In January 1933, the United Textile Workers of America was in danger of collapse. Its membership was no larger than 15,000; its attempts to organize southern workers had failed disastrously; and it was constantly under attack from rival organizations. Yet, barely eighteen months later, with 300,000 dues-paying members, with newly established or revived branches covering southern cotton textile workers, as well as northern woolen and worsted workers, silk and jacquard weavers, dyers and finishers, even rayon workers, and with locals in 208 cities, towns, and mill villages, UTW was about to embark on what one historian has termed "the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American labor." The General Textile Strike of 1934 is the story of that conflict. The few historians who have concerned themselves at all with the 1934 textile strike have all concentrated on its southern aspect, presenting it as a southern event, a cotton textile event. No one argues that the South and cotton were not crucial to the strike's story. It was cotton mill workers' anger over broken promises of the National Industrial Recovery Act that had forced a reluctant UTW leadership into supporting a strike vote. No industry leader was more devious in his dealings with the UTW leaders than George Sloan, the chair of the Cotton Code Authority and head of the Cotton Textile Institute. Nevertheless, the 1934 strike was a nationwide one, involving hundreds of thousands of silk, woolen, and rayon workers, all represented by the UTW and mostly living in states outside the South. Moreover, Peter Van Horn and Arthur Besse, head of the Silk and Woolen Code Authorities, respectively, lost little to Sloan in their intransigence toward labor's demands. And, though the great transfer of the cotton industry from New England to the South was almost complete, there were still little pockets left in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. In The General Textile Strike of 1934, John Salmond tells everyone's story. Looking at the strike from a national and an industrywide perspective, Salmond explains why workers were willing to risk protesting and describes the differences and similarities between southern and northern workers. Setting the strike within a New Deal context and focusing on its impact on the future of labor relations in the industry and the lives of those who participated in it, The General Textile Strike of 1934 fills an important gap in American labor history.


Fragility functions that define the probabilistic relationship between structural damage and ground motion intensity are an integral part of performance‐based earthquake engineering or seismic risk analysis. This paper introduces three approaches based on kernel smoothing methods for developing analytical and empirical fragility functions. A kernel assigns a weight to each data that is inversely related to the distance between the data value and the input of the fragility function of interest. The kernel smoothing methods are, therefore, non‐parametric forms of data interpolation. These methods enable the implicit treatment of uncertainty in either or both of ground motion intensity and structural damage without making any assumption about the shape of the resulting fragility functions. They are particularly beneficial for sparse, noisy, or non‐homogeneous data sets. For illustration purposes, two types of data are considered. The first is a set of numerically simulated responses for a four‐story steel moment‐resisting frame, and the second is a set of field observations collected after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The results demonstrate that these methods can develop continuous representations of fragility functions without specifying their functional forms and treat sparse data sets more efficiently than conventional data binning and parametric curve fitting methods. Moreover, various uncertainty analyses are conducted to address the issues of over‐fitting, bias, and confidence intervals. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) within the U.S. Department of Energy is charged with the responsibility of safe and efficient disposal of this Nation's civilian high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. Part of this responsibility includes providing for the application of both domestic and international safeguards on nuclear material at facilities of the Civilian Waste Management System. While detailed safeguards requirements for these disposal facilities have yet to be established, once established, they could impact facility design. Accordingly, OCRWM has participated in efforts to develop safeguards approaches for geologic repositories and will continue to participate actively with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as other Department of Energy (DOE) Offices in efforts to resolve safeguards issues related to spent fuel disposal, to minimize any potential design impacts and to support effective nuclear material safeguards. The following paper discusses current plans and issues related to the application of safeguards to the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS).


This volume offers substantive clarification of the proper roles for public agricultural research and development (R&D) throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and introduces an analytical framework for assessing cross-country collective action in funding and carrying out research. To inform research policy decisions, the book provides a wealth of newly digested information about trends in agricultural production, productivity, consumption, and trade for the region, placing those trends in a comparative international context. It also provides new information about the spatial patterns of agricultural production and productivity in LAC - especially critical information for making informed research priority decisions given the inherent agroecological specificity of many agricultural technologies.


We present teleassistance, a two-tiered control structure for robotic manipulation that combines the advantages of autonomy and teleoperation. At the top level, a teleoperator provides global, deictic references via a natural sign language. Each sign indicates the next action to perform and a relative and hand-centered coordinate frame in which to perform it. For example, the teleoperator may point to an object for reaching, or preshape the hand for grasping. At the lower level autonomous servo routines run within the reference frames provided. Teleassistance offers two benefits. First, the servo routines can position the robot in relative coordinates and interpret feedback within a constrained context. This significantly simplifies the computational load of the autonomous routines and requires only a sparse model of the task. Second, the operator's actions are symbolic, conveying intent without requiring the person to literally control the robot. This helps to alleviate many of the problems inherent to teleoperation, including poor mappings between operator and robot physiology, reliance on a broad communication bandwidth, and the potential for robot damage when solely under remote control. To demonstrate the concept, a Utah/MIT hand mounted on a Puma 760 arm opens a door.


This article is concerned with the role of perceived policy objectives in German citizens' attitude formation toward military action in Afghanistan. While some scholars have claimed that public opinion is prudent because citizens assess the effectiveness of a mission on the basis of these perceptions, micro-level tests of this kind of prudence remain scare. Drawing on two cross-sectional surveys of the German population conducted in 2008 and 2009, we use responses to open-ended questions about the German government's policy goals in Afghanistan to analyze whether such perceptions influenced support and whether any such influence was mediated via the perceived effectiveness of the mission. The results indicate that, irrespective of the level of political awareness, it was virtually irrelevant what German citizens perceived the military mission's objectives to be. In contrast, value-based attitude formation emerges as more important, with the foreign policy predispositions antimilitarism and Atlanticism exhibiting especially large effects.


Research to tackle hate speech plaguing online media has made strides in providing solutions, analyzing bias and curating data. A challenging problem is ambiguity between hate speech and offensive language, causing low performance both overall and specifically for the hate speech class. It can be argued that misclassifying actual hate speech content as merely offensive can lead to further harm against targeted groups. In our work, we mitigate this potentially harmful phenomenon by proposing an adversarial debiasing method to separate the two classes. We show that our method works for English, Arabic German and Hindi, plus in a multilingual setting, improving performance over baselines.


Abstract: Namibia has the largest remaining population of free‐ranging cheetahs ( Acinonyx jubatus ) in the world, 90% of which are found outside protected areas on commercial farms. We conducted a baseline survey of Namibian farmers between 1991 and 1993, with a yearly follow‐up thereafter until 1999, to quantify the perceptions of farmers toward cheetahs. Specifically, we sought to identify factors that cause cheetahs to be perceived as pests and management practices that mitigate this perception. The baseline survey revealed that farmers who regarded cheetahs as problems removed an average of 29 cheetahs annually, whereas those who did not consider them problematic removed a mean of 14 annually. These figures dropped significantly to 3.5 and 2.0 cheetahs per year after the introduction of educational materials. The perception that cheetahs are pests was significantly associated with game farms, and the presence of "play trees" on farms emerged as a significant corollary of both negative perceptions and removals of cheetahs. Between 1991 and 1999, the mean annual number of cheetah removals significantly decreased from 19 to 2.1. Late in the study, cheetah killing was more closely correlated with perceived problems than in the early years of the study. These findings suggest that although cheetahs are still perceived as a problem, farmers' tolerance toward cheetahs has increased. Management strategies and economic incentives that promote cheetah conservation, such as the formation of conservancies, development of ecotourism, and marketing of "predator‐friendly" meat, are essential for conserving cheetahs outside protected areas.


Background Patients receiving palliative care are often at increased risk of unsafe care, (Mazzocato and Stiefel 1997; Dietz et al. 2014) and the identification of improved ways of delivering palliative care outside working hours is a priority area. (Best et al. 2015) Aim To explore the nature and causes of unsafe care delivered to patients receiving palliative care from primary care services outside normal working hours. Methods The National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) collates patient safety incident reports written by healthcare professionals in England and Wales. We characterised reports, identified by keyword searches, using codes to describe what happened, underlying causes, harm outcome, and severity. Exploratory descriptive and thematic analyses identified factors underpinning unsafe care. Findings We identified 1072 incidents of suboptimal care, which included: medication-related issues (n=613); access to timely care (n=123); and or non-medication related treatment such as pressure ulcer relief or catheter care. (n=102). Almost two thirds of reports (n=695) described harm with outcomes including increased pain, emotional and psychological distress and dying in a place not of their choosing. Commonly identified contributory factors to these incidents were a failure to follow protocol (n=282); lack of skills/confidence of staff (n=156) and patients requiring medication delivered via a syringe driver (n=80). Conclusions This study is the largest characterisation of unsafe care for patients requiring palliative care in the community, outside working hours. Possible targets for organisations looking to improve care include improved communication between providers; better knowledge of commonly used medications and routes and easier access to medications and equipment. References 1. Mazzocato C, Stiefel F. How safe are opioids in palliative care?Supportive care in cancer: official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer 1997;5(6):427–427. 2. Dietz I, et al. "Please describe from your point of view a typical case of an error in palliative care": Qualitative data from an exploratory cross-sectional survey study among palliative care professionals. Journal of palliative medicine2014;17(3):331–337. 3. Best S, et al. Research priority setting in palliative and end of life care: the James Lind Alliance approach consulting patinets carers and clinicians. BMJ supportive & palliative care2015;5(1):102.1–102.


