Background: Fluoride exposures have not been established for pregnant women who live in regions with and without community water fluoridation. Objective: Our aim was to measure urinary fluoride levels during pregnancy. We also assessed the contribution of drinking-water and tea consumption habits to maternal urinary fluoride (MUF) concentrations and evaluated the impact of various dilution correction standards, including adjustment for urinary creatinine and specific gravity (SG). Methods: We measured MUF concentrations in spot samples collected in each trimester of pregnancy from 1,566 pregnant women in the Maternal–Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals cohort. We calculated intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) to assess variability in MUF concentrations across pregnancy. We used regression analyses to estimate associations between MUF levels, tea consumption, and water fluoride concentrations as measured by water treatment plants. Results: Creatinine-adjusted MUF values (mean±SD; milligrams per liter) were almost two times higher for pregnant women living in fluoridated regions (0.87±0.50) compared with nonfluoridated regions (0.46±0.34; p<0.001). MUF values tended to increase over the course of pregnancy using both unadjusted values and adjusted values. Reproducibility of the unadjusted and adjusted MUF values was modest (ICC range=0.37–0.40). The municipal water fluoride level was positively associated with creatinine-adjusted MUF (B=0.52, 95% CI: 0.46, 0.57), accounting for 24% of the variance after controlling for covariates. Higher MUF concentrations correlated with numbers of cups of black (r=0.31–0.32 but not green tea (r=0.04–0.06). Urinary creatinine and SG correction methods were highly correlated (r=0.91) and were interchangeable in models examining predictors of MUF. Conclusion: Community water fluoridation is a major source of fluoride exposure for pregnant women living in Canada. Urinary dilution correction with creatinine and SG were shown to be interchangeable for our sample of pregnant women. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP3546


Schizophrenia is one of the most traumatic psychiatric disorders, both for the affected person and their family. It also carries an unfortunate stigma and suffers from frequent misinterpretation by the popular media. The disorder usually manifests itself through significant periods of hallucinations, bizarre delusions, and disorganized behaviour, but the individuals who suffer from this brain disorder are not generally violent, and do have periods of remission. However it is often difficult for these individuals to maintain a regular lifestyle and relationships at home and at work, and many individuals with schizophrenia end up unable to live independently or, worse, homeless. This new edition in the popular Facts series provides a concise and up-to-date account of the underlying causes and symptoms of schizophrenia, as well as current theories about the disorder. The authors look at all the current treatment options, both medical and psychological, together with likely side-effects and the problem of compliance with treatment. The role of the family and the community in caring for individuals with schizophrenia is also considered. The authors are experienced psychiatrists and psychologists with many years' experience in the treatment and study of schizophrenia. This book will provide a welcome source of information for individuals with schizophrenia, their family members, and those involved in caring for them.


Friendsourcing games aim to collect useful information about individuals by targeting their socially connected groups or friends. The current method of eliciting information is to pose direct questions to friends and expect a truthful response in return. However, such an approach not only becomes monotonous after some time but also suffers from problems like social awkwardness and reticence and thus, affecting the accuracy of the generated responses. In this paper, we present Power of Friends, a novel approach to friendsourcing games, which involves identifying the unanimous opinion of all the friends about a question related to an individual. We tested our proposed approach with seven different groups and were able to generate 47 facts about members of the selected groups. Participants particularly enjoyed the guesswork and interactive elements of the game. Based on the feedback obtained from the study, we propose four strategies for designing similar friendsourcing games.


Ethiopia is endowed with water and has a high runoff generation area compared to many countries, but the total stored water only goes up to approximately 36BCM. The problem of water shortage in Ethiopia emanates from the seasonality of rainfall and the lack of infrastructure for storage to capture excess runoff during flood seasons. Based on this premise, a method for a syndicate use of topography, land use and vegetation was applied to locate potential surface water storing sites. The steady-state Topographic Wetness Index (TWI) was used to represent the spatial distribution of water flow and water stagnating across the study area and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to detect surface water through multispectral analysis. With this approach, a number of water storing sites were identified in three categories: primary sources (water bodies based), secondary sources (Swampy/wetland based) and tertiary sources (the land based). A sample volume analysis for the 120354 water storing sites in category two, gives a 44.92BCM potential storing capacity with average depth of 4 m that improves the annual storage capacity of the country to 81BCM (8.6 % of annual renewable water sources). Finally, the research confirmed the TWI and NDVI based approach for water storing sites works without huge and complicated earth work; it is cost effective and has the potential of solving complex water resource challenges through spatial representation of water resource systems. Furthermore, the application of remote sensing captures temporal diversity and includes repetitive archives of data, enabling the monitoring of areas, even those that are inaccessible, at regular intervals.


The purpose of this thesis was to examine ways to adapt common 2D segmentation techniques to work with 3D grids. The focus of the thesis became how to automate and improve the performance of region growing in 3D grids. After examining relevant literature and developing a tool to run experiments, a simple automatic region grower for 3D grids was developed. Quantitative performance measures and qualitative analysis of the segmentation results were performed. This algorithm was then used as a baseline for comparison when developing a more advanced region grower for 3D grids based on the seeded region grower (SRG) for 2D grids. This new algorithm was then modified to improve its speed and later extended to allow fully automatic operation by automating the placement of starting seeds. It was found that for the algorithms that were extended to a 3D grid, the main challenge was the resources needed by these algorithms when operating on high resolution grids. It was found that even though there have been steady and rapid improvements in consumer hardware since the original region growing algorithms were used on 2D grids, the very large amounts of data resulting from an extension from surface grids to volume grids requires that special attention is paid to handling resources effectively. It was further revealed that what was considered the best data structures and algorithms for the SRG algorithm when it was first introduced, is not necessarily the best choice on todays computing hardware. Also, the conclusion is drawn that with regards to performance, it is now possible to segment volumes approximately as fast as surfaces were segmented in the early 1990s.


Resumen The purpose of this descriptive survey was to investigate the risk perceptions of smoking in a sample of 1,510 Spanish adolescents (49.1% males; mean age = 14.03; SD = 1.28). In addition, the present research categorised adolescents into one of the four stages of smoking acquisition, as described by the Transtheoretical Model of Change (TMC): Precontemplation (not thinking about trying smoking in the next 6 months), Contemplation (thinking about trying smoking in the next 6 months), Preparation (thinking about starting smoking in the next 30 days) and Action (smokers), by gender and age. The results showed that age and risk perceptions are important variables in the progression through the stages of change towards regular tobacco consumption (Action stage). These results clearly demonstrate the importance of starting antismoking campaigns at an early age to prevent smoking acquisition or the thought of starting in the near future. These findings also highlight the need to continuously remind adolescents about the negative consequences of smoking.


ABSTRACT In the Norwegian oceanic fleet, whitefish onboard processing creates a great amount of rest raw materials. Cod heads are nutritious and a good source for production of high-quality marine peptides. Frozen cod heads, captured by trawl or longline, were evaluated based on the lightness and redness in the neck cut to compare the quality in heads from the different fishing gears. The heads were subjected to enzymatic hydrolysis. The hydrolysates have been chemically and sensory characterized. There was no significant difference in quality or chemical and sensory characteristics based on type of fishing gear. The resulting hydrolysates were of high quality, although moderately bitter. The study demonstrates that frozen cod heads from the oceanic fleet can be an excellent source of high-quality proteins for human consumption.


Population synthesis models (PSMs) are fundamental tools to study the star formation history and IMF of unresolved stellar populations using spectral features. This work presents a new set of PSMs constructed using theoretical isochrones and two state-ofthe-art synthetic spectral libraries. The BT-Settl and Munari libraries were chosen for their ability to predict the observed values of Lick-type and IMF-sensitive indices in individual stars of the solar neighbourhood. The BT-Settl library was used to sample the cool main sequence stars and the Munari library for the rest of the evolutionary phases. The PSMs cover a range of metallicities with [Fe/H]= 0, –1.31 and –1.81 for scaled-solar and _-enhanced metal mixtures.

