Atomic-defect engineering in thin membranes provides opportunities for ionic and molecular filtration and analysis. While molecular-dynamics (MD) calculations have been used to model conductance through atomic vacancies, corresponding experiments are lacking. We create sub-nanometer vacancies in suspended single-layer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) via Ga+ ion irradiation, producing membranes containing ∼300 to 1200 pores with average and maximum diameters of ∼0.5 and ∼1 nm, respectively. Vacancies exhibit missing Mo and S atoms, as shown by aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (AC-STEM). The longitudinal acoustic band and defect-related photoluminescence were observed in Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy, respectively. As the irradiation dose is increased, the median vacancy area remains roughly constant, while the number of vacancies (pores) increases. Ionic current versus voltage is nonlinear and conductance is comparable to that of ∼1 nm diameter single MoS2 pores, proving that the smaller pores in the distribution display negligible conductance. Consistently, MD simulations show that pores with diameters <0.6 nm are almost impermeable to ionic flow. Atomic pore structure and geometry, studied by AC-STEM, are critical in the sub-nanometer regime in which the pores are not circular and the diameter is not well-defined. This study lays the foundation for future experiments to probe transport in large distributions of angstrom-size pores.


Dendritic macromolecules' have attracted much attention as organic examples of well-defined nanostructures. These molecules are ideal model systems for studying how physical properties depend on molecular size and architecture. In this paper using a simple result, some GAP programs are prepared to compute Wiener and hyper Wiener indices of dendrimers.


From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled with what "performance" is all about. At the same moment, "performativity"--a new concept in language theory--has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. This volume grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, and in the sentences we speak.


Synaptic cell adhesion molecules are characterized by their potential to trigger synaptogenesis in vitro, even when expressed in non‐neuronal cell lines. In addition to the prototypic synaptic cell adhesion molecules (SynCAMs), other structurally unrelated families of synaptic cell adhesion molecules have been identified: neurexins and neuroligins, as well as the leucine‐rich repeat transmembrane neuronal protein family. Although in vivo the absence of individual synaptic cell adhesion molecules does not necessarily reduce the number of synapses, it does affect the function of synapses. Not surprisingly, mutations in synaptic cell adhesion molecules have been identified in patients suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disability or schizophrenia. In line with the major function of these genes at the synapse, their role in the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental diseases has been attributed to synaptogenesis, synapse maintenance and synaptic plasticity. However, one family of synaptic cell adhesion molecules, the SynCAMs, have also been implicated in axon guidance, that is, an earlier step in neural circuit formation. These findings suggest that SynCAMs, and maybe other families of synaptic cell adhesion molecules as well, could contribute to the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders at multiple steps of neural circuit formation and, thus, shape the distinct symptoms associated with different disease variants or distinct neurodevelopmental disorders in addition to their effect on synaptic function. In this review, we summarize the roles of one family of synaptic cell adhesion molecules, the SynCAMs, at the synapse and beyond in axon guidance and myelination.


Despite criticism that health reform legislation will result in cuts to Medicare, the bills passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as President Obama's proposal, contain provisions that would strengthen the program by reducing costs for prescription drugs, expanding coverage for preventive care, providing more help for low-income beneficiaries, and supporting accessible, coordinated, and comprehensive care that effectively responds to patients' needs. The legislation also would help to extend the program's fiscal solvency--for nine years, under the Senate bill. This issue brief examines the provisions in the pending legislation and how each one would work to improve benefits, extend the fiscal solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, reduce pressure on the federal budget, and contribute to moving the health care system toward better access to care, improved quality, and greater efficiency.


This study develops the concept of dialogic conversational practice (dialogic CP) as a conduit for effective engagement strategies and productive working arrangements. We begin with a critique of High-Involvement-High-Performance HR systems against the backdrop of the current economic crisis to underline its deep-seated instrumental orientation and adverse effects on employee engagement. We then outline the key dimensions of dialogic CP, and propose a conceptual framework grounded in the line manager–employee relationship, which we argue can moderate the adverse effects of the current economic crisis and frame a move towards more effective engagement strategies. Our research approach combines critical discourse analysis and critical realism to frame a thematic analysis of survey data gathered from two UK public sector organisations. Our core finding suggests that both organisations would fall short of the democratic values and principles underlying our framework but that, despite the negative impact of the current economic crisis on the employment relationship, do offer a glimpse of some of the key characteristics of dialogic CP and display a readiness for a more robust application of the concept to their respective contexts. We conclude by underlining the significance and limitations of our study and its implications for further research.


In order to observe growth phenomena in biology where dendritic shapes appear, we propose a simple model where a given population evolves feeded by a diffusing nutriment, but is subject to a density constraint. The particles (e.g., cells) of the population spontaneously stay passive at rest, and only move in order to satisfy the constraint $\rho\leq 1$, by choosing the minimal correction velocity so as to prevent overcongestion. We treat this constraint by means of projections in the space of densities endowed with the Wasserstein distance $W_2$, defined through optimal transport. This allows to provide an existence result and suggests some numerical computations, in the same spirit of what the authors did for crowd motion (but with extra difficulties, essentially due to the fact that the total mass may increase). The numerical simulations show, according to the values of the parameter and in particular of the diffusion coefficient of the nutriment, the formation of dendritic patterns in the space occupied by cells.


We provided a synthesis of use, summarized key issues in applying, and highlighted exemplary applications in the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework. We articulated key RE-AIM criteria by reviewing the published literature from 1999 to 2010 in several databases to describe the application and reporting on various RE-AIM dimensions. After excluding nonempirical articles, case studies, and commentaries, 71 articles were identified. The most frequent publications were on physical activity, obesity, and disease management. Four articles reported solely on 1 dimension compared with 44 articles that reported on all 5 dimensions of the framework. RE-AIM was broadly applied, but several criteria were not reported consistently.


Two signals activate meiosis in yeast: starvation and expression of the a1 and alpha 2 products of the mating-type locus. Prior studies suggest that these signals stimulate expression of an activator of meiosis, the IME1 (inducer of meiosis) product. We have cloned a gene, IME2, with properties similar to those of IME1: both genes are required for meiosis, and both RNAs are induced in meiotic cells. Elevated dosage of IME1 or IME2 stimulates the meiotic recombination pathway without starvation; thus, the IME products may be part of the switch that activates meiosis. IME1 was found to be required for IME2 expression, and a multicopy IME2 plasmid permitted meiosis in an ime1 deletion mutant. Accordingly, we propose that the IME1 product stimulates meiosis mainly through activation of IME2 expression.


The importance of disclosure in corporate annual reports has increased over the past couple of decades (Beattie and Pratt, 2002). This increase has been attributed in part to growth in the knowledge economy (Beattie and Pratt, 2002; Beattie, 2012). Disclosure is now accepted as an essential component of financial statements and its place is cemented by recent changes in the regulatory framework which place disclosure matters at the heart of some key accounting standards. In addition the recent financial crisis has further fuelled debate on the need for relevant disclosures but concern is growing about information overload and avoiding 'clutter' (Beattie and Pratt, 2002; Beattie, 2012). Disclosure has long been considered essential to economic development and growth particularly in an emerging economy context (Gill and Tropper, 1988). Notwithstanding the importance of corporate financial disclosure and a few notable exceptions, very little is documented in the extant literature about financial disclosure practices in developing countries. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to extend empirical knowledge and contribute to the corporate disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence on corporate financial disclosure in the emerging capital market of Kuwait. Kuwait is of interest because of the remarkable growth in stock exchange activity and the unique business environment faced there. In addition, as Kuwait first adopted IAS/IFRS in 1991 users and preparers should be well-versed in it and the country therefore represents an ideal and fruitful site for analysis. The results of the study are likely to have implications for decision makers, the academic community and accounting standard setters. This thesis has five principal aims: (i) to explore the extent of compliance with IFRS disclosure requirements by Kuwaiti non-financial listed companies; (ii) to investigate the extent of aggregate (mandatory and voluntary) financial disclosure provide by Kuwaiti nonfinancial listed companies; (iii) to ascertain the relationships between selected corporate characteristics such as company size, leverage, profitability, liquidity, listing age, type of auditor, and type of industry and aggregate, mandatory, and voluntary financial disclosure; (iv) to document the annual report preparers' perceptions of financial disclosure practices in Kuwaiti non-financial listed firms; and (v) to analyse whether/how annual reports of Kuwaiti non-financial listed companies satisfy users' needs. The study is grounded in the decision usefulness literature and makes use of two primary research methods, namely: (i) three unweighted disclosure indices aimed at measuring the extent of aggregate, mandatory and voluntary disclosure published in annual reports issued by 51 non-financial Kuwaiti companies; and (ii) a questionnaire survey which explored the perceptions of preparers and users of corporate annual reports. Overall, the results provided a detailed picture of reporting practices in Kuwait with large companies disclosing more information than small companies, but only in terms of voluntary disclosure. More profitable companies tended to disclose less mandatory information than companies with lower income levels, while leverage, liquidity, listing age and audit type were found to have no significant association with disclosure. The questionnaire evidence revealed that accounting practices in Kuwait non-financial firms are firmly rooted in a decision-usefulness tradition with management and the board of directors viewed as the key audience for reporting information. Indeed, the annual reports of Kuwaiti non-financial listed companies are perceived as the most important sources of information. On the whole both preparers and users shared similar concerns regarding the volume of information contained within annual reports, however, their views differed in terms of identifying potential solutions.


