no way official and does not pretend to be such, nevertheless has its founding fathers, its institutions, and an increasing output of publications. In large part thanks to this school, Spinoza is finally finding his place among the different rationalist systems of early modern philosophy (Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes, Leibniz), and as his is a singular place, we have not yet finished evaluating his importance. Long relegated to the margins of university philosophy programs and banned from official thought, the history of French Spinozism was at first that of an imposed silence, then that of an unclassifiable system of thought. The history of the reception of Spinoza's works bears witness to this. Pierre Bayle thought of a Spinozism before Spinoza, whose traits he found in Greek pagan thought and in the Orient; Hegel made Spinoza "the Oriental" into the very condition for philosophy; Bergson believed in the existence of a Spinozism without Spinoza as the eternal possibility of thought; Deleuze thought most often with Spinoza; and Negri finally brought together Spinoza's untimeliness with that of other "bad-boy" thinkers like Marx, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. All of these authors considered Spinozism as a contemporary form of thought, seeing in it less a philosophy of the past than a thought that never quite managed to go away. If we were to parody Bergson's way putting it, we could say that Spinoza gave rise to at least two histories of philosophy - one in which he belongs to the past and is ranked among the Cartesians with his attention turned toward the ancient theologies, one in which he is a member of the avant-garde, rebellious and subversive, polemicizing against the instituted order, resolutely turned towards a thought yet to be constructed. What is undeniable is that by making us better understand Spinoza in his own time, the French Spinozism of the last few years has also contributed to inserting him into our own time. It is almost as if his thought, taking on the image of an essentially posthumous work, has lost nothing of its a-topical and anachronistic dimension, which makes it be constantly out of step with his own time, so that it can finally deliver its message less to an already existing era than to the possibilities of a future yet to be defined.2 Now, after the announced deaths of God and man, after the proclaimed end of the grand foundational narratives of what we now habitually call modernity, after the end of metaphysics, of history, of art, of the book, a few philosophers (Lyotard and Derrida in France, Danto and Searle in the United States, Vattimo in Italy) has tried to piggy-back on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in order to be able to think the meaning of these closures in the era of globalization and of the global village. Consequently, there is nothing astonishing about Spinozism's radical anti-finalism finding a voice in the margins of post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-Freudianism, or postMarxism, all of which characterize themselves (sometimes in prophetic tones) as modes of the thought of the end and of the after-the-end. In one sense, then, there is nothing new under Spinoza's sun: contemporary French Spinozism only confirms and extends a history made of cyclical rebirths and eternal returns, which have announced and animated some of the great seasons of modern thought.3 The forceful return of Spinozism in France in the last fifty years nonetheless has its specific characteristics and its own reasons. …


The study is aimed at examining the effects of motivation on performance in public organization in Tanzania, concluding the necessary improvement, to advice on implementation of the changes based on the study and literature of the public organizations. The study focused on Tanzania Post Corporation to represent other public organizations. Other three similar private organizations were selected as a comparison in effectiveness in quality services provision. These organizations are DHL, FEDEX and SCANDINAVIA. The information collected was used to generalize the quality of services and motivation offered by the remaining organizations in Tanzania. Managers and frontline employees of the selected firms were involved to gather the required data. The study revealed that, poor motivation, low pay, non conducive working environment, accountability and accumulated arrears are among the major problems that hinder the public organizations system work efficiently. This leads to a number of employees quit the public sector and join the private ones causing decline in the quality of services, customers and hence less income.
The study revealed that most of the well qualified and competent personnel opt for private sectors due to good pay and conducive working environments. It is thus recommended that, the public organization leadership should grant stronger and coordinated efforts in supporting and work hand in hand with the frontline employees in order to eliminate the problem of ineffective work. The study recommends that the public organization must impose a system of offering customer care services to their employees so as provide quality services and become
more competitive. Also public organizations should create conducive working environments, improve remunerations, provide motivations and pay their employee without delay.
By so doing the public organizations will retain the professional employees, improve the services and attract more customers hence boosting the revenues. This makes the
public organizations to become more competitive and cope with the resulting changes.


The Highway Safety Manual is the national safety manual that provides quantitative methods for analyzing highway safety. The HSM presents crash modification factors related to work zone characteristics such as work zone duration and length. These crash modification factors were based on high-impact work zones in California. Therefore there was a need to use work zone and safety data from the Midwest to calibrate these crash modification factors for use in the Midwest. Almost 11,000 Missouri freeway work zones were analyzed to derive a representative and stratified sample of 162 work zones. The 162 work zones was more than four times the number of work zones used in the HSM. This dataset was used for modeling and testing crash modification factors applicable to the Midwest. The dataset contained work zones ranging from 0.76 mile to 9.24 miles and with durations from 16 days to 590 days. A combined fatal/injury/non-injury model produced a R2 fit of 0.9079 and a prediction slope of 0.963. The resulting crash modification factors of 1.01 for duration and 0.58 for length were smaller than the values in the HSM. Two practical application examples illustrate the use of the crash modification factors for comparing alternate work zone setups.