The models were used to study the behaviour of the IMF indices defined in the literature and the results are in good agreement with what other PSMs have determined. The PSMs in this work predict a strong degeneracy between age, metallicity and IMF. I used the models to study which are the main evolutionary phases contributing to each IMF-sensitive index and found that most indices reach their final integrated values before the turn off. The post-main sequence stars contribute mainly to the continuum of these bands. Uncertainties in the the effective temperature of the isochrones can affect IMF estimates.

The PSMs were applied to extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) and early-type galaxies (ETGs) using data from the literature. I determined the ages, metallicities and IMFs of these systems using index combinations in the optical and infrared. I explored how the morphology of the Horizontal Branch (HB) and dynamical evolution (which are key uncertainties in the modelling of GCs) can affect the IMF predictions. In a population with a Milky Way IMF, dynamical evolution can make the IMF indices mimic a bottom-light IMF. HB morphology has no impact on the IMF estimates at low [Fe/H]. In the IMF index-index diagrams for GCs, the results are significantly affected by the unknown sodium abundances of these systems. Using the PSMs in this work the best index combination to determine the IMF is CaH1 and TiO2. The ETGs and the [Fe/H]=0 GCs appear to have a bottom-heavy IMF with x _ 3:0. These results are discussed in the work.


Directing attention to a region of visual space facilitates the processing of relevant sensory information, resulting in increased neural and BOLD activity in areas of the brain that process this sensory information. This process is thought to be mediated by a frontoparietal "attentional control" network that biases processing in visual cortex. Electrical microstimulation of frontal area FEF in macaques selectively enhances responses in area V4, and also leads to improved behavior (Moore, Fallah 2001, 2004; Armstrong, Moore 2007). If frontoparietal regions such as the FEF are responsible for the differential modulations in early visual cortex across time, then the magnitude of frontoparietal activity should track the magnitude of attentional modulations in early visual cortex on a trial-by-trial basis. Here, we attempted to test this hypothesis using fMRI. Participants directed spatial attention to either the left or right visual field on each trial while performing a demanding spatial attention task. Consistent with previous data, we found that frontoparietal responses were high when early visual responses were high across trials (i.e. an overall yoking between frontoparietal and occipital regions). In addition, visual areas in the hemisphere contralateral to the attended stimulus showed reliably larger BOLD responses compared to areas in the ipsilateral hemisphere. We compared the magnitude of frontoparietal activity and the differential activity in visual areas contra and ipsilateral to the attended stimulus. However, we found no evidence that the overall magnitude of responses in frontoparietal regions track the magnitude of differential attentional responses in early visual cortex. These findings indicate that the univariate magnitude in frontoparietal ROIs is not related to the magnitude of attention effects in visual cortex, at least as measured with the BOLD signal. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


There are several CPU scheduling algorithms like FCFS, SRTN,RR , priority etc. Scheduling decision of these algorithms are based on parameters which are assumed to be crisp. However, in many circumstances these parameters are vague. The vagueness of these parameters suggests that scheduler should use fuzzy logic in scheduling the jobs. A fuzzy priority CPU scheduling algorithm has been proposed. This proposed algorithm improves the priority based CPU scheduling algorithm as obvious from simulation results.


Online games have gained significant following from Filipino gamers. In this study, the researchers argue that the involvement of the gamers have led to the formation of a virtual subculture, which is composed mainly of the youth. To frame this study, three communication theories were used to explain the online gaming phenomenon. Three qualitative methods were used to gather necessary data: a key-informant interview with a local game developer, focus group discussions with gamers, and participant observation wherein the researchers played with other gamers while observing the online environment. From the data gathered, the researchers were able to find out how gamers define, form and recreate the virtual subculture, as well as how their online identities and the ideas they share help maintain, sustain, develop and expand the said subculture. As this research aims to provide a holistic approach to online gaming, suggested areas for future research and some practical recommendations are also discussed.


Imperforate anus is a birth defect in which the anal opening is absent. This condition develops during the fifth to seventh weeks of pregnancy and the cause is unknown. It affects about one in every 5,000 newborns and is noted to be more common among boys than girls. Imperforate anus is usually present with other birth defects such as vertebral defects, cardiac problems, tracheoesophageal fistula, renal anomalies, and limb abnormalities, collectively known as the VACTERL association. These are classified as low or high type. In the low type, in which the rectum remains close to the skin, there may be associated stenosis of the anus, or the anus may be missing altogether, with the rectum ending in a blind pouch. In the high type, in which the rectum is higher up in the pelvis, there may be a fistula connecting the rectum and the bladder, urethra, or the vagina. The diagnosis is made by performing a physical exam after birth. An x-ray of the abdomen and abdominal ultrasound can help reveal the extent of the abnormalities. Treatment is surgical creation of an opening or new anus to allow stool to pass. The type of surgery differs and depends on whether the anus ends high or low in the pelvis. In the case of a low type, an anal opening is made in a single operation, and the rectum is pulled down to the anus. For high type, surgical correction is performed in three stages. The first procedure is bringing the intestine out of the abdomen creating a stoma; the second procedure is pulling the rectum down to the anus where a new anal opening is created; and the third procedure is closure of the intestinal stoma. Here, we present a case of a 9-month-old male who was born with a high-type imperforate anus. A posterior sagittal anorectoplasty (PSARP) was done as the second of three stages of treatment. The first was an emergency sigmoid colostomy, and the third will be to close the colostomy in about 6 to 8 weeks following the PSARP.


This chapter draws on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and its application to translation (Gutt 2000) to investigate processing effort in translation in relation to two different types of encodings, namely conceptual and procedural encodings (Blakemore 2002; Wilson 2011). Building on the experimental paradigm of data triangulation in translation process research (Alves 2003; Jakobsen 2005), it analyses the translation processes of eight professional translators when performing a direct and an inverse translation task. The analysis focuses on the number and types of encodings found in micro/macro translation units (Alves and Vale 2009; 2011). Results suggest that processing effort in translation is greater in instances of procedural than conceptual encodings.


With 20 million installs a day, third-party apps are a major reason for the popularity and addictiveness of Facebook. Unfortunately, hackers have realized the potential of using apps for spreading malware and spam. The problem is already significant, as we find that at least 13% of apps in our dataset are malicious. So far, the research community has focused on detecting malicious posts and campaigns.
 In this paper, we ask the question: given a Facebook application, can we determine if it is malicious? Our key contribution is in developing FRAppE---Facebook's Rigorous Application Evaluator---arguably the first tool focused on detecting malicious apps on Facebook. To develop FRAppE, we use information gathered by observing the posting behavior of 111K Facebook apps seen across 2.2 million users on Facebook. First, we identify a set of features that help us distinguish malicious apps from benign ones. For example, we find that malicious apps often share names with other apps, and they typically request fewer permissions than benign apps.
 Second, leveraging these distinguishing features, we show that FRAppE can detect malicious apps with 99.5% accuracy, with no false positives and a low false negative rate (4.1%). Finally, we explore the ecosystem of malicious Facebook apps and identify mechanisms that these apps use to propagate. Interestingly, we find that many apps collude and support each other; in our dataset, we find 1,584 apps enabling the viral propagation of 3,723 other apps through their posts. Long-term, we see FRAppE as a step towards creating an independent watchdog for app assessment and ranking, so as to warn Facebook users before installing apps.


"Fresh from practice, clerking, or sometimes even law school itself, the newly-appointed law professor is injected into the classroom with the incredible assumption that he or she will know what to do in front of a class and, therefore, needs no guidance in the art of teaching." Without formal guidance, new law professors often adopt the only approach to legal teaching they know–the same Socratic method employed when they were students.This short piece includes an account of freshman mistakes, lucky breaks, and the beginnings of a teaching philosophy. It includes resources to guide a new professor's decisions in choosing a textbook, developing a teaching philosophy, providing student feedback, and self evaluation. Part II, "the first day," suggests some rather obvious and immediate objectives for a new professor's first day of class – like, don't forget to wear pants. Part III, "the first semester," focuses on lessons learned the hard way and Part IV, "the first year," identifies a few strategies for improvement given the struggles inherent in the first year.