"38 Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 293 (2010)That lawmaking in many modern Muslim nation states appears to give rather short shrift to shari'a, seemingly ignoring it in all areas save the law of the family and replacing it elsewhere with European transplanted law, has been discussed. That the Muslim world is replete with political institutions and leaders that seek a greater role than this for the shari'a in the affairs of the state is obvious to anyone even faintly familiar with the region. However, left undiscussed is the fact that the Islamist, who derives his authority precisely on the basis of returning sovereignty to God in all matters of state and law, is no more enthused than anyone else in permitting God's Law to retain any real level of supremacy over the law of the state. Yet this is amply demonstrated by the Islamist obsession with seizing state control and enacting, selectively, shari'a as state law, rather than attempting the type of complete law overhaul that would be necessary to ensure the permanent primacy of the shari'a. The selectivity, while puzzling to one in search of logic in the law, provides in fact much guidance to precisely why the Islamist has chosen this road of incoherence, demanding that the law of man lie subservient to the Will of God on the one hand, and then gleefully ignoring the necessary consequences of taking such a notion seriously on the other. The fact is that while the Islamist may say that he wishes God's Law to be supreme over that of man, there is nothing in his actions to suggest that this rhetoric, however sincerely held, is an accurate reflection of his actual aims. The Islamist does not want God's Law to reign supreme in areas such as corporate law and the law of business entities, where the economic consequences might be dire. On the other end lies the law of the family, where God's Law is deemed a vital necessity, and any development, any evolution, any alteration of the rules established centuries ago when caliphs walked the earth will meet with red-faced Islamist indignation at the suggestion of such outrageous sacrilege. With the power of lawmaking safely in the hands of the state, the Islamist need only bring sharia where he wishes it, and leave all other, largely transplanted, law, where it lies, which is to say in as authoritative a position as any shari'a derived enactment by the state. The wide scale adoption of secular, transplanted law and secular legal systems and their continuation in force even in the most thoroughly Islamized societies is not a matter very thoroughly discussed by our academy, except to the extent that it is asserted as largely irrelevant to the reestablishment of a true "Islamic state" where some form of shari'a does indeed reign supreme. Thus, much scholarly attention has been focused on the "repugnancy clauses" in various Muslim state constitutions, which prohibit the enactment of laws that are repugnant to the shari'a. The focus on such clauses is striking, and portentous phrases on their importance are rife in our scholarship, among them "the Rise of the Islamic State," "theocratic constitutionalism," and "Islamic constitutionalism." On repugnancy, I offer only two points. First, to the extent that an "Islamic state†can be formed under such a conception, it only seems to confirm how fundamentally limited the role of shari'a has become in the "Islamic state." Secondly, no theory of repugnancy has been coherently laid out, let alone applied, in any Muslim state. Muslim states, and Islamist movements, are far too invested in their development to call for anything less than a selective application of shari'a, with the only real difference between the Islamist, the moderate and the secularist being precisely how much to select. Logic and coherence, in the end, has been forced to give way to the hard realities of our times, which cannot afford to Divinity the primary role in the making of law."


Successful negotiators look beyond a purely utilitarian view. We propose a new agent architecture that integrates the utilitarian, information, and semantic views allowing the definition of strategies that take these three dimensions into account. Information-based agency values the information in dialogues in the context of a communication language based on a structured ontology and on the notion of commitment. This abstraction unifies measures such as trust, reputation, and reliability in a single framework.


Distant supervised relation extraction has been an effective way to find relational facts from text. However, distant supervised method inevitably accompanies with wrongly labeled sentences. Noisy sentences lead to poor performance of relation extraction models. Though existing piecewise convolutional neural network model with sentence-level attention (PCNN+ATT) is an effective way to reduce the effect of noisy sentences, it still has two limitations. On one hand, it adopts a PCNN module as sentence encoder, which only captures local contextual features of words and might lose important information. On the other hand, it neglects the fact that not all words contribute equally to the semantics of sentences. To address these two issues, we propose a hierarchical attention-based bidirectional GRU (HA-BiGRU) model. For the first limitation, our model utilizes a BiGRU module in place of PCNN, so as to extract global contextual information. For the second limitation, our model combines word-level and sentence-level attention mechanisms, which help get accurate sentence representations. To further alleviate the wrongly labeling problem, we first calculate the co-occurrence probabilities (CP) between the shortest dependency path (SDP) and the relation labels. Based on these co-occurrence probabilities, two denoising strategies are proposed to reduce noise interference respectively from aspect of filtering labeled data and integrating CP information into model. Experimental results on the corpus of Freebase and New York Times (Freebase+NYT) show that the HA-BiGRU model outperforms baseline models, and the two co-occurrence probabilities based denoising strategies can improve robustness of HA-BiGRU model.


Objective: The author reviews the causes of nursing shortages and surpluses and examines data from California hospitals to demonstrate how these cycles are expressed in the demand for and wages of nurses. Background: Nursing shortages have been reported cyclically for more than 50 years in the United States. There has been little data analysis demonstrating the relationship between the current shortage and changes in wages and nurse staffing. Methods: Analysis of longitudinal hospital and patient data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Summary statistics of patient utilization, nurse staffing, and nurse wages were computed. Results: The data demonstrate that cyclical shortages are accompanied by higher wages and employment. This has been true in recent years. However, in medical–surgical units, hours per patient day declined between 2001 and 2002, perhaps reflecting the inability of hospitals to find more nurses to meet staffing goals. Conclusions: Nurse staffing per patient day and per discharge have remained stable, despite concerns about low staffing levels. Improved measures of patient care needs and studies of the precise staffing requirements for different types of patients and configurations of staff are required to make recommendations about staffing and policy.


The focused transport equation (FTE) includes all the necessary physics for modeling the shock acceleration of energetic particles with a unified description of first-order Fermi acceleration, shock drift acceleration, and shock surfing acceleration. It can treat the acceleration and transport of particles with an anisotropic distribution. In this study, the energy spectrum of pickup ions accelerated at shocks of various obliquities is investigated based on the FTE. We solve the FTE by using a stochastic approach. The shock acceleration leads to a two-component energy spectrum. The low-energy component of the spectrum is made up of particles that interact with shock one to a few times. For these particles, the pitch angle distribution is highly anisotropic, and the energy spectrum is variable depending on the momentum and pitch angle of injected particles. At high energies, the spectrum approaches a power law consistent with the standard diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) theory. For a parallel shock, the high-energy component of the power-law spectrum, with the spectral index being the same as the prediction of DSA theory, starts just a few times the injection speed. For an oblique or quasi-perpendicular shock, the high-energy component of the spectrum exhibits a double power-law distribution: a harder power-law spectrum followed by another power-law spectrum with a slope the same as the spectral index of DSA. The shock acceleration will eventually go into the DSA regime at higher energies even if the anisotropy is not small. The intensity of the energy spectrum given by the FTE, in the high-energy range where particles get efficient acceleration in the DSA regime, is different from that given by the standard DSA theory for the same injection source. We define the injection efficiency η as the ratio between them. For a parallel shock, the injection efficiency is less than 1, but for an oblique shock or a quasi-perpendicular shock it could be greater.


Fuelled by a sharp decline in the cost of large-screen display hardware, we are currently witnessing a continuous increase in the number of public displays being deployed in locations, such as airports, railway stations and shopping malls. These commercial deployments range from single displays in shop windows, to hundreds of displays in airports and train stations. In parallel, public display systems have provided researchers with a rich topic for research in a range of disciplines, including HCI, CSCW and sociology. However, once deployed, public displays represent a publicly visible "face" of the corporation or entity behind the deployment and the introduction of experimental, research-led content is therefore often undesirable. With advertising being a driving factor behind the deployment of many displays, stake holders are also less likely to give up valuable "airtime" to experimentation. Researchers willing to overcome these issues by deploying their own hardware, e.g. in a lab or campus environment, discover that the software packages used to drive commercial displays are tailored towards the needs of commercial deployments and are unable to meet the requirements for experimentation and research. As a result, researchers using public displays as a vehicle for their investigations normally create small-scale, closed deployments in lab or office environments aimed at investigating specific research questions. Applications and content are usually hand-crafted to best support the investigations at hand, and deployments are rather short-lived. While other research communities, e.g. in the context of PlanetLab or the Grid, have identified the benefits of creating open, shared, medium or large-scale research infrastructures, a similar move has so far not taken place in the context of public display networks. This thesis aims to provide the foundations for the creation of medium-scale, long-lived public display networks for experimentation and research. The thesis presents a distributed systems infrastructure and API for providing experimenters with the means for creating and running interactive experiments on public display networks. Moreover, it introduces a computational model that provides key abstractions over the hardware and software entities present in a public display network. The provided API is split into two parts: a low-level API, enabling experimenters to directly control the life-cycle and visibility of experimental content on displays, and a high-level API and scheduling service for scheduling experiments based on constraints, such as time, location, and the presence of Bluetooth devices (e.g. mobile phones). The low-level API features transactional semantics that provide atomicity, consistency and visual isolation for orchestrating experiments involving multiple displays. The constraint-based scheduling interface of the high-level API builds on and complements the low-level API, and provides experimenters with an easy-to-use interface for running and displaying content. The software infrastructure presented in this thesis has been implemented and deployed as part of the e-Campus public display network at Lancaster University. The software infrastructure is used on a daily basis for scheduling a mixture of research-led experimental content and informa- tional content. We report on both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the system based on performance measurements and a study of longitudinal use.


