A major challenge in addressing climate risk in developing countries is that many regions do not have the necessary historical weather data to design and validate solutions using technologies such as remote sensing. Therefore, many projects are build using farmer's reported perceptions and recollections of major climate risk events (such as drought). Although farmer perceptions are great potential value in the design and validation process, there are well known biases and limitations associated with farmer perceptions and recollections which could potentially lead to a problematic product. In order to better understand the value and validity of farmer perceptions this paper explores two related questions: 1) Is there evidence that farmer reporting data has any information about actual drought events and 2) Is there evidence that it is valuable to specifically address recollection and perception issues when using farmer reporting data? We investigate issues and strategies concerning farmer perceptions and remote sensing for risk protection by studying one of the most challenging climate risk applications of remote sensing, index insurance, for which remote sensing triggers payments to farmers during loss years. Our case study is of the largest participatory farmer remote sensing insurance projects in the developing world, the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative of the World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam America in Ethiopia. Our approach is to test the cross-consistency of farmer's reported seasonal vulnerabilities against the years reported as droughts by independent satellite data sources. We find evidence that farmer reported events are reflected in multiple remote sensing datasets, and that utilizing strategies of repeated interviews over time, and to some extent, aggregating independent village reports over space lead to improved predictions. These findings are not only important in understanding the quality of and strategies for utilizing farmer perception information, but also for verifying the appropriate remote sensing approaches as remote sensing applications such as index insurance continue to scale.


This paper explains why the politics-administration dichotomy became entrenched in the field of public administration in its first decade. The expansion of the public administration community depended on funding from three Rockefeller philanthropies who were sensitive to public criticism of their involvement in political work, and who had resisted supporting governmental research on the grounds that it would be perceived by the public as meddling in politics. The politics-administration dichotomy - an already well-known idea that suggested there was a certain sphere of governmental work that could be considered non-political - was a rhetorical device that allowed the philanthropies to defend their support of governmental research. Scholars and practitioners in public administration re-asserted their faith in the dichotomy, and tailored their work routines to bolster such assertions, in order to allay the philanthropies' concern about public criticism of the financial support which they provided to the new field. In other words, the dichotomy was an important part of a rhetorical strategy that was integral to the institutional development of the public administration community in its early years. It may be that the dichotomy continues to serve this function today.


In version-1 for the first time an announcement was made in this paper to have found fundamental evidence for the flyby-anomalies of six satellites earlier investigated by John Anderson and co-workers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena USA. The central part of this theoretical evidence exists of a 'dark matter flow' being the cause of a velocity-change for satellites during their 'flyby' along the earth. A formula is given to calculate the velocity-change caused by the dark matter flow. The origin of the evidence is related to a 'dark energy force formula', which is a new force in a new proposed cosmological model describing dark energy and dark matter in a double torus geometry. Version-2 replaces version-1, because I read about new investigation of GPS satellites, which predict dark matter surrounding the earth-equator. In version-2 I cleared an expression without an effect on the original end-result of version-1 and I extended it with the calculation of the energy satellites are feeling from dark matter around the earth-equator. Version-3 makes much better clear that satellites can be used to calculate the dark energy density flow around the earth-equator from the perspective of a new cosmological model: The Double Torus Universe.


Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the article discusses Roma Pentecostalism as nomad self-governance or self-ministry and political affirmation, in a dialectical conversation with stable apparatuses of power such as state and transnational polities advancing a neoliberal program of social integration as semiological apparatus of capture. The latter is upheld by expert social sciences as royal sciences, which translate alternative forms of self-governance into the conceptual apparatus of the state and transnational polities. On the other hand, Pentecostal self-ministry works as disaffected power undoing the architecture of the state subject, authorizing new hermeneutics of the self to take control over semiological acts of translation, and engenders a political resubjectivation of the governed. The article identifies Roma Pentecostalism as a source of political reawakening of Romani civil society, a creative line of flight with an immense power of deterritorialization of the main domains of subjection.


A combination of normal-incidence x-ray standing-wave (NIXSW) spectroscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and density-functional theory (DFT) has been used to investigate the interaction of a number of phthalocyanine molecules (specifically, SnPc, PbPc, and CoPc) with the Ag(111) surface. The metal-surface distances predicted by the DFT calculations for SnPc/Ag(111) (2.48 angstrom) and CoPc/Ag(111) (2.88 angstrom) are in good agreement with our NIXSW experimental results for these systems (2.31 +/- 0.09 and 2.90 +/- 0.05 angstrom, respectively). Good agreement is also found between calculated partial density-of-states plots and STM images of CoPc on Ag(111). Although the DFT and Pb 4f NIXSW results for the Pb-Ag(111) distance are similarly in apparently good agreement, the Pb 4f core-level data suggest that a chemical reaction between PbPc and Ag(111) occurs due to the annealing procedure used in our experiments and that the similarity of the DFT and Pb 4f NIXSW values for the Pb-Ag(111) distance is likely to be fortuitous. We interpret the Pb 4f XPS data as indicating that the Pb atom can detach from the PbPc molecule when it is adsorbed in the "Pb-down" position, leading to the formation of a Pb-Ag alloy and the concomitant reduction in Pb from a Pb2+ state (in bulklike films of PbPc) to Pb-0. In contrast to SnPc, neither PbPc nor CoPc forms a well-ordered monolayer on Ag(111) via the deposition and annealing procedures we have used. Our DFT calculations show that each of the phthalocyanine molecules donate charge to the silver surface, and that back donation from Ag to the metal atom (Co, Sn, or Pb) is only significant for CoPc. (Less)


In cities across the globe there is mounting evidence of growing mobilization by members of the so-called 'creative class' in urban social movements, defending particular urban spaces and influencing urban development. This essay discusses the meaning of such developments with reference to the hypothesis made by David Harvey in Spaces of Capital about the increasing mobilization of cultural producers in oppositional movements in an era of wholesale instrumentalization of culture and 'creativity' in contemporary processes of capitalist urbanization. After briefly reviewing recent scholarly contributions on the transformations of urban social movements, as well as Harvey's hypothesis about the potential role of cultural producers in mobilizations for the construction of 'spaces of hope', the essay describes two specific urban protests that have occurred in Berlin and Hamburg in recent years: the fight for Berlin's waterfront in the Media Spree area, and the conflict centred on the Gangeviertel in Hamburg. In both protests artists, cultural producers and creative milieux have played a prominent role. The essay analyses the composition, agenda, contribution and contradictions of the coalitions behind the protests, discussing whether such movements represent the seeds of new types of coalitions with a wide-ranging agenda for urban change. The essay finally proposes a future research agenda on the role of artists, cultural producers and the 'creative class' in urban social movements across the globe.


Why would Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179-1241), the most powerful and rapacious Icelander of his generation, dedicate so much time and effort to producing the Edda, a text that is widely recognized as the most significant medieval source for pre-Christian Norse myth and poetics? Kevin J. Wanner brings us a new account of the interests that motivated the production of this text, and resolves the mystery of its genesis by demonstrating the intersection of Snorri's political and cultural concerns and practices. The author argues that the Edda is best understood not as an antiquarian labour of cultural conservation, but as a present-centered effort to preserve skaldic poetry's capacity for conversion into material and symbolic benefits in exchanges between elite Icelanders and the Norwegian court. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's economic theory of practice, Wanner shows how modern sociological theory can be used to illuminate the cultural practices of the European Middle Ages. In doing so, he provides the most detailed analysis to date of how the Edda relates to Snorri's biography, while shedding light on the arenas of social interaction and competition that he negotiated. A fascinating look at the intersections of political interest and cultural production, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda is a detailed portrait of both an important man and the society of his times.


During the last decade the Inter-American Development Bank has invested heavily in promoting impact evaluation as a tool to assess its effectiveness. In favoring the use of IE, the Bank's intention has been to promote more effective interventions. The introduction of the Development Effectiveness Matrix (DEM), the first Bankwide effort to promote more evaluable projects, has strongly incentivized the production and use of IEs. The DEM includes a series of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements, and operations are rated according to their compliance with these requirements. This evolution has happened in the context of an overall cultural shift toward evaluation and more rigorous analysis, which were key components of the Ninth General Capital Increase and of the New Institutional Strategy. It is in this context that OVE assessed the production and use of IEs in IDB public sector operations, seeking to take stock and reflect on what this effort has brought to the Bank, what the cost has been, and what direction the Bank should take in the coming years.


VULCHINKOV, S., D. ILCHOVSKA, B. PAVLOVSKA and K. IVANOVA, 2013. Trends in productive abilities of maize hybrids from different fAO groups. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 744-749 Ten-year data (2001-2010) from official maize hybrids testing in IASAS and preliminary (ecological) trials of Maize Research Institute (MRI), carried out in different locations are compared. Besides the actions of many occasional factors – diversity of environments and great number of hybrids tested from 5 fAO groups (200-600) every year, common tendency of both groups of trials are observed. Grain yield (t/ha) has a relative maximum in semi-late hybrids (fAO 500-600). Closer to them are earlier groups – FAO 300-400 and 400-500. Correlations between grain yield and vegetation period like FAO groups are not significant and their regressions are not linear. Correlations of grain moisture at harvesting (%) and vegetation period are strongly positive and regressions are linear for both of trials. for the period of investigation, a progress of reduction of that trait was observed. Best combinations of relatively high grain yield and low grain moisture were pointed out for early hybrids (FAO 300-400) by performance index (Pi) values. Relatively good combinations of grain yield and stability were observed for fAO 500-600 hybrids, represented by their general adaptation index (xi bi). IASAS trials, like final step of maize hybrids testing including Bulgarian and foreign varieties with the same checks out yielded MRI trials as average levels by FAO groups, but overcoming the correlation high yield – late maturity, better pi values for earlier genotypes and their adaptation are very similar in both trials groups like general tendency. These results confirm the "post green revolution" trends in maize breeding discussed by Duvick and Gassman (1999).


