Information on net primary production in tropical forests is needed for the development of realistic global carbon budgets, for projecting how these ecosystems will be affected by climatic and atmospheric changes, and for evaluating eddy covariance measurements of tropical forest carbon flux. However, a review of the database commonly used to address these issues shows that it has serious flaws. In this paper we synthesize the data in the primary literature on NPP in old-growth tropical forests to produce a consistent data set on NPP for these forests. Studies in this biome have addressed only a few NPP components, all aboveground. Given the limited scope of the direct field measurements, we sought relationships in the existing data that allow estimation of unmeasured aspects of production from those that are more easily assessed. We found a predictive relationship between annual litterfall and aboveground biomass increment. For 39 diverse tropical forest sites, we then developed consistent, documented estimates of the upper and lower bounds around total NPP to serve as benchmarks for calibrating and validating biogeochemical models with respect to this biome. We developed these estimates based on existing field measurements, current understanding of aboveground consumption and biogenic volatile organic carbon emissions, and our judgment that belowground production is bounded by the range 0.2–1.2 3 ANPP (aboveground NPP). Across this broad spectrum of tropical forests (dry to wet, lowland to montane, nutrient-rich to nutrient-poor soils), our estimates of lower and upper bounds on total NPP range from 1.7 to 11.8 Mg C·ha21·yr21 (lower bounds) and from 3.1 to 21.7 Mg C·ha21·yr21 (upper bounds). We also showed that two relationships that have been used for estimating NPP (the Bray-Gorham relationship based on leaf litterfall and the Miami model based on temperature or precipitation) are not valid for the tropical forest biome.


Objective To compare mitral valve area (MVA) measurements obtained by 2D transthoracic planimetry and 3D transoesophageal echocardiography (TOE) in patients with mitral stenosis (MS), and to determine the causes of discrepancies between the two techniques. Design Reliability and agreement study. Setting Tertiary referral centre. Patients Eighty-seven patients with MS. Methods MVA was determined by transthoracic 2D planimetry and 3D TOE. Clinical and echocardiographic variables were evaluated. The angle (Mα) between the lines of the true mitral valve (MV) tip and the echo beam-to-MV tip was measured at early diastole from the parasternal long-axis view obtained from 2D echocardiography. Results Although MVA measurements using 2D planimetry and 3D TOE showed good agreement (intraclass correlation coefficient, 0.853; p<0.001), 2D planimetry overestimated MVA by 0.19±0.2 cm2 compared with 3D TOE (p<0.001). Left atrial (LA) dimension obtained from the parasternal long-axis view at end-systole (p=0.012), Mα (p<0.001), and left ventricular ejection fraction (p=0.022) were independent determinants of the MVA difference (MVA by 2D—MVA by 3D TOE; MVA2D–3D) according to multiple linear regression analysis. The LA dimensions correlated with Mα (r=0.352, p=0.001). The best cut-off values for predicting significant overestimation by 2D planimetry (MVA2D–3D>0.2 cm2) were LA dimension ≥49 mm (78% sensitivity, 72% specificity) and Mα≥9.5° (56% sensitivity, 89% specificity). Conclusions Because 2D planimetry tends to overestimate MVA, 3D TOE should be considered for accurate MVA assessment, especially in patients with a large LA and large Mα.


Recently, generalizations of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states known as fractional quantum anomalous Hall or, equivalently, fractional Chern insulators states, have been realized in lattice models. Ideal wave functions such as the Laughlin wave function, as well as their corresponding trial Hamiltonians, have been vital to characterizing FQH phases. The Wannier function representation of fractional Chern insulators recently proposed [X.-L. Qi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 126803 (2011)] defines an approach to generalize these concepts to fractional Chern insulators. In this paper, we apply the Wannier function representation to develop a systematic pseudopotential formalism for fractional Chern insulators. The family of pseudopotential Hamiltonians is defined as the set of projectors onto asymptotic relative angular momentum components which forms an orthogonal basis of two-body Hamiltonians with magnetic translation symmetry. This approach serves both as an expansion tool for interactions and as a definition of positive-semidefinite Hamiltonians for which the ideal fractional Chern insulator wave functions are exact null-space modes. We compare the short-range two-body pseudopotential expansion of various fractional Chern insulator models at filling mu = 1/3 in phase regimes where a Laughlin-type ground state is expected to be realized. We also discuss the effect of inhomogeneous Berry curvature which leads to components of the Hamiltonian that can not be expanded into pseudopotentials, and elaborate on their role in determining low-energy theories for fractional Chern insulators. Finally, we generalize our Chern pseudopotential approach to interactions involving more than two bodies with the goal of facilitating the identification of non-Abelian fractional Chern insulators.


Problem Statement : Aggression seems to be an extensive and serious problem among adolescents and emerging adults, negatively affecting both the victims and the offenders. In adolescence and emerging adulthood, a lot of factors affect aggression. In this study, five factors were examined: gender, life periods, identity formation, low self-control and self-esteem.  Purpose of the Study : The aim of the study is to examine the relations between identity dimensions, low self-control, self-esteem, gender and life period (adolescence and emerging adulthood) with aggression. Method : For this purpose, a structural equation model was developed and tested. In this model, the dependent variable was aggression and the independent variables were demographic variables (gender and life period), identity dimensions, self-esteem and low self-control. Participants consisted of 240 adolescents (high school students—132 female and 108 male) and 244 emerging adults (university students—128 female and 116 male) and their age was between 15-24 years old (mean age=18.99, SD=2.62). The Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, The Dimensions of Identity Development Scale , The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and The Low Self-Control Scale were used to collect data. Findings : Results of the overall fit indexes of the structural equation model revealed that fit indexes are at acceptable levels. Results of this study showed that life period, exploration in depth, ruminative exploration, self-esteem and low self-control significantly predicted aggression. According to model analysis, the best predictor of aggression was low self-control; the weakest predictor of aggression was life period. Conclusion and Recommendations : The present study provides important results. The first result is that aggression level changes according to life period. The second is that low self-control, self-esteem and some identity dimensions are crucial factors for aggression in adolescence and emerging adulthood. The results of the study provide several important explanations for counselors and educators. In order to reduce aggression, counselors, educators and mental health practitioners should consider identity, self-esteem and self-control. When counselors and educators prepare school-based intervention programs, they should consider the important predictors of aggression. Keywords : Problem behavior, adolescent, emerging adulthood


RNA interference (RNAi) is a potent method using only a few double stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecule per cell to silence the expression which has made it one of the hottest topics in molecular biology in last two years. Not long ago scientists conducted gene knock out using antisense, dominant negative or knockout techniques which were ineffective, but the discovery of RNAi has enabled to knock out gene in any organism efficiently. RNA silencing was first discovered in transgenic plants, where it was termed co-suppression or post transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS). Five years ago the evidence for RNA silencing emerged from experimental observation on Caenorhabditis elegans , this new approach for achieving efficient, targeted gene silencing is now making its way beyond laboratory notebooks into biotech strategic plans. It's a phenomenon of gene silencing which offers a quick and easy way to determine the function of a gene. It's a natural catalytic process and an intrinsic property of every cell of every multicellular organism. Reported to be 1,000-fold more effective than antisense. The new field of RNAi based genomics is increasingly being qualified as a fundamental paradigm shift for biomedical research and development and quite possibly the start of a veritable revolution for the development of modern therapeutics.


In 1934, DuVal [3] listed the configurations of curves which can be obtained by resolving certain isolated double points of embedded surfaces (they are depicted in the figure below). These configurations arise naturally in other contexts, for instance as exceptional curves for pluricanonical embeddings of surfaces [7], and so it seems desirable to have a converse result, showing that a singularity giving rise to such a configuration is necessarily a double point. We have reconsidered the question in a more general context, and obtain in addition the correct nunferical characterization of "rational" singularities (cf. definition below). This characterization is made without the assumption that the surface is embedded and points out the connection of Du Val's work with Castelnuovo's criterion for exceptional curves [2], ([8], p. 38). Finally, we list the configurations obtained from rational triple points.


This article describes an exploratory study of Facebook non-users living in rural Zambia. Drawing on evidence from 37 group interviews with mobile phone owners, we discovered that the majority of our participants were aware of, or 'imagined' Facebook, despite never having seen or used the site. Our analysis of how participants perceive Facebook suggests that they are interested in the communication and income-generating possibilities access to the site may provide, but that barriers prevent them from acting on these interests. This study contributes to social media research by making visible the experiences of a population whose non-use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) results from economic, infrastructural, and linguistic sources, as well as from other, hitherto less-explored areas. We discuss the practical significance of these findings, offer future research suggestions, and comment on what our respondents have not yet imagined about Facebook.


The thesis is concerned with cross-cultural distance learning in two countries: Great Britain and France. Taking the example of in-house sales training, it argues that it is possible to develop courses for use in two or more countries of differing culture and language. Two courses were developed by the researcher. Both were essentially print-based distance-learning courses designed to help salespeople achieve a better understanding of their customers. One used a quantitative, the other qualitative approach. One considered the concept of the return on investment and the other, for which a video support was also developed, considered the analysis of a customer's needs. Part 1 of the thesis considers differences in the training context between France and Britain followed by a review of the learning process with reference to distance learning. Part 2 looks at the choice of training medium course design and evaluation and sets out the methodology adopted, including problems encountered in this type of fieldwork. Part 3 analyses the data and draws conclusions from the findings, before offering a series of guidelines for those concerned with the development of cross-cultural in-house training courses. The results of the field tests on the two courses were analysed in relation to the socio-cultural, educational and experiential background of the learners as well as their preferred learning styles. The thesis argues that it is possible to develop effective in-house sales training courses to be used in two cultures and identifies key considerations which need to be taken into account when carrying out this type of work.