There is a great interest in experiments in the contemporary city. Many diverse initiatives use the term to describe their efforts of questioning existing configurations or proposing new ideas. In the wider literature on urban change, experimentation is frequently suggested as a method for bringing into being the uncertain and hopeful alternatives of critical or insurgent utopias. Yet there is little explicit discussion of what experimentation actually means in these contexts, which fuels concerns over an empty buzzword. Some useful ideas have started to emerge from discussions of grassroots innovations and urban laboratories, which highlight local relevance and strategic visibility as important markers of experimentation. Yet they also show the need for wider conceptual and empirical work on experiments that are explicitly urban and alternative in their outlook. This research takes up this challenge by interrogating the underlying notion of experimentation, tracing its development from a scientific method towards an adaptive and action-oriented social practice of knowledge-making. This extension highlights the importance of place and the involvement of heterogeneous, more-than-human collectives in this process. It also reveals collective experiments as relational practices of negotiation that create knowledge through surprise and adjustment, and which can best be conceptualised as socio-material assemblages.To understand how urban grassroots alternatives assemble their experimentality, the research works with three case studies that describe themselves as experiments: the autonomous town of Christiania in Copenhagen, the eco-squat of Can Masdeu in Barcelona, and the Prinzessinnengarten, an urban garden in Berlin. Using specific constructions, routines and projects for each site, the discussion traces their experimental dimensions through material practices, social dynamics and underlying approaches. It highlights their assembling as processes of balancing, integration and cultivation respectively. Despite these different modes of emergence, the cases indicate some shared experimental features: a focus on learning as knowing-in-practice, an ambiguous relationship of separation from and interconnection with the city, and a clear commitment to publicness. This casts experimental alternatives as distinctive sites of urban learning that make visible alternative modes of dwelling and enable translation through situated adaptation. It also presents them as sources of an urban innovation that is incremental and improvised rather than based on radical novelty. Experimental alternatives extend the promises of urban grassroots interventions by opening up wider avenues of engagement and participation, which suggests experimentation as a useful approach in the work of such initiatives.


Plastic pollution is a major environmental problem in the world, and Thailand is one of many countries faced with increasing plastic and foam waste problems. Plastic pollution affects canals, rivers and beaches, and the health of sea creatures and wild animals who eat plastic bags. The popular solutions for this plastic problem are reducing, reusing and recycling; however, the Thai government focuses on a different solution: replacing the problematic product (plastic) with bio-plastic. This research analyses the project initiated by the Thai government which aims to facilitate relevant public and private sector agencies, working together to push the Thai plastic industry towards becoming a bio-plastic hub. The government has chosen replacing because the development of bio-plastic contributes not just to environmental objectives, but also to economic, technological and social goals. The research undertakes a thorough review of critical literature in order to assess the challenges and barriers likely to face this project. The research also aims to find out how the strategies of the project in all three phases can address the challenges and barriers encountered.


Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of both sleeping sickness in humans and the related veterinary disease, Nagana. Both diseases have a wide distribution across sub-Saharan Africa and affect some of the poorest areas of the world. T. brucei can be segregated into three morphologically identical sub-species based on host, geography and pathology. T. b. brucei is limited to domestic and wild animals throughout sub-Saharan Africa and is non-infective to humans due to trypanosome lytic factors found in human serum. T. b. gambiense and T. b. rhodesiense are human infective sub-species, named due to their relative geographic locations. T. b. gambiense is the dominant form of the disease, causing over 90% of reported cases. Study of T. b. gambiense is complicated in that there are two distinct groups. Group 1 is invariably resistant to lysis and by far the more prevalent group. Group 2 T. b. gambiense exhibit a variable resistance phenotype and are only found at a small number of Cote d'Ivoire disease foci. There are two trypanosome lytic factors in human serum (TLF-1 & 2), both containing the proteins Apolipoprotein L1 (ApoL1) and Haptogoblin-related protein (Hpr). It has been conclusively demonstrated that the lytic component of TLF is ApoL1, although Hpr is required for maximal lysis by facilitating uptake of TLF particles via the HpHbR cell surface receptor.

This thesis has exposed several features of the human infectivity phenotype in both groups of T. b. gambiense, an area of research for which data has been lacking due to the difficulty of working with the organism. Fluorescence microscopy indicated that group 1 T. b. gambiense exhibit avoidance of TLF-1 particles by down-regulating HpHbR receptor expression and function. However, they are also able to resist the effects of recombinant ApoL1, suggesting an additional neutralisation or compensatory mechanism. Due to group 1 T. b. gambiense avoidance of TLF-1, TLF-2 is the more important lytic particle for this sub-species group and future research must take this into consideration. Unlike group 1, group 2 T. b. gambiense displays a variable human serum resistance phenotype that involves a neutralisation or compensatory mechanism for ApoL1, with no significant avoidance of lytic particles. Despite the high variability of the phenotype of group 2 T. b. gambiense, Quantitative Trait Analysis (QTL) using twenty-five F1 progeny from a T. b. brucei / group 2 T. b. gambiense cross indicated a strong heritable component to human serum resistance largely determined by a 30 gene locus on chromosome 8. Finally, a six multi-locus genotype population analysis of a Cote d'Ivoire T. b. gambiense focus was conducted, revealing little relationship between the two groups of T. b. gambiense in the field. The differences in the human serum resistance phenotypes and population genetics of both groups of T. b. gambiense revealed both prior and during this study make it appear likely that the two groups have evolved distinct human serum resistance strategies.


In order to automatically generate high-quality game levels, one needs to be able to automatically verify that the levels are playable. The simulation-based approach to playability testing uses an artificial agent to play through the level, but building such an agent is not always an easy task and such an agent is not always readily available. We discuss this prob- lem in the context of the physics-based puzzle game Cut the Rope, which features continuous time and state space, mak- ing several approaches such as exhaustive search and reactive agents inefficient. We show that a deliberative Prolog-based agent can be used to suggest all sensible moves at each state, which allows us to restrict the search space so that depth-first search for solutions become viable. This agent is successfully used to test playability in Ropossum, a level generator based on grammatical evolution. The method proposed in this paper is likely to be useful for a large variety of games with similar characteristics.


Over the last twenty years, the scholarly field of erroneous convictions has skyrocketed, with multiple articles and books exploring the failures that convict the innocent. However, there has been comparatively little attention to the other side of the coin, failed prosecutions, when the criminal justice system falls short in convicting the likely perpetrator. In this article, we take up failed prosecutions, simultaneously seeking to define its breadth and explain its relation to erroneous convictions. We explore potential hypotheses for the existence of failed prosecutions and then compare those theories to a set of failed prosecutions compiled from a moderately-sized district attorney's office. With almost no prior research on failed prosecutions, these empirical data help to put meat on the theoretical bones of the concept. In the end, we argue that failed prosecutions and erroneous convictions may be seen as different sides of the same coin of miscarriages of justice. Not only do both reflect significant errors by the criminal justice system, but the sources behind each also appear to be surprisingly similar.


An adult male greyhound was diagnosed with a thyroid carcino-sarcoma by means of histopathology and positive immuno-histochemistry staining for cytokeratin and vimentin. Surgery and radiotherapy of the area were successful in local tumour control. Adjuvant chemotherapy was recommended to treat and prevent further metastasis. The use of carboplatin, metronomic cyclophosphamide chemotherapy and toceranib failed to control the progression of distant metastasis. The survival time was seven months from the time of diagnosis. This is the eighth case of carcino-sarcoma of the thyroid documented in veterinary medicine and the first one treated with a multimodal approach based on surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. As documented in human medicine, chemotherapy appeared to be ineffective to prevent or delay the progression of the metastatic disease in this case.


Advice is a recommendation for action that includes both suggestions for behavior and ways of feeling and thinking about the problem. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon in personal and professional settings, and functions as a form of both social support and social influence. Advice often improves coping and decision-making outcomes but can also be perceived as intrusive, threaten recipient's sense of competence and autonomy, and damage relationships.
 Although advisors often have expertise that can benefit the recipient, advice recipients often discount and underutilize advice, to their disadvantage. Recipients are more likely to utilize advice from advisors they trust, who engender confidence, and who have more expertise or experience. They are also more likely to seek and use it when they have not thought of solutions independently. Recipients who are overconfident, have more expertise, or have more power than an advisor are much less likely to seek and utilize advice. When giving advice, advisors often consider different factors than they would if they were making decisions for themselves, resulting in advice that is more normative and less tailored to individual preferences.
 Advice can be delivered in a variety of ways, and this stylistic variation has consequences for recipient outcomes. For example, highly direct or blunt forms of advice underscore the advisor's implicit claim to status and often generate more negative evaluations of the advice and advisor. Advice message content also influences recipients' advice evaluation. Content that emphasizes efficacy of the action, feasibility, and limitations of the advice tends to improve evaluation and utilization of advice. This research is synthesized in advice response theory (ART), which indicates that advice outcomes are influenced by message content and style, interaction qualities, advisor characteristics, recipient traits, and features of the situation for which or in which advice is sought. Behaviors that co-occur with advice, such as argumentation, emotional support, and planning, also influence outcomes. The sequencing of advice in interaction also matters; the integrated model of advice (IMA) indicates that advice in supportive interactions is best placed after emotional support and problem analysis.
 The contexts in which advice are given influence the exchange and outcomes of advice. These include personal and professional relationships, in which relational cognitions and professional norms affect the process and outcomes of advising; groups and organizations, in which advising processes become complex due to the multiplicity of relationships, goals, and expectations; cultures, in which advice-seeking and advice-giving varies in perceived appropriateness; and digital environments, which are often valued for advice that is unobtainable elsewhere.