At 8:00 a.m., while children are arriving at school, Mrs.Beasley, the elementary school library media specialist, is busy shelving the books returned yesterday. She has new books to catalog, newspaper and magazines to display and audio visual equipment to distribute to teachers. Before she completes any of this, her first group of children arrives for their regularly scheduled 30 minutes library visit. Mrs. Beasley attempts to help a few children in their selection of appropriate books, but finds that she spends most of her time checking books in and out. To Mrs. Beasley's dismay, there is little time to share her love of books and reading with the children who visit her at the library. As this class leaves, another group of children arrives at the library, and the same scenario continues throughout the day.


Research in the field of information retrieval and recommendation mostly focuses on one single evaluation method and one single quality objective. On the one hand, many research endeavors focus on system-centric evaluation from an algorithmic perspective and consider the context of use only to a minor extent. On the other hand, there are research endeavors focusing on user-centric approaches to the design and evaluation of systems. However, algorithmic quality and perceived quality of user experience do not necessarily match. Thus, it is essential for system evaluation to substantially integrate multiple evaluation methods that cover a variety of relevant aspects and perspectives. Only such an integrated combination of methods may lead to a deep understanding of users, their behavior, and experience in their interaction with a system. This half-day tutorial follows the objective to raise awareness in the CHIIR community concerning the significance of using multiple methods in the evaluation of information retrieval and recommender systems. The tutorial illustrates the "blind spots'' when using single methods. It introduces the concept of "multi-method evaluation'' and discusses its benefits and challenges. While multi-method evaluations may be designed very flexibly, the tutorial presents broadly-defined basic options of how multiple methods may be integrated in an evaluation design. In group work, participants are encouraged to select and fine-tune a specific design that best matches their research endeavor's purpose.


We consider the problem of detecting anomalies in a large dataset. We propose a framework called Partial Identification which captures the intuition that anomalies are easy to distinguish from the overwhelming majority of points by relatively few attribute values. Formalizing this intuition, we propose a geometric anomaly measure for a point that we call PIDScore, which measures the minimum density of data points over all subcubes containing the point. We present PIDForest: a random forest based algorithm that finds anomalies based on this definition. We show that it performs favorably in comparison to several popular anomaly detection methods, across a broad range of benchmarks. PIDForest also provides a succinct explanation for why a point is labelled anomalous, by providing a set of features and ranges for them which are relatively uncommon in the dataset.


One of the major bottlenecks in the production of biopharmaceuticals is the efficient expression of therapeutic proteins in microbial or mammalian cells. The Escherichia coli pAVEwayTM expression system described here has been developed to ensure high product titres and efficient scale up to GMP manufacture, whilst minimising many common issues seen in other expression systems, such as 'leaky' expression (expression of recombinant protein in the absence of inducer).


The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that has occurred largely between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus is marked by a degree of religious tolerance that sees both communities worshiping together. This study describes one important site of such worship, the ancient Hindu temple complex of Munnesvaram. Standing adjacent to one of Sri Lanka's historical western ports, the fortunes of the Munnesvaram temples have waxed and waned through the years of turbulence, violence and social change that have been the country's lot since the advent of European colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Bastin recounts the story of these temples and analyses how the Hindu temple is reproduced as a center of worship amidst conflict and competition.


Since we have been university professors for over thirty years, with thousands of hours of teaching experience and being the expositive method the privileged one for the explanation of the various subjects, we wanted to find out from our 2nd year students, from of the law degree at Portucalense University, which methods they would consider most appropriate in order to instil in them more interest in the presence of the classes and more use in the conclusion of the curricular units. Indeed, in the recent years, we have been finding it more difficult for students to concentrate, subsequently they are more easily distracted and adopt behaviours that disrupt the normal functioning of the classes, namely producing noise, which compromises the intrinsic reflection inherent to the seriousness and importance of the topics covered in the classes. It has also been found that students nowadays tend to read less, often seeking to study by simple summaries and / or notes on the subjects, elaborated by themselves or their peers. For this reason, the presentation of audio-visual media, such as the exhibition of brief documentaries and thematic interviews, has already been taken to the classroom, all related to the subject to be taught or already taught, promoting, then, the critical discussion. Empirically, it has been found that students appreciate this kind of presentation and discussion, which led us to ask them how they evaluate this experience and what, according to them, would be a methodologically interesting class, so as to capture them more interest. We also wanted to know about their reading habits, whether from manuals and other academic bibliographic sources or other kind of literature, as well as their willingness to actively contribute in the classroom context or to adhere to the study-research method and autonomous study with simple tutorial guidance from the teacher. We create an anonymous brief-answers questionnaire so that our students could express themselves as clearly and truthfully as possible. The questionnaire was prepared by us and answered by the students in November 2019. The average age of our students was around 20 years. The results partly coincide with the perception we had already gained from our classroom experience: lectures are considered interesting, audio-visuals very interesting and PowerPoints interesting, contributing to the increased interest of students and their academic achievement; students do not reveal much interest in active participation when learning; students devote little time to reading; students consider the reading of simple summaries and /or notes, elaborated by themselves or their peers, to be sufficient to obtain approval, but nevertheless recognize that reading the manuals is interesting.


The development of computing and computer networks and the emergence of new software programs have contributed to the entrence of information and communication technology in education.
This paper deals with a topical issue of modern education like the integration of eLearning in the lessons.
We approached theoretical and practical applications used to study elementary logic gates.
The paper highlights the role of eLearning in digital electronic circuit simulation, to improve the quality of the educational process.
To provide attractive lesson to the students from technical profile - electronics and automation domein-, students who study in highschool "Basics of digital electronics" module, we created a system of lessons and an electronic course support for the study of logic gates.
We wanted to develop student's both abilities, one covered by this module "The use of logic integrated circuits (Ics)" and other one to develop student's computer skills.
Structured as a website developed using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the course covers:
-theoretical knowledge about basic logic gates: AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR (symbols, the logic function associated, truth table);
-the implementation of logic functions with logic gates;
-videos with practical works made with the educational kit NX-100plus and with Junior Digital Circuit experiment board;
-the interconection of logic integrated circuits, the test, verification and circuit simulation with the educational program "Circuit Maker";
- worksheets;
-assesment tests to verify the achievement skills;
-references for documentation and information.
For education and effective training it is required to use both: eLearning and Traditional educational methods.


Nanostructured material of layered organic-inorganic hybrid nanocomposites can be
generated by encapsulation of an organic moiety into an inorganic lamellar in which
the open lamellar systems such as layered double hydroxides (LDHs) can be used as
the host for this study, synthesis of nanocomposite materials was carried out by
using Mg/Al LDH as a host of inorganic layers and naphthol blue black (NEB), fast
green (FG) and methyl orange (MO), organic dyes, as a guest It was found that the
concentrations of the organic moiety and pH are critical for the formation of the well-ordered
nanolayered hybrid materials The optimum concentration of NBB at 1 50 x
10-³ M, FG of 250 x 10⁻² M and 300 x 10² M of MO at pH 10 resulted a well-ordered
nanolayered organic-inorganic hybrid nanocomposites FTIR spectrum of
each nanocomposites resembled a mixture of each spectrum of the organic and
inorganic species, indicating the presence of both in the resulting materials Surface
morphology of Mg/AI-LDH and its nanocomposites show agglomerates of compact and non-porous structure, a typical surface morphology for LDH and Its
nanocomposites.


Despite current advancements in online provision of eGovernment services, interoperability issues at national and crosscountry level that will facilitate fully integrated, both vertically and horizontally, one-stop, electronic services still remain unsolved. In this context, eGovernment Interoperability Frameworks try to continually extend their scope and to outline the essential prerequisites for joined-up and web-enabled e-government in order to effectively second the seamless exchange of information and the deployment of interoperable systems in the public sector. This paper presents the national interoperability frameworks that have been released by 9 countries (Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States of America) and have reached a certain degree of maturity. A comparative analysis among their contents is conducted in order to indicate the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation and to provide a set of recommendations for any interesting party embarking to design or update an Interoperability Framework.


p38 MAPKs play a central role in orchestrating the cellular response to stress and inflammation and in the regulation of myogenesis. Potent inhibitors of p38 MAPKs have been pursued as potential therapies for several disease indications due to their antiinflammatory properties, although none have been approved to date. Here, we provide a brief overview of p38 MAPKs, including their role in regulating myogenesis and their association with disease progression. Finally, we discuss targeting p38 MAPKs as a therapeutic approach for treating facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy and other muscular dystrophies by addressing multiple pathological mechanisms in skeletal muscle.


Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar's creative lights, transforming the onetime artists' utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. Kater's richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.


In the middle of the summer of 2011, an extraordinary whirlwind of public disorder swept briefly through London and a number of other English towns and cities. These 'riots' were apparently triggered by conflict in Tottenham between police and the friends and relatives of a young man who had been shot dead by police, although many questions were left unanswered as to what else may have contributed to the rapid rise and fall of this disorder, either in terms of broader social and political discontent, or in terms of the psychology of crowd and individual behaviour. In this paper I want to promote debate about the extent to which these 'English riots' may have been an expression of the antisocial tendency, and the extent to which they may have expressed other aspects of societal anxiety about order and disorder.


Geochronological data from the Aileu Complex provide new constraints on the development of the Banda Arc–continent collision. Detrital zircons of the Aileu Complex have major U–Pb age modes at 270–440 Ma, 860–1240 Ma and 1460–1870 Ma, most compatible with a sediment source located in SE Asia as part of the now fragmented Sula Spur. 40Ar/39Ar cooling ages of hornblende demonstrate an extended cooling history across the complex, with the eastern parts cooling through hornblende closure temperature by 10 Ma and central parts by 6 Ma, consistent with a variable exhumation history. The onset of cooling by 10 Ma implies that metamorphism was probably coeval with initiation of the Banda Arc. We propose that the Aileu Complex cooling ages record deformation related to fragmentation of the Sula Spur and early development of the Banda Arc, rather than collision between the Australian continent and the Banda Arc. Supplementary material: Detrital zircon U–Pb analytical results, hornblende argon isotope geochronology sample details, hornblende 40Ar/39Ar step heating analytical results and hornblende electron microprobe analytical results are available at www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18702.


It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to find that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. To explore the reasons for this, we evaluate some of the major bottlenecks facing content delivery networks (CDNs) in Africa. Amongst other factors, we find a lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes, preventing the sharing of CDN servers, as well as poorly configured DNS resolvers. Finally, our mapping of middleboxes in the region reveals that there is a greater presence of transparent proxies in Africa than in Europe or the US. We conclude the work with a number of suggestions for alleviating the issues observed.


Germany's parliamentary democracy appears to be in crisis. The major parties' membership is in decline and barely existing in East Germany, election turnout is decreasing at all levels, and the reputation of politicians has never been worse. At the same time, however, Germans are more interested in politics than in the 1990s, overwhelmingly support democracy, and are keen on participating particularly in local political decision making. Out of this situation emerged www.abgeordnetenwatch.de— a website that aims to re-establish the link between electors and elected by allowing voters and representatives to communicate via a publicly accessible question-andanswer structure. This article addresses the questions of whether such an instrument can revitalize representative democracy and whether it has done so in the context of the 2009 federal elections.


This article considers the staging of documents and national identity in Talgat Batalov's 2012 theatre production Uzbek, an autobiographical solo show that recounts Batalov's experience emigrating from Tashkent to Moscow at the age of nineteen. Through its close reading of Uzbek in performance, this study illustrates how the author uses irony and humor to both embody and elucidate the sociospatial discourse that posits Russia as the "modern center" to Central Asia's "pre-modern periphery." Additionally, this article explores how by presenting his audiences with his actual immigration records, and undermining their credibility, Batalov activates the unreliable status of documents in contemporary Russian culture.


Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, designed for mathematicians, is a rigorous introduction to perturbative quantum field theory, using the language of functional integrals. It covers the basics of classical field theory, free quantum theories and Feynman diagrams. The goal is to discuss, using mathematical language, a number of basic notions and results of QFT that are necessary to understand talks and papers in QFT and String Theory.


ABSTRACT A Fuel cleanup system (FCU) that recovers fusion fuel (tritium and deuterium) from plasma exhaust mixture gas has been developed and demonstrated at the Tritium Process Laboratory (TPL) of Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI). We have proposed a new closed loop FCU system built up by connecting the tubular reservoir tank, the electrolytic reactor and a palladium diffuser. In the electrolytic reactor, methane and water are converted at the same time by electrochemical reaction in gas phase oxidation and reduction to liberate hydrogen isotope as a form of elemental hydrogen. The long tubular reservoir tank that is designed to store and transfer the products gas in plug flow prevents from mixing with reactants for the successive repeat processing. With this tank, high overall decontamination factor of system can be obtained by small number of circulation. As the demonstration test, mixture gas consist of hydrogen isotopes, methane and He were processed in the closed loop FCU. The electrolytic reactor and the tubular reservoir tank worked as designed successfully, and the entire loop exhibited efficient impurity processing performance. The concentration of methane was observed to decrease sharply in every processing by the electrolytic reactor from 2.3% to less than 12ppm finally.


A wide range of problems can be formalized as a set of constraints that need to be satisfied. In fact, such a model is called a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Another way to represent a problem is to express it as a formula in propositional logic, or, in other words, a Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). In the quest to find efficient algorithms for solving instances of CSP and SAT specialised software has been developed. It is, however, not clear when should we choose a SAT-solver over a constraint solver (and vice versa). CSP-solvers are known for their domain-specific reasoning, whereas SAT-solvers are considered to be remarkably fast on Boolean instances. In this thesis we tackle these issues by investigating the connections between CSP and SAT. In order to answer the question why SAT-solvers are so efficient on certain classes of CSP instances, we first present the various ways one can encode a CSP instance into SAT. Next, we show that with some encodings SAT-solvers simulate the effects of enforcing a form of local consistency, called k-consistency, in expected polynomial-time. Thus SAT-solvers are able to solve CSP instances of bounded-width structure efficiently in contrast to conventional constraint solvers. By considering the various ways one can encode CSP domains into SAT, we give theoretical reasons for choosing a particular SAT encoding for several important classes of CSP instances. In particular, we show that with this encoding many problem instances that can be solved in polynomial-time will still be easily solvable once they are translated into SAT. Furthermore, we show that this is not true for several other encodings. Finally, we compare the various ways one can use a SAT-solver to solve the classical problem of the pigeonhole principle. We perform both theoretical and empirical comparison of the various encodings. We conclude that none of the known encodings for the classical representation of the problem will result in an efficiently-solvable SAT instance. Thus in this case constraint solvers are a much better choice.


A simple, accurate, specific and sensitive reverse phase high performance liquid chromatographic method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous estimation of cefixime trihydrate and moxifloxacin hydrochloride in tablet dosage form. The separation was achieved on a NeoSphere C18, 250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm column with detection at 290 nm. A mobile phase comprising of 0.025M phosphate buffer and methanol (60:40 v/v), adjusted to pH3.5 with 5% o-phosphoric acid was used at a flow rate 1.2 ml/min. The retention times for cefixime trihydrate and moxifloxacin hydrochloride were found to be 3.8 min and 16.5 min respectively. The calibration curves for the two drugs were linear in the concentration range 2-10 μg/ml. The developed method, validated as per ICH guidelines. It can be used for the simultaneous estimation of cefixime and moxifloxacin in tablet dosage forms.


Abstract Geological evidence indicates that sediment reworking is common around the continental margins and abyssal depths of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, a high-latitude setting with glacier-influenced margins. Detailed analysis of 22 cores up to 5 m long, placed in context by accompanying geophysical data including high resolution sub-bottom profiles, swath bathymetry and backscatter maps, indicates that reworking is variable and ranges from debris flows and turbidity currents, to bottom-current activity, as well as iceberg scouring. Reworking by debris flows appears to be restricted mainly to the main trough-mouth fans and sediment slides. Elsewhere, turbidity-current activity frequently dominates, although iceberg ploughing down to 600 m depth and current winnowing assume increasing significance on continental shelves. Reworking in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea reflects variations in ice-sheet dynamics that, in turn, influence the rate of sediment delivery and location of depocentres. Spatial variations in the style of reworking may also reflect the influence of continental slope gradient and bedrock geology on continental shelves. The widespread nature of sediment reworking has important implications for palaeoceanographic investigations in the region, as reworking can result in erosion and disturbance of the sediment column. It is estimated that less than 7% of material delivered to the Norwegian-Greenland Sea since the Late Weichselian is derived from hemipelagic and pelagic sedimentation. This problem is significant where continuous, high-resolution records of hemipelagic and pelagic sedimentation are required, and attempts are made to correlate with other high-resolution proxy records, such as ice cores, at sub-millennial scales. Bioturbation results in the smoothing of high-resolution records and imposes a maximum resolution for sediment-core time-slices of generally 400 years or more. In the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, areas of high sedimentation such as trough-mouth fans or contourite drifts are commonly associated with extensive reworking. Identification of reworking is particularly important where attempts are made to link records of iceberg-rafted debris to past ice-sheet dynamics, as bottom-current winnowing and mass-flow processes can increase the concentration of coarse-grained iceberg-rafted debris. Such localized accentuation of the iceberg-rafted debris signal may lead to erroneous palaeo-environmental interpretations. It is therefore critical that palaeoceanographic interpretations are firmly underpinned by an explicit sedimentological assessment of reworking.