Two new acanthodian species are described from the Spitsbergen Old Red Sandstone. Mesacanthus grandis n.sp. is represented by an articulated specimen showing unornamented body scales, elongate modified tectal scales, and a mesacanthid type of scapula. The second species, Xylacanthus minutus n.sp. is represented by a right branch of the mandible in lingual view, showing a single row of triangular striated teeth with an anterior flange. Phylogenetic affinities of these forms are discussed as well as their paleoenvironmental significance.


I have for some time found it increasingly difficult to resist a conclusion so heretical that the mere acceptance of it may seem a proof of lunacy. Yet the failure of a recent attempt to resist it has led me to want to confess the heresy. And at any rate a statement of my reasons may provoke a refutation.


Many calls for reform in school mathematics emphasize number sense (Australian Education Council, 1991; Cockroft, 1982; Japanese Ministry of Education, 1989; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989; 2000; Swedish Ministry of Education and Science, 1994). But what is number sense? According to Case (1998), "Number sense is difficult to define, but easy to recognize. Students with good number sense can move seamlessly between the real world of quantities and the mathematical world of numbers and numerical expressions. They can invent their own procedures ... represent the same number in multiple ways.... recognize benchmark numbers and number patterns.... and gross numerical errors...." (p. 1). I am using number sense to refer to "the general understanding of number and operations, along with the ability and inclination to use this understanding in flexible ways to make mathematical judgments and to develop useful and efficient strategies for managing numerical situations" (Reys & Reys, McIntosh, Emanuelsson & Johansson, and Der, 1999, p. 61). Most research on number sense has, focused on "average" children's number sense (e.g. Reys & Reys et al., 1999; Turner, 1996; Yang, 2002), while some studies have focused on the number sense of children with learning disabilities (e.g. Gersten & Chard, 1999; Griffin, Case, and Siegler, 1994). However, studies on teachers' number sense (e.g. Ma, 1999; Menon, 1999) have been limited, and hence this study serves to augment knowledge about teachers' number sense, specifically preservice teachers' number sense. Participants and Methodology This study involved 142 preservice teachers from four groups of mathematics methods classes/sections I taught. These students were in a teaching credential program, which included 8 credit hours of mathematics education, leading to a K-8 teaching certification. Since these preservice teachers were going to teach mathematics that can be considered foundational to students in K-8, I believed it would be beneficial for me to find out these preservice teachers' mathematical competence, specifically their own number sense. Many of them (almost 90%) had not taken algebra and geometry in high school. But all of them had taken mandatory mathematics content courses for teachers (that included algebra and geometry), taught by the mathematics department faculty of the university. (In this university, the math methods courses are taught by the college of education faculty, but the math content courses are taught by math department faculty.) In spite of their taking, and passing, the mandatory university math content courses, results from an informal survey revealed that about 85% of them still lacked confidence in teaching middle school mathematics, mainly because they were unsure of their ability to successfully do mathematics content at that level. On the first day of their mathematics education class, these 142 preservice students were given a 10 item, multiple choice paper and pencil test on number sense. For each item, they were given space on the test paper itself, to give written explanations for their answers. They were given 25 minutes to complete the test. The 10 items were selected from those used in previous studies on number sense (e. g. Menon, 1999; Reys & Reys et al., 1999). The components of number sense (also based on previous studies), together with the relevant item number assigned to test them, are given next: 1. To make mathematical judgments (J), for example, by determining appropriateness and sufficiency of information--item #s 1 & 2. 2. To develop useful and efficient strategies for managing numerical situations (E), for example, by using estimation and number relationship--item #s 3 to 5. 3. The general understanding of number and operations (U), especially those related to fractions and decimals--item #s 6 to 10. …


Kathmandu Valley, where Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal is located, is among the fastest-growing urban agglomerations in South-Asia. Rapid urbanization has resulted in rising competition for peri-urban water, and increased peri-urban water insecurity and related conflicts in this rapidly urbanizing valley. However, these issues of increasing peri-urban water insecurity, how diverse actors in the peri-urban context experience and deal with these changes, and how these changes affect social relations and the "resilience" of communities in the increasingly diverse and dynamic peri-urban spaces have received little attention, both in academic and policy-oriented studies. Taking a multi-sited ethnographic case study approach, this study contributes to a better understanding of processes, mechanisms and consequences of peri-urbanization, their differential impacts on water access, water rights, and water security of various actors, how these changes co-produce conflicts and cooperation, perpetuate insecurities, exclusion, and inequalities and what these processes of and responses to socio-environmental changes mean for "community resilience".


The reform of the CAP in 1999, with extensive revisions in 2003 (Council regulation 1782/2003), was constructed around three central ideas: decoupling, cross-compliance of payments, and modulation. Decoupling, which is specifically analysed in this article, is intended to eliminate all aid linked in one way or another to production, in favour of aid which is completely independent of the production activity. It is encapsulated in the new 2003 regulation by the introduction of the right to a single farm payment (SFP) proportional to farm area, independent of production activities. These new arrangements have been accompanied by much variation in the application of the reform, and the member states have taken great advantage of the extensive room for manoeuvre inherent in the new regulation. This is revealed in the extreme diversity of choices made, both in the degree of decoupling (total or partial) and in the methods of calculating the SFPs (historical or regionalised references). In order to better understand the reasons for and practical details of the differing national choices, this article presents a synthesis of the results of a comparative study of how the SFPs are managed in four large EU 15 countries (Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy), chosen because of the diversity in their approaches to decoupling and the calculation and trade of the SFPs. Objective economic data specific to each country and national political context are combined to e on the evolution of production systems and xplain the observations, taking into account both the implications of how agricultural holdings, production systems and land are categorised, and the expected effects structures.


Movement and location data collected via satellite-linked telemetry tags are often used to inform spatial conservation measures for threatened marine populations. Most applied telemetry studies aim to reconstruct the continuous utilization distribution underlying reported locations to characterize the relative intensity of space use. However, commonly applied space use estimators do not directly estimate the underlying distribution of interest and, perhaps more importantly, ignore correlations in space and time that may bias estimates. Here we describe how geostatistical mixed effects models, which explicitly account for spatial and/or temporal correlation using Gaussian random fields, can be applied to estimate utilization distributions from satellite telemetry data. We use simulation testing to compare the performance of the proposed models with several conventional space use estimators. Our results suggest that geostatistical mixed effects models outperform conventional estimators when the number of tag transmissions changes over time, a common source of bias in satellite telemetry studies that is rarely addressed. We illustrate this approach via application to satellite telemetry location observations collected from 271 large juvenile and adult loggerhead sea turtles in the western North Atlantic from 2004 to 2016. We demonstrate how such models can be used to predict the overall spatial distribution of tagged individuals, as well as seasonal shifts in densities at smaller time scales. For tagged loggerheads, overall predicted densities were greatest in the shelf waters along the US Atlantic coast from Florida to North Carolina, but monthly predictions highlight the importance of summer foraging habitat in the Mid-Atlantic Bight.


We adopt an innovation-driven framework and investigate the sparse/compressible distributions obtained by linearly measuring or expanding continuous-domain stochastic models. Starting from the first principles, we show that all such distributions are necessarily infinitely divisible. This property is satisfied by many distributions used in statistical learning, such as Gaussian, Laplace, and a wide range of fat-tailed distributions, such as student's-t and α-stable laws. However, it excludes some popular distributions used in compressed sensing, such as the Bernoulli-Gaussian distribution and distributions, that decay like exp (- O(|x|p)) for 1 <; p <; 2. We further explore the implications of infinite divisibility on distributions and conclude that tail decay and unimodality are preserved by all linear functionals of the same continuous-domain process. We explain how these results help in distinguishing suitable variational techniques for statistically solving inverse problems like denoising.