Abstract. A summary workshop report describing the progress made so far by the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) is presented below. The report provides recommendations concerning technical aspects related to deep drilling, and invites international participation in both the engineering and the scientific activities of the next phase of the IDDP. No issues were identified at the workshop that should rule out attempting the drilling, sampling and testing of the proposed IDDP-2 well. Although technically challenging, the consensus of the workshop was that the drilling of such a hot deep well, and producing potentially hostile fluids, is possible but requires careful contingency planning. The future well will be explored for supercritical fluid and/or superheated steam beneath the current production zone of the Reykjanes geothermal field in SW Iceland. This deep borehole will provide the first opportunity worldwide to directly investigate the root zone of a magma-hydrothermal system which is likely to be similar to those beneath the black smokers on the world-encircling mid-ocean rift systems.


Organic carbon (OC) is a major component of atmospheric particulate matter (PM). Typically OC concentrations are measured using thermal methods such as thermal-optical reflectance (TOR) from samples collected on quartz filters. However, TOR measurements are destructive and expensive. We estimate TOR OC concentrations using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra of ambient samples collected on Teflon filter. We have developed a sparse statistical calibration model (ElnetPLS), which excludes unnecessary wavenumbers from infrared spectra during the model building process, permitting the identification and evaluation of the most relevant vibrational modes of molecules in complex aerosol mixtures associated with reported TOR OC concentrations. The sparsest ElnetPLS model has similar model performances of the full (2784) wavenumber models while requiring only ten wavenumbers associated with carbonyl groups.


Abstract. The knowledge of the crustal strain rate tensor provides a description of geodynamic processes such as fault strain accumulation, which is an important parameter for seismic hazard assessment, as well as anthropogenic deformation. In the past two decades, the number of observations and the accuracy of satellite based geodetic measurements like GPS greatly increased, providing measured values of displacements and velocities of points. Here we present a method to obtain the full continuous strain rate tensor from dense GPS networks. The tensorial analysis provides different aspects of deformation, such as the maximum shear strain rate, including its direction, and the dilatation strain rate. These parameters are suitable to characterize the mechanism of the current deformation. Using the velocity fields provided by SCEC and UNAVCO, we were able to localize major active faults in Southern California and to characterize them in terms of faulting mechanism. We also show that the large seismic events that occurred recently in the study region highly contaminate the measured velocity field that appears to be strongly affected by transient postseismic deformation. Finally, we applied this method to coseismic displacement data of two earthquakes in Iceland, showing that the strain fields derived by these data provide important information on the location and the focal mechanism of the ruptures.


Extracted from text ... Research Review NS 17.1 (2001) 25-47 25
GLOBALIZATION AND the
DISRUPTION OF MOTHERCARE1
Christine Oppong
INTRODUCTION
The theme of this paper, infant hunger, nutritional deprivation and its causes and consequences in the
African region, has already been the
urgent subject of many international statements and policy reviews by the
United Nations (UN) and its specialized bodies, as well as the
focus of policies and programs by many governmental and non-governmental organizations. It has also been the
topic of research by scholars from several disciplines in addition to food scientists and lactation management specialists. This essay, though short and perforce ..


In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, practitioners and theorists in law, finance, and economics are rethinking our theories about how the financial sector influences the real economy. In particular, they are reexamining the linkages among financial innovation, supply of credit and money, monetary policy, bubbles, financial stability, and economic growth. One of the key issues that is being reconsidered is the dynamics of how banks and other financial institutions drive credit creation and credit allocation, and how these factors, in turn affect the performance of the macroeconomy. In this article, I argue that, by providing an alternative to "money" (as traditionally defined), credit acts like money in stimulating the economy. When financial institutions that provide credit to the real economy borrow too much and become over-leveraged, the effect is like an uncontrolled expansion of the money supply, increasing the risk of dangerous asset bubbles and making financial markets unstable. Excessive leverage in the financial sector can set the stage for sudden and catastrophic contractions when multiple financial institutions all try to deleverage quickly and at the same time. This is because when financial institutions collectively withdraw credit from the market, this depresses aggregate economic growth, I further argue that the tendency of financial institutions to use too much leverage will not be self-correcting because leverage has helped to drive up profits and incomes over time in the financial sector. Thus, because of the substantial negative social externalities of excessive leverage, financial market regulations must be deployed to prevent financial institutions from using too much leverage.


The copulatory behavior of the monogamous Montagu's Harrier (Circus pygargus) was studied between 1992 and 1995 near Madrid, Spain. Copulations started around 20 days before laying, and typically stopped at the end of the laying period. Copulation frequency peaked just before the start of the laying period, averaging 2.2 copulations day-'. Females copulated on average 39 times per brood. Copulation rates apparently were not related to food provisioning by males except in the early pre-laying period. At least 5 and up to 11 (4-8%) of the copulations observed were extra-pair copulations (EPCs), and all occurred within the fertile period. Montagu's Harriers increased their copulation rate in situations of increased EPC risk: solitary pairs copulated for a shorter period of time and at an overall lower frequency, whereas pairs nesting in clumps showed higher copulation rates with increasing number of neighboring pairs. This increase was most marked during the laying period, when there is a higher risk of EPCs producing extra-pair fertilizations.


We report on homosexual men's uptake of voluntary HIV testing. A sample of 677 men was recruited from four different areas of England, which included 30% obtained via clinics. The criterion for inclusion was 'any man who had had sex with another man in the previous 5 years'. Men were interviewed about their sexual behaviour, history of sexually transmitted diseases, reasons for seeking or not seeking an HIV test, experience of HIV tests and attitudes to the test. They were also asked to provide a sample of their saliva for anonymous screening for antibodies to HIV-1. The majority of men (63%) reported serological testing. Those who reported a history of sexually transmitted diseases, higher numbers of unprotected penetrative partners or unprotected anal sex in the last 5 years were significantly more likely to have had a test. Attitudes towards voluntary testing were largely favourable with 64% citing the availability of early treatment for HIV infection as a good reason for being tested. The findings suggest that those most at risk of infection are also those most likely to seek a test and that national voluntary testing data for homosexual men therefore overestimate HIV prevalence for homosexually active men as a whole.


This paper introduces the concepts of asking point and expected answer type as variations of the question focus. They are of particular importance for QA over semistructured data, as represented by Topic Maps, OWL or custom XML formats. We describe an approach to the identification of the question focus from questions asked to a Question Answering system over Topic Maps by extracting the asking point and falling back to the expected answer type when necessary. We use known machine learning techniques for expected answer type extraction and we implement a novel approach to the asking point extraction. We also provide a mathematical model to predict the performance of the system.


This is a study of the epistemological implications of Mulla Sadra's philosophy. It has four major parts, as follows: Part I: Mulla Sadra's life and works. Part II: A brief account of his Sufism, with reference to his mystical teachings and his attitude toward Sufism and the Sufis. An attempt has been made to delineate his Sufi perspective and to spotlight some of his mystical ideas and assumptions which have epistemological significance. Part III: A study of Mulla Sadra's major philosophical doctrines. His ontological doctrines, such as the doctrines of the primordiality, the Unity, and the gradation of existence as well as his account of the unequivocality of existence and mental existence have been examined critically. His doctrine of substantial motion has been studied and some of its major implications have been considered. His psychological ideas which explain Mulla Sadra's view of man's nature, his doctrine of the unity of the intelligent and the intelligible, which is Sadra's analysis of the human mind, and also his eschatological doctrine of bodily resurrection have been studied. Part IV: presents an epistemological account of Mulla Sadra, with reference to his philosophical and mystical ideas. His definition of knowledge has been critically examined, and the criteria of truth and falsehood which are either implicitly or explicitly advocated by Mulla Sadra are specified and examined. At the end a conclusion has been provided which puts the general structure of Mulla Sadra's system in perspective and presents an overall epistemological evaluation of it.


The past decade has seen the rapid growth of Islamic finance on both international and domestic levels. Accompanying that growth is a rise in the number of disputes that implicate Islamic law. This remains true even when the primary law of the contract is that of a common law or civil law country. If judges and lawmakers do not understand the reasoning of Islamic finance professionals in incorporating Shariah law, the result could be precedents and codes that hamper the growth of a multi-trillion dollar industry. This note compares the reasoning of the English court in Shamil Bank v. Beximco Pharmaceuticals to the practice of forums specializing in Islamic finance dispute resolution. The note then addresses other perceived difficulties in applying Islamic law in common law and civil law courts. The practice of Islamic finance alternative dispute resolution (ADR) forums shows a consistent reliance on the use of national laws coupled with Shariah. Also, there are cases showing that U.S. courts and European arbitrators are willing to use Islamic law. Research indicates that the decision in Shamil Bank v. Beximco Pharmaceuticals was not consistent with the intentions of the parties or the commercial goals of Islamic finance. Finally, this note concludes that it is not unreasonable for a Western court to judge a case if the dispute arises out of an Islamic finance agreement.