It is a well-known fact that minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has many benefits, e.g., unnecessary trauma and blood loss can be minimized by opening tiny surgery scars, recovery process of patients can be lessened, and the possibilities of complications can be decreased. Although robots are widely used in MIS due to their fundamental superiorities such as high precision, current surgery robots mainly suffer from absence/limitation of haptic feedback during operation. This paper proposes a novel electrohydraulic haptic transmission system to improve the haptic feedback of a surgery robot. This new device replaces the highly nonlinear mechanical friction of thrust wire by viscous friction and avoids the backlash due to the incompressibility of fluid. Moreover, since the fluid is constantly occupying the entire volume of the hydraulic tube, the system behavior during bending of the tube can be modeled much easier than the thrust wire, for which position, shape, and bending angles of the inner wire inside the outer tube are hardly predictable. The validity of the proposal and its superiorities over conventional transmission mechanisms, such as thrust wire, are experimentally verified.


Although the potential to adapt to warmer climate is constrained by genetic trade‐offs, our understanding of how selection and mutation shape genetic (co)variances in thermal reaction norms is poor. Using 71 isofemale lines of the fly Sepsis punctum, originating from northern, central, and southern European climates, we tested for divergence in juvenile development rate across latitude at five experimental temperatures. To investigate effects of evolutionary history in different climates on standing genetic variation in reaction norms, we further compared genetic (co)variances between regions. Flies were reared on either high or low food resources to explore the role of energy acquisition in determining genetic trade‐offs between different temperatures. Although the latter had only weak effects on the strength and sign of genetic correlations, genetic architecture differed significantly between climatic regions, implying that evolution of reaction norms proceeds via different trajectories at high latitude versus low latitude in this system. Accordingly, regional genetic architecture was correlated to region‐specific differentiation. Moreover, hot development temperatures were associated with low genetic variance and stronger genetic correlations compared to cooler temperatures. We discuss the evolutionary potential of thermal reaction norms in light of their underlying genetic architectures, evolutionary histories, and the materialization of trade‐offs in natural environments.


BACKGROUND
Congenital oral adhesions may pose both aesthetic and functional disturbing ailments to wary parents. Most of these as we have experienced, are benign, easily cured and may be treated as soon as possible in the office. A local survey elucidated that these youngsters are usually advised to wait until one year of age and then taken into the operating room and incision of the adhesion is performed under general anesthesia. We assessed the benign nature of this ailment and relative avascularity of the tissue involved and concluded that with minimal risk an office procedure under local anesthesia can replace current practice. We also found that most referrals with this condition present with the lowest grade of severity of ankyloglossia, amenable to a very brief intervention.

MATERIAL/METHODS
During the period 1998-2002 we diagnosed nineteen congenital lesions in thirteen patients. All children were treated in a community clinic setting using electrocautery under local anesthesia. Surgical success was defined as significant improvement in the ability to protrude the tongue outwards beyond the gums and teeth. Gingival adhesions were judged by release of soft tissue adhesions.

RESULTS
Tongue Surgical success was accomplished in all cases with minimal discomfort and without complications. In one single case the previous functional limitation was not relieved.

CONCLUSIONS
Our experience indicates that office-based electrocautery dissection is an efficacious economical and safe treatment of mild congenital oral adhesions. We recommend this method as therapy of choice for such lesions.


The Yahoo! music rating data set in KDD Cup 2011 raises several interesting challenges: (1) The data covers a lengthy time period of more than eight years. (2) Not only are training ratings associated date and time information, so are the test ratings. (3) The items form a hierarchy consisting of four types of items: genres, artists, albums and tracks. To capture the rich temporal dynamics within the data set, we design a class of time-aware matrix/tensor factorization models, which adopts time series based parameterizations and models user/item drifting behaviors at multiple temporal resolutions. We also incorporate the taxonomical structure into the item parameters by introducing sharing parameters between ancestors and descendants in the taxonomy. Finally, we have identified some conditions that systematically affect the effectiveness of different types of models and parameter settings. Based on these findings, we designed an informative ensemble framework, which considers additional meta features when making predictions for a particular pair of user and item. Using these techniques, we built the best single model reported officially, and our final ensemble model got third place in KDD Cup 2011.


Accessible design and technology could support the large and growing group of people with chronic illnesses. However, human computer interactions (HCI) has largely approached people with chronic illnesses through a lens of medical tracking or treatment rather than accessibility. We describe and demonstrate a framework for designing technology in ways that center the chronically ill experience. First, we identify guiding tenets: 1) treating chronically ill people not as patients but as people with access needs and expertise, 2) recognizing the way that variable ability shapes accessibility considerations, and 3) adopting a theoretical understanding of chronic illness that attends to the body. We then illustrate these tenets through autoethnographic case studies of two chronically ill authors using technology. Finally, we discuss implications for technology design, including designing for consequence-based accessibility, considering how to engage care communities, and how HCI research can engage chronically ill participants in research.


A spectrum of the very metal poor ((Fe/H) approximately -3) halo star BD -13 deg 3442 is presented and used to determine this star's oxygen abundance. Our determination makes BD -13 deg 3442 the most metal poor dwarf (though a somewhat evolved one) with an O abundance determination. The O abundance (determined from the 7774 A O I triped) and (O/Fe) ratio is compared to that of two other metal-poor stars. The (O/Fe) ratio of BD -13 deg 3442 is found to be approximately 0.35 dex larger than that of the other two halo stars. Possible implications of this result are discussed.


Recently a large amount of interest has developed around separating out impurities of
small size; pertinent examples are found within fuel and solvent processing. For such
applications a leading candidate process is nanofiltration. This thesis focuses on SRNF
(solvent resistant nanofiltration) composite membranes consisting of a dense polymer
active layer bonded to a stronger, but ultimately more porous, support layer. The
composite membranes that have been produced during the course of this work consist
of a PDMS (polymdimethylsiloxane) active layer bonded to a commercially available
support layer of PAN (polyacrylonitrile). To create the membrane a monomer was
spread over the support layer and then polymerised to form the matrix which was
responsible for separation. Commercially, either heat or radiation is often applied to
cause polymerisation, however the membranes in the current work have been formed
by the used of a homogeneous catalyst. This thesis investigates the transport and
separation dynamics of the produced membranes for a series of fuel simulants
composed of organometallics and poly-nuclear aromatic solutes dissolved in aromatic
and alkane solvents.
Membrane composition and the extent of polymer swelling were found to be the two
key factors which had the greatest influence on solvent flux and solute rejection. By
increasing catalyst concentration it was found that the dual effects of increased
rejection and reduced flux occurred, with the converse also being true. The effective
pore size of the membrane could also be controlled by varying the catalyst amount
during manufacture as this directly affected the limit of crosslinking which formed.
Polymer swelling was the most pronounced using solvents with a solubility parameter
close to that of the polymer. The membrane transport mechanism was most accurately
forecast by the solution diffusion model for flux predictions and the convection diffusion
model for rejection predictions, however all the models tried were in close agreement.
This was postulated to be due to the swelled polymer matrix which allows for both
convective and diffusive transport to occur.


Introduction: The continuous use of computers in office environments, due to the unfavorable sitting postures as a risk factor for the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorders is prevalent. The purpose of this study was to assess the ergonomic office units of Abadan Oil Refining Company by using ROSA and also to evaluate the musculoskeletal disorders using CMDQ tool to identify and prevent musculoskeletal disorders (MSDSs) in the workplace. Materials & methods: The present study is a cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical one. Using Cochran formula 276 office personnel were obtained as the sample volume. The data were collected by using assessment posture ROSA, CMDQ questionnaires and were analyzed using SPSS version 20 statistical tests of Pearson and multiple linear regressions. Findings: The results indicated that 36 persons were in a safe area, 230 in the warning area and 10 were in the danger zone .Also, according to scale CMDQ, 235 persons had very minor problem, 20 persons a small problem, 11 very little problem, 6 persons low problem, 2 medium and 2 difficult problem was extremely high. Also, test results revealed a significant association just about sex and musculoskeletal problems (P = 0.001), and on the other variables were unreported a significant association. Discussion & conclusions: Based on the findings of the study and scores of using of tools, corrective actions and ergonomic interventions, including educational seminars, modifying and designing office work stations, equipment adjustments of the workplace, and treatment were performed.