The mobility patterns of the population are the basis of most analyses in the transportation field. We aim to extract these patterns from smartphone traces. The following thesis proposes a Bayesian approach based on smartphone location records, land use information and schedule data to understand the activities that people daily perform. We investigate two alternatives. The prior is either based on schedule data or based on land use information. We test the algorithm on the smartphone WiFi traces provided by Nokia. They have been obtained from people who live around the Leman Lake, essentially in the region of Lausanne. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) and OpenStreerMap (OSM) provide the schedule and the land use information. The results show that the prior based on schedule data is not convenient: the importance of the individual behavior decreases, and the activity Home comes up too often. The results are much better when the prior depends on the land use that surrounds a users' location of interest. In addition, we have successfully extracted recognizable mobility patterns, particularly for the activities Home and Work.


Roseires Dam and reservoir are located in Sudan, Africa on the Blue Nile River. The hydropower from the reservoir provides approximately 80% of the power used in Sudan, thus having a tremendous economic impact on the country. The reservoir was first impounded in 1966 and has been filled annually since then. The Blue Nile has historically been known to carry heavy sediment loads which is associated with erosion from overgrazing in Ethiopia, the Blue Nile's headwaters. During the flood season, the dam's turbine intakes become blocked with debris and sediment. After a severe blockage in 1981, which prevented hydropower generation for several days, consultants from USAID were asked to make recommendations on reducing the sediment and debris impacts on reservoir operations. This led to debris clearing and dredging equipment acquisitions in 1982. In 1988, blockage occurred again during the flood season. This writer was asked by the World Bank to travel to Sudan, investigate the sediment and debris problems, examine the USAID recommendations, comment on potential sediment and debris problems associated with a proposed plan to raise the dam, make additional recommendations, and return to Sudan several times to determine the effectiveness of the recommendations. This paper discusses the results of the aforementioned activities and describes the new recommendations made by this writer.


Background and Aim: Motivation is an important tool to motivate nurses to provide empathetic and safe care in complicated working conditions and crisis. This study aimed to survey the relationship between job motivation and empathy in nurses working in a military hospital in Shiraz in 2014. Methods: A descriptivecorrelational and sectional study was done on 102 nurses working in a military hospital. A census sampling was performed in a hospital affiliated to the armed forces in Shiraz. Data were collected with Jeffersons' Empathy and Herzbergs' Motivation-Healthy Questionnaires. The validity and reliability of these questionnaires have been confirmed in previous studies between r =0.85 and r=0.89. After data gathering was done, they were analyzed using SPSS software version 22, descriptive and analytical tests and also Pearsons' correlation coefficient with a significant level )P =0.05). Results: The mean score of motivation was 86.40 out of a total score of 150. Also, the mean score of empathy was 65.01 out of a total score of 100. Most nurses were at a moderate level in regards to job motivation (63.7%) and empathy (81.4%).There was a significant positive but at the same time, weak correlation between motivation and empathy (P=0.049, r=0.198). There was no significant relationship between demographic variables and motivation and empathy (p <0.05). Conclusion: Regarding the moderate level of occupational motivation and empathy in nurses, executive managers can promote nurses' motivation to bring about demonstrating their empathetic behaviors and improve nursing care quality.


Seismic fragility evaluation of the buried Auxiliary Cooling Water System (ACWS) intake pipeline of the Muhleberg Nuclear Power Plant (KKM) was conducted to determine its performance when subjected to liquefaction-induced soil settlement. This evaluation utilized nonlinear analysis as a rigorous alternative to more approximate methods due to the importance of the ACWS to plant safety. The ACWS intake line is constructed of welded steel pipe with a nominal outside diameter of 23.6 in. (600 mm) and a wall thickness of 0.22 in. (5.6 mm). The line was modeled and analyzed using computer program Abaqus, considering nonlinearities of the pipe material and pipe-soil interaction. Failure of the pipe is initiated by local wrinkle-type buckling at the wall penetration followed by local ductile tearing. Failure criterion for local tearing is expressed in terms of effective plastic strain including the effects of triaxiality at the critical section. Parameters critical to the pipe settlement capacity include pipe yield and ultimate strengths, pipe effective strain capacity, and soil yield strength and displacement. The variabilities in the pipe settlement capacities were calculated considering varabilities of the critical parameters by the Separation-of-Variables Method recommended by EPRI TR-103959. The 1% non-exceedance probability (NEP) settlement capacities were determined to be well in excess of the 99% NEP settlements estimated by the geotechnical investigation. Based on this comparison, it was concluded that the probability of ACWS intake line failure due to soil liquefaction is negligible.Copyright © 2011 by ASME


The emergence of bacteria resistance to most of the currently available antibiotics has become a critical therapeutic problem. The bacteria causing both hospital and community-acquired infections are most often multidrug resistant. In view of the alarming level of antibiotic resistance between bacterial species and difficulties with treatment, alternative or supportive antibacterial cure has to be developed. The presented review focuses on the major characteristics of bacteriophages and phage-encoded proteins affecting their usefulness as antimicrobial agents. We discuss several issues such as mode of action, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, resistance and manufacturing aspects of bacteriophages and phage-encoded proteins application.


The thesis reports an experimental investigation concerned with the optimisation of
mechanical properties in investment cast LM25 aluminium alloy. The effects of melt
hydrogen content, filter usage, grain refinement, eutectic silicon modification, heat
treatment, pouring and shell preheat temperatures on the structure and tensile properties of
LM25 investment cast tensile test specimens were studied. Four series of experiments were
conducted to assess the effects of the parameters studied on the structure and tensile
properties.
The first series established the effect of melt hydrogen content, pouring temperature and
shell preheat temperature on the casting porosity, pore morphology and tensile properties.
The second series investigated the effect of using a ceramic foam filter on the tensile
properties. Pouring temperature and shell preheat temperature were variable parameters in
this part of the investigation. The objective of the third series of experiments was to
investigate the effect of grain refinement and eutectic silicon modification on the structure
and tensile properties. The interaction of these melt treatments with shell preheat
temperature and filtration was also studied. In the final series of experiments the effect of
heat treatment cycles on the samples produced in the third series of experiments was
evaluated in terms of structure and tensile properties.
The principal findings of the research were that: shell preheat temperature and hydrogen
content are the most important process variables determining the total porosity content;
shell temperature affects the structure and, hence, the tensile properties; grain refinement is
enhanced as the titanium content increases to about 0.28% but the tensile properties remain
unaffected; a modified eutectic Si structure is achieved with 0.01 - 0.02% Sr with optimum
Sr addition, based on tensile properties, being 0.01%; and, as would be expected, heat
treatment improves the tensile properties of investment cast LM25. On the basis of the
inter-relationships between process variables, structural changes and tensile properties
observed, an optimum processing route was proposed. Grain refined and modified
specimens produced with low hydrogen content and ambient shell temperature had
optimum tensile properties when fully heat treated to produce eutectic Si transformation.


The goal of plant breeding is to effectively and efficiently select for the best phenotypes leading to the development of improved cultivars. The objectives for this review are to describe and critically evaluate breeding methods appropriate to the improvement of perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.) in a long-term breeding programme. The optimum breeding system is dependent on the traits for improvement, and the available physical and human resources. Forage dry matter yield, persistency, disease resistance, nutritional value and seed yield are considered among the most important traits for improvement. Careful consideration should be given to the expression of the trait under the management regime imposed in the breeding programme and under real-world sward conditions in the target sowing region. Recurrent selection programmes for intrapopulation improvement are most appropriate for breeding perennial ryegrass. Three distinct types of recurrent selection may be implemented: (i) phenotypic recurrent selection, (ii) genotypic recurrent selection and (iii) marker-assisted selection. Genotypic recurrent selection will be a necessary part of the breeding system if forage yield is a trait for improvement. Genotypic recurrent selection may be practiced using full-sib or half-sib families, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Phenotypic recurrent selection in tandem (i.e., within-family selection) or in succession with genotypic recurrent selection should be used to improve traits that have a high-correlation between performance from spaced plants and from sward plots. Genome-wide selection represents the most interesting and exciting potential application of marker-assisted selection, although it remains to be seen how beneficial it will be in practice.


This datasheet on turfgrasses covers Identity, Overview, Associated Diseases, Pests or Pathogens, Distribution, Biology & Ecology, Uses, Management, Genetics and Breeding, Economics, Further Information.


We study ultraslow diffusion processes with logarithmic mean squared displacement (MSD) ⟨ x 2 ( t ) ⟩ ≃ log γ t ?> . Comparison of annealed (renewal) continuous time random walks (CTRWs) with logarithmic waiting time distribution &psgr; ( τ ) ≃ 1 / ( τ log 1 + γ τ ) ?> and Sinai diffusion in quenched random landscapes reveals striking similarities, despite the great differences in their physical nature. In particular, they exhibit a weakly non-ergodic disparity of the time-averaged and ensemble-averaged MSDs. Remarkably, for the CTRW we observe that the fluctuations of time averages become universal, with an exponential suppression of mobile trajectories. We discuss the fundamental connection between the Golosov localization effect and non-ergodicity in the sense of the disparity between ensemble-averaged MSD and time-averaged MSD.