This dissertation examines the impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation in German-speaking preschoolers. A puzzle in the area of language acquisition concerns the production-comprehension asymmetry for non-canonical sentences like "Den Affen fangt die Kuh." ("The monkey, the cow chases."), that is, preschoolers usually have difficulties in accurately understanding non-canonical sentences approximately until age six (e.g., Dittmar et al., 2008) although they produce non-canonical sentences already around age three (e.g., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). This dissertation investigated the production and comprehension of non-canonical sentences to address this issue.
Three corpus analyses were conducted to investigate the impact of givenness, topic status and the type of referring expression on word order in the spontaneous speech of two- to four-year-olds and the child-directed speech produced by their mothers. The positioning of the direct object in ditransitive sentences was examined; in particular, sentences in which the direct object occurred before or after the indirect object in the sentence-medial positions and sentences in which it occurred in the sentence-initial position. The results reveal similar ordering patterns for children and adults. Word order variation was to a large extent predictable from the type of referring expression, especially with respect to the word order involving the sentence-medial positions. Information structure (e.g., topic status) had an additional impact only on word order variation that involved the sentence-initial position.
Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether the type of referring expression and topic status influences the comprehension of non-canonical transitive sentences in four- and five-year-olds. In the first experiment, the topic status of the one of the sentential arguments was established via a preceding context sentence, and in the second experiment, the type of referring expression for the sentential arguments was additionally manipulated by using either a full lexical noun phrase (NP) or a personal pronoun. The results demonstrate that children's comprehension of non-canonical sentences improved when the topic argument was realized as a personal pronoun and this improvement was independent of the grammatical role of the arguments. However, children's comprehension was not improved when the topic argument was realized as a lexical NP.
In sum, the results of both production and comprehension studies support the view that referring expressions may be seen as a sentence-level cue to word order and to the information status of the sentential arguments. The results highlight the important role of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation and indicate that the production-comprehension asymmetry is reduced when the type of referring expression is considered.


The Data Mining OPtimization Ontology (DMOP) has been developed to support informed decision-making at various choice points of the data mining process. The ontology can be used by data miners and deployed in ontology-driven information systems. The primary purpose for which DMOP has been developed is the automation of algorithm and model selection through semantic meta-mining that makes use of an ontology-based meta-analysis of complete data mining processes in view of extracting patterns associated with mining performance. To this end, DMOP contains detailed descriptions of data mining tasks (e.g., learning, feature selection), data, algorithms, hypotheses such as mined models or patterns, and workflows. A development methodology was used for DMOP, including items such as competency questions and foundational ontology reuse. Several non-trivial modeling problems were encountered and due to the complexity of the data mining details, the ontology requires the use of the OWL 2 DL profile. DMOP was successfully evaluated for semantic meta-mining and used in constructing the Intelligent Discovery Assistant, deployed at the [...] KEET, C. Maria, et al. The Data Mining OPtimization Ontology. Journal of Web Semantics, 2015, vol. 32, p. 43-53 DOI : 10.1016/j.websem.2015.01.001


Firms' survival and internationalization are key elements to assess a country's competitiveness. In this paper, we draw on these two strands of literature and study how firms' characteristics affect demographic dynamics. We focus on foreign direct investors' survival probability, modelling it conditional on both parent company and affiliates' set of characteristics. The novelty of our approach is twofold: on the one hand, we generalize the base model used in business demography disentangling the effect of affiliates and parents. On the other hand, we stress the technological level relationships between affiliates and their investors. For the empirical assessment, we use an original longitudinal database (2004 - 2012) for Italy. We show that, larger affiliates of large investors compete better and survive more. Being part of networks of affiliates in the same country and/or sector also decrease the risk of exiting markets. When the investors have a higher (lower) technological level, their affiliates' failure probability increases (decreases). When the investor is more advanced than its affiliates, it considers the investment abroad like a cost-saving, low skills investment. The investor will easily disinvest, moving to a more convenient economic context. Affiliates with a higher level of technology, instead, are considered strategic to the parent company, due to skills, talent or competencies.


The current saturation associated with the acoustoelectric effect has been investigated in photoconducting crystals of cadmium sulphide. Under normal band gap irradiation the current-voltage characteristic measured under pulsed conditions shows a departure from Ohm's law at a critical field, E(_c), of the order of l0(^3)v cm(^-1). The current saturation is associated with the internal generation of acoustic flux which occurs when the electron drift velocity, v(_d), exceeds the velocity of sound, v(_s), in the crystal. In consequence the critical field for saturation is determined by the drift mobility µ(_d) = v(_s) /E(_c). The work described in this thesis concerns the measurement of the drift mobility and its relationship to the experimentally determined Hall mobility, fd^, as a function of conductivity and temperature. In uniform samples the critical field at room temperature was independent of conductivity over the range 10(^-4) to 10(^-2) ohm(^-1)cm(^-1). The corresponding values of µ(_d)were all about 300 cm(^2)v(^-1)sec(^-1) in most of the samples studied and agreed well with the measured values of the Hall mobility. With non-uniform samples, however, the critical field varied strongly with the intensity of incident illumination. Under saturated conditions potential probe measurements on uniform samples revealed the presence of a stationary high field domain near the positive electrode.


Although a number of studies have examined the role of gastric emptying (GE) in obesity, the influences of habitual physical activity level, body composition and energy expenditure (EE) on GE have received very little consideration. In the present study, we compared GE in active and inactive males, and characterised relationships with body composition (fat mass and fat-free mass) and EE. A total of forty-four males (active n 22, inactive n 22; BMI 21–36 kg/m2; percentage of fat mass 9–42 %) were studied, with GE of a standardised (1676 kJ) pancake meal being assessed by the [13C]octanoic acid breath test, body composition by air displacement plethysmography, RMR by indirect calorimetry, and activity EE (AEE) by accelerometry. The results showed that GE was faster in active compared with inactive males (mean half-time (t 1/2): active 157 (sd 18) and inactive 179 (sd 21) min, P< 0·001). When data from both groups were pooled, GE t 1/2 was associated with percentage of fat mass (r 0·39, P< 0·01) and AEE (r − 0·46, P< 0·01). After controlling for habitual physical activity status, the association between AEE and GE remained, but not that for percentage of fat mass and GE. BMI and RMR were not associated with GE. In summary, faster GE is considered to be a marker of a habitually active lifestyle in males, and is associated with a higher AEE level and a lower percentage of fat mass. The possibility that GE contributes to a gross physiological regulation (or dysregulation) of food intake with physical activity level deserves further investigation.


The widespread existence of unhealed wounds, ulcers, and burns has a great impact on public health and economy. Many interventions, including new medications and technologies, are being used to help achieve significant wound healing and to eliminate infections. Therefore, to find an intervention that has both therapeutic effect on the healing process and the ability to kill microbes is of great value. Honey is a natural product that has been recently introduced in modern medical practice. Honey's antibacterial properties and its effects on wound healing have been thoroughly investigated. Laboratory studies and clinical trials have shown that honey is an effective broad-spectrum antibacterial agent. This paper reviews data that support the effectiveness of natural honey in wound healing and its ability to sterilize infected wounds. Studies on the therapeutic effects of honey collected in different geographical areas on skin wounds, skin and gastric ulcers, and burns are reviewed and mechanisms of action are discussed. (Ulcers and burns are included as an example of challenging wounds.) The data show that the wound healing properties of honey include stimulation of tissue growth, enhanced epithelialization, and minimized scar formation. These effects are ascribed to honey's acidity, hydrogen peroxide content, osmotic effect, nutritional and antioxidant contents, stimulation of immunity, and to unidentified compounds. Prostaglandins and nitric oxide play a major role in inflammation, microbial killing, and the healing process. Honey was found to lower prostaglandin levels and elevate nitric oxide end products. These properties might help to explain some biological and therapeutic properties of honey, particularly as an antibacterial agent or wound healer. The data presented here demonstrate that honeys from different geographical areas have considerable therapeutic effects on chronic wounds, ulcers, and burns. The results encourage the use of honey in clinical practice as a natural and safe wound healer.


We consider a budgeted learning setting, where the learner can only choose and observe a small subset of the attributes of each training example. We develop efficient algorithms for Ridge and Lasso linear regression, which utilize the geometry of the data by a novel distribution-dependent sampling scheme, and have excess risk bounds which are better a factor of up to O(√d/k) over the state-of-the-art, where d is the dimension and k + 1 is the number of observed attributes per example. Moreover, under reasonable assumptions, our algorithms are the first in our setting which can provably use less attributes than full-information algorithms, which is the main concern in budgeted learning. We complement our theoretical analysis with experiments which support our claims.