Introduction Designing and launching an entirely new program, leading to bachelor degree, is a challenging job for every school, especially if this program is a new one not only for the school itself, but globally. Such project requires allocation of significant resources, first of all human and intellectual resources, but also financial, material and informational. The puzzle of the new program is constructed piece by pieces from information collected from many sources. Also designing the curriculum for a new program has to show balance between what are needed and what are available training resources--relevant courses taught in other majors, instructors, training materials, laboratories, equipment, etc. available in the school, but designed for different purpose. Here we will share the experience we gained in launching a major for "Information Brokerage" in the State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia. The program was launched in academic year 2003/04 and the first class graduated in 2006/07. Information Brokerage, as an educational subject, existed solely as qualifying professional training at that time (Rachmeler, 1995). Special programs were designed for serving different categories of students, e.g. designed to qualify unemployed professionals to find a new carrier path (Christozov & Nikolova, 2001). Some universities offered graduate programs oriented to train the expertise we are defining as Information Brokers (http://www.libsci.sc.edu/). But at the time of launching the major, mentioned above, there were no, to the best of our knowledge, programs designed for a bachelor level of Information Brokerage. At that time, we had clear understanding about how important is the early start of training in the field to accomplish the objectives of this program, as well as quite clear understanding what has to be included in such a program. Also we were fully aware about the difficulties in building such program, because we lacked direct sources we may learn from, and more importantly, we lacked knowledge of social and professional experience students need to advance in this subject. The third difficulty comes from the extensive and diverse corpus of knowledge we had to accumulate to proceed. The lack of prior experience required ordering carefully the sequence of topics to allow smooth grow. The paper is organized in the following way: The first section addresses the social, technological and economic factors that create the necessity of launching the program. In second section we described our preliminary assumptions about the knowledge and skills needed to excel in the profession of information brokers. They have not changed significantly since the launching of the program. The third section describes the curriculum of the program. The fourth section comments strengths and weaknesses of the program. In the Conclusion we list recommendations for further development of the program and assess the level of achievement of the initial objectives. Needs of Properly Educated Information Mediators The dilemma "sinking in information and being not enough informed", characterize the last twenty years. There are two major factors in support of the need for establishing proper education in the field of informing clients, and therefore the need for professionally educated information mediators--Information Brokers. The first one is the advancement of information technologies and their impact. In the last years all facets of human life have changed completely, making information technologies unavoidable. The second major factor is globalization of the world economy, with two basic consequences: --To do his or her everyday business, to make proper and rational decisions, one needs information--complete, correct, reliable, etc. Both parties, sellers and clients, have similar access to information and to succeed in the business everyone has to be better informed. …


Purpose
To provide insight into how Public Relations can be used in an innovative manner, when looking to harmonise social, resource-based and financial equity - through strengthening stakeholder relations and capitalising on dynamic extended networks. Following this, the suggestion is that the root of its successful execution lies in mapping cultural change and then embarking on a process of engineering consent. Areas of discussion are offered, in the interests of stimulating new thinking and further knowledge - surrounding public relations, also within a Muslim context. More specifically, Iranian culture and the differences between Arab and Persian-centric approaches, towards an adherence to Islamic ethea are considered.
Design/methodology/approach
Interpretive phenomenological analysis and syllogisms, as a basis for conceptual metaphor theory, inductive reasoning and critical discourse analysis. Evidence supported by discussions and participant observation methods.

Findings
Consumers are becoming more significant in shaping the PR agenda. Furthermore, the evolutionary growth and mutations spawned by Web 2.0 draw non-brand users, social networks and anti-branding movements towards engagement and the possession of greater social capital. When gifting stakeholders with a larger share of voice, consumption definitions become judged less by tangible transactions; and more by figurative, intangible and co-dependent communication drivers. In addition, with the increase in interactivity afforded by media channels, two-way communication, and the inclusion of more parties; a normalisation and leveling of information also occurs.

Originality/value
The paper attempts to respond conceptually to phenomena with point towards an increase in the significance of technology, fused with social networks and cultural hybridisation. Finally, there currently exists little academic material examining public relations, with consideration of varying Muslim perspectives, cultures and schools of thought. Furthermore, analyses which are reflective of examining the nuances between different Muslim nations remains scarce. To this end the following paper attempts to highlight and address some of these issues.


Mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases clearly produce many of their actions by regulating (presumably by phosphorylation) various transcription factors. But does such interaction occur in the cytoplasm or the nucleus, or in complexes formed on the promoters of target genes? Alepuz et al. show that, in the case of the Hog1 MAP kinase of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (which is required for response to osmotic stress), the last-mentioned appears to be the case. In chromatin immunoprecipitation assays (for more on this method, see Takahashi et al.), they demonstrate association of the kinase with transcription factors in complexes at various promoters. Formation of functional complexes appeared to depend in one case on targeting of the MAP kinase to the promoter, but in others on promoter recognition by the target transcription factor Hot1. In another case, interaction of both proteins was required. Surprisingly, although Hot1 does seem to be a direct target of Hog1, this phosphorylation appeared not to be essential for transcriptional activation. In other experiments, replacement of the DNA binding domain of Hot1 with another, to target it to a new reporter gene, conferred sensitivity of that gene to osmotic stress. Thus, the authors propose that the MAP kinase could have more general effects on transcription through recruitment or regulation of the general transcription machinery. P. M. Alepuz, A. Jovanovic, V. Reiser, G. Ammerer. Stress-induced MAP kinase Hog1 is part of transcription activation complexes. Mol. Cell 7, 767-777 (2001). [Online Journal] K. Takahashi, S. Saitoh, M. Yanagida, Application of the ChIP (chromatin immunoprecipitation) method to identify in vivo protein-DNA associations in fission yeast. Science's STKE (2001), http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/OC_sigtrans;2000/56/pl1 [Full Text]


Victoria's reptiles are not often encountered by urban dwellers, with many species now threatened. You may have glimpsed a skink darting into the undergrowth, a snake slithering along a walking path or a blue-tongued lizard sunning itself near your garden shed. Yet the turtles, skinks, geckos, goannas, snakes and other reptiles that call Victoria home are fascinating and important members of urban and rural ecosystems.
Reptiles of Victoria is the first regional guide to all reptiles known to occur in Victoria. It contains keys and illustrated descriptions to allow identification of the 123 native, introduced and vagrant reptile species and describes their biology, ecology, distributions and the habitats in which they live. It also indicates the level of risk that the venomous snakes pose to humans and includes a brief section on first aid for snake bites. Natural history enthusiasts and professional and amateur herpetologists will find this an essential guide.


Purpose: To characterize the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of oxaliplatin in cancer patients with impaired renal function. Experimental Design: Thirty-four patients were stratified by 24-h urinary creatinine clearance (CrCL) into four renal dysfunction groups: group A (control, CrCL, ≥60 mL/min), B (mild, CrCL, 40-59 mL/min), C (moderate, CrCL, 20-39 mL/min), and D (severe, CrCL, <20 mL/min). Patients were treated with 60 to 130 mg/m2 oxaliplatin infused over 2 h every 3 weeks. Pharmacokinetic monitoring of platinum in plasma, plasma ultrafiltrates, and urine was done during cycles 1 and 2. Results: Plasma ultrafiltrate platinum clearance strongly correlated with CrCL (r2 = 0.712). Platinum elimination from plasma was triphasic, and maximal platinum concentrations (Cmax) were consistent across all renal impairment groups. However, only the β-half-life was significantly prolonged by renal impairment, with values of 14.0 ± 4.3, 20.3 ± 17.7, 29.2 ± 29.6, and 68.1 h in groups A, B, C, and D, respectively (P = 0.002). At a dose level of 130 mg/m2, the area under the concentration time curve increased in with the degree of renal impairment, with values of 16.4 ± 5.03, 39.7 ± 11.5, and 44.6 ± 14.6 μg·h/mL, in groups A, B, and C, respectively. However, there was no increase in pharmacodynamic drug-related toxicities. Estimated CrCL using the Cockcroft-Gault method approximated the measured 24-h urinary CrCL (mean prediction error, −5.0 mL/min). Conclusions: Oxaliplatin pharmacokinetics are altered in patients with renal impairment, but a corresponding increase in oxaliplatin-related toxicities is not observed.


We demonstrate a high-performance optical arbitrary waveform shaper based on a single 10 GHz arrayed-waveguide grating with 64 loopback waveguides and integrated amplitude and phase modulators on each waveguide. The design is compact and self-aligning and allows for bidirectional operation. The device's complex transfer function is manipulated and measured over the full 640 GHz passband. To demonstrate optical arbitrary waveform shaping, high-fidelity 15-line shaped waveforms are measured with cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating.


ÖRVIG, T.: Thelodont scales from the Grey Hoek Formation of Andree Land, Spitsbergen. Norsk Geologisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 49, pp. 387-401. Oslo 1969. A description is given of a new assemblage of thelodont scales (the Skarndalen assemblage), contained in some samples of the Grey Hoek Formation from Eastern Andree Land in Spitsbergen ( = Vestspits bergen). Some of these scales are rather similar to, hut possibly not conspecific with, the horn-like ones narned Amaltheolepis winsnesi in an earlier described assemblage (the Röykensåta assemblage), which in all prohability belongs to the uppermost part of the Wood Bay Group; these are referred to as Amaltheolepis sp. Other scales ,are tricuspidate ones of a variety of shapes which are classified as Thelodontida gen. et sp. indet. In addition to ostracods, e.g. Evlanovia cf. tichonovichi , the thelodont scales in question are associated with petalichthyid and arctolepid arthrodires, crossopterygians and acanthodians.