Background and Objectives The quantification of fetal cells in the maternal circulation is an important goal to determine the amount of anti-D for prevention of active immunization of a D-negative mother giving birth to a D-positive baby. The aim of this study was to evaluate two flowcytometric staining technics for determination of fetal erythrocytes in maternal blood and to recognize the best. Materials and Methods In this experimental study, 34 adult D-negative blood samples were spiked with six serial dilutions of D-positive cord blood (0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 5 and 10%) which was representative of 99.9% of the clinical fetomaternal hemorrhage (FMH); they were stained for flow cytometric analysis. The Fetal Cell Count Kit was used for HbF dual staining and monoclonal anti-D for RhD single staining. Results A comparison between RhD and HbF percentages and FMH volume in spiking samples was performed. A significant correlation between two different parameters in flowcytometric percentages was observed (anti-HbF versus anti-D, r= 0.897, p<0.05). FMH volume was calculated and a significant correlation between expected and observed FMHs in RhD and HbF was obtained (p<0.05, r=0.984, r=0.874). The anti-HbF flowcytometric dual staining allowed better distinction between fetal RBCs (HbF+,CA-), F cells (HbF+,CA+), and adult RBCs (HbF-,CA+). Although Rh-D showed better correlation, but higher values with the RhD in suspensions lower than 10% were noted. Conclusions Data showed that anti-HbF labeling is significantly much more accurate than RhD labeling. Quantification of FMH using these two techniques described allows precise dosage of RhD immunoglobulin for protection against anti-D allo-immunization.


High-throughput experimental and computational approaches are facilitating the collection of large-scale biological networks, consisting of proteins and the interactions among them, for a growing number of species. With appropriate computational analysis and experimental work the potential exists for uncovering the organizational principles of the cell and, consequently, protein functions and pathways, which are still largely unidentified. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for analyzing protein interaction networks in order to uncover organizational units corresponding to recurring means with which diverse biological processes are carried out. We formalize recurring patterns of interaction among different types of proteins using "network schemas"; network schemas specify descriptions of proteins and the topology of interactions among them.
In the first part of this thesis, we develop algorithms for systematically uncovering recurring, over-represented schemas in physical interaction networks and apply these methods to the S. cerevisiae interactome, identifying hundreds of such organizational units of varying complexity. We establish the functional importance of these schemas by showing that they correspond to functionally cohesive sets of proteins, are enriched in the frequency with which they have instances in the H. sapiens interactome, and are useful for predicting protein function. In the second part of this thesis, we introduce NetGrep, a system for searching protein interaction networks for matches to more general network schemas. NetGrep provides an advanced graphical interface for specifying schemas and fast algorithms for extracting their matches.


In the ten years since the University of NSW proposed a pillar design methodology for bord and pillar operations, the Australian coal mining industry has changed substantially. What was primarily a bord and pillar design approach is now being applied to chain pillar design in longwall mines where the requirements are substantially different. The dimensions of chain pillars can impact on tailgate conditions (roof, rib and floor), seal performance, and surface subsidence. The status of chain pillar design practice in Australia is reviewed, with a focus on defining pillar strength, chain pillar loading, and assessing the performance of the roof/pillar/system. A new pillar strength equation is proposed for Australian coal that applies for all width/height ratios. An alternative analysis of probability of failure of chain pillars is presented.


Cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer mortality among women worldwide (Franco et al, 2003). Epidemiological studies have shown a strong link between human papilloma virus (HPV) infection and the development of cervical cancer (Franco et al,  carcinogenic process (Chan et al, 2005). Most HPV infections are transient and regress spontaneously and only a minority of women develops persistent infection that with time may evolve into cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and/or progress to invasive cervical cancer(Villa, 1997; Franco et al, 1999). Given that host immune response to HPV is thought to be an important determinant of HPV acquisition and progression to high-grade cervical lesions and cancer, it is plausible that human leucocyte antigen (HLA) variations may affect pathogenesis of cervical neoplasia (Beskow et al, 2005; Clerici et al, 1997; Hildesheim et al, 1997). The major histocompatibility complex is a highly  polymorphic gene cluster on the short arm of chromosome six. The genes in this cluster are divided into three classes with different roles in immune responses. HLA gene polymorphisms result in variations in peptide-binding cleft, therefore influencing the antigens bound and presented to T cells (Beskow et al, 2005; Wang e al, 2005). The HLA class I genes (HLAA, -B, and –C) present foreign antigens to CD8+ Cytotoxic T lymphocytes, while class II genes (HLA-DR, - DQ and –DP) present antigenic peptides to CD4+ T helper cells and are important in host immune responses to viruses and other pathogens (Wang et al, 2001).


Text recognition has attracted considerable research interests because of its various applications. The cutting-edge text recognition methods are based on attention mechanisms. However, most of attention methods usually suffer from serious alignment problem due to its recurrency alignment operation, where the alignment relies on historical decoding results. To remedy this issue, we propose a decoupled attention network (DAN), which decouples the alignment operation from using historical decoding results. DAN is an effective, flexible and robust end-to-end text recognizer, which consists of three components: 1) a feature encoder that extracts visual features from the input image; 2) a convolutional alignment module that performs the alignment operation based on visual features from the encoder; and 3) a decoupled text decoder that makes final prediction by jointly using the feature map and attention maps. Experimental results show that DAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text recognition tasks, including offline handwritten text recognition and regular/irregular scene text recognition. Codes will be released.1


Augmented Reality or AR filters on selfies have become very popular on social media platforms for a variety of applications, including marketing, entertainment and aesthetics. Given the wide adoption of AR face filters and the importance of faces in our social structures and relations, there is increased interest by the scientific community to analyze the impact of such filters from a psychological, artistic and sociological perspective. However, there are few quantitative analyses in this area mainly due to a lack of publicly available datasets of facial images with applied AR filters. The proprietary, close nature of most social media platforms does not allow users, scientists and practitioners to access the code and the details of the available AR face filters. Scraping faces from these platforms to collect data is ethically unacceptable and should, therefore, be avoided in research. In this paper, we present OpenFilter, a flexible framework to apply AR filters available in social media platforms on existing large collections of human faces. Moreover, we share FairBeauty and B-LFW, two beautified versions of the publicly available FairFace and LFW datasets and we outline insights derived from the analysis of these beautified datasets.


ABSTRACT This article explores the shifting methods of U.S. state violence. Building on their earlier work, the authors focus on the use of drones for targeted killings in Pakistan, but here they tease out the wider implications for the future of "warfare"—particularly the meaning and extent of sovereignty and territory. The authors argue that drone strikes both emerge from and feed back into a series of evolutions in the nature of state violence, centered on the intensely bureaucratic and automated delivery of death. This technopolitical transformation, they contend, is underwritten by the abandonment of "thought" and the ascendance of what Hannah Arendt calls an unaccountable "rule by nobody." To build this argument, the authors investigate the institutional conditions of modern-day drone strikes, moving historically and geographically to the birth of the Predator drone and the rise of the CIA in 1980s Afghanistan. By studying nonhuman sources of power, the authors argue that today's planetary manhunt exceeds any direct human control. They conclude by exploring the "individualization" of targeting and its likely consequences for war and law enforcement.


John C. Harsanyi sketches an entire normative and metaethical theory in under twenty pages.' Combining breadth and brevity, his essay is useful and interesting. It reveals the interrelations between Harsanyi's positions on various issues as no longer work or series of articles could do. But by virtue of its programmatic nature, the essay creates a dilemma for a commentator, at least for one who finds many things to disagree with. If I responded to Harsanyi in the same sweeping terms in which he argues, we would end up with little more than opposing assertions. At the other extreme, I could point out what seem to me particular defects in Harsanyi's arguments as they stand. But that would seem pedantic and ungenerous if my particular objections could be avoided by spelling out his arguments at greater length, as some of them surely could. (I am especially troubled by this possibility because I am persuaded that in the past I once misinterpreted an argument of Harsanyi's and treated it unjustly.)2 Constraints of space prevent me from first spelling out Harsanyi's arguments as best I can and then criticizing them. Accordingly, I shall limit myself to two topics, chosen partly because I think the observations I shall make are worth making whether or not they represent points of ineliminable disagreement between Harsanyi and myself.


PURPOSE
To investigate a technique for optimizing radiation dose and image quality for a computed radiography system.

METHODS
Entrance skin doses were measured for phantom models of the pelvis and lumbar spine imaged using the vendor's recommended exposure settings (ie, the reference doses) as well as doses above and below the vendor's recommended settings for both body parts. Images were assessed using visual grading analysis (VGA).

RESULTS
The phantom dosimetry results revealed strong positive linear relationships between dose and milliampere seconds (mAs), mAs and inverse exposure indicator (EI), and dose and inverse EI for both body parts. The VGA showed that optimized values of 16 mAs/EI = 136 for the anteroposterior (AP) pelvis and 32 mAs/EI = 139 for the AP lumbar spine did not compromise image quality.

DISCUSSION
Selecting optimized mAs reduced dose by 36% compared with the vendor's recommended mAs (dose) values.

CONCLUSION
Optimizing the mAs and associated EIs can be an effective dose management strategy.