The need for effective and efficient evaluation schemes of security assurance is growing in many organizations, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Although there are several approaches and standards for evaluating application security assurance, they are qualitative in nature and depend to a great extent on manually processing. This paper presents a quantitative evaluation approach for defining security assurance metrics using two perspectives, vulnerabilities and security requirements. While vulnerability represents the negative aspect that leads to a reduction of the assurance level, security requirement improves the assurance posture. The approach employs both Goal Question Metric (GQM) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) methods. GQM is used to construct measurement items for different types of assurance metrics and assess the fulfillment of security requirements or the absence of vulnerabilities, and CVSS is utilized to quantify the severity of vulnerabilities according to various attributes. Furthermore, a case study is provided in this work, which measures and evaluates the security assurance of a discussion forum application using our approach. This can assist SMEs to evaluate the overall security assurance of their systems, and result in a measure of confidence that indicates how well a system meets its security requirements. Keywords–Quantitative security assurance metrics; Security testing; Goal question metric (GQM); Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS); Security metrics.


Abstract. A large number of calculations of the absorptive partitioning of organic compounds have been made using a number of methods to predict the component vapour pressures, p0, and activity coefficients, γi, required in the calculations. The sensitivities of the predictions in terms of the condensed component masses, volatility, O:C ratio, molar mass and functionality distributions to the choice of p0 and γi models and to the number of components to represent the organic mixture have been systematically compared. The condensed component mass was found to be highly sensitive to the vapour pressure model, and less sensitive to both the activity coefficient model and the number of components used to represent the mixture although the sensitivity to the change in property estimation method increased substantially with increased simplification in the treatment of the organic mixture. This was a general finding and was also clearly evident in terms of the predicted component functionality, O:C ratio, molar mass and volatility distributions of the condensed organic components. Within the limitations of the study, this clearly demonstrates the requirement for more accurate representation of the p0 and γi of the semi-volatile organic proxy components used in simplified models as the degree of simplification increases. This presents an interesting paradox, since such reduction in complexity necessarily leads to divergence from the complex behaviour of real multicomponent atmospheric aerosol.


To make sound economic decisions, the brain needs to compute several different value-related signals. These include goal values that measure the predicted reward that results from the outcome generated by each of the actions under consideration, decision values that measure the net value of taking the different actions, and prediction errors that measure deviations from individuals' previous reward expectations. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a novel decision-making paradigm to dissociate the neural basis of these three computations. Our results show that they are supported by different neural substrates: goal values are correlated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, decision values are correlated with activity in the central orbitofrontal cortex, and prediction errors are correlated with activity in the ventral striatum.


The ability for autonomous agents to learn and conform to human norms is crucial for their safety and effectiveness in social environments. While recent work has led to frameworks for the representation and inference of simple social rules, research into norm learning remains at an exploratory stage. Here, we present a robotic system capable of representing, learning, and inferring ownership relations and norms. Ownership is represented as a graph of probabilistic relations between objects and their owners, along with a database of predicate-based norms that constrain the actions permissible on owned objects. To learn these norms and relations, our system integrates (i) a novel incremental norm learning algorithm capable of both one-shot learning and induction from specific examples, (ii) Bayesian inference of ownership relations in response to apparent rule violations, and (iii) perceptbased prediction of an object's likely owners. Through a series of simulated and real-world experiments, we demonstrate the competence and flexibility of the system in performing object manipulation tasks that require a variety of norms to be followed, laying the groundwork for future research into the acquisition and application of social norms.


The Emotional Literacy Support Assistant (ELSA) programme was developed in 2001 with the aim to increase schools' capacity to support children and young people (CYP) with social emotional mental health (SEMH) difficulties. The majority of the current research includes staff's views (Bravery & Harris, 2009; Burton, Traill, & Norgate, 2009; Cardiff Educational Psychology Service, 2012; Dodds & Brake, 2015; Dorset Targeted Mental Health Schools, 2010; Litten, 2012; Russell, 2011) and has major methodological limitations (Burton et al., 2010; Butcher et al., 2013; Hardman, 2011; Mann & Russell, 2011) which raise questions around the reliability and validity of their findings.

Very little of the current research has been conducted from CYP's perspectives. Therefore, this study attempts to cover this gap. The purpose of this study is to understand the CYP's perspectives of the intervention following their participation in the programme. The aim of the research is to explore how and why the ELSA intervention may lead to change. In other words, the proposed research attempts to explain what works for children, in what context, with what outcomes. 8 children (key stage two) were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. Strauss and Corbin's 1998 Critical Realist Grounded Theory (GT) was applied to analyse the data.

The emerging theory summarises 4 overarching themes including 1) the structure of the ELSA, 2) child-centred sessions 3) the impact of the ELSA on CYP's learning, and SEMH and 4) rationale why ELSA intervention helps. CYP identified activities that they found most helpful, gave views on how the ELSA could have been different and how and why the ELSA intervention led to positive changes for them. These findings informed the development of the suggested theory namely "The Uniqueness of the ELSA approach makes the difference in children's lives".

Professional implications of these findings and future research, in light of methodological limitations, are discussed.


Introduction "If our teaching is to be an art, we need to know we can draw from all we know and believe and see in order to create something beautiful." (Lucy Calkins, 2001, p. 6) Universal design for learning is a teaching and learning approach that helps to ensure that high quality literacy and learning experiences are multi-dimensional, multi-sensory, satisfying, meaningful, and exciting for every child. Universal Design began as an architectural concept that involved planning the environment for optimal accessibility and productivity. Recently, it has become extended and infused into learner-centered classrooms, involving the carefully planned arrangements and applications of space, materials, curriculum, technology, and personnel. "Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design" (Mace, 1996). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) encourages the "design of instructional materials and activities that allows learning goals to be attainable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities to see, hear, speak, move, read, write, understand English, attend, organize, engage, and remember without having to adapt the curriculum repeatedly to meet special needs (Orkwis, 1999). Universal Design for Learning involves the integration of initiatives. "The concept of UDL is the intersection where all of our initiatives--integrated units, multi-sensory teaching, multiple intelligences, differentiated instruction, use of computers in schools, performance-based assessment, and others--come together" (Palley, 2001). Therefore, UDL is a method of teaching and learning that encompasses a wide variety of content areas while it is also simultaneously customized to meet the needs of all individuals. Founded in 1984 as the Center for Applied Special Technology CAST developed Universal Design for Learning as a means of expanding learning opportunities for all students. CAST is a nonprofit research and development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals, especially those with disabilities, through Universal Design for Learning. Its staff includes specialists in education research and policy, neuropsychology, clinical/school psychology, technology, engineering, curriculum development, K-12 professional development, and more. The four Core Principles of CAST (1) are: * Multiple Means of Representation (enlisting the knowledge network) * Multiple Means of Expression (enlisting the brain's affective network) * Multiple Means of Engagement (enlisting the brain's strategic network) * Multiple Means of Assessment (enlisting the brain's knowledge, affective, and strategic networks) Using the four principles of UDL, above, teachers of reading and language arts can conveniently and effectively integrate sensory-rich learning opportunities into their daily literacy teaching that enable young learners to make text connections and thereby increase their vocabulary and text comprehension. Comprehension, the ultimate goal of all reading, is facilitated by the application of Cognitive Principles (Bransford et al, 2005) Multiple Intelligence Theory (Gardner, 1983), and Universal Design for Learning (Orkwis, 1998). According to cognitive learning theory, implicit learning plays an important role in language development and reading comprehension, beginning very early in life (Bransford et al, 2005). Implicit learning involves indirect, automatic processes that frequently lie beyond the conscious awareness of those who process the information. Patterns and strategies learned early, such as text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world reading connections, are quite literally learned for life because, with practice and experience, they are processed automatically and with high efficiency. …


In the last two decades, people in a growing number of localities in the United States have developed grassroots ecosystem management (GREM) as a means to resolve policy problems affecting their environment, economy, and communities. Ad hoc and voluntary groups of environmentalists, developers, businesspeople, federal and state resource managers, farmers, loggers, local citizens, and those representing recreation interests use deliberation and consensus to enhance public policy performance. Instead of focusing on specific issues such as air pollution, GREM emphasizes the integrated management of entire watersheds and ecosystems. But what happens to democratic accountability in these collaborative efforts? Despite concerns that they might result in special interest government, the acceleration of environmental degradation, and an end-run around national environmental protection laws, this book suggests otherwise.Bringing Society Back In establishes a theoretical framework for exploring issues of policy performance and democratic accountability raised by GREM. Through three case studies--the Applegate Partnership in Oregon, the Henry's Fork Watershed Council in Idaho, and the Willapa Alliance in Washington state--it explores the mechanisms used to determine how accountability works. The book finds that by combining traditional and formal governance structures with informal institutions, GREM can be accountable to individuals, communities, surrounding regions, and the nation. The book also identifies conditions under which GREM is most likely to achieve democratic accountability. In addition, it investigates the connection between accountability and policy performance. The evidence suggests that GREM can produce environmental policy outcomes that are supportive not only of the environment and economy, but also of environmental sustainability.


We present the results of searches for point-like sources of neutrinos based on the first combined analysis of data from both the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes. The combination of both detectors, which differ in size and location, forms a window in the southern sky where the sensitivity to point sources improves by up to a factor of 2 compared with individual analyses. Using data recorded by ANTARES from 2007 to 2012, and by IceCube from 2008 to 2011, we search for sources of neutrino emission both across the southern sky and from a preselected list of candidate objects. No significant excess over background has been found in these searches, and flux upper limits for the candidate sources are presented for E−2.5 and E−2 power-law spectra with different energy cut-offs.