Abstract. The energy sector will drastically change in the following years; multiple agreements have been signed by countries with the purpose to reduce carbon emission and contain the global temperature increase. Besides, in the next years the energy demand will increase with the growth of the Information and Communications Technology sector. To combine these two aspects, future energy needs to be produced with renewable resources and less with fossil fuels. An opportunity to discover and plan the use of renewable energy resources are geospatial data derived from satellite acquisitions. The European Earth Observation programme Copernicus provides multiple datasets in an Open Science approach. Within this paper, multiple datasets offered by Copernicus services are presented in relation to their exploitation for the energy system analysis, with a particular attention to renewable energy. The datasets will be analysed according to their properties and possibility of usage. Additional Copernicus satellite derived data that can benefit the emerging topic of the food-energy-water nexus are finally presented to point out significant development in the energy sector which is recently claiming growing attention.


Fruit flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster develop from eggs to adults in eight to ten days at 25 degrees Celsius. They develop through four primary stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. When in the wild, female flies lay their fertilized eggs in rotting fruit or other decomposing material that can serve as food for the larvae. In the lab, fruit flies lay their fertilized eggs in a mixture of agar, molasses, cornmeal, and yeast. After roughly a day, each egg hatches into a larva. The larva eats the material it finds itself in, and for four days it grows into stages of increasing size, called first-, second-, and third-instar stages. This figure shows a third-instar larva. Each larva has sections of tissue called imaginal discs, from which various parts of the adult anatomy develop. This figure shows the imaginal discs that will develop into antennae (colored purple), eyes (colored red), brain (colored blue), and wings (colored green). After four days, the larva turns into a pupa by making a casing, similar to caterpillars, and grows within the casing. After a four-day metamorphosis, the adult fly then emerges from its pupal casing. Adult males look somewhat different from adult females, as the males have darker rear abdomen segments than do females. The warmer the temperature around the eggs, the faster the flies develop to adults.


Britain's royals are the official face of the state and the centre of a worldwide media circus. This entertaining "Rough Guide to the Royals" explores the paradox of one of the world's oldest monarchies. It casts a quizzical eye over the current royal family and their privileges, roles and relationships, from former Olympic horse rider Anne and industry ambassador Andrew to current favourites William and Kate. It answers such burning questions as what they do, where they get their money from, how fundamentally British are they, and how much they cost the British public. It looks at the most extravagant royal ceremonies and the heros and villains, from Henry VIII to the scandalous Caroline of Brunswick (who was banned from her husband's coronation but turned up anyway). The best and the worst monarchs are reassessed, with investigations into how the likes of alleged nephew-killer and hunchback, Richard III, achieved their reputations. Whatever you want to know about the British royal family past and present, "The Rough Guide to the Royals" reveals it all.


JEL classification: F35 F36 F59 Keywords: Foreign aid Aid effort Ideology International political economy a b s t r a c t The vast majority of scholarship on foreign aid looks at either the effectiveness of foreign aid or why particular countries receive aid from particular donors. This paper takes a different approach: what are the domestic sources of support for foreign aid? Specifically, how does the donor's domestic political and economic environment influence 'aid effort'? This paper uses a time-series cross-sectional data set to analyze the influence of changes in political and economic variables. As governments become more conservative, their aid effort is likely to fall. Domestic political variables appear to influence aid effort, but only for aid to low income countries and multilaterals while aid effort to middle income countries in unaffected. This suggests that models solely emphasizing donor economic and international strategic interests as determinants of donor aid policy may be mis-specified. These results also suggest sources of aid volatility that might influence recipient growth prospects.


In the last 15 years, the ground - both in terms of technological advance and in the sophistication of analyses of technology - has shifted. At the same time, librarianship as a field has adopted a more skeptical perspective; libraries are feeling market pressure to adopt and use new innovations; and their librarians boast a greater awareness of the socio-cultural, economic, and ethical considerations of information and communications technologies. Within such a context, a fresh and critical analysis of the foundations and applications of technology in librarianship is long overdue.


Since its introduction, XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, has quickly emerged as the universal format for publishing and exchanging data in the World Wide Web. As a result, data sources, including object-relational databases, are now faced with a new class of users: clients and customers who would like to deal directly with XML data rather than being forced to deal with the data source particular schema and query languages. XML is also rapidly becoming popular for representing web data as it brings a finely granulated structure to the web information and exposes the semantics of the web content. In all these web applications including electronic commerce and intelligent agents, view mechanisms are recognized as critical and are being widely employed to represent, users' specific interests. Rewriting the user queries using views is a powerful technique in the above described applications, which can be categorized as data integration, data warehousing and query optimization. In this study we identify some difficulties with currently known methods for using rewritings in XML-like "semistructured" databases. We study the problem in two realistic scenarios. The first one is related to information integration systems such as the Information Manifold, in which the data sources are modelled as sound views over a global schema. The second scenario, is query optimization using cached views. In this setting we propose two kinds of algebraic rewritings that focus on extracting as much information as possible from the views for the purpose of optimizing regular path queries, which are the building block of all the query languages for semistructured data.


Symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SymNMF) plays an important role in applications of many data analytics problems such as community detection, document clustering and image segmentation. In this paper, we consider a stochastic SymNMF problem in which the observation matrix is generated in a random and sequential manner. We propose a stochastic nonconvex splitting method, which not only guarantees convergence to the set of stationary points of the problem (in the mean-square sense), but further achieves a sublinear convergence rate. Numerical results show that for clustering problems over both synthetic and real world datasets, the proposed algorithm converges quickly to the set of stationary points.


In society today music use by athletes and exercise enthusiasts alike has become extremely popular, however the music selection process is typically quite personal and based often on intuition rather than any type of scientific formula. Some people say a certain type of music motivates them, some people suggest it is a certain beat or tempo and some people say it is any type of music at all. One thing that is commonly agreed upon however is that for whatever reason the music seems to make exercising more enjoyable. Thus, the present review of literature on music use during exercise is to develop an understanding of the scientific evidence as a basis for the finds that music can assist in exercise performance. The proposed benefits of using music in the exercise setting have intrigued researchers for quite some time even before portable music devices were easily accessible to the general public. There is a whole body of literature that suggests that during repetitive endurance-type activities ' motivational' music can decrease rates of perceived exertion and can lead to a positive impact on exercise performance measures. However, what has not been conclusively shown is whether listening to music has a purely psychological effect, a physiological effect, or a psychophysical effect on the participant and their responses to exercise. The actual mechanisms that are responsible for the beneficial effects music can have on exercise performance are still equivocal. Thus, future research is necessary to develop a better understanding of the effect and effect limitations of listening to music for improved exercise performance. -- Evidence indicates that music can have a psychological effect by decreasing rate of perceived exertion and increasing exercise enjoyment. However, it has yet to be concluded whether listening to music affects the physiological responses to exercise, specifically with respect to high intensity or maximal work efforts. The purpose of this study was to assess the following physiological responses: heart rate (HR), ventilatory kinetics, time to task failure (TTF) and blood lactate (BL), as well as perceived exertion; while exercising and listening to high tempo music, all set at a tempo of 130 bpm. The exercise entailed interval training at 80% of an individual's peak power output (PPO) as assessed during incremental maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) test on a stationary bicycle. The main finding in this study was that the participant's TTF when listening to music during their exercise performance was significantly greater (p<0.05), by one minute, than when exercising without music. Exercise heart rate was not significantly affected by music, however heart rate recovery was significantly faster by 13 bpm following the music condition (p<0.05). Additionally, participants had higher blood lactate levels and they rated their perceived exertion to be lower at the same or greater workloads when listening to music (p<0.05). Lastly, a higher breathing frequency was recorded with music (p<0.05). The results demonstrate that listening to music during high intensity exercise results in physiological changes. The results also support the theory that music can contribute to prolonged exercise durations at higher intensities with lower perceived exertion.