The resources industry has been the driving force behind Western Australia's remarkable economic trajectory over the last two decades, delivering billions of tonnes of iron ore to steel mills around the world. WA has prospered, wages have soared and unemployment has fallen to levels that have been the envy of the world. Yet there are strong indications that the West Australian economy is undergoing a period of change. Rising iron ore prices, having fuelled much of the expansion in the resources sector, may no longer be guaranteed, and the industry itself is moving from a capital-intensive construction phase to a period of production in which the massive investment is 'put to work'. The theme of the third report in the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre's 'Focus on Western Australia' report series is captured efficiently by its title, Workforce and Skills: Western Australia labour markets in transition. In writing this report, we had one core objective in mind: to understand the trajectory of the Western Australian labour market – where it has come from; where it currently stands; where it is headed and where it could go. At issue is whether the West Australian labour market is flexible enough to handle this transition. Does the state's current workforce have sufficient versatility to adapt to a changed industrial landscape that may require the acquisition of new skills? With our unique economic geography, do we have the regional labour mobility to match the supply of labour to areas of high demand? In the future we foresee a diversification of the West Australian economy, building on the strong foundations of mining production and construction to expand into other industrial sectors – in areas such as agribusiness, education, health – that will deliver growth to the state, employment to West Australians, and opportunities for new entrants moving West from interstate and overseas. But economic prosperity also depends on a productive and motivated pool of labour. The report examines the conditions required to maximise WA's economic potential and highlights a number of issues that may be preventing us from making the best use of our talented workforce. We assess the trade-off between work and leisure, labour underutilisation and the health and wellbeing of our workforce, as well the main barriers to equality of opportunity in the workplace. We focus in particular on what drives the high gender wage gap in WA, and ask to what extent the benefits of the resources boom have flowed to the state's Indigenous Australians.


CONTEXT
C1 inhibitor (C1-INH) is an alpha2-globulin that blocks esterolytic activity of the first component of the classic complement cascade. The alpha-granules of normal human platelets also contain C1-INH, which is expressed on the platelet surface during platelet secretion in healthy patients, but it is clearly reduced in patients with hereditary angioedema (HAE).

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effects of in vivo C1-INH concentrate infusion on platelet responsiveness and coagulation system activity in patients with HAE.

DESIGN
Assessment of the platelet activity and plasma levels of C1-INH, activated factor XII (XIIa), and prothrombin fragment F1.2 (F1.2) before and after infusion of 15 U/kg of C1-INH concentrate.

PATIENTS
In 6 patients (4 men and 2 women), HAE was diagnosed according to the accepted clinical and laboratory criteria.

MEASUREMENTS
Platelet aggregation (final concentrations: adenosine diphosphate, 0.5, 1.25, and 2.5 microM; collagen, 5 microg/mL), C1-INH antigen (radial immunodiffusion), C1-INH activity (chromogenic substrates), and XIIa and F1.2 (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay).

RESULTS
After C1-INH infusion, we observed a prompt increase of C1-INH level and a slow return toward its plasma preinfusion values within 4 to 7 days, a significant decrease of both adenosine diphosphate- and collagen-induced platelet aggregation versus preinfusion values (maximum after 1-2 days; P <.001), and a rapid decrease of high basal values of XIIa and F1.2 in 30 and 120 minutes, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS
These data show a role of C1-INH in the control of platelet activity and that its deficiency increases platelet aggregability and plasma levels of XIIa and F1.2 in patients with HAE.


Abstract Background CT-guided percutaneous biopsy is a minimally invasive technique used for obtaining enough tissue samples in the diagnosis of pulmonary lesions. The common complications of CT-guided percutaneous lung biopsy include pneumothorax, hemoptysis. Coaxial technique makes it much easier to repeat sampling and obtain adequate specimens, still it makes no change to the high incidence of pneumothorax. Basic on the research De Filippoet al. had done about complications, we hypothesis that when the inner chuck of coaxial guiding needle was removed and the cutting needle was placed inside the guiding needle, the injection of a small amount of liquid (a mixture of lidocaine and hemocoagulase) through the syringe while withdraw of the guiding needle may help to prevent the incidence of pneumothorax for which close the needle track with liquid. Methods From August 24th, 2018 to April 1th ,2019, a total of 32 CT-guided percutaneous transthoracic biopsy procedures performed in 32 patients were retrospectively evaluated. The patients were divided into groups regarding the lesion from pleural surface: Results Pathology results were malignant in 28 patients (17 cases were adenocarcinoma), benign in 4 patients.7 cases (21.9%) happened pneumothorax (4 very mild pneumothorax, 2 mild pneumothorax, 1 moderate pneumothorax),13 cases (40.6%) happened pneumorrhagia (12 mild pneumorrhagia, 1 very mild pneumorrhagia). And there was no statistically significant between pneumothorax and the depth of lesion to pleural surface (P > 0.05). Conclusions Compared to co-axial technique only, CT-guided percutaneous lung biopsy using co-axial combined with "liquid withdraw" significantly reduced the incidence of pneumothorax, which has been confirmed what we found in earlier retrospective study. The new technique provided an more accurate, secure and reliable way to obtain adequate tissue samples in the diagnosis. Legal entity responsible for the study Comprehensive Cancer Center of Drum-Tower Hospital. Funding Has not received any funding. Disclosure All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.


We report an all-fiber high power, single frequency large-mode area (LMA) linearly polarized ytterbiumdoped fiber amplifiers (YDFA) module, which is based on the master oscillator multi-stage power amplifiers (MOPA). The maximum output power is 43.8 W at a wavelength of 1064 nm when 60-W launched pump light is coupled, with high slope efficiency of 88%, polarization extinction rate (PER) >17.2 dB and nearly diffraction-limited beam quality (M2<1.1).


Learning the structure of a causal graphical model using both observational and interventional data is a fundamental problem in many scientific fields. A promising direction is continuous optimization for score-based methods, which efficiently learn the causal graph in a data-driven manner. However, to date, those methods require constrained optimization to enforce acyclicity or lack convergence guarantees. In this paper, we present ENCO, an efficient structure learning method for directed, acyclic causal graphs leveraging observational and interventional data. ENCO formulates the graph search as an optimization of independent edge likelihoods, with the edge orientation being modeled as a separate parameter. Consequently, we can provide convergence guarantees of ENCO under mild conditions without constraining the score function with respect to acyclicity. In experiments, we show that ENCO can efficiently recover graphs with hundreds of nodes, an order of magnitude larger than what was previously possible, while handling deterministic variables and latent confounders.


Cultural historians have vigorously debated the impact of the First World War in shaping male subjectivities and (heroic) masculinities. Victimhood, emotional survival and disablement have featured in recent scholarship as a means to shed light on the psycho-social products of war and how these have fed into new or reconstructed forms of male subjectivity and agency. This paper adds to this literature through a consideration of the place of mountains and mountaineering in post-war recovery. It does so by means of a close reading of 'Action' (1928), a short story composed by journalist and novelist C.E. Montague. The story is an exploration of the experience of degeneration and how it could be overcome through the agency, willpower and awareness of the male climbing body. The paper situates 'Action' in relation to Montague's more famous work, Disenchantment (1922), and contends that the story was a response to Montague's diagnosis of post-war ills. As such, 'Action' resurrects associations between gender, virtue and the body present in Victorian and Edwardian constructions of manliness and maintains the special place afforded to (Alpine) mountains as health-giving, recuperative and restorative sanctuaries for male body projects.


The attorney-client privilege is in disarray. This Article traces why the doctrinal confusion is deeper and more widespread than most realize and proposes a radical reform - federalizing the privilege. Attorney-client privilege law varies greatly from state to state, federal circuit to federal circuit, and context to context, and its application is often unclear within particular jurisdictions. Most strikingly, the conflicts and ambiguities are not relegated to the margins. Issues lying at the heart of privilege doctrine - including the requirements of confidentiality, the parameters of the corporate privilege, and the scope of the crime-fraud exemption - are disputed or unresolved. Inadequate choice-of-law principles and the growth of national litigation and nonjudicial fora simply exacerbate the law's unpredictability. This Article demonstrates why such uncertainty is intolerable: an uncertain privilege inhibits access to the truth and creates enormous transaction costs while failing to enhance attorney-client communication and candor. Other reformers propose changes to address particular aspects of the existing uncertainty, but fail to offer holistic solutions. To resolve both lingering conflicts between jurisdictions and confusion within jurisdictions, we need a national, codified approach. Congress should federalize the law of privilege preemptively, creating uniform protection for client confidences that will apply in every proceeding in federal and state court, and in arbitration hearings, agency adjudications, and legislative proceedings. Federal privilege legislation that provides clear, unqualified, and generally applicable privilege protections will produce a level of certainty sufficient to reap the potential benefits of the privilege while ultimately lowering its transaction costs. This Article concludes that Congress has both the capacity and constitutional power to enact this needed reform.


In information facilities such as libraries, finding documents that are relevant to a user query is difficult because of the indeterminism involved in the process by which documents are indexed, and the latitude users have in choosing terms to express a query on a particular topic. Reference librarians play an important support role in coping with this indeterminism, focusing user queries through an interactive dialog. Based on thirty detailed observations of user/librarian interactions obtained through a field experiment, we have developed a computational model designed to simulate the reference librarian. The consultation includes two phases. The first is handle search, where the user's rough problem statement and a user stereotyping imposed by the librarian are med in determining the appropriate tools (handles). The second phase is document search, involving the search for documents within a chosen handle. We are collaborating with the university library for putting our model to use as an intelligent assistant for an online retrieval system.