Stress regarded as a major cause of body destruction. Stress can trigger the gluconeogenesis mechanism that initiates new glucose production from another molecule in the body's storage tissue depot. When the stress occurs, the body gives a 'fight or flight' response. In this condition, the body prioritizes to survive rather than multiplying itself. The reproductive system categorized as the highest rank in the body needs pyramid. Therefore, the reproductive system is on the first line to be sacrificed when the stress occurs. This research was conducted to observe the potential mice's reproductive adaptation from mild stress using dark light cycle alteration. Mice considered as the small laboratory animal with rapid metabolism rate. This study expected to be able to enrich the information of mice's biology reproductive adaptation.


Why do humans make errors on seemingly trivial perceptual decisions? It has been shown that such errors occur in part because the decision process (evidence accumulation) is initiated before selective attention has isolated the relevant sensory information from salient distractors. Nevertheless, it is typically assumed that subjects increase accuracy by prolonging the decision process rather than delaying decision onset. To date it has not been tested whether humans can strategically delay decision onset to increase response accuracy. To address this question we measured the time course of selective attention in a motion interference task using a novel variant of the response signal paradigm. Based on these measurements we estimated time-dependent drift rate and showed that subjects should in principle be able trade speed for accuracy very effectively by delaying decision onset. Using the time-dependent estimate of drift rate we show that subjects indeed delay decision onset in addition to raising response threshold when asked to stress accuracy over speed in a free reaction version of the same motion-interference task. These findings show that decision onset is a critical aspect of the decision process that can be adjusted to effectively improve decision accuracy.


This introductory article aims to clarify why soft law is an interesting field to explore from a legal anthropological perspective and to point out a number of issues this theme section suggests taking into consideration. The article provides the context for the theme section, inserting soft law within global legal concerns and processes. It outlines the emergence of the notion of soft law, and summarizes the controversies it has raised among legal scholars and law practitioners. Then it explains why, despite the elusive character of the notion and its uncertain normative status, as soon as we move beyond a number of emblematic concerns for law practitioners, soft law mechanisms and practices appear to be a vantage point to explore the emerging transnational legal order, and particularly the relations among state, supra-state, and non-state (private) forms of regulation. Finally, the article introduces the articles in the special section of this issue by highlighting the ways in which they empirically deal with soft law practices and global legal pluralism in a variety of social fields and contexts, using ethnographic sensitivity and imagination.


Virtually all blood-contacting medical implants and devices initiate immunological events in the form of thrombosis and inflammation. Typically, patients receiving such implants are also given large doses of anticoagulants, which pose a high risk and a high cost to the patient. Thus, the design and development of surfaces with improved hemocompatibility and reduced dependence on anticoagulation treatments is paramount for the success of blood-contacting medical implants and devices. In the past decade, the hemocompatibility of super-repellent surfaces (i.e., surfaces that are extremely repellent to liquids) has been extensively investigated because such surfaces greatly reduce the blood-material contact area, which in turn reduces the area available for protein adsorption and blood cell or platelet adhesion, thereby offering the potential for improved hemocompatibility. In this review, we critically examine the progress made in characterizing the hemocompatibility of super-repellent surfaces, identify the unresolved challenges and highlight the opportunities for future research on developing medical implants and devices with super-repellent surfaces.


To elucidate development of shear-induced damage in erythrocytes, it is necessary to visualize erythrocytes under high-shear flow. Therefore, we prototyped a special shear flow chamber with a counter-rotating mechanism consisting of a transparent acrylic cone and a glass plate. The flow chamber was mounted on an inverted microscope and illuminated by a 350-W metal halide lamp. This experimental system made it possible for a digital video camera to record through the microscopes' objective lens the rheological behavior in shear flow of erythrocytes diluted in highly viscous polyvinyl pyrrolidone. We successfully visualized the blood cells' ellipsoidal deformation response to an unphysiological, high shear stress of 288 Pa, their shift into abnormal rheological behavior, and final collapse. When abnormality first appeared, the membrane surface of some ellipsoidal erythrocytes started undulating and their shape became more asymmetric. Finally, the erythrocytes appeared to fragment, although the fragments continued tumbling together suggesting that they were all still connected. One such abnormal erythrocyte became segmented through collision with other cell. The undulation of the membrane surface when erythrocytes experienced trauma suggests possible detachment of the lipid bilayer from the membrane cytoskeleton. As the damage increased, the morphological abnormality of cells became greater with less tank-treading, and then, the erythrocytes started tumbling. This unstable behavior increases the volume of flow region occupied by the erythrocytes and increases the chance that neighboring cells will hit them and break them into segmented pieces. This study clearly showed that the beginning of erythrocytes' morphological abnormality was induced by shear stress.


Absenteeism is increasingly becoming an area of concern for Employers. In these economically challenging times when Employers are focusing on cost cutting across their businesses, absenteeism is an area that is being highlighted as an issue in need of addressing. Because of competitive pressures, Companies can no longer afford to carry absenteeism that they may have tolerated in the past (www.ibec.ie). In 2010, the Irish Business and Employer's Confederation (IBEC) calculated the cost per employee to be €818 per annum resulting in a loss to the Irish exchequer of €1.5 billion (IBEC Absence Survey, 2010).
What is Absenteeism?
Huczynski and Fitzpatrick defined Absence as "the non-attendance of employees for scheduled work when they are expected to attend" (1989, p.4). Harrison and Prices (2003) defined Absence as "the lack of physical presence at a behaviour setting when and where one is expected to be" (Harrison and Prices (2003) as cited by Shapira-Lishchinksy and Rosenblatt, 2003, p.204).
Absence Management is the term used to reduce levels of absenteeism through the introduction of policies and procedures. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found in their Absence Management Survey 2010 that Public Sector employees' average absenteeism levels are 9.7 days per employee per year in comparison to the Private Sector's at 6.6 days. This rate may come under increased scrutiny because of reform in the Irish Public Sector. "High absence levels obviously reduce productivity but also have knock-on effects as other employees may be placed under increased pressure and stress" (CIPD, Absence Management Survey, 2010, p.10).
The subject of Absenteeism has been researched under many different headings over the years. Examples of such Studies eing: "contrasted paid with unpaid absences, organisationally excused with organisationally unexcused absence, genuine with false reasons for absence, voluntary with involuntary" (Huczynski and Fitzpatrick, 1989, p.4). The "science" of Absence Management is a vast topic and encompasses areas of Management Theory such as motivation, organisational behaviour, job satisfaction, employee engagement and communication, costs, measurements and recording processes. Due to the broad nature of the subject and the limitations of the thesis itself, the Author has decided to focus on the causes of absenteeism and will evaluate Company X in terms of what factors impact on absence within the organisation. This will be done through the gathering and dissemination of thoughts and opinions of Senior Management and Employees through a combination of interviews and a questionnaires supplemented by secondary data gathered from academic journals and various employer organisations such as IBEC and CIPD.
The Author will highlight the importance of calculating the cost of absence together with providing information on the measurements available. Absence has been researched by sociologists and psychologists for many years. It draws on motivational and behavioural theories. The Author has researched many of the most common reasons and discussed them.
The chapter on research methodology provides an insight into how the Author conducted the research. The Author is using an organisation she is familiar with as a case study. The organisation will be referred to as Company X. This is to ensure confidentiality regarding the findings and information provided. Following the Author's own research into Company X, she has made recommendations which the Company could adopt to provide a more comprehensive absence management policy.
In conclusion, the Author will summarise her findings based on her own research and that of current academic thinking on the subject.


Although quality communication has been identified as a necessary component to cancer care, communication skills training programs have yet to focus on the unique role of nurses. This study explored communication barriers as reported by seven nurse managers to better identify communication skills needed for oncology nurses to practice patient-centered care. Thematic analysis of transcripts was used to identify barriers to patient and family communication and desirable patient-centered nursing communication skills. Overall, the nurse managers reported that nurses experience patient and family communication difficulties as a result of inconsistent messages to patients and family from other healthcare staff. Physician assumptions about nursing left nurses feeling uncomfortable asking for clarification, creating a barrier to team communication processes. Patient-centered communication and care cannot be actualized for nurses unless team roles are clarified and nurses receive training in how to communicate with physicians, patients, and family. Therefore, the authors of this article created the COMFORT communication training protocol, and key concepts and resources for nurse communication training through COMFORT are detailed in this article.