The explosion of cities in recent decades has posed myriad problems for town planners. Most of this huge and rapid expansion of the urban area has been taking place in the Global South, so it is fitting that the 15th Conference of the International Planning History Society was held in Sao Paulo. Founded by Portuguese missionaries during the 1600s, Sao Paulo was for centuries a slow-growing city within a vast rural hinterland. By 1900, it numbered less than 200,000 inhabitants. Today it is the largest city in Brazil, and one of the largest in Latin America, with a population of over 11 million, and an estimated wider metropolitan population of over 17 million. The city thus deserves its ranking in the 'top ten' of the world's largest cities. From the 41st floor of the Italia Building, in the heart of downtown Sao Paulo, the 360-degree view from the conference cocktail party was of a vast and uninterrupted urban area sprawling to the hills in the far distance.Conference organisation and contributionsThe 15th IPHS Conference convenor was Professor Maria Cristena da Silva Leme of the University of Sao Paulo (USP). The local organising committee was comprised of academics based at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at USP, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University (MPU), the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Pontificia Catholic University de Campinas and Sao Judas Tadeu University. The conference was held mostly in MPU and USP, and in adjacent buildings within relatively close range of each other in an attractive district of Sao Paulo.Within the rubric of the conference and beyond it, a diverse set of over 230 papers and presentations were offered over the three days of the meeting. Many of them addressed the wider rubric of the conference theme outlined in the conference handbooks, including 'issues of territorial disparities in the sphere of planning history' and 'connections and discontinuities, tensions and superimpositions, both in the process of urbanisation and in the planning field'. It is impossible to do justice to all of them herein this brief report, but across the sessions and papers some key themes and subjects emerged, including:* the international diffusion of town planning ideas; large-scale urbanisation and planning; transnational planning and regional conditions;* the right to the city in response to the processes of gentrification; social housing in comparative perspective; privatisation and housing inequality;* housing, planning and production; architecture and urban design; cultural and social processes in Latin American cities;* the colonial presence of European settlers in Latin America, and their relationship to urban development;* the relationship between town planning, architecture and urban design;* modernisation and planning in Latin America and other regions of the Global South; immigration and ethnic diversity in the city;* water and urban development; sport, heritage and urban regeneration;* city-planning exhibitions;* the origins and development of planning education;* film, representation and city image; heritage, urbanisation and planning; and* the contribution of women to the development of town planning.Another interesting point about the academics giving papers or chairing sessions was that there were probably more women among the delegates than at previous IPHS conferences.Brazilian cities and regions, as might be expected, were the subject of many papers. Although this was the first IPHS conference to be held in Latin America, it was surprising that there were relatively few papers from academics in other countries south of the United States border. Chile was the subject of a session on public buildings and public space, although a couple of comparative sessions focused on city plans for Buenos Aires, Argentina and Brazilian cities.What was also striking, however, in terms of the wider geographical coverage of the conference, was the relatively scant number of papers delivered on the United Kingdom, Eastern and Western Europe and the United States of America. …


Summary Emergency contraception is a common practice now. Many categories of drugs are marketed with modifications in dosage, in combination and even in the timing of administration. Recent re-analysis suggests that there is still no uniformity of opinion on the actual mechanism of action and this has often fueled the ethical controversy. This review analyzes the most common emergency contraception drugs: levonorgestrel, mifepristone and ulipristal acetate about their action underlining that the hormonal products, when used in emergency contraception, play different roles depending on the phase of the menstrual cycle during which they are administered.This review aims to examine rigorously the most accredited literature to verify if a evidence-based uniformity of opinions has been achieved about the biological effects of hormones administered after the sexual intercourse.


Gas Separations When gas separation membranes are made thinner, they usually allow permeating gases to pass through faster. However, a thinner membrane may be poorer at separating between gas species. Kim et al. (p. 91) examined the permeability and selectivity of layered graphene and graphene oxide membranes. Gas molecules diffuse through defective pores and channels that form between the layers. Controlling these structures tuned the properties of the membranes to allow the extraction of carbon dioxide from other gases. Li et al. (p. 95) describe membranes as thin as 1.8 nanometers made from only two to three layers of graphene oxide. Small defects within the layers allowed hydrogen to pass through, separating it from carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Ultrathin graphene oxide membranes show enhanced separation selectivity for hydrogen gas. Ultrathin, molecular-sieving membranes have great potential to realize high-flux, high-selectivity mixture separation at low energy cost. Current microporous membranes [pore size < 1 nanometer (nm)], however, are usually relatively thick. With the use of current membrane materials and techniques, it is difficult to prepare microporous membranes thinner than 20 nm without introducing extra defects. Here, we report ultrathin graphene oxide (GO) membranes, with thickness approaching 1.8 nm, prepared by a facile filtration process. These membranes showed mixture separation selectivities as high as 3400 and 900 for H2/CO2 and H2/N2 mixtures, respectively, through selective structural defects on GO.


Liposome systems are well reported for their activity as vaccine adjuvants; however novel lipid-based microbubbles have also been reported to enhance the targeting of antigens into dendritic cells (DCs) in cancer immunotherapy (Suzuki et al 2009). This research initially focused on the formulation of gas-filled lipid coated microbubbles and their potential activation of macrophages using in vitro models. Further studies in the thesis concentrated on aqueous-filled liposomes as vaccine delivery systems. Initial work involved formulating and characterising four different methods of producing lipid-coated microbubbles (sometimes referred to as gas-filled liposomes), by homogenisation, sonication, a gas-releasing chemical reaction and agitation/pressurisation in terms of stability and physico-chemical characteristics. Two of the preparations were tested as pressure probes in MRI studies. The first preparation composed of a standard phospholipid (DSPC) filled with air or nitrogen (N2), whilst in the second method the microbubbles were composed of a fluorinated phospholipid (F-GPC) filled with a fluorocarbon saturated gas. The studies showed that whilst maintaining high sensitivity, a novel contrast agent which allows stable MRI measurements of fluid pressure over time, could be produced using lipid-coated microbubbles. The F-GPC microbubbles were found to withstand pressures up to 2.6 bar with minimal damage as opposed to the DSPC microbubbles, which were damaged at above 1.3 bar. However, it was also found that DSPC-filled with N2 microbubbles were also extremely robust to pressure and their performance was similar to that of F-GPC based microbubbles. Following on from the MRI studies, the DSPC-air and N2 filled lipid-based microbubbles were assessed for their potential activation of macrophages using in vitro models and compared to equivalent aqueous-filled liposomes. The microbubble formulations did not stimulate macrophage uptake, so studies thereafter focused on aqueous-filled liposomes. Further studies concentrated on formulating and characterising, both physico-chemically and immunologically, cationic liposomes based on the potent adjuvant dimethyldioctadecylammonium (DDA) and immunomodulatory trehalose dibehenate (TDB) with the addition of polyethylene glycol (PEG). One of the proposed hypotheses for the mechanism behind the immunostimulatory effect obtained with DDA:TDB is the 'depot effect' in which the liposomal carrier helps to retain the antigen at the injection site thereby increasing the time of vaccine exposure to the immune cells. The depot effect has been suggested to be primarily due to their cationic nature. Results reported within this thesis demonstrate that higher levels of PEG i.e. 25 % were able to significantly inhibit the formation of a liposome depot at the injection site and also severely limit the retention of antigen at the site. This therefore resulted in a faster drainage of the liposomes from the site of injection. The versatility of cationic liposomes based on DDA:TDB in combination with different immunostimulatory ligands including, polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (poly (I:C), TLR 3 ligand), and CpG (TLR 9 ligand) either entrapped within the vesicles or adsorbed onto the liposome surface was investigated for immunogenic capacity as vaccine adjuvants. Small unilamellar (SUV) DDA:TDB vesicles (20-100 nm native size) with protein antigen adsorbed to the vesicle surface were the most potent in inducing both T cell (7-fold increase) and antibody (up to 2 log increase) antigen specific responses. The addition of TLR agonists poly(I:C) and CpG to SUV liposomes had small or no effect on their adjuvanticity. Finally, threitol ceramide (ThrCer), a new mmunostimulatory agent, was incorporated into the bilayers of liposomes composed of DDA or DSPC to investigate the uptake of ThrCer, by dendritic cells (DCs), and presentation on CD1d molecules to invariant natural killer T cells. These systems were prepared both as multilamellar vesicles (MLV) and Small unilamellar (SUV). It was demonstrated that the IFN-g secretion was higher for DDA SUV liposome formulation (p<0.05), suggesting that ThrCer encapsulation in this liposome formulation resulted in a higher uptake by DCs.


Since the beginning of the crisis of 2008, the credibility of central banks is again an important question. Indeed, in spite of their independence and the success of their monetary policy, based on price stability, they were not able to ensure financial stability. To restore it and save the banking systems, central banks and states, whose deficits strongly increased, had to conduct new joint actions. The subject of this article is to show the unsuitable character of the monetarist literature devoted to the credibility of the central bank prior to the crisis and the inevitable dependence between monetary and fiscal policies questioning the independence of central banks which they seek to preserve by "disconnecting" the banking crisis and the sovereign debt, in particular in Europe. The observation of the results shows that the choices operated by central banks, essentially providing liquidity, only strengthen their credibility. Classification JEL: E58, E63.