Examination of 10 K/T boundary sections in northeastern and east-central Mexico, and new data presented from 7 sections, permit the following conclusions. (1) The globally recognized K/T boundary and mass extinction in planktic foraminifera is stratigraphically above, and separated by a thin marl layer of Maastrichtian age, from the siliciclastic deposit that is commonly interpreted as a short-term (hours to days) K/T-impact–generated tsunami deposit. A similar relationship between the K/T boundary and siliciclastic or breccia deposits is observed at Brazos River in Texas, Beloc in Haiti, and Poty Quarry in Brazil. (2) Stratigraphic control indicates that deposition of the siliciclastic member occurred sometime during the last 150 k.y. of the Maastrichtian, and ended at least several thousand years prior to the K/T boundary. (3) At least four discrete horizons of bioturbation have been observed within the siliciclastic deposit that indicate episodic colonization by invertebrates over an extended time period. (4) The glass- and spherule-rich unit, which has been linked to the Haiti spherule layer and the Chicxulub structure, is at the base of the siliciclastic deposit and thus significantly predates the K/T boundary event.

The stratigraphic separation of the K/T boundary and siliciclastic deposits and the evidence of long-term deposition between them, suggests the presence of two events: (1) a globally recognized K/T boundary (impact) event marked by Ir anomaly and the mass extinction, and (2) a Caribbean event (impact or volcanic and probably linked to the Chicxulub structure) that predates the K/T boundary and is marked by glass and siliciclastic or breccia deposits.


Introduction: Obesity is one of the major risk factors for many diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Although a few studies have been shown the pharmacological properties of Peganum harmala, there is no data on the anti-obesity effect of this plant. This study was designed to investigate the effect of the hydroalcoholic extract of Peganum harmala seed on the weight and blood biochemical parameters in male wistar rats. Materials and Methods: Fifty male Wistar rats were categorized into 5 groups: Negative control group (standard diet); positive control group (high-fat diet with 4 of fat); treatment groups (high-fat diet + hydroalcoholic extract of Peganum harmala at 200 and 400 mg/kg/day and high-fat diet + Orlistat at 200 mg/kg/day). Extracts and orlistat were administrated by gavage for 8 weeks, and levels of serum glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL) and liver enzymes were measured by routine laboratory kits. Results: Our findings demonstrate that this extract reduced weight in the group that received high-fat diet, at both doses (P<0.05). This extract also significantly decreased the levels of serum glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol and increased HDL in the group that received high-fat diet (P<0.05); however it had no effect on reduction of liver enzymes. Conclusion: Our data suggest that the hydroalcoholic extract of Peganum harmala has beneficial effects on controlling body weight in animals fed with a high-fat diet and it also significantly improves biochemical parameters in animals fed with a high-fat diet. © 2015, Endocrine Research Center. All rights reserved.


The National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA"), the Magna Carta of environmental law, requires all federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impacts of their actions, a duty that extends to state, local, and private entities when a federal link is present. Though followed by legislation that enacted massive duties to protect air, water, and other natural resources, NEPA remains a critical environmental law. This article looks at major elements in NEPA's implementation and the major contributions NEPA has made to environmental analysis. It reviews strengths and weaknesses and suggests where improvement can occur as NEPA moves forward as a protector of environmental values. The article's focus is on encouraging agencies to take a wider view of the environmental impacts they consider in a decision making process that is less confining than the process now in place. Part I begins the analysis by reviewing NEPA's record as an environmental statute, noting achievements the statute has attained and criticisms it has attracted. Part II reviews the NEPA decision making process, assessing whether it has been effective as a means of carrying out NEPA's environmental mandate. Part III considers how NEPA applies to agency projects as compared with agency plans and programs, and how NEPA's effectiveness differs in these two settings. Part IV considers the "heart" of the environmental impact statement, the duty to consider alternatives to a proposed action, and how the courts have interpreted this requirement. Part V examines agency duties to extend their environmental analysis beyond the proposal under review by considering its indirect impacts. Part VI concludes by asking, in view of this discussion, whether NEPA has met the environmental challenge the statute was intended to meet.


The main claim of this chapter is that metaphors ought to be taken seriously byresearchers and policymakers alike as a means to both understand policymakingand contest an existing dialogue around a particular issue. In order to supporta richer appreciation regarding the multifaceted roles metaphors can anddo play in the policy world, this discussion investigates the metaphors withinthe specialist discourse genre of policy press releases in relation to a real worldinitiative within the province of Alberta, Canada: the Alberta SuperNet. In total,24 documents are examined using the following questions: (1) what metaphorsare present, and (2) how are metaphors used to advance certain images of technology,citizens, government and industry?


Modeling transport-the phenomenon of people or goods moving in vehicles in space and time and being constrained in that movement by transport networks-is inherently related to geospatial data (Miller and Shaw 2001, 2015). People, goods, and vehicles are located somewhere at any time, in relation to each other as well as in relation to various mode-specific transport networks; they are coming from some location and heading to another location within some time constraints. The movements of people and goodscollectively defining the transport demand-can be solitary or shared, but are neither independent of each other, nor independent of the vehicles, which are defining the transport supply. In addition to the factors of space and time, economic, social, and individual factors also determine choice and behavior. That is why transport has long been recognized as a complex system and, as such, hard to model.


Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease, and one of the culprits may be infections caused by pathogens, that may be linked to development and progression of atherosclerosis by several mechanisms. Class B scavenger receptor BI (SR-BI), an HDL receptor, SR-BI is expressed in a variety of cell types, most abundantly in steroidogenic cells and in the liver. SR-BI is also expressed in macrophages has been shown to mediate the cellular uptake of certain bacteria and may therefore play an important role in innate immunity. The innate immune response and the homeostatic network controlling cellular sterol are important implications for several common diseases, including atherosclerosis. The TLR4-independent SR-BI signaling in macrophages and the implication for its role in atherosclerosis has not yet to be investigated. Our data showed that mice lacking SR-BI are highly sensitive to form atherosclerosis than wild type mice. In addition, we showed that SR-BI-/- mice attenuated proinflammatory cytokines and chemokine response to LPS. The LPS-induced cytokine expression in both WT and SR-BI-/- was dependent on NFκB signaling pathways. One possibility is that an interaction between SR-BI and the TLR4 complex might modulate TLR4 activation and subsequent intracellular signaling pathways. The interaction of HDL and SR-BI in endothelial cells inhibits the activation of NFκB and subsequent expression of the adhesion molecules vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 and intercellular adhesion molecule 1 to inflammatory stimuli. We conclude that SR-BI plays an important function in the atherosclerosis mechanism.


Distance learning, despite being a relatively new phenomenon, has been incorporated into many college and university programs, both as single courses and in complete programs. Those institutions that have not already begun to offer distance learning are quickly developing courses and programs to meet the needs and demands of their students. While each institution has its own mission and goal for distance learning, there are certain things that need to be considered while developing or implementing a curriculum that involves education at a distance. This paper will explore distance learning from a macro perspective and suggest some critical success factors that will aid faculty and institutions in distance learning development. The author will also share anecdotes from his experiences.