Introduction: Burns are skin injuries caused by external agents and can result in functional, aesthetic, psychological, and fatal sequelae. The objective is to determine the epidemiological profile of burn cases hospitalized at the Plastic Surgery and Burns Service of Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Santos (Serviço de Cirurgia Plástica e Queimados da Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Santos-SCPQSCMS). Methods: A total of 589 burn cases hospitalized at SCPQSCMS from March 2010 to March 2015 were evaluated. Results: Of these, 180 were children (aged <10 years), 72 were adolescents, 287 were adults, and 50 were elderly. The majority of the study sample were men, and the primary place of occurrence was the home. The most commonly affected regions were the head, face and neck, abdomen, thorax and trunk, and upper limbs. Burns were mainly caused by scalding (36.8%), flammable liquids (18%), fire (14.4%), and electrical injuries (10.5%). The average hospitalization time was 22 days; however, 61% of the sample remained hospitalized for up to 2 weeks and 4% died. Conclusions: The study demonstrated that the profile of patients hospitalized at SCPQSCMS was similar to that found in other units specializing in this type of treatment. Our results emphasize the importance of this type of study to understand and avoid risk factors and behaviors associated with burns. ■ ABSTRACT


The study aimed to analyze and determine the extent of implementation and compliance of selected Higher Education
Institutions (HEIs) in Bulacan based on the Guidelines on Student Affairs and Services (SAS) and its impact to the students
and institutions. The results of the study revealed that the assessment of the student respondents and student personnel
services produced similar results. They perceived that SAS programs among selected HEIs in Bulacan are "existing and
implemented." However, Student Housing, and Services for Students with Special Needs are perceived by both groups as
"not existing but implemented." Both groups consistently perceived that SAS programs are mostly implemented at "great
extent" by their institutions and implemented within the minimum standard and its impact are perceived by both groups
positively.


Commodities represent today the fastest growing markets worldwide. Historically misunderstood, generally under– studied and under– valued, certainly under– represented in the literature, commodities are suddenly receiving the attention they deserve.

Bringing together some of the best authors in the field, this book focuses on the risk management issues associated with both soft and hard commodities: energy, weather, agriculturals, metals and shipping. Taking the reader through every part of the commodities markets, the authors discuss the intricacies of modelling spot and forward prices, as well as the design of new Futures markets. The book also looks at the use of options and other derivative contract forms for hedging purposes, as well as supply management in commodity markets. It looks at the implications for climate policy and climate research and analyzes the various freight derivatives markets and products used to manage shipping and freight risk in a global commodity world.

It is required reading for energy and mining companies, utilities' practitioners, commodity and cash derivatives traders in investment banks, CTA's and hedge funds .


A manipulator wrist-mounted camera considerably facilitates motion stereo, object tracking, and active perception. An important issue in active vision is to determine the camera position and orientation relative to the camera platform (head-eye calibration or hand-eye calibration). We present a technique for calibrating the head-eye geometry and the camera intrinsic parameters. The technique allows camera self-calibration because it requires no reference object and directly uses the images of the environment. Camera self-calibration is important especially where the underlying visual tasks do not permit the use of reference objects. Our method exploits the flexibility of the active vision system, and bases camera calibration on a sequence of specially designed motion. It is shown that if the camera intrinsic parameters are known a priori, the orientation of the camera relative to the platform can be solved using 3 pure translational motions. If the intrinsic parameters are unknown, then two sequences of motion, each consisting of three orthogonal translations, are necessary to determine the camera orientation and intrinsic parameters. Once the camera orientation and intrinsic parameters are determined, the position of the camera relative to the platform can be computed from an arbitrary nontranslational motion of the platform. All the computations in our method are linear. Experimental results with real images are presented.


This paper proposes a Region-based Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (R-CRNN) for audio event detection (AED). The proposed network is inspired by Faster-RCNN, a well known region-based convolutional network framework for visual object detection. Different from the original Faster-RCNN, a recurrent layer is added on top of the convolutional network to capture the long-term temporal context from the extracted high level features. While most of the previous works on AED generate predictions at frame level first, and then use post-processing to predict the onset/offset timestamps of events from a probability sequence; the proposed method generates predictions at event level directly and can be trained end-to-end with a multitask loss, which optimizes the classification and localization of audio events simultaneously. The proposed method is tested on DCASE 2017 Challenge dataset. To the best of our knowledge, R-CRNN is the best performing single-model method among all methods without using ensembles both on development and evaluation sets. Compared to the other region-based network for AED (R-FCN) with an event-based error rate (ER) of 0.18 on the development set, our method reduced the ER to half.


PURPOSE Data confirm that high rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination have not been achieved despite strong clinician endorsement of the vaccine. We conducted a study of primary care clinicians to assess the broad range of health care delivery, health policy, and attitudinal factors influencing vaccination uptake and opportunities for informed decision making. METHODS We implemented a mixed methods study in RIOS Net, a primary care practice–based research network in New Mexico. We first conducted qualitative, in-depth interviews with primary care clinicians, health policy makers, and immunization experts, and followed up with a confirmatory survey distributed to RIOS Net clinician members. RESULTS Health service delivery challenges emerged as the greatest barrier to HPV vaccination, specifically the lack of capacity to track and distribute reminders to eligible patients. Clinicians also reported variations in counseling approaches attributable to both age and emphasis on the cancer prevention benefits of the vaccine. There was no evidence of sociocultural influences on vaccine decision making, nor did concerns about perceived overprotection emerge. CONCLUSIONS Our findings, based on a long-term program of research, suggest that both patients' attributes and health system delivery are most influential in HPV vaccination coverage challenges. Interventions targeting innovative communication techniques, as well as health system changes that build on efforts toward coordinated care and utilization of other venues to promote vaccination, will be necessary to address these challenges.


The objective of this study has been to examine which significant values are of importance in the telecom sector today, and in a continuing perspective yet to be. To ensure the factors of relevance in the study, we have identified three purposes: - Our first purpose is to clarify the eminent values in the competitive market of the mobile phone operators today, and the reason for its importance. - The second purpose is to understand the function of the brand regarding to value creation and loyalty in the sector of mobile phone operators. - The third purpose is to explore the potential approaches for mobile phone operators to increase value. In this study, our approach has been a qualitative methodology by conducting seven interviews with respondents related to the telecommunication sector. As a result of the process, we find the need to divide the concept of value into two dimensions, which we entitle organizational related values and customer related values. We have found the values related to the characteristics of the market in aspects of its infrastructural features but also in regards to the homogenous core service. Our findings in the empirical data with support to our theoretical frame of reference, is the current highly important organizational related value of constant high result quality (well-functional technological aspect), and the value enhancer by a low price; the strategy of bundling also results in higher value. This result in customer related values that perceives as safeness, availableness and convenience. The brands are a significant source of customer related values with identity value, image value and assuredness. A continued advancement in process quality and individualization will imply greater customer related values of closeness, freedom and flexibility.


Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president—making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln's leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln's thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln's presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God's design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln's decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American "exceptionalism." They emphasize that the "real" Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was selfconfident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller's Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln's presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the "Great Emancipator" and "savior of the Union" was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that "getting right with Lincoln" requires seeing the intersections of his—and America's—military, political, and religious interests and identities. [From the publisher] Disciplines History | Political History | United States History This book chapter is available at The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College: http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cwfac/2 5 Lincoln and Leadership: An Afterword


This article derives optimal consumption, investment, and annuitization patterns for retired households that have access to German-style participating payout life annuities (PLAs), allowing for capital market risks as well as idiosyncratic and systematic longevity risks. PLAs provide guaranteed minimum benefits in combination with participation in insurers' surpluses. Minimum benefits are calculated based on conservative assumptions regarding capital market and mortality developments, while surpluses distributed to annuitants bridge the gap between the insurers' actual investment and mortality experiences and the projections used in pricing. Through the participation scheme, systematic longevity risk is shared between insurers and annuitants, as unanticipated longevity shocks result in benefit adjustments via the surplus mechanism. We show that the retiree draws substantial utility from access to PLAs, equivalent to 20% of initial wealth in the presence of systematic longevity risk. We also find that stochasticity in mortality rates only has minor impact on the appeal of PLAs to the retiree. Even if the interest rate guarantee is reduced to zero in adverse capital market environments, PLAs prove to provide substantial utility for retirees. Overall, the participating life annuity design produces substantial welfare gains over a no-annuity world, while being an effective setup that helps providers manage long-term risks that are difficult to hedge otherwise, such as systematic longevity risks.


Tropical corals are routinely monitored from satellite and aeroplane using remote sensing techniques, revealing the health of coral reefs. Notably, coral bleaching is continuously monitored using multi-or hyperspectral imagery from satellites and aeroplanes. For deep-water corals, however, no established remote sensing technique exists, and for this reason, much less is known about the status of their habitats over time. The purpose of the present work was to evaluate the use of underwater hyperspectral imaging to detect changes in health status of both orange and white color morphs of the coral species L. pertusa. In this study, we examine the feasibility of similar ecosystem health monitoring by the use of underwater hyperspectral imagery. A total of 66 coral samples were exposed to 2-methylnaphthalene concentrations from 0 mg L−1 to 3.5 mg L−1, resulting in corals of varying health condition. By use of a machine learning model for classification of reflectance spectra, we were able to classify exposed corals according to lethal concentration (LC) levels LC5 (5 % mortality) and LC25 (25 % mortality). This is a first step in developing a remote sensing technique able to assess environmental impact on deep-water coral habitats over larger areas underwater.