The "Arnolfini" portrait, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434, is one of the world's most famous paintings. It intrigues all who see it. Scholars and the public alike have puzzled over the meaning of this haunting gem of medieval art, a subtle and beautiful double portrait of a wealthy Bruges merchant and his wife. The enigmatic couple seem to be conveying a message to us across the centuries, but what? Is the painting the celebration of marriage or pregnancy, a memorial to a wife who died in childbirth, a fashion statement or a status symbol? Using her acclaimed forensic skills as an art historian, Carola Hicks set out to decode the mystery, uncovering a few surprises along the way. She also tells the fascinating story of the painting's survival through fires, battles, hazardous sea journeys, and its role as a mirror reflecting the culture and history of the time - from jewel of the Hapsburg empire to Napoleonic war trophy. Uniquely, for a masterpiece this old, it can be tracked through every single owner, from the mysterious Mr Arnolfini via various monarchs to a hard-up Waterloo war hero, until it finally came to rest in 1842 as an early star of the National Gallery. These owners, too, have cameo parts in this enthralling story of how an artwork of genius can speak afresh to each new generation.


Developing an adaptive interface requires a user interface that can be adapted, a user model, and an adaptation strategy. Research on adaptive interfaces in the past suffered from a lack of supporting tools which allow an interface to be easily created and modified. Also, adding adaptivity to a user interface so far has not been supported by any user interface systems or environments. In this paper, we present an overview of a knowledge base model of the User Interface Design Environment (UIDE). UIDE uses the knowledge of an application to support the run-time execution of the application's interface and provides various kinds of automatic help. We present how the knowledge model can be used as a basic construct of a user model. Finally, we present adaptive interface and adaptive help behaviors that can be extended to the current UIDE architecture utilizing the user model. These behaviors are options from which an application designer can choose for an application interface.


We present an approach to training neural networks to generate sequences using actor-critic methods from reinforcement learning (RL). Current log-likelihood training methods are limited by the discrepancy between their training and testing modes, as models must generate tokens conditioned on their previous guesses rather than the ground-truth tokens. We address this problem by introducing a \textit{critic} network that is trained to predict the value of an output token, given the policy of an \textit{actor} network. This results in a training procedure that is much closer to the test phase, and allows us to directly optimize for a task-specific score such as BLEU. Crucially, since we leverage these techniques in the supervised learning setting rather than the traditional RL setting, we condition the critic network on the ground-truth output. We show that our method leads to improved performance on both a synthetic task, and for German-English machine translation. Our analysis paves the way for such methods to be applied in natural language generation tasks, such as machine translation, caption generation, and dialogue modelling.


Objective: To examine whether cognitive reserve (CR) attenuates the initial impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on cognitive performance (neural reserve) and results in faster cognitive recovery rates in the first year postinjury (neural compensation), and whether the advantage of CR differs on the basis of the severity of TBI. Setting: Inpatient/outpatient clinics at an academic medical center. Participants: Adults with mild TBI (mTBI; n = 28), complicated mild TBI (cmTBI; n = 24), and moderate to severe TBI (msevTBI; n = 57), and demographically matched controls (n = 66). Design: Retrospective, longitudinal cohort assessed at 1, 6, and 12 months postinjury. Main Measures: Outcomes were 3 cognitive domains: processing speed/executive function, verbal fluency, and memory. Premorbid IQ, estimated with the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading, served as CR proxy. Results: Higher premorbid IQ was associated with better performance on cognitive domains at 1 month postinjury, and the effect of IQ was similarly beneficial for all groups. Cognitive recovery rate was moderated only by TBI severity; those with more severe TBI had faster recovery in the first year. Conclusion: Results support only the neural reserve theory of CR within a TBI population and indicate that CR is neuroprotective, regardless of the degree of TBI. Higher premorbid CR does not allow for more rapid adaptation and recovery from injury.


With increasing demand for computing and memory, distributed computing systems have attracted a lot of attention. Resource allocation is one of the most important challenges in the distributed systems specially when the clients have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the total profit in the system depends on how the system can meet these SLAs. In this paper, an SLA-based resource allocation problem for multi-tier applications in the cloud computing is considered. An upper bound on the total profit is provided and an algorithm based on force-directed search is proposed to solve the problem. The processing, memory requirement, and communication resources are considered as three dimensions in which optimization is performed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm.


Multiple neurological conditions can manifest primarily with psychiatric symptoms. The physical signs and symptoms may be much delayed. We have summarized seven clinical presentations of psychiatric symptoms, which were finally diagnosed as neurological conditions, including Huntington's disease, brain tumors (glioblastoma multiforme, glioma and meningioma), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), neurosyphilis and anti-N-Methyl-DAspartate (NMDA) Receptor Encephalitis. These cases highlight that the practicing physician and psychiatrist be cognizant of the differential diagnosis spectrum of presenting symptoms. Conducting appropriate physical examinations, ordering relevant laboratory and imaging tests will clinch an organic versus a psychiatric diagnosis. Such diagnostic acumen will not only improve the quality of life for the patient, but also limit further morbidity.


We challenge the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent (in our view) in organizational decision support and strategy: assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intentional capability. We describe the Cynefin framework, a sense-making device we have developed to help people make sense of the complexities made visible by the relaxation of these assumptions. The Cynefin framework is derived from several years of action research into the use of narrative and complexity theory in organizational knowledge exchange, decision making, strategy and policy making. The framework is explained, its conceptual underpinnings are outlined, and its use in group sense-making and discourse is described. Finally, the consequences of relaxing the three basic assumptions, using the Cynefin framework as a mechanism, are considered.


During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans were fascinated with fraud. P. T. Barnum artfully exploited the American yen for deception, and even Mark Twain championed it, arguing that lying was virtuous insofar as it provided the glue for all interpersonal intercourse. But deception was not used solely to delight, and many fell prey to the schemes of con men and the wiles of spirit mediums. As a result, a number of experimental psychologists set themselves the task of identifying and eliminating the illusions engendered by modern, commercial life. By the 1920s, however, many of these same psychologists had come to depend on deliberate misdirection and deceitful stimuli to support their own experiments. "The Science of Deception" explores this paradox, weaving together the story of deception in American commercial culture with its growing use in the discipline of psychology. Michael Pettit reveals how deception came to be something that psychologists not only studied but also employed to establish their authority. They developed a host of tools - the lie detector, psychotherapy, an array of personality tests, and more - for making deception more transparent in the courts and elsewhere. Pettit's study illuminates the intimate connections between the scientific discipline and the marketplace during a crucial period in the development of market culture. With its broad research and engaging tales of treachery, "The Science of Deception" will appeal to scholars and general readers alike.


Surface-initiated controlled radical polymerization is a powerful strategy to tailor the chemical and physical surface properties of materials. This article highlights recent work from the author's laboratory in which surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization is used to generate biofunctional and biomimetic surface coatings. Three examples will be discussed. The first two examples are based on the surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization of 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate and (polyethylene glycol) methacrylate, which generates a polymer brush that suppresses non-specific adhesion of proteins and cells. These non-fouling brushes have been used to generate protein microarrays and to produce coatings that can promote endothelialization of implantable biomaterials. The third example describes the use of polyelectrolyte brushes as matrices to direct the mineralization of calcium carbonate. © Schweizerische Chemische Gesellschaft.


Metamorphic devolatilization generates fluid and grain-scale porosity. Evidence for high fluid pressure indicates that devolatilization occurs under poorly drained conditions. Under such conditions, fluid expulsion is limited by the capacity of the reacted rocks to resist compaction or by the rate at which deformation modifies the permeability of the overlying rocks. In the former case, the compaction timescale must be greater than the metamorphic timescale, and flow patterns are dictated by details of rock permeability. The alternative is that compaction processes are fast relative to metamorphism. In this case, flow is compaction driven and accomplished by waves of fluid-filled porosity.


A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, relative to lottery losers, winners report improved housing farther from the city center, but no change in family income or human capital. Winners also report increased isolation from family and caste networks and lower access to informal insurance. We observe significant program exit: 34% of winners never moved into the subsidized housing and 32% eventually exited. Our results point to the importance of considering social networks when designing housing programs for the poor.


The "Kentucky Irish American" began life in 1898 as one of many ethnic newspapers in America, but by its final years it attracted an avid national audience of many ethnicities. From 1925, the "KIA" was owned and edited by the Barry family of Louisville: by John J. Barry to 1950, and by his son Michael to its demise in 1968.This anthology focuses on the Mike Barry years -- a time of Cold War and Vietnam, of Kennedy, Nixon, McCarthy, Goldwater, and Happy Chandler. Under Mike's brilliant editorship, the "KIA" offered its readers a richly textured, pungent voice that combined humor with a constant push for social improvement in Kentucky and in the nation.Always the "KIA" was strong in its support of all things Irish, Catholic, and American. It was also an acerbic commentator on the absurdities of Kentucky politics. But the "KIA" was notable -- and noticed -- for its strong positions on national and international issues.Red Smith once described the "KIA" as "all the excuse any man needs for learning to read." Today's readers can now discover the pleasures of a livelier era in journalism.