The use of integration as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of English language and literature subjects is a priority in Kenya. Despite the inception of the integrated English curriculum two decades ago, not all English language teachers use it as conceived by the curriculum developer, Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD). The Purpose of this study was to explore pedagogical experiences of teachers in implementing the integrated English language curriculum in Kenya, Kisumu County. Guided by Fuller's Concern Based Adoption Model (CBAM) theoretical framework, this study utilized Concurrent Triangulation design under a mixed methods approach to establish the level of coverage on components of both language and literature and to determine the integration methods used by teachers of both language and literature in implementing the integrated curriculum. Saturated sampling design was used to select 110 subject teachers, 52 heads of departments and 52 principals currently implementing the integrated English curriculum to fill questionnaires. Purposive sampling was done to select 16 teachers for interviews. The Sub County Quality Assurance Officer was interviewed and document analysis done to corroborate and triangulate data. Quantitative data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20 computer program to generate descriptive statistics while the qualitative data was analyzed using content, narrative, and thematic methods in line with the study objectives. The findings indicated that most teachers implemented certain aspects of the integrated curriculum in using the integrated approach. Subsequently, some teachers taught language and Literature as separate subjects and the various components of both subjects as separate. The study recommended a home-grown, school-based on-going preparation model for professional teacher development to succeed in implementing the official curriculum.


Michael Hagiotheodorites was the brother of Nicholas Hagiotheodorites, Metropolitan of Athens (ca. 1166-1175) and, we believe, also of the mesazon (1143 - ca. 1155) John (1) Hagiotheodorites. He was certainly one of the most illustrious and powerful officials of Manuel I Comnenus. By 1158/59, he was already the man of confidence (in his capacity of mesazon and after succeeding Theodore Styppeiotes also as epi tou kanikleiou) of Manuel I Comnenus. Logothete tou dromou from 1166, Eustathius tells us that he died shortly before the death of the emperor himself, namely Michael died ca. 1179-1180. Since the year 1166, he holds in addition the office of Orphanotrophe of Constantinople. If not earlier, at least after 1175, he became a member of the clergy of St. Sophia and also took up monastic life (but he held political office until his death!). The latter finding strengthens our belief that Michael died being childless.


The economic boom that has taken place in Qatar in the last few decades has resulted in rapid population growth, urban expansion and change in life-style. Qatar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has increased from 5.05 billion USD in 1986 to 211.8 billion USD in 2014. At the same time population has increased from 0.4 million in 1986 to 2.17 million in 2014. Urban expansion was and the accompanied modern urban life-style was necessary to accommodate this rapid population increase. Doha City has had the biggest share of urban expansion in the country. Recently, Doha faced a huge urban development and urban expansion in a short period of time. The modern urban designs in the city and the material used in the construction have changed the land surface albedo and the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in city. With this urban expansion, the Urban Heat Island phenomenon has become more noticeable between the urban center and the suburbs. Changing of landscape in the city due to the construction of roads and buildings has increased the surface temperature, as paving and building material replaces the Earth's natural surface causing surface compactness. Surfaces that were once pervious moist have become impermeable and dry. Open land and vegetation are replaced by buildings, roads, and other infrastructures and surfaces with high heat capacity, which impacted and created microclimates. This impact is due to the fact that many surfaces and asphalt absorb heat during the day and releases it during the night. Anthropogenic heat is one of the main causes of UHI in cities. The main sources of this heat include cooling and heating buildings, industrial processes, and transportation (highways, airports,..etc). Other causes of UHI are: air pollution; surface waterproofing; thermal properties of fabrics; and surface geometry. Urban heat island and temperature increase have a negative impact on the environment and on human health. Increased temperature also increases energy demand, air pollution and water shortages. This study uses remotely sensed data (high resolution satellite images) to highlight the urban expansion in Doha and the expansion of the UHI phenomenon as the city expands. Multi-date images from Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) sensor on board Landsat Satellite were classified using supervised and un-supervised classification techniques to accurately identify and map the urban expansion in Doha. The classification results were verified and tested. Support Vector Machine supervised classification provided the most accurate classification of urban areas. In addition to the classification of the images, Thermal Bands of the same Landsat ETM images were modeled to calculate LST images for Qatar using Planck's function: T = K_2/In([K1*ϵ]/[CV]_R1+1) Where: T is degrees Kelvin K1 & K2 are satellite sensor constants obtained from the image metadata CVR1 is cell value as radiance ϵ_is emissivity (typically 0.95) The LST images show higher LST in the urban areas than in the desert suburbs by considerable margins especially in compacted areas, such as asphaltic roads and airports. This study also looked at the changes of urban fabrics over time and their land surface temperature Varian's in Doha. These variations in LST within the city and between the city and the desert suburbs create microclimates. These LST images could be used for the identification of different micro-climates within Doha. This micro-climates identification is very important to town planners, The results could also be used for air quality, solar energy and land-use planning studies. This study made some recommendations on how to reduce the UHI and increase in temperature phenomena by introducing Green Building technologies and green positive road network, and the interlocution of more green spaces in the cities.


Model checking algorithms for the verification of reactive systems proceed by a systematic and exhaustive exploration of the system state space. They do not scale to large designs because of the state explosion problem—the number of states grows exponentially with the number of components in the design. Consequently, the model checking problem is PSPACE-hard in the size of the design description. This dissertation proposes three novel techniques to combat the state explosion problem.
One of the most important advances in model checking in recent years has been the discovery of symbolic methods, which use a calculus of expressions, such as binary decision diagrams, to represent the state sets encountered during state space exploration. Symbolic model checking has proved to be effective for verifying hardware designs. Traditionally, symbolic checking of temporal logic specifications is performed by backward fixpoint reasoning with the operator pre. Backward reasoning can be wasteful since unreachable states are explored. We suggest the use of forward fixpoint reasoning based on the operator post. We show how all linear temporal logic specifications can be model checked symbolically by forward reasoning. In contrast to backward reasoning, forward reasoning performs computations only on the reachable states.
Heuristics that improve algorithms for application domains, such as symbolic methods for hardware designs, are useful but not enough to make model checking feasible on industrial designs. Currently, exhaustive state exploration is possible only on designs with about 50–100 boolean state variables. Assume-guarantee verification attempts to combat the state explosion problem by using the principle of "divide and conquer," where the components of the implementation are analyzed one at a time. Typically, an implementation component refines its specification only when its inputs are suitably constrained by other components in the implementation. The assume-guarantee principle states that instead of constraining the inputs by implementation components, it is sound to constrain them by the corresponding specification components, which can be significantly smaller. We extend the assume-guarantee proof rule to deal with the case where the specification operates at a coarser time scale than the implementation. Using our model checker MOCHA, which implements this methodology, we verify VGI, a parallel DSP processor chip with 64 compute processors each containing ∼800 state variables and ∼30K gates.
Our third contribution is a systematic model checking methodology for verifying the abstract shared-memory interface of sequential consistency on multiprocessor systems with three parameters—number of processors, number of memory locations, and number of data values. Sequential consistency requires that some interleaving of the local temporal orders of read/write events at different processors be a trace of serial memory. Therefore, it suffices to construct a non-interfering serializer that watches and reorders read/write events so that a trace of serial memory is obtained. While in general such a serializer must be unbounded even for fixed values of the parameters—checking sequential consistency is undecidable!—we show that the paradigmatic class of snoopy cache coherence protocols has finite-state serializers. In order to reduce the arbitrary-parameter problem to the fixed-parameter problem, we develop a novel framework for induction over the number of processors and use the notion of a serializer to reduce the problem of verifying sequential consistency to that of checking language inclusion between finite state machines.


Constitutive IKK activity associated with increased IkappaBalpha phosphorylation and degradation contribute to the high level of endogenous nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB) activation in Hs294T melanoma cells as compared with RPE cells (R. L. Shattuck-Brandt and A. Richmond, Cancer Res., 57: 3032-3039, 1997; M. N. Devalaraja et al., Cancer Res., 59: 1372-1377, 1999). To determine whether this endogenous NF-kappaB activation was characteristic of melanoma, we examined the level of constitutive activation of NF-kappaB in a number of melanoma cell lines. We demonstrate here that eight melanoma cell lines exhibit increased IkappaB kinase (IKK) activity, enhanced phosphorylation of IkappaBalpha and p65, and enhanced nuclear localization of p65/p50 in comparison to normal human epidermal melanocytes. The chemokines, CXC ligand 1 (CXCL1) and CXCL8, but not CXCL5, are highly expressed in most of the melanoma cell lines, suggesting that the constitutive production of chemokines is highly correlated to endogenous NF-kappaB activity. Our failure to observe a direct relationship between the fold activation of IKK, CXCL1, or CXCL8 mRNA levels and secretion of these chemokines into the culture medium suggest that regulation of chemokine expression also occurs at the posttranscription level of mRNA stability and/or translational control. Moreover, recombinant CXCL1 can directly induce IKK activity in normal human epidermal melanocytes in a concentration-dependent manner after up-modulation of CXCL1 protein expression, whereas inhibition of IKKbeta activity results in down-modulation of CXCL1 protein expression. Finally, CXCL1 antibody blocks IKK activity and inhibits the proliferation of melanoma cells to further support the concept that the constitutive activation of NF-kappaB and autocrine effects of CXCL1 play an important role in the pathogenesis of melanoma.