This four-case series follows a team through a weeklong kaizen event. The A case sets up the situation, and the B (UVA-OM-1259), C (UVA-OM-1260), and D (UVA-OM-1261) cases depict what happens on the successive days. The series teaches such concepts as takt time, line balancing, and managing change. The A case is intended to be handed out as an assignment, and the B, C, and D cases provide real-time exercises for the students.


If one assumes that organizational citizenship behavior (OCBs) have an effect on organizational performance; it makes sense to identify those variables that increase these behaviors in organizational setting. That is probably why most research in this domain has focused on the potential antecedents of OCBs. One of the main reasons for the interest in OCBs is that they are expected to be positively related to measures of organizational effectiveness. The challenges in meeting the demand for highly qualified teachers are essential. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine in what level the teachers at primary schools display contextual performance namely OCB. This paper will also examine the influence of self-leadership and self-efficacy (individual-level variables) and OCB (individual-level performance) according to the perceptions of the teacher itself.


We propose a practical method for synthesizing plausible fire sounds that are synchronized with physically based fire animations. To enable synthesis of combustion sounds without incurring the cost of time-stepping fluid simulations at audio rates, we decompose our synthesis procedure into two components. First, a low-frequency flame sound is synthesized using a physically based combustion sound model driven with data from a visual flame simulation run at a relatively low temporal sampling rate. Second, we propose two bandwidth extension methods for synthesizing additional high-frequency flame sound content: (1) spectral bandwidth extension which synthesizes higher-frequency noise matching combustion sound spectra from theory and experiment; and (2) data-driven texture synthesis to synthesize high-frequency content based on input flame sound recordings. Various examples and comparisons are presented demonstrating plausible flame sounds, from small candle flames to large flame jets.


At present, pharmaceutical researchers are focusing on instantaneous intraoral dispersible technologies as novel drug delivery systems because; they have outstanding advantages over the traditional oral and parenteral routes of drug administration. Some essential natural drugs have low oral bioavailability due to extensive first pass metabolism and pre systemic degradation in the gastrointestinal tract. Now, a cheap rice paper Intraoral Dispersible Film (IDF) has been developed. In this study, formulation was optimized using the experimental factorial design. The IDFs were loaded with model, natural, anti-cancer drugs, Resveratrol and Curcumin with low oral bioavailability. They were evaluated for thickness, folding endurance, swelling behaviour, among others. These related to their drug release properties. Permeation was evaluated using the pig mucosal membrane mounted on a Franz diffusion cell. Taste testing was done to determine acceptability using a taste panel. Sixteen formulations showed variations in their profiles. Formulation 16 proved optimal. The dissolution rate at steady state concentrations of Resveratrol was 29 mg per second and the Permeability coefficient was 389 mg/sec.cm2. Curcumin dissolution rate at steady state concentrations was 0.25 mg per second and the Permeability coefficient was 42.71 mg/sec.cm2. Resveratrol permeability rate was 0.42 mg/sec. And that of Curcumin was 0.14 mg/sec. Resveratrol Flux was 0.21 mg/sec./cm2. Curcumin Flux was 0.14 mg/sec. / cm2. Drug entrapment was 80% for both molecules. The 20 mg of Resveratrol and Curcumin dissolved in 47.6 sec. and 71.4 sec. respectively. In this study, after permeation, a concentration of 6.73 mg/ml of Resveratrol and 0.061 mg/ml of Curcumin were detected after 2 hours of the experiment on administering only 20 mg of each of the drugs suggesting that Curcumin is 100 times less permeable than Resveratrol. The release profile was a burst release. On contrast, Curcumin oral dose of 2 g/kg to rats yielded 1.35 ± 0.23 μg/ml in 0.83 hours and in humans, given the same dose yielded either undetectable or extremely low (0.006 ± 0.005 μg/ml after 1 hour in blood. Two separate monoglucuronide metabolites yielded a Cmax of ~7.5 μm following a single 5.0 g oral dosage of Resveratrol. The key finding was, ex vivo release profiles of the optimized formulation revealed first order release and later zero order. Therefore, it is evident that rice paper IDF could efficiently deliver natural drugs into the systemic circulation intraorally. However, further studies using human subjects need to be performed to prove increased bioavailability in human subjects (Graphical Abstract).


The present thesis (mostly) concerns the application of alternative mathematical methods to understand patterns in human cognition and to model them. The different chapters presented in this thesis show research that concerns the application of quantum probability (QP) theory in the modeling of human decision-making. Quantum probability (QP) theory is a theory for how to assign probabilities to events. QP theory can be thought of as the probability rules from quantum mechanics, without any of the physics. This work is not about the application of quantum physics to brain physiology. Rather, we are interested in QP theory as a mathematical framework for cognitive modelling. This theory is potentially relevant in any behavioural situation that involves uncertainty. QP theory is analogous to classical probability theory, though QP theory and classical probability (CP) theory are founded from different sets of axioms (the Kolmogorov and Dirac/von Neumann axioms respectively) and so are subject to alternative constraints. In this thesis we show that especially over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in decision-making and cognitive models using a quantum probabilistic (QP) framework. We see how this development encompasses publications in major journals (see Pothos and Busemeyer, 2013; Wang et al., 2014; and Yearsley and Pothos, 2014; among others), special issues, and dedicated workshops, as well as several comprehensive books (Busemeyer and Bruza, 2012; Khrennikov, 2010; and Haven and Khrennikov, 2010).

However, uncertainty itself is neither ethical nor unethical – yet it is inherent to most situations in which, for instance, moral judgments and decisions have to be made. For a descriptive understanding of judgment and decisions in moral situations, it is an important lesson to acknowledge both the cognitive side (bounded rationality) and the environment (ecological rationality) – and thus the uncertainty of the world and how the mind deals with it. This thesis also shows significant interest in moral and social psychology. Specifically, we consider present technologies that suggest a need for evaluating alternative contexts for ethical decision-making. How the research on human-machine interaction feeds back into humans' understanding of themselves as moral agents? This key question ultimately relates to the nature of ethical theory itself.

Overall, this dissertation presents and addresses not only standard aspects of decision- making processes, such as similarity judgments (Chapters 1 to 4) or the constructive role of articulating impressions (Chapter 5), but also standard aspects of social psychology, such as moral judgments (Chapters 6 and 7) and game theory (Chapter 8). As stated in the Declarations section, the present thesis is a combination of a standard and a publication- based dissertation.


Occupational fraud is a growing business risk that is causing greater financial losses in small businesses than large businesses.  Business owners lose approximately 5% of their revenues due to occupational fraud.  The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies used by some business owners of small restaurants to reduce occupational fraud.  The fraud triangle theory was the conceptual framework for this study.  Three small restaurant owners from Puerto Rico participated in face-to-face, semi-structured interviews to reveal their successful strategies to minimize fraud.  The data collection process also included business documents and researcher observations that assisted in establishing methodological triangulation.  Using Yin's 5-step process, data were coded and analyzed to identify emergent themes.  The primary emergent themes obtained from data analysis revealed that owner monitoring, analytical procedures, and segregation of duties are effective strategies to minimize employee fraud.  Participants revealed that implementing these strategies may reduce organizational losses associated with the fraud.  The findings of this study may contribute to social change by reducing fraud activities, business failures, unemployment level, and criminality rate while promoting trust between community members and their institutions.


As many instructors have noted, it is challenging to lead a successful microbiology laboratory, especially for students without sufficient prerequisite training such as in pre-allied health/nursing classes. In the community college setting, this is compounded by the lack of adequate resources, especially teaching assistants or others, to help individual students during a laboratory experience. In addition, there is much transition in the student population of the college so asking students who have completed a class to help in this setting is often impractical. To modify our system to allow students to more easily ask questions and get feedback, we designed a student facilitator system. This system allowed each student to be a leader of the team for a particular laboratory experience. Each student was individually trained to be supportive of the team as a whole. This program is useful in that it can be applied to any class-based laboratory setting to provide better student team interactions than if there were no facilitator.