This study was intended to investigate the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking on students' writing performance and their critical thinking dispositions. To this end, 140 students were selected. 73 students were assigned to the experimental group and 67 were assigned to the control group. The experimental group received instruction in critical thinking strategies whereas the control group did not. The instruments used in this study were the researcher-developed essay test, the Ennis-Weir critical thinking essay test, and the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI). A 2-group pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design was utilized to determine the outcome measures. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and independent-samples ttest. Statistically significant differences were observed in the experimental and the control groups in the total scores of the three instruments. The results indicated an improvement in students' writing performance and their dispositions toward using critical thinking strategies. Nonetheless, some dispositional aspects such as truth-seeking, cognitive maturity, and open- mindedness did not differ significantly after the intervention.


"Exploring Art and Visual Culture: A Reader" brings together essential primary texts by artists, critics and art historians ranging from the medieval period right through to our own times. There is no other reader available that covers such an extensive period. Selected by leading academics in their field, and published in conjunction with the Open University, the reader will be an essential sourcebook for every student of art history as well as all those seeking a greater understanding of art and of the cultural and historical context in which it is made. "The Reader" is organised in three parts. The first section, Medieval to Renaissance, 1000 - 1600, includes extracts from the writings of the Venerable Bede, Vasari, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aristotle, Erwin Panofsky, Nikolaus Pevsner, Erasmus and Walter Pater, among others, and sections on sacred art, Gothic architecture, the art of the crusades and the Renaissance. The second part Patronage to the Public Sphere, 1600 - 1850 includes texts by W.J.T. Mitchell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Crowe, Richard Shiff and Caspar David Freidrich and examines the city and the country, the golden age of Dutch painting, London and Paris, landscape design, exploration, neoclassicism and the birth of Romanticism. The section on Exploring Art from Modernity to Globalisation, 1850 - 2010 includes writings by Marinetti, Gauguin, John Ruskin, William Morris, John Berger, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Miwon Kwon examining modernism, the rise of abstraction, conceptual art and globalisation.


We describe the activities of the Empirical Software Engi-neering (ESE) group at Microsoft Research. We highlight our research themes and activities using examples from our research on socio technical congruence, bug reporting and triaging, and data-driven software engineering to illustrate our relationship to the CSCW community. We highlight our unique ability to leverage industrial data and developers and the ability to make near term impact on Microsoft via the results of our studies. We also present the collaborations our group has with academic researchers.


Exploring the chemical and biological space covered by patent and journal publications is crucial in early- stage medicinal chemistry activities. The analysis provides understanding of compound prior art, novelty checking, validation of biological assays, and identification of new starting points for chemical exploration.
Extracting chemical and biological entities from patents and journals through manual extraction by expert curators can take substantial amount of time and resources. Text mining methods can help to ease this process.
In this book, we addressed the lack of quality measurements for assessing the correctness of structural representation within and across chemical databases; lack of resources to build text-mining systems; lack of high performance systems to extract chemical compounds from journals and patents; and lack of automated systems to identify relevant compounds in patents. The consistency and ambiguity of chemical identifiers was analyzed within and between small- molecule databases in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 we developed resources to enable the construction of chemical text-mining systems. In Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, we used community challenges (BioCreative V and BioCreative VI) and their corresponding resources to identify mentions of chemical compounds in journal abstracts and patents. In Chapter 7 we used our findings in previous chapters to extract chemical named entities from patent full text and to classify the relevancy of chemical compounds.


We investigate the computational power of a formal model for networks of spiking neurons. It is shown that simple operations on phase differences between spike-trains provide a very powerful computational tool that can in principle be used to carry out highly complex computations on a small network of spiking neurons. We construct networks of spiking neurons that simulate arbitrary threshold circuits, Turing machines, and a certain type of random access machines with real valued inputs. We also show that relatively weak basic assumptions about the response and threshold functions of the spiking neurons are sufficient to employ them for such computations.


Low vision (LV) is a term that denotes a visual acuity of 6/18 metres in the better eye after medical correction and other intervention measures. This is interpreted to mean that what a pupil who is sighted can see at six metres, a pupil with LV will see it at eighteen metres. This condition makes performance of everyday tasks difficult or impossible. It affects central and/or peripheral(side) vision. The condition is caused by; injuries that damage the optic nerve, cataract, glaucoma and birth injuries among others. In Kenya, most learners with LV are educated in integrated programmes with most teachers not trained on how to manage nor identify them because of their unique identity. This group of students has been thought to be relatively wellintegrated and socially accepted by the sighted peers and therefore, have continued to suffer amidst peers and teachers. They have continued to perform poorly academically. This study investigated the impact of social experiences on academic performance of pupils with low vision in integrated primary schools in Nairobi County. The objectives of the study were: to establish the academic performance of pupils with LV in integrated regular primary schools in Nairobi, determine the impact of social interaction with sighted peers and teachers on academic performance of learners with LV, the role of family and community in the social experiences of learners with LV, establish intervention measures by school to enhance social experiences and academic performance and to establish materials and facilities that support learners with LV by the school. This study used descriptive survey research design. Kilimani and Our Lady of Mercy, Shauri Moyo primary schools in Westlands and Makadara Districts respectively, Nairobi County were used for the study. These are resource centers for learners with LV. Purposive sampling procedure was used to select learners with low vision and teachers. The target population was learners with LV of classes 5, 6, and 7, teachers in these classes and the headteachers. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the pupils and teachers and an interview schedule for the headteachers. A check-list was used to establish available support for learners with LV in the school. Piloting of the instruments was carried out at Muthaiga Primary School which is also a resource center for learners with LV in Kasarani District to determine reliability of data. The pilot school was excluded from the study. Data were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The study showed that the level of peer and teacher interaction at school had the highest influenced academic performance of pupils with low vision and that support given by the school for example teaching resources and friendly environment influenced academic performance the least.


This work concerns with experimental and analytical investigation of role of ultrasonic wave radiation in relative permeability of both wetting and non-wetting phases in a free gravity drainage process in porous media under the influence of ultrasonic wave. Glass beads ranged from 70 to 100 mesh sizes were packed and used in the tests. The working fluids consist of distilled water, kerosene and Doroud and Paidar crude oils as wetting and air as non-wetting phase. The measured oil recovery data along with Hagoort (1984) backward methodology were used to determine and to compare the relative permeability of wetting phases in presence and absence of ultrasonic radiation. In addition, the relative permeability of non-wetting phases for both cases was calculated from inverse modeling of provided data. The results showed that wave enhanced the relative permeability of phases, except than for the case of Paidar crude oil, which is asphaltenic. According to this study, it is proved that wave radiation increases the relative permeability of both wetting and non wetting phases. Although, the results where adverse in the case of asphaltenic crude oil which could be justified as a result of breakdown and dissociation-dissolution of asphaltene particles.


Ocular allergy is one of the most common disorders of the eye surface. Following diagnosis this condition is typically treated with preparations containing antihistamines. However, anatomy of the eye and its natural protective mechanisms create challenges for ocular drug delivery. Rapid elimination of antihistamine substances due to short residency times following application can lead to insufficient treatment of ocular allergies. With this in mind, the aim of this study was to prepare a controlled ocular delivery system to extend the retention time of olopatadine hydrochloride (OLO) and in doing so to reduce the need for frequent application. We developed extended-release ocular in situ gelling systems for which in vivo retention times were determined in sheep following in vitro characterization and cytotoxicity studies. In vivo results were then compared to commercially available Patanol eye drops. the transparent gels formulated using appropriate amounts of polymers and having longer ocular retention times appear to be a viable alternative to commercially available eye drops.


In this article, the authors discuss the use of power-sharing instruments in the Western Balkans. While the comparison will focus on the use of power-sharing in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia, there will be occasional references to Kosovo, the third country in the region that displays elements of power-sharing. We argue that the region has been a laboratory of power-sharing instruments, with rather mixed results. While in all three cases, power-sharing was part of a larger strategy of peacebuilding, and was, therefore, successful in ending violent conflict and supporting peaceful conflict resolution, the introduction of power-sharing has also had some negative side effects. We will discuss, in particular, the consequences of complicated political systems, veto rights, as well as far-reaching ethno-territorial autonomy. Furthermore, the article will asses the risk of blockages arising from complex political arrangements and resulting international mediation. A particular focus of the article will be to distinguish between federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina and alternative forms of autonomy (both territorial and non-territorial) in Macedonia and Kosovo. Rather than suggesting that power-sharing as such has failed in the region, we submit that the experience in the region suggests that: (a) there are no viable alternatives to power-sharing in the selected countries; (b) that different types of power-sharing need to be considered; and (c) that potential membership in the European Union continues to be the only incentive for the efficient implementation and application of power-sharing in the cases discussed.


We present the analysis of the atmospheric trajectory and orbital data of four bright bolides observed over Spain, one of which is a potential meteorite dropping event. Their absolute magnitude ranges from −10 to −11. Two of these are of sporadic origin, although a Geminid and a κ-Cygnid fireball are also considered. These events were recorded in the framework of the continuous fireball monitoring and spectroscopy campaigns developed by the SPanish Meteor Network (SPMN) between 2010 and 2012. The tensile strength of the parent meteoroids is estimated and the abundances of the main rock-forming elements in these particles are calculated from the emission spectrum obtained for three of these events. This analysis revealed a chondritic nature for these meteoroids.