Research on textile crafting offers an opportunity to investigate reconciliation in a context that brings together every day practice, the realities of the conflict, the possibility of healing, and the rebuilding of social fabric. In this exploratory paper we deploy a methodological design which contributes to think about reconciliation with care through the practice of textile crafting in four memory sewing circles, integrated mostly by elderly women in different Colombian municipalities. This design implies the prototyping of a set of technologies that integrate digital components to various handcrafted textiles with the ability to digitally embody reconciliation in the selected sites, and also contribute to the interconnection between these sites. Specifically, the project is oriented towards the collaborative design of textile-digital objects, as testimonial digital textiles which allow research to be conducted in the Colombian context.


Evidence suggests that Alzheimer disease (AD) begins as a disorder of synaptic function, caused in part by increased levels of amyloid beta-peptide 1-42 (Abeta42). Both synaptic and cognitive deficits are reproduced in mice double transgenic for amyloid precursor protein (AA substitution K670N,M671L) and presenilin-1 (AA substitution M146V). Here we demonstrate that brief treatment with the phosphodiesterase 4 inhibitor rolipram ameliorates deficits in both long-term potentiation (LTP) and contextual learning in the double-transgenic mice. Most importantly, this beneficial effect can be extended beyond the duration of the administration. One course of long-term systemic treatment with rolipram improves LTP and basal synaptic transmission as well as working, reference, and associative memory deficits for at least 2 months after the end of the treatment. This protective effect is possibly due to stabilization of synaptic circuitry via alterations in gene expression by activation of the cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA)/cAMP regulatory element-binding protein (CREB) signaling pathway that make the synapses more resistant to the insult inflicted by Abeta. Thus, agents that enhance the cAMP/PKA/CREB pathway have potential for the treatment of AD and other diseases associated with elevated Abeta42 levels.


A photogrammetric monitoring method of structural deformation has been developed during the course of this project. The Gabion Wall which is part of the I-90 project has been used as the site for practical tests of the theoretical development. The monitoring consists of photographing the structure from three camera stations with KA-2 f=24" camera. The camera has been modified to a plate camera to provide the maximum accuracy. The methodology consists of the geodetic determination of the camera location and the orientation and photogrammetric determination of targets (natural and artificial) on the structure. During the course of this project more than 100 target ocations were determined by three dimensional coordinates. The maximum error was found to be plus 3/4 inch; the average, 1/2 inch. This represents a relative accuracy of from 1/58,000 to 1/120,000 of the photographic distance. Using the actual construction site for research has permitted immediate implementation. The instrumentation as well as the methodology along with the computer program has been transmitted to the Washington State Higwhay Department & their Photogrammetric Branch has been assisted in the implementation. /FHWA/


In this study, a feeding trial was conducted to examine the potential of replacing fish meal with brewers yeast in practical diet of goldfish ( Carassius auratus ). Five isoproteic (37% CP) and isocaloric (3350 kcal/kg) diets were formulated to contain graded levels of brewers yeast. Fish meal protein was replaced by 0%, 15%, 25%, 35%, and 45% of yeast. Each diet was randomly allocated to triplicate groups of 20 fish (initial average weight of 0.56 g fish -1 ) in glass aquarium (65L). Fish were fed three times per day to apparent satiation for 84 days. At the end of the experiment, weight gain, specific growth rate (SGR), feed conversion ratio (FCR), protein efficiency ratio (PER), condition factor (CF), survival rate (SR), hepatosomatic indices (HSI) and body composition of goldfish fry were determined. According to the results, weight gain, SGR, FCR and PER of fish fed the diet including yeast replaced 35% of the fish meal were better than those of fish fed the other diets. There were no significant differences in SR and HSI values among fish fed diets ( p >0.05). However, CF among fish fed the experimental diets was significantly differ ( p >0.05). Whole body composition was similar among fish fed different diets. The optimal replacement level of fishmeal protein by brewers yeast was determined by second-order polynomial regression to be (y= 2, 2237- 0,0004x 2 + 0,0279x; R² = 0,9977) 34.875%, on the basis of SGR.