Two of the most significant challenges in the design of blockchain protocols is increasing their transaction processing throughput and minimising latency in terms of transaction settlement. In this work we put forth for the first time a formal execution model that enables to express transaction throughput while supporting formal security arguments regarding safety and liveness. We then introduce parallel-chains, a simple yet powerful non-black-box composition technique for blockchain protocols. We showcase our technique by providing two parallel-chains protocol variants, one for the PoS and one for PoW setting, that exhibit optimal throughput under adaptive fail-stop corruptions while they retain their resiliency in the face of Byzantine adversity assuming honest majority of stake or computational power, respectively. We also apply our parallel-chains composition method to improve settlement latency; combining parallel composition with a novel transaction weighing mechanism we show that it is possible to scale down the time required for a transaction to settle by any given constant while maintaining the same level of security.


Generating functions play a large role in the study of special functions. The present paper deals with the derivation of some novel generating functions of extended Jacobi polynomials by the application of group-theoretic method introduced by Louis Weisner. In fact, by suitably interpreting the index $(n)$ and the parameter $(\beta)$ of the polynomial under consideration we define four linear partial differential operators and on showing that they generate a Lie-algebra, we obtain a new generating relation (3.3) as the main result of our investigation. Furthermore, some generating functions of Laguerre, Hermite, Bessel and Jacobi polynomials are obtained as the special cases of our main result. Some applications of our results are also pointed out.


For the last few decades, the doctrine of proportionality has demonstrated and corroborated that it is the most effective legal standard used around Europe for the adjudication of constitutional rights. From its German origins, proportionality has migrated across jurisdictions and areas of law and has become one of the most successful legal transplants. However, there is some confusion as to whether there is any justification for the intervention of this in the UK's legal system, as the UK's legal system is based on common law, and did not welcome this doctrine very much. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the basic principles of this doctrine and check its compatibility with the common law system, which is based on democratic norms. To test the similarity, this article would also reflect on the underlying characteristics of the theory of proportionality and equate it with the standards of a democratic society. To begin with, this article first endeavors to analyze the legal sources of the doctrine of proportionality and then examines its affinity with the democratic norms of the common law system to investigate the compatibility level with each other in protecting the constitutional rights of the people.


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Background and Objectives: Among modern organizations with their competitive nature, only the organizations can continue working that improve their performances. Hospitals as modern organizations should pay more attention on quality of work life of their staff. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of work life among midwives working in hospitals of Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in 2012. Material and Methods: In this descriptive cross-sectional study, all midwives (n=85) working in the hospitals of Zanjan University of Medical Sciences were recruited to the study. Data were gathered using: 1) demographic characteristics questionnaire; and 2) a 30 -item five-point Likert scale based on the Walton Life Quality questionnaire. Results: The results showed that 38.8% of the midwives had low quality of work life and 61.2% had medium quality of work life. None of the participants reported high quality of work life. There were no significant relationships between the quality of work life with age, marital status, shift work, type of working contract, work precedent and setting (P<0.05). Conclusion : The quality of work life of midwives working in the hospitals of Zanjan University of Medical Sciences was not appropriate and they were not satisfied with their work. Lack of job satisfaction can affect the quality of services provided by them. The results of this study should be noticed by managers to identify midwives' needs and enhance their quality of


This study examines the processes of engaging a group of highly diverse 7 th and 8 th grade students in the utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) for collaborative activities through a global networked learning environment called APEC Cyber Academy. Thirty- six middle school students went through a nine-week project-based learning program that aimed at improving ICT skills and promoting international peer learning. Although students showed strong interest in learning about ICT, the findings suggest that students need to be coached in collaboration skills, given appropriate roles to ensure proper division of labor, and supervised closely to ensure the completion of tasks.


The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China, in January 2020 just before the Spring Festival and subsequent country-wide measures to contain the virus, effectively resulted in the lock-down of the country. Most industries and businesses were closed, traffic was largely reduced, and people were restrained to their homes. This resulted in the reduction of emissions of trace gases and aerosols, the concentrations of which were strongly reduced in many cities around the country. Satellite imagery from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) showed an enormous reduction of tropospheric NO2 concentrations, but aerosol optical depth (AOD), as a measure of the amount of aerosols, was less affected, likely due to the different formation mechanisms and the influence of meteorological factors. In this study, satellite data and ground-based observations were used together to estimate the separate effects of the Spring Festival and the COVID-19 containment measures on atmospheric composition in the winter of 2020. To achieve this, data were analyzed for a period from 30 days before to 60 days after the Spring Festivals in 2017–2020. This extended period of time, including similar periods in previous years, were selected to account for both the decreasing concentrations in response to air pollution control measures, and meteorological effects on concentrations of trace gases and aerosols. Satellite data from TROPOMI provided the spatial distributions over mainland China of the tropospheric vertical column density (VCD) of NO2, and VCD of SO2 and CO. The MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) provided the aerosol optical depth (AOD). The comparison of the satellite data for different periods showed a large reduction of, e.g., NO2 tropospheric VCDs due to the Spring Festival of up to 80% in some regions, and an additional reduction due to the COVID-19 containment measures of up to 70% in highly populated areas with intensive anthropogenic activities. In other areas, both effects are very small. Ground-based in situ observations from 26 provincial capitals provided concentrations of NO2, SO2, CO, O3, PM2.5, and PM10. The analysis of these data was focused on the situation in Wuhan, based on daily averaged concentrations. The NO2 concentrations started to decrease a few days before the Spring Festival and increased after about two weeks, except in 2020 when they continued to be low. SO2 concentrations behaved in a similar way, whereas CO, PM2.5, and PM10 also decreased during the Spring Festival but did not trace NO2 concentrations as SO2 did. As could be expected from atmospheric chemistry considerations, O3 concentrations increased. The analysis of the effects of the Spring Festival and the COVID-19 containment measures was complicated due to meteorological influences. Uncertainties contributing to the estimates of the different effects on the trace gas concentrations are discussed. The situation in Wuhan is compared with that in 26 provincial capitals based on 30-day averages for four years, showing different effects across China.


Whether gazing at ambiguous thresholds on the edges of the city, or tracing liminal spaces in its centre, these photographs explore themes of place, identity, boundaries and the uneasy encounter between land and built environment. The images do not capture urban life as action, but meditate on the spaces where it unfolds. What arises from this observation of traces and aftermath is a poetic quality hinting at the potential beauty of the most unlikely places.

The ideas behind Strange Places are drawn from both photographic discourses and emerging ideas of alternative urbanism. In the realm of recent cultural and urban theory, scholars have argued for a broadening of our intellectual stance and range of media for engaging with the modern urban phenomenon. Simultaneously, a growing body of photographic land- and cityscapes has challenged established definitions and categories, in an attempt to represent the richness and ambiguity of our late modern notion of place. The artists represented in this show have been attracted to the blurred boundaries and surprising intersections of culture and nature, fact and fiction, private and public, to produce work that reveals complex modes of inhabitation, appropriation, alienation and destruction.
Featured artists: Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber (b.1960/1957, Austria); Rut Blees Luxemburg (b.1967, Germany); Hannah Collins (b.1956, UK); Ori Gersht (b.1967, Israel); Steffi Klenz (b.1979, Germany); Sze Tsung Leong (b.1970, Mexico); Mark Power (b.1959, UK); Xavier Ribas (b.1960, Spain); Heidi Specker (b.1962, Germany); Thomas Weinberger (b.1964, Germany); Rachel Wilberforce (b.1975, UK).