The study investigated the effect of teacher empowerment on the quality of education in secondary schools in Borama district, Somaliland. Teacher empowerment was measured from autonomy and promotion; and quality of education from teacher characteristics, teaching methods, learning environment, and learner readiness. The problem of the study was the low quality of education in Somaliland. In Borama, only 51.4% of teachers are qualified; the teacher-student ratio is 55.4% and the student-classroom ratio is 55.3%. Less than 40% of students engage in active learning. The study specifically determined the effect of autonomy and promotion on quality of education, based on a cross-sectional survey of a stratified sample of 132 teachers in 16 secondary schools. Teacher promotion has a significant lone effect on quality of education, F (2, 13) = 5.113, p = .023,  = .263, but teacher autonomy, [F (2, 13) = 2.424, p = .127] does not have significant lone effect on quality of education. Teacher autonomy and teacher promotion have a significant interaction effect, F (1, 15) = 5.000, p = .041, = .250. Hence, teacher empowerment has a significant effect on the quality of education in secondary schools in Borama district. The MoES should re-evaluate its teacher autonomy policy and practices to eliminate the aspects of the policy that make a negative contribution to the quality of education. It should also develop means of promoting teachers to empower them.


Importance Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) reflects past glucose concentrations, but this relationship may differ between those with sickle cell trait (SCT) and those without it. Objective To evaluate the association between SCT and HbA1c for given levels of fasting or 2-hour glucose levels among African Americans. Design, Setting, and Participants Retrospective cohort study using data collected from 7938 participants in 2 community-based cohorts, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study and the Jackson Heart Study (JHS). From the CARDIA study, 2637 patients contributed a maximum of 2 visits (2005-2011); from the JHS, 5301 participants contributed a maximum of 3 visits (2000-2013). All visits were scheduled at approximately 5-year intervals. Participants without SCT data, those without any concurrent HbA1c and glucose measurements, and those with hemoglobin variants HbSS, HbCC, or HbAC were excluded. Analysis of the primary outcome was conducted using generalized estimating equations (GEE) to examine the association of SCT with HbA1c levels, controlling for fasting or 2-hour glucose measures. Exposures Presence of SCT. Main Outcomes and Measures Hemoglobin A1c stratified by the presence or absence of SCT was the primary outcome measure. Results The analytic sample included 4620 participants (mean age, 52.3 [SD, 11.8] years; 2835 women [61.3%]; 367 [7.9%] with SCT) with 9062 concurrent measures of fasting glucose and HbA1c levels. In unadjusted GEE analyses, for a given fasting glucose, HbA1c values were statistically significantly lower in those with (5.72%) vs those without (6.01%) SCT (mean HbA1c difference, −0.29%; 95% CI, −0.35% to −0.23%). Findings were similar in models adjusted for key risk factors and in analyses using 2001 concurrent measures of 2-hour glucose and HbA1c concentration for those with SCT (mean, 5.35%) vs those without SCT (mean, 5.65%) for a mean HbA1c difference of −0.30% (95% CI, −0.39% to −0.21%). The HbA1c difference by SCT was greater at higher fasting (P = .02 for interaction) and 2-hour (P = .03) glucose concentrations. The prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes was statistically significantly lower among participants with SCT when defined using HbA1c values (29.2% vs 48.6% for prediabetes and 3.8% vs 7.3% for diabetes in 572 observations from participants with SCT and 6877 observations from participants without SCT; P<.001 for both comparisons). Conclusions and Relevance Among African Americans from 2 large, well-established cohorts, participants with SCT had lower levels of HbA1c at any given concentration of fasting or 2-hour glucose compared with participants without SCT. These findings suggest that HbA1c may systematically underestimate past glycemia in black patients with SCT and may require further evaluation.


Statistical distributions of lightning current amplitude, time-to-peak and other lightning current parameters used in power system insulation coordination are based on experimental data obtained by means of tall instrumented towers. It is, however, generally accepted that these distributions, which we will call 'classical' ones, are affected by the presence of the tower, as the tower ability to attract lightning flashes tends to increase for flashes with larger currents. Current amplitudes are thus biased towards higher values with respect to those which refer to flashes at ground. In this paper, we adopt a procedure recently proposed by the authors to infer the statistical distributions of lightning current parameters at ground level starting from those obtained from data measured using tall instrumented towers. The procedure is first applied to classical statistical distributions of lightning current parameters to quantify the tower bias, and this for various models that have been proposed in the literature to represent the exposure of the tower to direct strokes. Then, the statistical distributions at ground, calculated by applying the proposed procedure, are used to calculate the indirect-lightning performances of an overhead line above an ideal and a lossy ground. The results are also compared with those obtained using the original distributions of lightning current parameters, i.e. by neglecting the bias introduced in the distributions by the presence of the instrumented tower, and a significant difference is found.


Letter from Thomas Falconer to "My dear Austin" in London. The letter was written in the third month of Falconer's captivity and posted from San Luis Potosi, Mexico. The letter recounts how he became part of the Santa Fe Expedition in June 1841 and narrates his experiences during the expedition. Falconer states that he was falsely told that the expedition was for trade when in fact its purpose was to capture Santa Fe. The letter describes his companions; the decline of Santa Fe's importance for trade; problems with the route and guides; lack of food; a camp fire that becomes a prairie fire; buffalo; and Indian attacks, scalpings, and deaths. The original handwritten letter is also available via the Portal to Texas History.


In this article I discuss the question of whether a person's existence can be better (or worse) for him than his non-existence. Recently, Nils Holtug and Melinda A. Roberts have defended an affirmative answer. These defenses, I shall argue, do not succeed. In different ways, Holtug and Roberts have got the metaphysics and axiology wrong. However, I also argue that a person's existence can after all be better (or worse) for him than his non-existence, though for reasons other than those provided by Holtug and Roberts.


We study the structural, magnetic, and transport properties of LaAlO3/EuTiO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures grown by pulsed laser deposition. The samples are characterized in situ by electron diffraction and scanning probe microscopy and ex situ by transport measurements and x-ray absorption spectroscopy. LaAlO3/EuTiO3/SrTiO3 films show a ferromagnetic transition at T <= 7.5 K, related to the ordering of Eu2+ spins, even in samples characterized by just two EuTiO3 unit cells. A finite metallic conductivity is observed only in the case of samples composed by one or two EuTiO3 unit cells and, simultaneously, by a LaAlO3 thickness greater than or equal to four unit cells. The effect of ferromagnetic EuTiO3 on the transport properties of delta-doped LaAlO3/EuTiO3/SrTiO3 is critically discussed.


The Cultural Diffusion of the Fertility Transition: Evidence from Internal Migration in 19th Century France* France experienced the demographic transition before richer and more educated countries. This paper offers a novel explanation for this puzzle that emphasizes the diffusion of culture and information through internal migration. It tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial bilateral migration matrix between French regions for 1861-1911. The identification strategy uses exogenous variation in transportation costs resulting from the construction of railways. The results suggest the convergence towards low birth rates can be explained by the diffusion of low-fertility norms by migrants, especially by migrants to and from Paris. JEL Classification: J13, N33, O15


A visual telepresence system has been developed at the University of Reading which utilizes eye tracing to adjust the horizontal orientation of the cameras and display system according to the convergence state of the operator's eyes. Slaving the cameras to the operator's direction of gaze enables the object of interest to be centered on the displays. The advantage of this is that the camera field of view may be decreased to maximize the achievable depth resolution. An active camera system requires an active display system if appropriate binocular cues are to be preserved. For some applications, which critically depend upon the veridical perception of the object's location and dimensions, it is imperative that the contribution of binocular cues to these judgements be ascertained because they are directly influenced by camera and display geometry. Using the active telepresence system, we investigated the contribution of ocular convergence information to judgements of size, distance and shape. Participants performed an open- loop reach and grasp of the virtual object under reduced cue conditions where the orientation of the cameras and the displays were either matched or unmatched. Inappropriate convergence information produced weak perceptual distortions and caused problems in fusing the images.


Since its discovery in 1974, Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis - or "southern ape of Afar" has provided invaluable information about human evolution. However, Lucy's death has always remained a mystery. Over forty years after its discovery, Dr. Kappelman shares the remarkable story of how he studied Lucy's bones along with his insights into how Lucy died, cracking one of the coldest cases in history. What do Lucy's remains tell us about her life and death?