SELF-REFLEXIVENESS, the human ability to pay attention to what we pay attention to by moving to a higher order of abstracting, our power to develop a detached almost third-person perspective about a Cast-person perspective, I consider one of the most fascinating formulations of general semantics. The capacity to step back and observe an intense emotional upheaval, in some cases even studying it in slow motion and thoroughly mapping its subtle changes, distinguishes the human being from the animal. Dr. Joseph DeVito, in his introduction to General Semantics: Guide and Workbook, suggested that self-reflexiveness was perhaps "the most difficult of the principles, and the least written about in general semantics." Using Korzybski's map/territory analogy, DeVito continues, "an ideal map would have to include a map of itself, if the map were a part of the territory. And then that map would have to include a map of the map." Dr. Sanford I. Berman, in his How to Think, Communicate, and Behave Intelligently: An Introduction to General Semantics, notes that, You can have a map, and then you can have a map of a map. And you Can have a map of that map, and a map of that map, and you can go on indefinitely having maps of maps. This is also true of language. You can have words about the nonverbal world of reality. Then you can have a word or a statement about that statements you can have a statement about that statement, indefinitely. This is another similarity between language and a map--the self-reflexiveness. We can find examples of self-reflexive human behavior in the works of several writers of what has become labeled the Realistic and Naturalistic periods of American literature. Incidentally, regarding these periods, Meyer Abrams characterizes naturalistic literary philosophy as an expression of the impersonality of the scientific method--a cold detached view of humanity. Stephen Crane We can see a form of self-reflexiveness in the precarious situation described in Crane's Open Boat, in which shipwrecked individuals huddle together, afraid for their lives, in a small dinghy surrounded by roaring whitecaps. Even in the midst of this emotional turmoil, the narrator reflects, "viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque." (Crane, p.904) As the narrator reflects upon the calamitous situation of their shipwreck, he moves into a detached absurd self-effacing irony. "Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea." (Crane, p.907) (This narrator's comments remind me of an incident in which I made a statement to a police officer in Pasadena following a fender bender on Colorado Boulevard. "I didn't even see the guy coming," I told the policeman in an incredulous tone of voice. The officer replied flatly, "That's why we call these accidents.") In another incident in the Open Boat, the crew members become frustrated at the ineffectiveness of their attempt to enlist help from the people on shore. The former light-heartedness has gone. "To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign." (Crane, p.909) Although we realize that Crane's own hindsight has led to this evaluation, as had the "viewed from a balcony" observation, in the context of the story, the narrator in real time appears to evaluate his evaluations. Walt Whitman Similarly, the kaleidoscopically shifting point of view of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" allows us to see the process of the mapper mapping his mapping. Several episodes reveal a systematic shift of focus from the map to the mapper. The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud, (Whitman, p. …


AIMS To examine the relation between maternal body fat and fetal metabolism. METHODS In this observational study, cord blood samples were collected from 60 infants of healthy women for the measurement of insulin and C peptide concentrations. Maternal weight, height, body mass index (BMI) and body composition (skinfold thickness measurements and bioelectrical impedance) were assessed at 13–15 weeks of gestation. Twenty five of the volunteers agreed to have a 75 g oral glucose tolerance test at 28–31 weeks of gestation. RESULTS Positive correlations were observed with both cord insulin or C peptide concentrations and maternal early pregnancy BMI (r=0.44, p=0.002 and r=0.33, p=0.008, respectively). There was no significant correlation between cord insulin or C peptide concentrations and birthweight or birth weight centiles. CONCLUSION Maternal BMI could be a predictor of fetal cord insulin concentration.


This study examined the efficacy of a brief math intervention using cognitive behaviour instruction (CBI) supplemented by a mnemonic cue system for a 5th grade student with math computation and fluency difficulties. Regrouping operations in addition and subtraction were the targeted skills. Curriculum-based measurements were conducted at the end of each session to monitor the student's response to the intervention. Preand post-assessment with alternate forms of Key Math-Revised were also conducted. As compared to baseline performance, there was a 48% improvement in computing regrouping problems. There was a greater effect on accuracy in computing addition than on subtraction problems requiring regrouping, based on the post-intervention assessment. The results are discussed in relation to previous intervention research incorporating CBI approaches aimed at promoting students' cognitive, metacognitive, and selfregulatory skills for proficient computation. ISSN 1918-5227 Pages 116 This Article Open Access after 1 year is brought to you by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Exceptionality Education International by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com. Recommended Citation Waugh, M., & Harrison, G. L. (2014) WWW.com: A Brief Intervention to Bolster a 5th Grader's Regrouping Skills in Math. Exceptionality Education International, 24, 1-16. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/eei/vol24/iss2/1


Camera Image Quality Benchmarking contains the basic information and approaches for the use of subjectively correlated image quality metrics and outlines a framework for camera benchmarking. The authors show how to quantitatively compare image quality of cameras used for consumer photography. This book helps to fill a void in the literature by detailing the types of objective and subjective metrics that are fundamental to benchmarking still and video imaging devices. Specifically, the book provides an explanation of individual image quality attributes and how they manifest themselves to camera components and explores the key photographic still and video image quality metrics. The text also includes illustrative examples of benchmarking methods so that the practitioner can design a methodology appropriate to the photographic usage in consideration.


Yb9Mn4.2Sb9 has been shown to have extremely low thermal conductivity and a high thermoelectric figure of merit attributed to its complex crystal structure and disordered interstitial sites. Motivated by previous work which shows that isoelectronic substitution of Mn by Zn leads to higher mobility by reducing spin disorder scattering, this study investigates the thermoelectric properties of the solid solution, Yb9Mn4.2−xZnxSb9 (x = 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4.2). Measurements of the Hall mobility at high temperatures (up to 1000 K) show that the mobility can be increased by more than a factor of 3 by substituting Zn into Mn sites. This increase is explained by the reduction of the valence band effective mass with increasing Zn, leading to a slightly improved thermoelectric quality factor relative to Yb9Mn4.2Sb9. However, increasing the Zn-content also increases the p-type carrier concentration, leading to metallic behavior with low Seebeck coefficients and high electrical conductivity. Varying the filling of the interstitial site in Yb9Zn4+ySb9 (y = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5) was attempted, but the carrier concentration (∼1021 cm−3 at 300 K) and Seebeck coefficients remained constant, suggesting that the phase width of Yb9Zn4+ySb9 is quite narrow.


There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In the UK, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real terms since 2000. Thus, providing an answer to the question as to whether such spending has an impact on educational outcomes (and whether it is good use of public money) is of paramount importance. In this paper we address this issue for England using much better data than what has generally been used in such studies. We are also able to test our identification assumption by use of a falsification test. We find that the increase in school expenditure over recent years has had a consistently positive effect on outcomes at the end of primary school. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the investment may well be cost-effective. There is also some evidence of heterogeneity in the effect of expenditure, with higher effects for students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.


The increasing amount of network-based attacks evolved to one of the top concerns responsible for network infrastructure and service outages. In order to counteract these threats, computer networks are monitored to detect malicious traffic and initiate suitable reactions. However, initiating a suitable reaction is a process of selecting an appropriate response related to the identified network-based attack. The process of selecting a response requires to take into account the economics of an reaction e.g., risks and benefits. The literature describes several response selection models, but they are not widely adopted. In addition, these models and their evaluation are often not reproducible due to closed testing data. In this paper, we introduce a new response selection model, called REASSESS, that allows to mitigate network-based attacks by incorporating an intuitive response selection process that evaluates negative and positive impacts associated with each countermeasure. We compare REASSESS with the response selection models of IE-IRS, ADEPTS, CS-IRS, and TVA and show that REASSESS is able to select the most appropriate response to an attack in consideration of the positive and negative impacts and thus reduces the effects caused by an network-based attack. Further, we show that REASSESS is aligned to the NIST incident life cycle. We expect REASSESS to help organizations to select the most appropriate response measure against a detected network-based attack, and hence contribute to mitigate them.


Objective:To examine the direct, mediated, and moderated associations among cognition, coping, and emotional adjustment following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Design:Cross-sectional, single-group design. Participants:Ninety-seven participants with mild to severe TBI recruited from their rehabilitation hospital and assessed on average 19 months postinjury. Measures:The BIRT Memory and Information Processing Battery, Doors Test from the Doors and People Test, Hayling Sentence Completion Test, Controlled Oral Word Association Test, Trail Making Test, Digit Span, Symbol Digit Modalities Test–Oral Version, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and the Coping Scale for Adults. Results:Poorer performance on measures of memory, executive functions, and attention and information processing was associated with greater levels of self-reported depression and anxiety. No mediated relation was found between cognition and emotional adjustment. However, the use of adaptive coping strategies was found to moderate the relation between the Hayling A—a measure of information processing speed—and self-reported depression. Conclusions:Greater impairments in cognition directly predicted higher levels of anxiety and depression following TBI. In addition, the results suggest that the use of adaptive coping strategies has a greater effect on levels of depression for individuals with poor information processing speed.