Much recent academic discussion exaggerates the distance between plausible legal ethics and ordinary morality. This essay criticizes three prominent strands of discussion: one drawing on the moral philosophy of personal virtue, one drawing on legal philosophy, and a third drawing on utilitarianism of the law-and-economics variety. The discussion uses as a central reference point the "Mistake-of-Law" scenario in which a lawyer must decide whether to rescue an opposing party from the unjust consequences of his own lawyer's error. I argue that academic efforts to shore up the professional inclination against rescue are not plausible. I conclude by recommending an older jurisprudential tradition in which legal ethics is more convergent with ordinary morality.


ABSTRACT The present study utilizes psychometrically sound organizational orientation scales to test if "spinoff" organizations exhibit a higher degree of either marketing orientation or entrepreneurial orientation than non-spinoff organizations. The results of this empirical study indicated that there was not a significant difference in the level of marketing orientation between spinoff firms and non-spinoff organizations. In addition, the results indicated that there was no significant difference in the level of entrepreneurial orientation between spinoff firms and non-spinoff organizations. These findings fail to support the literature that suggests that spinoffs may utilize either a marketing and/or entrepreneurial orientation as a strategic response to a more hostile environment. INTRODUCTION The business orientations of interest in the present study are the marketing orientation and the entrepreneurial orientation. Marketing orientation is conceptually defined by McCarthy and Perreault (1984) as the adoption of the marketing concept by an organization. Entrepreneurial orientation refers to "the propensity of a company's top management to take calculated risks, to be innovative, and to demonstrate proactiveness" (Morris & Paul, 1987). PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The relationship between a firm's propensity toward a marketing orientation and its propensity toward an entrepreneurial orientation has been studied in traditional organizations (Murray, 1981; Webster, 1981; Zeithaml & Zeithaml, 1984; Hills, 1987; Morris & Paul, 1987). The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between "spinoff" and "non-spinoff" organizations with respect to their relative degrees of marketing orientation and entrepreneurial orientation. Timmons, Smollen, and Dingee (1985) suggest that new ventures, such as might be typified by a spinoff venture from an existing organization, often face a more uncertain environment than existing organizations. This is important in studying spinoff ventures because numerous researchers have proposed a link between environmental turbulence and firms' tendency to adopt either a marketing or entrepreneurial orientation (Foxall, 1984; Ginsberg, 1985; Morris & Paul, 1987; Covin & Slevin, 1989). Zeithaml and Zeithaml (1984) suggest that an entrepreneurial orientation may assist a firm in dealing with both its macroenvironment and its task environment. Morris and Paul (1987) argue that both the marketing and the entrepreneurial orientations can be strategic responses by management to increasing levels of environmental uncertainty. Smith, Arnold, and Bizzell (1988) suggest that organizations now face "increasingly turbulent, complex, threatening environments." Because environmental change is accelerated for spinoff organizations, it is suggested that this creates a need for such organizations to adopt strategies designed to cope with uncertain macroenvironments. This implies that spinoff ventures may have a higher level of either entrepreneurial orientation or marketing orientation than similar non-spinoff organizations as correlates of a potentially more uncertain macroenvironment. The specific objective of the present study was to empirically determine whether spinoff organizations exhibit a greater degree of either marketing orientation or entrepreneurial orientation than non-spinoff firms. SPINOFF VS. NON-SPINOFF ORGANIZATIONS There is no consensus as to the exact definition of a spinoff. However there is general agreement that "spinoffs" are new and independent ventures that are in some significant way related to a previous or existing organization (Danilov, 1969; Bruno & Tyebjee, 1982). Danilov (1969) implies that spinoffs are typically technology- or product-based firms. Spinoff organizations for the purpose of the present study are looked on as new ventures started by former employees of another organization that utilized the same or a related technology, products, or customer base, regardless of whether it has or has not spawned other firms. …


Increasing individuals' understanding and participation in their health care is good for their health and for the health care system. So goes the argument for encouraging and enhancing technologies that allow interaction between patients and their providers, including patients' access to their health records. With electronic health records (EHRs) and panoplies of remote communication technologies, patient access can be direct, in real-time, and interactive. These technologies include portals for patients to access their providers' EHRs and communicate electronically with their providers, remote sensing devices for patient data to be entered directly into EHRs, and EHR capabilities that allow patients to download electronic copies of information in their EHRs. But patient interaction with their EHRs also presents privacy and confidentiality risks. From the perspective of privacy, patients may be unaware of the extent to which information may be gleaned from them and then be available to others, including their health care providers. From a confidentiality perspective, inadequate identity proofing or authentication procedures may allow unauthorized individuals to access records. Moreover, rules governing records access by authorized personal representatives may reveal more than patients would expect or want. Use by patients of capabilities to download their records may open these records to confidentiality and security protections that are far less stringent than the protections afforded these same records in the possession of health care providers. The article concludes with suggestions for protections that can enable patients to enjoy the great advantages of participative technologies with assurance that privacy and confidentiality are respected.


This paper presents the use of a simulator of the hydroelectric plants operation as tool for analyzing data. Two approaches are shown. In the first the simulator must reproduce the water discharge trajectory recorded by the plant. In the second the simulator's aim is reproduce the generation trajectory of a certain operation period. The two methods for analyzing data are described and the advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed. The data analysis via simulation has been applied to Brazilian hydroelectric plants which are under the coordination of the Brazilian Electric System National Operator. The results show the potential of this tool for the consistency evaluation of the data used in the hydroelectric operation planning.


This paper examines employment policies in urban areas of developing world. We follow traditional economic analysis and present the urban unemployment problem as an inequality of labour supply and demand on labour markets. The effects of demand-side and supply-side policies on informal urban employment are investigated through econometrical models. One or several variables are employed as crude proxies for every policy option. The dependent variable is informal urban employment as a per cent of total urban employment, with the data on eighteen developing countries from different parts of the world.


Teresa Morgan's Roman Faith and Christian Faith provides a major new study of the lexicon of 'faith' (pistis/fides) in the early Roman Empire. This review essay provides a summary of the book's contents as well as a critical assessment. The book begins with study of uses of pistis and fides in Greek and Roman sources, in domestic and personal relations, in military and religious contexts. It then moves to the Septuagint, before turning to the New Testament, which is considered in detail. The early Christian sources are unusual in the prominence and weight they give to pistis, but their usage nonetheless fits within the wider social and cultural matrix, in which pistis and fides primarily express the notion of trust and express the importance of trust and fidelity in a wide range of social and religious relationships. In these early Christian sources there is a heavy focus on divine-human pistis, but this creates networks of trusting and trustworthiness that are crucial to the formation and cohesion of early Christian communities. Some critical questions may be raised – for example, concerning Morgan's heavy focus on divine-human pistis, and her arguments against the early emergence of a titular usage of pistis to denote the early Christian movement – but overall this is an important study which should reconfigure our sense of early Christian (and especially Pauline) pistis, which is less about 'belief', whether salvific or propositional, and more about relationships of trust, which are the foundation of community.


Behavioral Efference is a hypothetical positive feedback from the performance of an aggressive display that augments the level of aggressive motivation. The hypothesis was proposed (BOND, 1989) to account for the occurrence of truthful communication during aggressive encounters, even in the face of a presumed selective pressure in favor of deceit (MAYNARD SMITH, 1984). Evidence of Behavioral Efference was sought in an experimental study of adult Midas cichlids Cichlasoma citrinellum, in which subjects responded aggressively to varying sizes of dummy fish. Before and after each aggression trial, the level of aggressive motivation was estimated from the intensity of the subject's attacks on conspecific juveniles. A weighted index of aggressiveness that objectively combined the frequencies of four aggressive action patterns was obtained using detrended correspondence analysis. Aggression indices from aggression trials, as well as from intertrial intervals, furnished a basis for comparison of two causal models: behavioral efference, which assumes that post-stimulus motivation is substantially influenced by display performance, and Direct Stimulus Mediation, which assumes that the displays themselves play no immediate causal role. When the subjects actively displayed to the stimulus dummy, the results showed no significant correlation between the size of the dummy and the magnitude of the motivational effect. However, a significant relationship was demonstrated between the level of aggressive display and subsequent increases in aggressive motivation, in precise accord with the Behavioral Efference model. Direct Stimulus Mediation was evident only in trials in which the subject displayed no overt aggression toward the stimulus object. An account of the functional significance of Behavioral Efference is provided, suggesting that the feedback serves to regulate the intensity of aggressive interactions by preparing the displaying individual for active combat.


In 30 % of all human tumors are point mutations of Ras proteins, which lead to a loss
of the intrinsic and GAP-stimulated GTPase activity. Cause of the occurence of
oncogenic Ras mutations in these proteins encoding genes, these proteins become
oncogene. In this work, two ways were chosen for the disturbance of the oncogene Ras:
The identification of the ligands for the recognition of protein surfaces and the
synthesis of artificial receptors for the C-termini of proteins.
The first part of this dissertation describes the development of a new head group for
peptide receptor libraries (based on an published synthesis by Anslyn et al.). The
association constants with carboxylate were determined in the range of 165-731 M-1
(100% d6-DMSO). These constants decrease strongly with increasing water content
of the solvent.
The second part deals with the synthesis and the screening of combinatorial libraries
of artificial receptors as well as their characterisation. The head group of Schmuck et
al. has a better affinity to carboxylates, for which reason this was used for the
synthesis of the receptor libraries. The resulting receptors showed affinity to the
target molecules, the C-terminal CaaX-peptides of the Ras proteins. The associated
association constants are determined in an organic solvent as well as in an
aquaeous solvent.
The last part of this thesis consists of the screening and the identification of ligands
for the surface of the Ras proteins. Through the investigation of less than 100
compounds, binding ligands of Rheb protein were identified in the lower millimolare
range: bisphenol A and 4,4'-biphenol. These bind with a KD of 1800 +/- 500 and 1500
+/- 200 µM in one of the switch-II-region adjacent binding pocket. Bisphenol A binds
with greater affinity to the K-Ras4B protein (KD = 600 +/- 200 µM).