We argue that political parties take not only the economic conditions into account when developing a position on entrepreneurship and self-employment but also consider the "heritage" of a socialist state, which can influence the preferences of voters regarding this issue area. We test our hypotheses on the basis of an analysis of election manifestos and coalition agreements. We focus on the German case since unification allows for comparing electorates socialized in a market economy in the West German states and in a socialist economy in East Germany by holding the institutional setting constant. The results support our hypotheses that growing economic problems increase the saliency of entrepreneurship and self-employment and that differences between parties exist: Christian democratic and liberal parties emphasize entrepreneurship and self-employment in their manifestos more than green or socialist parties. In addition, governments including Christian democratic and liberals agree on more market-liberal policies in coalition agreements compared to left-wing governments.


This paper explored on readiness and level of acceptance and perceptions towards e-learning among Physics students of Physics with Electronic Programme of University Malaysia Sabah. A constructive approach (i.e., Problem-Based Learning (PBL)) was implemented using an e-learning as its main medium of teaching and learning (T&L). Two (2) physics subjects were involved (i.e., Thermodynamics Physics and Statistical Physics) which were offered on Semester 1 and Semester 2 respectively which took twenty eight (28) weeks durations. During the class, teaching and learning activities were done via e- learning including some of their assessment (i.e., online discussion, forum, uploading and downloading files, etc.). A set of questionnaire was distributed to twenty five (25) second year students before and after e-learning was implemented. Students' response towards e-learning also enclosed in this paper.


In‐stream flow protection programs require accurate, real‐time streamflow data to aid in the protection of aquatic ecosystems during winter base flow periods. In cold regions, however, winter streamflow often can only be estimated because in‐channel ice causes variable backwater conditions and alters the stage‐discharge relation. In this study, an automated dye dilution gauging system, a tracer gauge, was developed for measuring discharge in ice‐affected streams. Rhodamine WT is injected into the stream at a constant rate, and downstream concentrations are measured with a submersible fluorometer. Data loggers control system operations, monitor key variables, and perform discharge calculations. Comparison of discharge from the tracer gauge and from a Cipoletti weir during periods of extensive ice cover indicated that the root‐mean‐square error of the tracer gauge was 0.029 m3 s−1, or 6.3% of average discharge for the study period. The tracer gauge system can provide much more accurate data than is currently available for streams that are strongly ice affected and, thus, could substantially improve management of in‐stream flow protection programs during winter in cold regions. Care must be taken, however, to test for the validity of key assumptions, including complete mixing and conservative behavior of dye, no changes in storage, and no gains or losses of water to or from the stream along the study reach. These assumptions may be tested by measuring flow‐weighted dye concentrations across the stream, performing dye mass balance analyses, and evaluating breakthrough curve behavior.


We experimentally investigated the temporal and spectral profiles of the four-wave mixing (FWM) signals from 350-µm-thick undoped InP at various temperatures when the laser was tuned from the exciton resonance to 100 meV below the band gap. The temporal and spectral shapes of the observed FWM signals well below the band gap were nearly consistent with those of the excitation laser pulse and exhibited significantly different behavior from the excitonic properties in thin samples. Furthermore, we observed temperature-independent large blue shifts of the spectrally resolved FWM signals far below the band gap with respect to the excitation laser spectrum when the time delay moved from positive to negative. Based on our experimental observations, we conclude that this behavior can be explained not simply by the excitonic effects but by the instantaneously created virtual states and the frequency-broadening effect.


An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about 'citizen history' but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history.


This study investigates when a cartel that uses a sales quota allocation scheme monitors more frequently than it enforces; for example, monitoring of sales is done on a weekly basis but firms are only required to comply with sales quotas on a quarterly basis. In a simple three-period quantity game with i.i.d cost and demand shocks, we show that the volatility of a cartel member's sales follows a U-shape within the compliance horizon. In comparison, sales volatility is constant over time under competition. This result offers a simple empirical test for distinguishing collusion from competition using sales data.


The magnetic resonance (MR) imaging features, signalment, clinical history and outcome of 55 horses with a penetrating sole injury were evaluated. Our aim was to describe MR imaging findings within the hoof capsule, assess the utility of the technique and give recommendations for the optimal MR imaging protocol to evaluate such injuries. Data from five equine hospitals were analyzed retrospectively. The tract was more likely to be visualized in animals scanned within the first week postinjury. There was no significant predisposition based on breed, age, or gender. T2*W transverse sequences were the most useful for assessment of solar penetrations due to their orientation perpendicular to the deep digital flexor tendon, the reduced scanning time, and the T2* capability of enhancing magnetic susceptibility caused by hemorrhage.