'You have come too late', he said. The Government Agent avoided my eyes. With an instant glance at my face he returned to his concentrated staring outside the window. 'A meeting has already been held in Colombo; on January 28. The location of the National Park borders are determined. All people inside will be relocated.' (Excerpt from my field notes, 7 February 1982) The meeting had taken place with short advanced notice. Few people were there: No-one from the provincial capital Badulla and no indigenous people. The Indigenous Wanniyala-Aetto At the same time on the east side of the country, between the central mountain chain and the sea where none of the colonising powers from Europe had found it worthwhile to exploit the land for coffee, tea or rubber, the last remnants of the indigenous Wanniyala-Aetto [wanniya-la-aetto], as they call themselves, lived in their traditional way. Their name means ' forest people'. Today they number less than two thousand individuals. Their legends, archaeology and recent living patterns suggest they descend from the first hunters and gatherers in the island. Since they have not yet been absorbed by one of the two mainstream societies, the Singhalese or the Tamil, they maintain their distinct physical and cultural characteristics. They sustain their basic needs by foraging supplemented by swidden and fallow cultivation. The northern part of their territory is drained by the Maduru Oya River and in the south by the Ulhitiya Oya River and the slowly flowing Mahaweli Ganga. The Mahaweli Project and the Maduru Oya National Park Almost two years after the decision in Colombo, on 9 November 1983, the traditional forestland of the Wanniyala-Aetto, comprising about 51,468 hectares, was designated a combined catchment area (1) and a Forest and Wildlife Reserve. It is called the Maduru Oya National Park. The Department of Wildlife Conservation marked off the land. Barriers, guards, and high-voltage electric fencing were raised and outposts were stationed along the borders. No-one was allowed to enter the park without a written permit from the Wildlife Department in Colombo, on the other side of the country. Most Wanniyala-Aetto cannot read and write. From one day to the next their ancient life became criminal in the eyes of the law. Yesterday's hunters and gatherers became today's poachers. As the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Programme proceeded, the old Wanniyala-Aetto country was segmented into systems, using alphabetic designations. Half the Tropical Dry Zone Rainforest belonged to System B (north of Maduru Oya) and the southwestern half to System C. The huge trees were logged and bulldozers levelled the last hunting grounds and traditional honeybee sites. The Wanniyala-Aetto country underwent dramatic change into vast areas office paddy cultivation, towns, villages, highways and infrastructure. Thousands of Singhalese settlers poured into the area. Eleven thousand hectares of hunting ground were inundated. Two small villages situated close to a dam (Kandeganville and Kaeragoda) were threatened with flooding during the monsoon rains. Offer to 'Develop' Their Jungle The Wanniyala-Aetto tried to survive in the forest; they searched for food unsuccessfully because the animals fled from the construction turmoil. There was famine. Finally they went to the developers for help, but were told that they could not collect food directly as before. The Wanniyala-Aetto now must follow the government's instructions to cut trees, blast mountains and dig channels in their hunting grounds. They were told that never again could they return to their traditional life in the forest. Their hunting ground would be reserved for the purpose of a combined catchment area between the two rivers and a National Park. Equality Before the Law The reason why the Wanniyala-Aetto could not remain in the forest is based on the concept of equality before the law. …


Sle1 is a major lupus susceptibility locus in NZM2410 lupus model that is associated with a loss of tolerance to nuclear Ags. At least three genes, Sle1a , Sle1b , and Sle1c contribute to Sle1 , and their relative role in lupus pathogenesis is unknown. We show here that Sle1 -expressing CD4 (cid:1) T cells present an activated phenotype associated with increased proliferation and cytokine production. In addition, Sle1 CD4 (cid:1) T cells provide help to anti-chromatin B cells to produce anti-nuclear antibodies, whether or not these B cells express Sle1 . The Sle1a locus alone accounts for all these Sle1 phenotypes, implying that a specific genetic defect in Sle1a is necessary and sufficient to produce autoreactive T cells. However, Sle1c induces intermediate T cell activation and only provides help to Sle1 -expressing anti-chromatin-producing B cells, demonstrating the synergic interactions between Sle1c T and Sle1 B cells. Moreover, Sle1a and Sle1c were associated with a significantly reduced level of CD4 (cid:1) CD25 (cid:1) regulatory T cells that precedes autoantibody production, suggesting a causal relationship with the generation of autoreactive T cells. Our study identifies for the first time that a specific genetic defect is responsible for lupus pathogenesis by inducing autoreactive T cells to break self-tolerance and that this genetic defect is also associated with a decreased number of regulatory T cells. The Journal of Immunology, 2005, 174: 7692–7702.


Under our federal system, states can pursue competitive labor market strategies to attract economic development and raise levels of employment for their citizens. Differences in per capita income vary substantially across the continental United States, ranging from a high in Connecticut of $42,706 to a low in Mississippi of $22,372 (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2003). Employment growth also shows marked disparities, increasing between May 2002 and May 2003 by over two percent in Hawaii and New Mexico but declining by more than one percent in Missouri, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and ,South Carolina (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2003a). While various factors can influence regional economic outcomes, one of the most controversial legal policies involves right-to-work (RTW) laws which prohibit compulsory union membership. A large body of economic literature examines the effect of RTW on labor markets, growth, and wages (see Moore (1998) for a review). The analytical framework typically assumes that RTW states have lower union membership density and lower wages, and it follows on this model that lower wages will attract employment. Empirical studies find some support for the theory (Dinlersoz and Hernandez-Murillo, 2002). Conversely, other research disputes the argument that RTW produces beneficial economic results in general (Holmes, 2000). Despite the controversy surrounding RTW, 22 states have enacted such laws, and one state--Colorado--is a "modified" RTW jurisdiction (i.e., workers must approve union security in a special state election). Oklahoma is the most recent state to adopt RTW, which it did by referendum in 2001 (Hogler and LaJeunesse, 2002). Proposed legislation to enact a federal RTW law was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2003 (U.S. Congress, 2003). This article explores the RTW debate from a business policy perspective. We first propose a model of union membership density on the state level. Next, we empirically analyze the different ['actors associated with membership levels, focusing particularly on the effects of RTW laws. The analysis confirms previous research that RTW laws negatively impact union density. Our findings also suggest important correlations between managerial opposition to unions and a state's level of social capital. Thus, the presence of a RTW law may indicate a conflictual labor relations environment characterized by lack of trust, cooperation, and mutual agreement about work processes and outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of RTW for managerial practices and legal policies affecting employment relations. MODELING STATE UNION DENSITY The ongoing decline of American unions has prompted speculation about the labor movement's future viability (Bennett and Kaufman, 2002; Rose and Chaison, 2001; Troy, 1999, 2001). In 2002, total membership density was 13.2 percent of the non-agricultural workforce, with only nine percent in the private sector (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2003b). Since the enactment of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act in 1935, federal policy has expressly promoted collective bargaining as a means of reducing industrial conflict and promoting equality of bargaining power between employers and employees throughout the country (Kaufman, 1996). Although those policy objectives remain unchanged, levels of union influence in both regional and sectoral labor markets vary considerably and impede standardization of wages and working conditions. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of unionization in this country is the substantial difference in density rates among states. Recent data, to illustrate, show that union membership in North Carolina stands at a low of 3.2 percent of the workforce, while the rate peals at 25.3 percent in New York (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2003b). Such differences raise important questions about the nature of the U.S. labor relations system. One of the central is sues in that debate is the role of right-to-work laws. …


This work deals with a method for building a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) from a Hilbert space with frame elements having special properties. Conditions on existence and a method of construction are given. Then, these RKHS are used within the framework of regularization theory for function approximation. Implications on semiparametric estimation are discussed and a multiscale scheme of regularization is also proposed. Results on toy and real-world approximation problems illustrate the effectiveness of such methods.


A new technique has been developed to grip small tension specimens. The specimens are 30.5 mm long with a test cross section that is 3.2 by 3.2 mm. and they have wedge-shaped ends that fit into matching slots in the grips. Alignment is accomplished by screws that position the specimen into the middle of the slots. Strain is measured with foil gages mounted front and back. and the specimen is tested in a medium-size servohydraulic test machine. The stress-strain curves of the small specimens agree well with those from standard-size specimens. The objective was to develop a specimen to study the local behavior of inhomogeneous materials such as steel weldments. The specimen had to be small enough for the test section to contain material from one weld bead, yet large enough to be tested in a servohydraulic test machine using a standard load cell, grips, and strain gages. There are two sub-size or small-size specimens described in ASTM E 8 and E 8M [1]. The sub-size rectangular specimen is 6.4 mm (1/4 in.) wide with a gage length of 25.4 mm ( 1 in. ) and an over-all length of 101.6 mm (4 in.). The smallest round specimen described has a diameter of 2.87 mm (0. 113 in. ), a gage length of 11.4 mm (0.450 in.), and an overall length of 32 mm (1.25 in.). While the test section of the round specimen is small enough, cutting and testing these from weld metal using standard techniques would be difficult. The size of the available weld specimen prevented the use of the sub-size rectangular specimen as it required 100 much extra material for gripping.