In this compendium of current studies on olfaction and taste - the most comprehensive yet to appear in this series - the chemical senses are elucidated from points of view ranging from anatomy, electrophysiology, molecular biology (especially chemoreceptor gene cloning), biochemistry, and psychophysics to the latest clinical and technological applications of chemosensory research. Specific topics include the structure and function of the tastebud and olfactory epithelium; the genetics and mechanisms of olfactory and taste transduction; the chemistry and function of flavor compounds; the psychophysics of taste and olfaction in daily human life; the brain mechanisms of coding, learning, and memory in olfaction and taste; the clinical assessment of taste and olfaction with special reference to aging and disorders; noninvasive measurements of human olfactory and taste responses for therapeutic purposes; artifical sensing devices; chemoreception in aquatic organisms and other species; and chemosensory transduction in insects. With its multidisciplinary approach, this volume will be an invaluable source of information not only for researchers, clinicians, and students but also for technologists in fields such as artificial sensing, perfumery, brewery, food chemistry, aquafarming, and agriculture.


Corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features in our cultural lives. From Absolut Vodka's sponsorship of art shows to ABN-AMRO Bank's branding of Van Gough's self-portrait to advertise its credit cards, we have born witness to a new sort of patronage, in which the marriage of individual talent with multinational marketing is beginning to blur the comfortable old distinctions between public and private. Chin-tao Wu's book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. charting the various shifts in public policy which first facilitated the entry of major corporations into the cultural sphere, it analyses the roles of governments in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agencies - in particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It goes on to study the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which ;cultural capital' can be garnered by various social and business 'elites' through commercial involvement in the arts, and shows how corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises. Mapping for the first time the increasingly hegemonic position that corporations and corporate elites have come to occupy in the cultural arena, this is a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America.


Background Performance in high school science is a critical indicator of science literacy and regional competitiveness. Factors that influence science proficiency have been studied using national databases, but these do not answer all questions about variable relationships at the state level. School context factors and opportunities to learn science may vary geographically across states and interact with demographic composition variables. Purpose The purpose was to examine relationships between 10th-grade science proficiency and school context factors related to school environment, courses, and teachers. The moderating or interaction effects were examined for the school demographic composition variables of free/reduced lunch and minority percentages on variable relationships with science proficiency scores. Population and Unit of Analysis Data for this study consisted of all Missouri high schools in 2002 with a 10th-grade class size of at least 25 students (N = 423). Unit of analysis was the single school. Research Design This was a secondary data analysis study that used variables collected annually from all schools in Missouri. Multiple regression was used to examine relationships and moderating effects of school demographic composition. Predictor variables were grouped into three categories for school context: school environment, course-related, and teacher-related. The outcome variable was 10th-grade scientific attainment as measured by the Missouri state proficiency test in science. Results School context variables of higher dropout and mobility rates signaled greater risk factors, especially when moderated by free/reduced-price lunch percentage (FRL pct) and minority status. When FRL pct and Minority pct were higher, lower science proficiency scores were associated with elevated dropout rates. Similarly, greater mobility was related to lower science scores when school FRL pct was high. Some school-level variables interacted positively with FRL pct and minority status, which resulted in higher science scores. Schools with more FRL and minority students achieved higher science proficiency scores when they had a greater percentage of courses taught by highly qualified teachers and more teachers were regularly certified. Higher science scores were associated with greater percentages of master's degree teachers in schools with a larger percentage of minority students. A surprising finding revealed a geographic influence and demonstrates why testing for interactions can lead to better understanding of the data. Conclusions The findings are consistent with the status attainment literature and the theoretical arguments associated with geography and educational attainment in that socioeconomic status and minority status are important predictive factors in Missouri. As an extension of previous research, this study demonstrates that the school composition variables of FRL pct and Minority pct are significantly related to science proficiency in the 10th grade. Not only are they predictive of science proficiency scores, but they also interact with each other and moderate the relationships between school context variables and 10th-grade science scores. This study suggests that teacher quality in high-poverty majority-minority school settings remains an important policy target for reform and improvement.


Abstract After the 2012 Republican New Hampshire primary, 159 poll results were released prior to the subsequent nomination contests in the Republican presidential primary. More than two-thirds of these polls relied on interactive voice response (IVR) software to conduct the interviews. We evaluate the ability of polls to predict the vote-share for the Republican candidates Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich. We find no overall difference in the average accuracy of IVR and traditional human polls, but IVR polls conducted prior to human polls are significantly poorer predictors of election outcomes than traditional human polls even after controlling for characteristics of the states, polls, and electoral environment. These findings provide suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence that pollsters may take cues from one another given the stakes involved. If so, reported polls should not be assumed to be independent of one another and so-called poll-of-polls will be misleadingly precise.


Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are an integral part of vector control recommendations for malaria elimination in China. This study investigated the extent to which bed nets were used and which factors influence bed net use among Jinuo Ethnic Minority in China-Myanmar-Laos border areas. Methods and Findings This study combined a quantitative household questionnaire survey and qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews (SDI). Questionnaires were administered to 352 heads of households. SDIs were given to 20 key informants. The bed net to person ratio was 1∶2.1 (i.e., nearly one net for every two people), however only 169 (48.0%) households owned at least one net and 623 (47.2%) residents slept under bed nets the prior night. The percentages of residents who regularly slept under nets (RSUN) and slept under nets the prior night (SUNPN) were similar (48.0% vs. 47.2%, P>0.05), however the percentage correct use of nets (CUN) was significantly lower (34.5%, P<0.0001). The annual cash income per person (ACIP) was an independent factor that influenced bed net use (P<0.0001), where families with an ACIP of CNY10000 or more were much more likely to use nets. House type was strongly associated with bed net use (OR: 4.71, 95% CI: 2.81, 7.91; P<0.0001), where those with traditional wood walls and terracotta roofs were significantly more likely to use nets, and the head of household's knowledge was an independent factor (OR: 5.04, 95% CI: 2.72, 9.35; P<0.0001), where those who knew bed nets prevent malaria were significantly more likely to use nets too. Conclusions High bed net availability does not necessarily mean higher coverage or bed net use. Household income, house type and knowledge of the ability of bed nets to prevent malaria are all independent factors that influence bed net use among Jinuo Ethnic Minority.


The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank. The Asian Development Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data presented.


Despite tremendous progress seen in the computational fluid dynamics community for the past few decades, numerical tools are still too slow for the simulation of practical flow problems, consuming thousands or even millions of computational core-hours. To enable feasible multi-disciplinary analysis and design, the numerical techniques need to be accelerated by orders of magnitude. Reduced-order modeling has been considered one promising approach for such purposes. Recently, non-intrusive reduced-order modeling has drawn great interest in the scientific computing community due to its flexibility and efficiency and undergoes rapid development at present with different approaches emerging from various perspectives. In this paper, a brief review of non-intrusive reduced-order modeling in the context of fluid problems is performed involving three key aspects: i.e. dimension reduction of the solution space, surrogate models, and sampling strategies. Furthermore, non-intrusive reduced-order modelings regarding to some interesting topics such as unsteady flows, shock-dominating flows are also discussed. Finally, discussions on future development of non-intrusive reduced-order modeling for fluid problems are presented.


We propose a stable and efficient particle‐based method for simulating highly viscous fluids that can generate coiling and buckling phenomena and handle variable viscosity. In contrast to previous methods that use explicit integration, our method uses an implicit formulation to improve the robustness of viscosity integration, therefore enabling use of larger time steps and higher viscosities. We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to solve the full form of viscosity, constructing a sparse linear system with a symmetric positive definite matrix, while exploiting the variational principle that automatically enforces the boundary condition on free surfaces. We also propose a new method for extracting coefficients of the matrix contributed by second‐ring neighbor particles to efficiently solve the linear system using a conjugate gradient solver. Several examples demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our implicit formulation over previous methods and illustrate the versatility of our method.