The advent of many-core processors is imposing many changes on the operating system. The resources that are under contention have changed; previously, CPU cycles were the resource in demand and required fair and precise sharing. Now compute cycles are plentiful, but the memory per core is decreasing. In the past, scientific applications used all the CPU cores to finish as fast as possible, with visualization and analysis of the data performed after the simulation finished. With decreasing memory available per core, as well as the higher price (in power and time) for storing data on disk or sending it over the network, it now makes sense to run visualization and analytics applications in-situ, while the application is running. Visualization and analytics applications then need to sample the simulation memory with as little interference and as little changes in the simulation code as possible.
 We propose an asynchronous memory sharing facility that allows consistent states of the memory to be shared between processes without any implicit or explicit synchronization. We distinguish two types of processes; a single producer and one or more observers. The producer modifies the state of the data, making available consistent versions of the state to any observer. The observers, working at different sampling rates, can access the latest available consistent state.
 Some applications that would benefit from this type of facility include check-pointing applications, processes monitoring, unobtrusive process debugging, and the sharing of data for visualization or analytics. To evaluate our ideas we have developed two kernel-level implementations for sharing data asynchronously and we compared these implementations to a traditional user-space synchronized multi-buffer method.
 We have seen improvements of up to 3.5x in our tests over the traditional multi-buffer method with 20% of the data pages touched.


Early expectations for a role of diffractive lenses were dramatically lessened by their high order overlapping foci, low optical powers, and competing advances in refractive micro-optics. By bringing the Bragg properties of volume holograms to diffractive lenses we got rid of ghost diffractive orders and the critical trade-off between diffraction efficiency, number of phase levels, and spatial feature-size. Binary off-axis resonance domain diffractive lens with high numerical aperture of 0.16 was designed with analytical effective grating theory, fabricated by direct e-beam writing, etched in fused silica and experimentally investigated. More than 81% measured diffraction efficiency exceeds twice the limits of thin binary optics.


This study is a bachelor degree project which focuses on the lack of safe drinking water in a small village known as Macedonia in the Amazon basin in Colombia. The inhabitants of the village are 850 to the number and have never had access to safe drinking water. To solve this problem a system has been built where the rainwater is harvested in a pond and also from a church roof During the dry season the rainwater in the pond is harvested and pumped into sedimentation tanks. Thereafter, the water is led into the sand filtration tanks. While during the rain season, the rainwater is harvested from a church roof which is situated at highest level in Macedonia. The water is stored in a cistern and then it is led into sand filtration tanks via pipes. This means that the pond water and rainwater are never mixed before entering the filtration tanks. The sand filtration tanks contain about 1000 mm thick layer of sand and under it, a layer of gravel which is placed in the bottom of the tank. It takes a while for the water to be filtered through the sand filtration tank. Afterwards, it is led into the final tank, where the drinking water is stored ready to be used. The method of using slow sand filtration (SSF) is suitable for small scale-projects and therefore for this project a good idea for making drinking water. SSF requires no mechanical power or replaceable parts, this is why the technique is good for purifying water in developing and isolated areas. The result of the system is water with satisfied quality running through pipes and taps, ready to be consumed.


Introduction: Injuries from accidents are the major and avoidable causes of illness and death in most countries of the world. Knowledge of the occurrence of accidents is of special importance to health policy makers. The aim of this study was to determine the injuries caused by accidents in emergency department of Hamadan province. Methods: This study is descriptive-analytic from cross sectional type, that all patients referred to emergency department of hospitals in Hamadan province, during 2009 to 2014, were assessed. Data extracted from injury register software and was analyzed with Stata software version 12, at an inaccuracy of less than 5%.To determine the relation between sex and mechanism of injury chi square test was used. Results: A total of 135,925 patients were registered during this period. Mean age of patients was 30.19±18.4. 72.6% of cases were men and 39.74% in the age group of 20-34 years. Household accidents included 37.27% of the occurred accidents. Hitting (22.21%), car accidents (21.78%) and falling (10.69%), were the most accidents accounted in both sexes. There was a significant difference between sex and mechanism of injury (P<0.001). Conclusion: Because the men in youth and middle age are the most victims of accidents, therefore a great economic burden is imposed on the society. Moreover, it is necessary to allocate precise educations for this age group and to take preventive strategies to reduce the burden of injuries related to accidents.


General Probabilistic Theories provide the most general mathematical framework for the theory of probability in an operationally natural manner, and generalize classical and quantum theories. In this article, we study state-discrimination problems in general probabilistic theories using a Bayesian strategy. After re-formulation of the theories with mathematical rigor, we first prove that an optimal observable to discriminate any (finite) number of states always exists in the most general setting. Next, we revisit our recently proposed geometric approach for the problem and show that, for two-state discrimination, this approach is indeed effective in arbitrary dimensional cases. Moreover, our method reveals an operational meaning of Gudder's ``intrinsic metric'' by means of the optimal success probability, which turns out to be a generalization of the trace distance for quantum systems. As its by-product, an information-disturbance theorem in general probabilistic theories is derived, generalizing its well known quantum version.


A systematic study was carried out to investigate the attachment of inorganic particles to fabric media in the presence of divalent cations and the dissolved organics in water, on filter media, or on both. The presence of organics (humic acid, HA) reduced the attachment of inorganic particles on the fabric. Specific attachment trends were observed for the inorganic particles–fibre system. For [CaCl2] < 500 ppm, the particle attachment was lower in the presence of 10 ppm of HA compared to its absence. At [CaCl2] ≥ 500 ppm, the attachment in the presence or absence of HA was similar, suggesting that the attachment was independent of the presence of HA. It was also found that the particle attachment to the fabric was lower when HA was present in water compared to when present on the fabric, suggesting that the attachment behaviour of inorganic particles was dependent on water chemistry (i.e. presence of calcium ions and organics in water), which also altered the surface properties of filter media. The removal trends were explained on the basis of particle aggregation, surface charge and Derjaguin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek (DLVO) theory.


GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Searching for Common Ground (Again) 1 J. Thatcher 1 , L. Bergmann 2 , D. O'Sullivan 3 University of Washington Tacoma, 1900 Commerce Street, Tacoma, WA 98402 Email: email@example.com University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195 Email: email@example.com University of California Berkeley, 504 McCone Hall #4740, Berkeley, CA 94720 Email: email@example.com Abstract At over twentyfive years old, GIScience has been successful academically and institutionally. However, its relationship to one of its 'natural' homes, the discipline of Geography, has often been troubled and uncertain. We suggest that from the founding of GIScience, its close association with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has contributed to an acceptance of an absolute coordinate space   encoded   as ( x , y [,  z ,  t ]) as both a relatively unproblematic and dominant representation of geographical space. We briefly consider how this situation may have arisen, perhaps as an unintended consequence of an originally tactical disciplinary positioning move. However, our purpose here is  not criticism, but to highlight the many other more minor strands within GIScience, which can provide fertile common ground for renewed conversations between GIScience and Geography. We suggest congruences between less dominant strands of research in GIScience and theoretical concepts in Geography, as an invitation to constructive collaborations. 1. Introduction "GIScience," as a term, is around a quarter of a century old. It has become institutionally and academically valorized through multiple conferences, journals, and textbooks. We argue that from its inception as distinct from GISystems (GIS), GIScience (GISci) has been framed in ways that have partially delimited the spatial thinking that occurs within it. Specifically, by framing GISci as fundamentally concerned with "spatial information" and "spatial analysis" of such information (Goodchild 1992, 2006), GISci has tended to accept space as absolute, transforming it into data whose 'atomic' units are measurements within a coordinate system of the form ( x ,  y [,  z ,  t , etc.]) (Goodchild et al. 2007), and deemphasizing alternative conceptualizations of space, time, and process. While this reflects GISci's construction as a "science  of  geographical information " (Goodchild 1992: 38, emphasis ours), we suggest that, in taking a specific concept of spatial information as given, GISci may have unnecessarily distanced itself from broader research in computational geography and in geographic thought. To make this argument, first, we briefly examine how GISci was framed in an important early conceptualization, focusing on definitions of geographic information. Next, we provide evidence suggestive of continuing ties between these early framings and ongoing research in the field. Finally, we suggest that a reconsideration of the conceptualizations of both space and spatial processes found in broader computational and quantitative geography as well as some theoretical realms of (human) Geography could be valuable to GISci. Our title is a nod to  A Search for Common Ground (Gould and Olsson 1982) and the follow up  A Ground for Common Search (Golledge et al. 1986) which were among the last attempts to bridge the philosophical divides between quantitative and 'critical' geography before the 1990s 'science wars' and, more recently, 'critical GIS'.