The invasion of multi-core and multi-processor platforms on all aspects of computing makes shared memory parallel programming mainstream. Yet, the fundamental problems of exploiting parallelism efficiently and correctly have not been fully addressed. Moreover, the execution model of these platforms (notably the relaxed memory models they implement) introduces new challenges to static and dynamic program analysis. In this work we address 1) the optimization of pessimistic implementations of critical sections and 2) the dynamic information flow analysis for parallel executions of multi-threaded programs. Critical sections are excerpts of code that must appear as executed atomically. Their pessimistic implementation reposes on synchronization mechanisms, such as mutexes, and consists into obtaining and releasing them at the beginning and end of the critical section respectively. We present a general algorithm for the acquisition/release of synchronization mechanisms and define on top of it several policies aiming to reduce contention by minimizing the possession time of synchronization mechanisms. We demonstrate the correctness of these policies (i.e., they preserve atomicity and guarantee deadlock freedom) and evaluate them experimentally. The second issue tackled is dynamic information flow analysis of parallel executions. Precisely tracking information flow of a parallel execution is due to non-deterministic accesses to shared memory. Most existing solutions that address this problem enforce a serial execution of the target application. This allows to obtain an explicit serialization of memory accesses but incurs both an execution-time overhead and eliminates the effects of relaxed memory models. In contrast, the technique we propose allows to predict the plausible serializations of a parallel execution with respect to the memory model. We applied this approach in the context of taint analysis, a dynamic information flow analysis widely used in vulnerability detection. To improve precision of taint analysis we further take into account the semantics of synchronization mechanisms such as mutexes, which restricts the predicted serializations accordingly. The solutions proposed have been implemented in proof of concept tools which allowed their evaluation on some hand-crafted examples.


BACKGROUND: Bronchiectasis is a chronic debilitating suppurative disease that significantly impacts quality of life. Clinical outcomes like exacerbations, are usually physician centered; however, the patients' experience, health-related behaviors, and expectations have frequently been neglected. In addition, patients' health perceptions may be influenced by their culture. OBJECTIVE: To determine the health perception and behavior in adults with bronchiectasis. METHODS: We performed semi-directive interviews, which were audiotaped, with 60 adults with bronchiectasis between April 2016 and December 2016. Our interview focused on issues related to symptom perception, access to health-care resources and patient-physician communication, medication adherence, outcomes and expectations, quality of life, and social relationships. RESULTS: The subjects with bronchiectasis developed varying patterns of symptom perception (ranging from highly distressing to barely disturbing) and had conflicting opinions on whether and when they should seek health-care services (ranging from active consultations to being totally passive or resistant to seek health care). We observed certain discrepancies between symptom perception and health-related behaviors. Overall, medication adherence was suboptimal, but the subjects were willing to participate in clinical trials and receive complementary alternative medications despite concerns regarding adverse effects of prolonged treatment. There were concerns about the adverse effects of bronchiectasis on fertility and infectiousness to others, although most subjects disregarded these issues. CONCLUSIONS: The diverse symptom perception and health-related behaviors highlighted the need for evaluation and intervention in bronchiectasis. These findings will provide rationales for refining future health care through comprehensive (particularly psychological) interventions worldwide.


Involvement of consumer in each purchasing decision would always colours in every election of product brand by bases consideration of benefit criterion with product characteristic becoming its alternative. Consumer usually stays in weak position. To protect consumer is required a set law order. Involvement of consumer is a best concept to be comprehended as function of object. situation that altogether that will constitute in so many action of consumer with reference to accomplishment of requirement


Chimpanzees and large, social, mammalian carnivores hunt similarly, yet few studies use comparative methodologies to help understand these animals hunting behaviour. This thesis investigates the extent of current knowledge of chimpanzee hunting in the context of what, how and why chimpanzees hunt. Furthermore it investigates whether the high hunting success of chimpanzees is related to their choice of relatively small prey. This is done by comparing chimpanzee hunting to that of other social carnivores that hunt relatively large prey, wolves, Canis lupus, African hunting dogs, Lycaon pictus, spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta, and the lion, Panthera leo.. Chimpanzees are highly successful hunters compared to large social carnivores. Chimpanzees preferentially hunt relatively small prey compared to the carnivores studied. The mediation analysis shows that the high hunting success of chimpanzees is partially mediated by them hunting prey of a smaller relative size. A comprehensive review of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, as predators as well as a mediation analysis on the relationship between prey size and hunting success across the five social predators is presented. It is shown that chimpanzees prefer hunting arboreal primates, particularly the red colobus monkey, Piliocolobus sp.. Seasonality in hunting prevalence occurs at some study sites but is not ubiquitous. Adult and adolescent males conduct the majority of hunts and often hunt in groups. Chimpanzees at the Tai Forest, Cote d'Ivoire, hunt more cooperatively (fulfilling different roles) than documented elsewhere. This has been likened to hunting by large social carnivores, specifically African lions and African hunting dogs. The traditional explanations of the reasoning behind chimpanzee hunting that have currently been proposed are not well supported. A more recently proposed explanation, the meat-‐scrap hypothesis provides an important avenue for future research and the explanation for chimpanzee hunting is likely to be related to nutritional, rather than social factors.


Background: Observational studies have consistently associated obesity with colorectal cancer risk. Because both traits are genetically determined and share some metabolic biomarkers, we hypothesized that obesity-related polymorphisms could also influence the risk of developing colorectal cancer. Methods: We conducted a comprehensive population-based case–control study in 1,792 German colorectal cancer cases and 1,805 controls to explore associations between 28 obesogenic variants identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and colorectal cancer risk. We also evaluated interactions between polymorphisms and body mass index (BMI), type II diabetes (T2D), and gender. Results: No evidence of association between obesogenic variants and colorectal cancer risk was observed after correction for multiple testing. There was only a remarkable interaction between the LTArs1041981 polymorphism and gender, which modified the risk of colorectal cancer [Pinteraction = 0.002; males: odds ratio (OR), 1.14; 95% confidence intervals (CI), 1.00–1.30 vs. females: OR, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.71–0.97]. Conclusions: Our findings showed that obesogenic variants are not a major pathogenetic risk factor for colorectal cancer. Impact: This comprehensive population-based case–control study does not provide evidence of a shared genetic component between obesity and colorectal cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 23(6); 1125–8. ©2014 AACR.


The andesitic volcanoes Kirishima, Kyushu, and Esan, Hokkaido, discharge 94 to 225 °C HCl-bearing vapors from summit fumaroles. At Kirishima a geothermal system exists on the flanks of the large volcanic massif (1500 m relief and 12 km radius). In contrast, Esan is a small dome (600 m relief and 1 km radius) with ephemeral hot springs. The chemical and isotopic compositions of the fumarole gases and condensates, and of waters from hot springs, indicate that Esan discharges are dominated by magmatic water and gases, whereas those at Kirishima are mainly meteoric. The Kirishima geothermal system contains acid fluids that are neutralized by interaction with the host rock and dilution by meteoric ground water; the acidity is probably of magmatic origin. A large ground-water carapace at Kirishima condenses a majority of magmatic volatiles and metals before they can discharge to the surface, in contrast to Esan, where the volatiles (including metals) degas to the atmosphere. This suggests that a meteoric system may be necessary to condense metals in this high-level volcanic environment to provide a situation conducive to hydrothermal mineralization at epithermal depths.


Using Scopus and national sources, I have investigated the evolution of the cost of publishing in Danish astronomy on a fine scale over a number of years. I find that the number of publications per year from Danish astronomers increased by a factor of four during 15 years: naturally, the corresponding potential cost of publishing must have increased similarly. The actual realized cost of publishing in core journals are investigated for a high profile Danish astronomy research institutions. I argue that the situation is highly unstable if the current cost scenario continues, and I speculate that Danish astronomy is risking a scholarly communication collapse due to the combination of increasing subscription cost, increased research output, and increased direct publishing costs related to Open Access and other page charges.


In this paper we present a new method for joint denoising of depth and luminance images produced by time-of-flight camera. Here we assume that the sequence does not contain outlier points which can be present in the depth images. Our method first performs estimation of noise and signal covariance matrices and then performs vector denoising. Two versions of the algorithm are presented, depending on the method used for the classification of the image contexts. Denoising results are compared with the ground truth images obtained by averaging of the multiple frames of the still scene.


This book presents an overview of the core printmaking areas: intaglio, lithography, collagraph, monoprinting, relief printing and screenprinting. There are also sections on Health & Safety, Workshop and Studio Space, and Displaying and Storing Prints, as well as a comprehensive glossary and list of suppliers. Separate chapters covering digital printmaking and the use of photography in printmaking ensure that the book is up to date with contemporary practice. Each chapter rounds off with a small gallery section showcasing the work of contemporary printmakers working with the relevant techniques. In each instance, the cheapest and easiest methods for each technique is explained and wherever possible the author covers methods for making prints at home, without the need for expensive equipment and presses. The whole book is filled with step-by-step sequences and clear instructions. The result is an excellent guide for the beginner and useful reference for the intermediate printmaker on all the printmaking techniques and how to use them.