We present a study of the relative orientation between the magnetic field projected onto the plane of sky (B⊥) on scales down to 0.4 pc, inferred from the polarized thermal emission of Galactic dust observed by Planck at 353 GHz, and the distribution of gas column density (NH) structures on scales down to 0.026 pc, derived from the observations by Herschel in submillimeter wavelengths, toward ten nearby (d < 450 pc) molecular clouds. Using the histogram of relative orientation technique in combination with tools from circular statistics, we found that the mean relative orientation between NH and B⊥ toward these regions increases progressively from 0°, where the NH structures lie mostly parallel to B⊥, with increasing NH, in many cases reaching 90°, where the NH structures lie mostly perpendicular to B⊥. We also compared the relative orientation between NH and B⊥ and the distribution of NH, which is characterized by the slope of the tail of the NH probability density functions (PDFs). We found that the slopes of the NH PDF tail are steepest in regions where NH and B⊥ are close to perpendicular. This coupling between the NH distribution and the magnetic field suggests that the magnetic fields play a significant role in structuring the interstellar medium in and around molecular clouds. However, we found no evident correlation between the star formation rates, estimated from the counts of young stellar objects, and the relative orientation between NH and B⊥ in these regions.


In The Underpricing of Sin Stocks in the June 2020 edition of The Journal of Investing, Robert Killins and Hongxia Wang of Coastal Carolina University and Thanh Ngo of East Carolina University discuss "sin stocks," and in particular, the relative performance of their initial public offerings (IPOs) compared to other IPOs. The authors characterize "sin firms" as those engaged in controversial businesses like alcohol, tobacco, and gaming. Even though the securities of these firms often offer favorable returns, they also often are shunned by investors, and particularly by institutions proscribed by societal norms. The negative reputations of sin firms may contribute to the underpricing of their stocks and their IPOs. The authors find that sin-stock IPOs are underpriced to a greater degree than other IPOs, after controlling for various issuance and company characteristics. Because of this underpricing and the negative reputations of the firms, sin stocks can offer unique return characteristics. Investors willing to ignore the opprobrium may benefit from a reputational risk premium. The authors suggest that managers and individuals take a closer look at these potentially underpriced IPOs and securities as alternative investments. TOPICS: Portfolio theory, portfolio construction


Both Ni-Cu and PGE deposits are associated with mafic and ultramafic rocks, but the former often occur in dynamic magmatic systems such as lava channels and magma conduits whereas the later occur in larger layered intrusions. The contrasting modes of occurrence appear to be related to different degrees of preferential partitioning of the metals (PGE versus Cu and Ni) into segregating sulfide liquid and different concentration processes of the sulfide liquid during the formation of the ores.

Primary magmas derived from partial melting of the upper mantle are fertile in PGE, Ni and Cu only when the molten sulfides are completely dissolved in the magmas. This requires a high degree of partial melting of the mantle, perhaps higher than 30 percent. The partial melts usually have basaltic to komatiitic compositions, and are unlikely to achieve sulfide saturation during ascent to the crust. Fractional crystallization and crustal contamination are the most important processes known to have induced sulfide saturation in magma upon intrusion. Sulfide liquid segregated in a large chamber may achieve high R-factors required for the formation of reef-type PGE deposits. Crustal assimilation appears to be most effective in dynamic lava channels and magma conduits. A large volume of sulfide liquid segregated from magma in such dynamic environments often has a lower R-factor, and relatively lower metal concentrations. Such metal-poor sulfide liquid needs to be deposited in restricted localities, and/or to be upgraded in metals by reacting with new surges of magma, to become a Ni-Cu sulfide deposit.

Because of their extremely high partition coefficient between sulfide liquid and magma, PGE will become significantly depleted in magma even at small amounts of sulfide segregation. Copper, on the other hand, will be much less depleted because of its relatively low partition coefficient. Thus, Pd/Cu ratios in whole rocks can be used to detect PGE mineralization associated with small sulfide segregation in large layered intrusion. The whole rock Cu/Zr ratio is sensitive to large amounts of sulfide liquid segregation from magma and thus is a useful tool for Ni-Cu exploration. Nickel contents of olivine can also be used to identify Ni depletion in magma associated with large amounts of sulfide segregation.


California's Greenhouse Gas (GHG) cap-and-trade program is a key element of the suite of policies the State has adopted to achieve its climate policy goals. The passage of AB 398 (California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006: market-based compliance mechanisms) extended the use of the cap-and-trade program for the 2021-2030 period, while also specifying modifications of the program's "cost containment�? structure and directing CARB to "[e]valuate and address concerns related to overallocation in [ARB's] determination of the allowances available for years 2021 to 2030.�? The changes being considered by CARB will not only affect the program's stringency, but also its performance by affecting the ability of the "cost containment�? structure to mitigate allowance price volatility and the risk of suddenly escalating allowance prices. We address key design issues that were identified by the legislature in AB 398 and have been identified by CARB in its "Preliminary Concepts�? white paper, including: (1) Price levels for the Price Ceiling and Price Containment Points; (2) Allocation of allowances between the auction budgets, Price Containment Points, and Price Ceiling; (3) "Overallocation�? of GHG allowances; and (4) the program's administrative and operational rules, such as procedures for distributing allowances to the market from the Price Ceiling or Price Containment Points, procedures for using allowances once distributed, and banking rules.


Background: Essential oils and various extracts from plant are of great interests in the industry and scientific research. Objective: This study was designed to examine the chemical composition of essential oil and of Echinophora platyloba from Iran. Method: The chemical composition of the hydrodistilled essential oil of the air-dried aerial parts of Echinophora platyloba growing wild in Iran was obtained by hydrodistillation and was analyzed by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Results: The species is poor in essential oil (yield = 0.7%). Twenty-nine constituents representing 97.43% of total oil have been identified. The main constituents of the oil were found to be (Z)-β-ocimene (26.71%), ∆-3-carene (16.16%), Limonene (6.59 %). Other representative compounds were identified as Cis-3-hexylbenzoate (4.57%), Spathunenol (4.57%), Myristicin (4.48 %), Myrcene (4.31%), 4-decanolide (4.2%) and α-Pinene (4.03 %). Conclusion: The oil of Echinophora platyloba consists of 16 monoterpenoids (69.55%) and 5 sesquiterpenoids (7.08%).


Complex trauma is a result of multiple types of severely distressing events that are chronic or repeated in nature and occur over an extended period of time. The events that may lead to complex trauma include, but are not limited to; neglect, chronic verbal, sexual, and emotional abuse, poverty, severe chronic illness, and living in a community with frequent violent crimes or war. Individuals who live under such conditions often experience a sense of horror or helplessness, and that their personal safety or their lives are in danger. Children, especially young ones under the age of five are particularly vulnerable to changes in their neurobiological development as they adapt to the environments in which they live. This often leaves them with hyper-vigilance, anxiety, memory and attention issues, as well as a host of other physical, neurobiological and social-emotional problems that can impede their progress in school. Fortunately, there are many protective factors and some interventions that can reduce the impact of children's chaotic environments. Schools, teachers and school counsellors function as protective factors. This paper will examine how schools, teachers and school counsellors can act as protective factors and foster students' development.


The traditional artistic technique of stippling places small dots of ink onto paper such that their density give the impression of tone. The artist tightly controls the relative placement of the stipples on the paper to produce even tones and avoid artifacts, leading to long creation times for the drawings.We present two non-interactive techniques for generating stipple drawings from grayscale images using weighted centroidal Voronoi diagrams. An iterative technique acts on input images directly to produce high-quality stipple drawings and a real-time approach uses precomputed dot distributions to stipple images quickly.


Before the advent of molecular biology methods, studies of pathogens were dominated by analyses of their metabolism. Development of molecular biology techniques then enabled the identification and functional characterisation of the fascinating toolbox of virulence factors. Increasing, genomic and proteomic approaches form the basis for a more systemic view on pathogens' functions in the context of infection. Re-emerging interest in the metabolism of pathogens and hosts further expands our view of infections. There is increasing evidence that virulence functions and metabolism of pathogens are extremely intertwined. Type three secretion systems (T3SSs) are major virulence determinants of many Gram-negative pathogens and it is the objective of this review to illustrate the intertwined relationship between T3SSs and the metabolism of the pathogens deploying them.


August 2009 For Back Lane West¹s inaugural show, Two is One, One is None, three artists have each chosen an artist to join forces with to produce new work in a fast and immediate manner. Patrick Lowry, Steven Paige and Alison Sharkey have chosen to work with Ben Rowe, Clare Thornton and Alex Schady respectively. The work being produced is a spontaneous and immediate reaction to the act of partnering and negotiation. Without much preamble the focus has been on making work, without any over arching theme or curatorial line. What is a concern are the practicalities of making work, having somewhere to show it and the relations that can make this happen. Part experiment and part challenge the results are as much a dialogue between the participants as pieces of work. Back Lane West, is a newly initiated space/place/repository, whose vision is to host and present national and international artists' works and projects in Cornwall, UK, and reverse this relationship to work nationally and internationally. Its mission is to enable artists to present and exhibit their work and projects to their peers and chosen audience. The potential uses of the existing project space are not limited and a variety of outcomes and events are planned for the foreseeable future, including invited artists, residency programmes, artists¹ talks and exchanges. Back Lane West is currently self-funded, being flexible in how it programmes and presents projects. In the first show the three founding members were working with artists based in Bristol and London to collaborate and create work. The results of this endeavour was exhibited in the project space Sat 29 and Sunday 30 August 2009. There was an artist discussion chaired by Megan Wakefield on Sunday 30th. To listen to the discussion, click here (coming soon) Artists: Patrick Lowry = Ben Rowe Steven Paige = Clare Thornton Alison Sharkey = Alex Schady