The yin and yang of proteasomal regulation The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway regulates myriad proteins through their selective proteolysis. The small protein ubiquitin is attached, typically in many copies, to the target protein, which is then recognized and broken down by the proteasome. Shi et al. found a repeat structure in the proteasome for recognizing ubiquitin as well as ubiquitin-like (UBL) proteins. Tandem binding sites allow the proteasome to dock multiple proteins. One of the bound UBL proteins is an enzyme that cleaves ubiquitin-protein conjugates, which antagonizes degradation. Thus, the repetition of related binding sites with distinct specificity achieves a balance of positive and negative regulation of the proteasome. Science, this issue p. 10.1126/science.aad9421 Tandem ligand-binding sites in the proteasome subunit Rpn1 modulate proteasome activity both positively and negatively. INTRODUCTION The ubiquitin-proteasome system comprises hundreds of distinct pathways of degradation, which converge at the step of ubiquitin recognition by the proteasome. Five proteasomal ubiquitin receptors have been identified, two that are intrinsic to the proteasome (Rpn10 and Rpn13) and three reversibly associated proteasomal ubiquitin receptors (Rad23, Dsk2, and Ddi1). RATIONALE We found that the five known proteasomal ubiquitin receptors of yeast are collectively nonessential for ubiquitin recognition by the proteasome. We therefore screened for additional ubiquitin receptors in the proteasome and identified subunit Rpn1 as a candidate. We used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to characterize the structure of the binding site within Rpn1, which we term the T1 site. Mutational analysis of this site showed its functional importance within the context of intact proteasomes. T1 binds both ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like (UBL) proteins, in particular the substrate-delivering shuttle factor Rad23. A second site within the Rpn1 toroid, T2, recognizes the UBL domain of deubiquitinating enzyme Ubp6, as determined by hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry analysis and validated by amino acid substitution and functional assays. The Rpn1 toroid thus serves a critical scaffolding role within the proteasome, helping to assemble multiple proteasome cofactors, as well as substrates. RESULTS Our results indicate that proteasome subunit Rpn1 can recognize both ubiquitin and UBL domains of substrate shuttling factors that themselves bind ubiquitin and function as reversibly associated proteasomal ubiquitin receptors. Recognition is mediated by the T1 site within the Rpn1 toroid, which supports proteasome function in vivo. We found that the capacity of T1 to recognize both ubiquitin and UBL shuttling proteins was shared with Rpn10 and Rpn13. The surprising multiplicity of ubiquitin-recognition domains within the proteasome may promote enhanced, multipoint binding of ubiquitin chains. The structures of the T1 site in its free state and in complex with monoubiquitin or lysine 48 (K48)–linked diubiquitin were solved, which revealed that three neighboring outer helices from the T1 toroid engage two ubiquitins. This ubiquitin-binding domain is structurally distinct from those of Rpn10 and Rpn13, despite their common ligands. Moreover, the Rpn1-binding mode leads to a preference for certain ubiquitin chain types, especially K6- and K48-linked chains, in a distinct configuration that can position substrates close to the entry port of the proteasome. The fate of proteasome-docked ubiquitin conjugates is determined by a competition between substrate degradation and deubiquitination; the latter leads to premature release of substrates. Proximal to the T1 site within the Rpn1 toroid is a second UBL-binding site, T2, that does not assist in ubiquitin chain recognition but, rather, in chain disassembly, by binding to the UBL domain of deubiquitinating enzyme Ubp6. Note that the UBL interactors at T1 and T2 are distinct and assign substrate localization to T1 and substrate deubiquitination to T2. CONCLUSION A ligand-binding hotspot was identified in the Rpn1 toroid, consisting of two adjacent receptor sites, referred to as T1 and T2. The Rpn1 toroid represents a distinct class of binding domains for ubiquitin and UBL proteins. The T1 site functions to recruit substrates directly by binding to ubiquitin itself and indirectly by binding to UBL shuttling factors, a feature shared by Rpn10 and Rpn13 despite a lack of structural similarity among these receptors. The T2 site also binds to a UBL domain protein, in this case deubiquitinating enzyme Ubp6. This study thus defines a two-site recognition domain intrinsic to the proteasome that uses distinct ubiquitin-fold ligands to assemble substrates, substrate shuttling factors, and a deubiquitinating enzyme in close proximity. A ligand-binding hotspot in the proteasome for assembling substrates and cofactors. Schematic (top) and model structure (bottom, left) mapping the UBL-binding Rpn1 T1 (indigo) and T2 (orange) sites. (Bottom, right) Enlarged region of the proteasome designed to illustrate Rpn1 T1 and T2 sites bound to a ubiquitinated (yellow) substrate (beige) and deubiquitinating enzyme Ubp6 (green), respectively. Aided by PDB 4CR2, 1WGG, 1VJV, and 2B9R. Hundreds of pathways for degradation converge at ubiquitin recognition by a proteasome. Here, we found that the five known proteasomal ubiquitin receptors in yeast are collectively nonessential for ubiquitin recognition and identified a sixth receptor, Rpn1. A site (T1) in the Rpn1 toroid recognized ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like (UBL) domains of substrate shuttling factors. T1 structures with monoubiquitin or lysine 48 diubiquitin show three neighboring outer helices engaging two ubiquitins. T1 contributes a distinct substrate-binding pathway with preference for lysine 48–linked chains. Proximal to T1 within the Rpn1 toroid is a second UBL-binding site (T2) that assists in ubiquitin chain disassembly, by binding the UBL of deubiquitinating enzyme Ubp6. Thus, a two-site recognition domain intrinsic to the proteasome uses distinct ubiquitin-fold ligands to assemble substrates, shuttling factors, and a deubiquitinating enzyme.


Optimized Link State Routing protocol, an ad-hoc routing protocol, has been popular in wireless devices running on Linux operating system for quite some time. In this project we have outlined the process of preparing Android devices for ad-hoc networking, a way to overcome limitations of the OS for continuous UDP communication, ensure all devices communicate on the same wireless Wi-Fi SSID, Cell-ID, subnet and finally implement the Optimized Links State Routing (OLSR) in Android Operating System using Google Nexus 7 devices. Using the code base from ProjectSPAN, an open source project, OLSR protocol has been ported to Android Nexus 7 devices. The core application is divided into two major sections, MANET and OLSR. Mobile Ad-hoc Network portion of the code takes care of setting up the device for ad-hoc mode communication, firewall and peripheral setup while OLSR portion of the code maintains the neighbor tables, MPRs and routing. The project also describes the process by which a device is prepared to run low level custom codes in Android operating system.

The OLSR implementation has been successfully tested with three nodes test bed, demonstrating the multi-hop ad-hoc networking capabilities of this wireless routing protocol. With the aid of the Android's graphical interface the application is able to exhibit the dynamic nature of the OLSR protocol. As nodes and neighbors in the network moves around with respect to time and relative location, OLSR protocol is able to form new neighbors and elect Multipoint Relay in real time.


We present APLUSIX, a computer system that helps students to learn algebra, available at http://aplusix.imag.fr. APLUSIX contains an advanced 2D editor of algebraic expressions that allows students to make the calculations (s)he wants, like in a paper-pencil context. The system verifies the student's calculations, by calculating the equivalence between two consecutives expressions, and shows the result to the student. It provides information concerning the progress of the resolution. Furthermore, the students can use commands like Reduce, Expand to ask the system to make some particular calculations. So APLUSIX combines features of a Microworld and of a CAS (Computer Algebra System) for education. This system has a lot of parameters allowing the teacher to choose the way it works. In particular, the teacher may active or not the verification of the equivalence between calculation steps, the progress indicators and the commands, to suit its own teaching strategy. We present also an experiment of the APLUSIX system realised in September 2002 with ten classes of 15 to 17 years old students (grade 9, 10, 11) on the following tasks: expand or factor polynomial expressions, solve equations, inequalities or systems of linear equations. We describe the influence of some parameters on the students' behaviour and statistics concerning the work of the ten classes. We have observed and analysed the resolutions of the students. The analysis was made by replaying their actions (they are recorded by the system). We present some results of this analysis. Last, we summarize an inquiry among the teachers who participated to the experiment


Indonesia's Almost 30,000 pesantren are private Islamic education institutions and acknowledged
as part of Indonesia's education system. They are particularly known for their long presence in
society delivering education to those coming from low-income families in rural areas mostly on
the island of Java.

While retaining the authority to conduct education independently, pesantren have long received
some public financing but significantly less than public schools. To a large extent, pesantren are
funded independently from their own sources. Problems to raise adequate financial support are
considered to have affected the quality of facilities and infrastructure as well as the remuneration
of pesantren teachers.

Following presidential elections, in which Javanese Muslims largely provided their support to
incumbent President Widodo, in late September 2019 the Indonesian House of Representatives
(DPR) passed the "Pesantren Law." It provides the legal base for pesantren to receive funding
from central and local governments. This public funding introduces pesantren to the regulatory
obligations of public schools. The law states that pesantren are going to be subjected to a quality
assurance system that determines standards for the curriculum, the institution, the students and
the teachers.

The Pesentran Law potentially results in the disappearance of the pesantren's distinctive features
determined by the Kyai and the demand of the community in which they operate. Instead, it is
recommended that the government provides funds only as an incentive to improve pesantren
education. The pesantren should remain largely autonomous to preserve their diversity and to
prevent that their accountability is going to be redirected from their respective communities
towards government institutions.

A checklist should set benchmarks for the government: it should impose minimum standards
for the curriculum, facilities and management while still ensuring substantial autonomy for
the pesantren. Moreover, efforts are needed in accordance with the Pesantren Law to improve
MORA's Islamic education data management and the Education Management Information System
(EMIS) to generate reliable data for future technical regulations.


Ischemic injury results in proximal tubule (PT) dysfunction and loss of surface membrane (SM) polarity. Since epithelial vectorial transport requires SM polarity, we set out to determine if correction of renal cortical PT dysfunction following ischemia was dependent on the reestablishment of SM polarity. Acute renal failure was induced using a bilateral 50-min pedicle clamp. Serum creatinine and fractional sodium excretion were maximal on day 1, remained elevated on day 3, and returned toward base line by day 8. PT cellular ultrastructure was normal by day 3. Despite rapid morphological recovery, ischemia resulted in a prolonged defect in glucose reabsorption. The delayed recovery of normal glucose handling closely paralleled the slow normalization of apical membrane lipid polarity. Na+-K+-ATPase polarity was also lost secondary to ischemia as demonstrated cytochemically and biochemically by the redistribution of Na+-K+-ATPase to the apical membrane. The time required to reestablish normal Na+-K+-ATPase polarity (8 days) paralleled the recovery of normal PT Na+ reabsorption (8 days), as assessed by fractional lithium clearances. This finding supports the hypothesis that apical Na+-K+-ATPase is in part responsible for reduced Na+ reabsorption following ischemic injury. In summary, these data suggest that functional recovery of PT glucose and Na+ reabsorption following a reversible ischemic insult requires not only morphological recovery, but also the reestablishment of surface membrane lipid and protein polarity.


Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters-Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino-author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt. The aspirations of these individuals demonstrate the unifying role that the American motion picture capital played in shaping cultural notions of reputation, success, glamour, and visibility. Through extensive and unprecedented primary research and illuminating analyses of films, texts, and personal writings, each chapter provides new insight into its subject's dealings in the mythic city. Hollywood Ambitions affords a unique understanding of the tremendous diversity of the Hollywood experience and its allure in the first half of the cinematic century.