Plant biodiversity studies of three coastal wetlands in Ghana were made. The wetlands are the Sakumo, Muni-Pomadze and Densu Delta Ramsar sites. Each wetland is made up of a flood plain which consists of salt marsh (about 20%), mangrove swamps (between 15 and 30%), fresh water swamp (about 40 - 45%), and in some cases grassland (20 to 40%). Densu delta site had the highest number of species (136) as against 133 for Muni-Pomadze and 114 for Sakumo. Forty plant families were represented by their species in all the sites. However certain families were restricted only to specific sites. Nine of such families were in Muni-Pomadze, 3 in Sakumo and 2 in Densu Delta. These families and their species add uniqueness to each of the sites studied. Sesuvium portulacastrum, Paspalum vaginatum and Sporobolus virginicus were characteristic for salt marsh and fresh water swamps while Avicennia africana was the dominant species in the mangrove swamp. For the strand, Ipomoea pes-caprae, Canavalia rosea and Opuntia vulgaris were the characteristic species. For the scrub vegetation, various woody plant species dominated at the different Ramsar sites. However, Azadirachta indica, a naturalised tree species, was very well represented in all sites, and indeed dominated in the Sakumo Ramsar site. It is expected that these studies will lay the strong scientific basis for the future management and strategic plans for the sustainable development of these three Ramsar sites in Ghana. JOURNAL OF THE GHANA SCIENCE ASSOCIATION Volume 1 Number 3, July (1999) pp. 147-149


This paper measures the size and incomes of six major social classes across the Industrial Revolution using social tables for England and Wales in 1688, 1759, 1798, 1846, and 1867. Lindert and Williamson famously revised these tables, and this paper extends their work in three directions: First, servants are removed from middle and upper class households in the tables of King, Massie, and Colquhoun and tallied separately. Second, estimates are made for the same tables of the number and incomes of women and children employed in the various occupations, and, third, incomes are broken down into rents, profits, and employment income. These extensions to the tables allow variables to be computed that can be checked against independent estimates as a validation exercise. The tables are retabulated in a standardized set of six social groups to highlight the changing structure of society across the industrial revolution. Gini coefficients are computed from the social tables to measure inequality. These measures confirm that Britain traversed a 'Kuznets curve' in this period. Changes in overall inequality are related to the changing fortunes of the major social classes.


The Hadza, an ethnic group indigenous to northern Tanzania, are one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations. Archaeology shows 130,000 years of hunting and gathering in their land but Hadza are rapidly losing areas vital to their way of life. This book offers a unique opportunity to capture a disappearing lifestyle. Blurton Jones interweaves data from ecology, demography and evolutionary ecology to present a comprehensive analysis of the Hadza foragers. Discussion centres on expansion of the adaptationist perspective beyond topics customarily studied in human behavioural ecology, to interpret a wider range of anthropological concepts. Analysing behavioural aspects, with a specific focus on relationships and their wider impact on the population, this book reports the demographic consequences of different patterns of marriage and the availability of helpers such as husbands, children, and grandmothers. Essential for researchers and graduate students alike, this book will challenge preconceptions of human sociobiology.


Quantum computing set a goal to harness the quantum laws of physics and create computers more powerful than ever imagined. Different technologies can be chosen to implement quantum bits (qubits), each with their advantages and drawbacks. The idea of combining different technologies then seems natural in order to come up with an optimal quantum computer. In this sense, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) seem to be the perfect marriage. Indeed, while electron spins can perform quantum gates within nanoseconds, they have to fight very fast decoherence phenomena, the nuclear spins, on the other hand, require longer electromagnetic pulses to be rotated but can be controlled longer without loss of quantum information. Using electron spins as actuators and nuclear spins as memory then appears as the optimal use of this hybrid system. Another fact accounting for this association is that the control of the system through the electron spin requires techniques very similar to the well-known NMR ones. This work focuses on characterizing as precisely as possible the Hamiltonian of a hybrid spin system in a solid-state single crystal, especially the electron-nuclear interactions, to perform high-fidelity control in a home-built pulsed ESR spectrometer. Using this knowledge, we show that we can choose the orientation of the magnetic field with respect to our crystal to obtain optimal experimental conditions. Indeed, with a good knowledge of the Hamiltonian of the system, we want demonstrate high-fidelity quantum control. The final aim of this work is to dynamically supply highly polarized ancilla qubits that can be used in a Quantum Error Correction (QEC) experiment by implementing heat bath algorithmic cooling using a cold electron spin bath. This is an important step towards demonstrating the viability of spin systems for building quantum computers.


BACKGROUND AND AIM: Physical activity (PA) is important to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Beneficial effects of activity have been reported for people with Parkinson's disease (PD), and there is evidence to suggest it may be neuroprotective. Most people with PD do not achieve the recommended levels of PA, although the reasons for this are unclear [1]. It is important to understand the drivers of PA especially in the early stages of the disease before the secondary effects of PD are established. The aim of this study was to examine change in PA over 18 months in an incident cohort of PD and to identify possible drivers of PA.

METHODS: For this preliminary analysis 35 people with PD [mean (SD) age 67.4 (10.4) years; 14 females; UPDRS III 23(10)] were recruited through an ongoing longitudinal study (ICICLE-PD). PA was measured for 7 days at baseline and 18 months, using a uniaxial accelerometer (ActivPal TM1,10Hz). PA outcomes included: 1) pattern of accumulation of activity (alpha); 2) number of steps accumulated in walking bouts of 100 steps (long); and 3) variability of stepping bout duration. A range of cognitive, motor, affective and quality of life outcomes were measured, including PD questionnaire (PDQ), the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), UPDRSIII and the Activities Balance Self- Confidence Scale (ABC). Multiple regression analysis was used to identify independent predictors of change in PA.

RESULTS: At 18 months, there was a non-significant trend for people with PD to accumulate more steps in shorter bouts and fewer in longer bouts. Results from multiple regression showed that younger age, less severe PDQ stigma and lower PDQ mobility scores were independent predictors of a decrease in the number of steps accumulated in long bouts (F (5, 34) = 7.00, p < 0.001), with the model explaining 47% of the variance. In addition, more severe PDQ stigma and mobility scores were independent predictors of a decrease in steps accumulated in moderate bouts, total time spent walking and alpha. Post-hoc analysis showed these findings were independent of change in working status and medication. There were no significant independent predictors of change in variability of bout duration or number of steps accumulated in short bouts.

CONCLUSION: Age, stigma and mobility are significant drivers of change in PA in early PD. This behavioural change reflects an early response to PD, even in those whose levels of physical activity should arguably be least affected. Future analysis will be performed on a larger cohort and compared with aged-matched controls to gain a greater understanding of the motor and non-motor drivers of PA in PD.


The Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region has experienced dramatic gains in health and life expectancy in the past century. Yet hundreds of millions of people in the region are still at risk of contracting at least one Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD), a class of diseases that cause chronic suffering and disabilities, impede physical and social development, and result in stigmatization of people living in poverty. Unfortunately, many existing programs designed to combat NTDs are underfunded, do not collaborate with each other, and are not integrated with the general health system and other sectors vital for addressing risk factors.This book analyzes the efforts made by the Neglected Tropical Disease Initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC NTD Initiative) to control or eliminate these dreadful diseases through integrated NTD programs that address multiple diseases by combining interventions from health, water and sanitation, education, and other sectors in a unified, coordinated way. It shares the LAC NTD Initiatives experiences advocating for the financing, design, and implementation of integrated programs to combat the diseases, and it highlights several important lessons learned and challenges confronted throughout the process. Unlike previous works, this book employs a single conceptual framework to compare and contrast the integration of projects implemented in different contexts. The experiences, case studies, and analyses presented here offer ideas and best practices for building partnerships for promoting NTD control, and for integrating the management structures, financing arrangements, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation activities of NTD projects and programs. Accordingly, the LAC NTD Initiative believes that this book is a valuable resource for donors, advocates, policy makers and program managers who are working to control and eliminate NTDs in LAC and around the world.


Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay--the former focusing on life's definition, the latter on life's entitlements. Reframing Rights argues that this period of transformative change in law and the life sciences should be considered "bioconstitutional."Reframing Rights explores the evolving relationship of biology, biotechnology, and law through a series of national and cross-national case studies. Sheila Jasanoff maps out the conceptual territory in a substantive editorial introduction, after which the contributors offer "snapshots" of developments at the frontiers of biotechnology and the law. Chapters examine such topics as national cloning and xenotransplant policies; the politics of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, and Italy; DNA profiling and DNA databases in criminal law; clinical trials in India and the United States; the GM crop controversy in Britain; and precautionary policymaking in the European Union. These cases demonstrate changes of constitutional significance in the relations among human bodies, selves, science, and the state.


Assessments of oil and gas potential provide insight into future energy use. With regard to undiscovered resources, this paper contrasts the approach of pure statistical extrapolation with an alternate approach based on geological study of petroleum systems combined with a study of the exploration history of the assessed area. With regard to reserve growth, this paper contrasts a simplified approach with an approach relying on more detailed analysis of the data. An approach to estimating undiscovered resources using pure statistical extrapolation is quick, inexpensive and requires relatively little data and few personnel. Subjective judgment is not avoided, however, in that the choice of one assessment methodology over another is, in itself, very subjective. By calculating resource estimates based on a limited number of variables, statistical extrapolation ignores critical types of information. These methodologies commonly rely on assumptions that production history curves are simplistic, despite evidence to the contrary. Pure statistical extrapolation methodologies also inappropriately apply play-level exploration trends to larger features such as basins or countries. Reserve growth, the additions to booked reserves of previously discovered fields, is quantitatively a large portion of the potential additions to oil and gas supply. Reserve growth is not just a US phenomenon, but has been demonstrated in many countries. Even estimates that, by definition, should grow 50% of the time and shrink 50% of the time, grow much more often than they shrink. Nor was it brought about merely by OPEC countries trying to increase their production quotas. Although M. King Hubbert's work was advanced for his time, the reported success of his prediction of the year of peak US oil production has been overrated and is more than balanced by a lack of success in other predictions. The focus on the year of peak world oil production in Hubbert's methodology distracts attention from the more important questions of what the real constraints on increased production are, and how regional distribution of resources has a great effect on economics and politics world-wide.