The five appended papers all deal with gearbox noise and vibration. The first paper presents a review of previously published literature on gearbox noise and vibration. The second paper describes a test rig that was specially designed and built for noise testing of gears. Finite element analysis was used to predict the dynamic properties of the test rig, and experimental modal analysis of the gearbox housing was used to verify the theoretical predictions of natural frequencies. In the third paper, the influence of gear finishing method and gear deviations on gearbox noise is investigated in what is primarily an experimental study. Eleven test gear pairs were manufactured using three different finishing methods. Transmission error, which is considered to be an important excitation mechanism for gear noise, was measured as well as predicted. The test rig was used to measure gearbox noise and vibration for the different test gear pairs. The measured noise and vibration levels were compared with the predicted and measured transmission error. Most of the experimental results can be interpreted in terms of measured and predicted transmission error. However, it does not seem possible to identify one single parameter, such as measured peak-to-peak transmission error, that can be directly related to measured noise and vibration. The measurements also show that disassembly and reassembly of the gearbox with the same gear pair can change the levels of measured noise and vibration considerably. This finding indicates that other factors besides the gears affect gear noise. In the fourth paper, the influence of bearing endplay or preload on gearbox noise and vibration is investigated. Vibration measurements were carried out at torque levels of 140 Nm and 400 Nm, with 0.15 mm and 0 mm bearing endplay, and with 0.15 mm bearing preload. The results show that the bearing endplay and preload influence the gearbox vibrations. With preloaded bearings, the vibrations increase at speeds over 2000 rpm and decrease at speeds below 2000 rpm, compared with bearings with endplay. Finite element simulations show the same tendencies as the measurements. The fifth paper describes how gearbox noise is reduced by optimizing the gear geometry for decreased transmission error. Robustness with respect to gear deviations and varying torque is considered in order to find a gear geometry giving low noise in an appropriate torque range despite deviations from the nominal geometry due to manufacturing tolerances. Static and dynamic transmission error, noise, and housing vibrations were measured. The correlation between dynamic transmission error, housing vibrations and noise was investigated in speed sweeps from 500 to 2500 rpm at constant torque. No correlation was found between dynamic transmission error and noise. Static loaded transmission error seems to be correlated with the ability of the gear pair to excite vibration in the gearbox dynamic system.


For high-speed motorized spindle bearing, temperature rise is the primary factor that restricts the maximum speed of spindle and affects the stability of system. This paper addresses the lubrication and cooling of spindle bearing by exploiting the precise oil control and high cooling efficiency of oil–air lubrication. Enlightened by the bearing tribology and two-phase flow theory, a numerical model of oil–air two-phase flow heat transfer inside bearing cavity is created, with which the effects of operating condition and nozzle structure parameters on the temperature rise are studied. As the results show, with the elevation in speed, the heat generation increases rapidly, and despite the somewhat enhanced heat transfer effect, the temperature still tends to rise. Given the higher volume fraction of air than oil in the two-phase flow, the temperature rise of bearing is suppressed greatly as the air inlet velocity increases, revealing a remarkable cooling effect. When a single nozzle is used, the bearing temperature increases from the inlet to both sides, which peaks on the opposite side of the inlet. In case multiple evenly distributed nozzles are used, the high-temperature range narrows gradually, and the temperature distributions in the inner and outer rings tend to be consistent. With the increase in the nozzle aspect ratio, the airflow velocity drops evidently, which affects the heat dissipation, thereby resulting in an aggravated temperature rise. Finally, the simulation analysis is verified through experimentation, which provides a theoretical basis for selecting optimal parameters for the oil–air lubrication of high-speed bearing.


Performance on visual delayed nonmatching-to-sample was assessed in rhesus monkeys with combined and separate ablations of the perirhinal and entorhinal cortex, as well as in unoperated controls. Combined (i.e., rhinal cortex) lesions yielded a striking impairment on this task, one almost as severe as that seen after combined amygdalohippocampal removals that included some of this subjacent cortex (Mishkin, 1978; Murray and Mishkin, 1984). Ablations of the perirhinal cortex alone produced a deficit nearly as severe as that found after rhinal cortex lesions, whereas ablations of the entorhinal cortex alone produced only a mild deficit. Contrary to the conclusion from an earlier study (Murray and Mishkin, 1986), the present results demonstrate not only that damage limited to the rhinal cortex is sufficient to produce a severe loss in visual recognition, but also that such damage leads to a far greater loss than damage to any other single structure in the medial part of the temporal lobe.


In the framework of Isothermal Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), a new finned piston compressor has been designed and realized at LEI laboratory in EPFL. This system comprises a series of concentric annuli's fitting into each other compressing the air while keeping its temperature close to ambient thanks to increased heat transfer area. Modeling of heat transfer in such a complicated geometry with a transient, multi layer, multi dimensional nature can be best done by Thermo-Electric Analogy Method (TEAM). Using bond graph representation method and based on the previously developed model for a classic reciprocating compressor, energy conversion has been modeled based on equivalent electric circuits for both heat transfer and fluid flow bonds. Results have been verified using a test bench and to provide contrast to current technology, compared to a conventional reciprocating compressor.


Abstract: Revelation's symbolisms and catastrophic descriptions greatly influenced the Western world. Yet the book has not been much examined for its literary and narrative qualities, except by some critics who were more interested in fragmenting it into disconnected sources than understanding the richness of its literary production. A thorough analysis of its literary resources, however, reveals the greatness of its style, the sense of its purposes, and the unity of the book. There are rich intertextual relations with the Old Testament, especially with Genesis and Daniel, as well as repetition, numerology, cross-references, and a cyclic plot. When the art in the narrative (especially in 12:1–6) is considered, not only does the book become extraordinary for the readers, but its theological and moral meanings become more accessible.


From 2011 to 2013, anadromous brown trout Salmo trutta (213−730 mm, total body length, LT) were collected during or shortly after their marine feeding migration at 7 different localities in central Norway. The mean volume of stomach content (%) of marine fish prey eaten by S. trutta captured in marine waters varied from 34 to 89%. There was a high prevalence (67−100%) for parasite groups potentially transmitted by marine prey fish (i.e. nematodes, cestodes and trematodes) at all sampling sites. There was a significant overlap in the signatures of both δ13C and δ15N in the muscle tissue between the 7 groups of S. trutta; however, individual variation within groups was large. A strong positive relationship between δ13C and LT indicated sizedependent niche selection, with smaller individuals feeding less on marine prey and more on brackish or freshwater invertebrates in the estuary. Short-term gut contents data and trophically transmitted parasites showed that all size groups were feeding on marine fish. However, an increased dependence upon marine prey fish by larger S. trutta was indicated by a strong positive relationship between LT and δ15N. Similarities in S. trutta feeding and time-integrated trophic tracers (stable isotopes and parasites) across the 7 localities supports the general view that S. trutta feed within similar marine trophic niches. This similarity in feeding niche requirements may make S. trutta populations vulnerable to anthropogenic ecosystem perturbations which reduce the diversity of potential marine prey items.


This article considers the development and use of the law regulating the prosecution of parents under section 444 of the Education Act 1996, in the broader context of legislation and policy initiatives concerned with the governance of parental responsibility. It explores the ways in which the power to prosecute parents has been used by local educational authorities (LEAs) and interpreted by the courts. The article critically analyses the manner in which the powers emphasise punishment and retribution in the context of the social moralisation of 'flawed' parents; pay insufficient regard to the effects of parental responsibility laws on low-income, single parent families; represent an attempt to impose a simple solution on to a complex socio-economic problem; and amplify the scope for mothers to be made the subject of criminal justice interventions. It is argued that the prosecution of parents imposes an unfair burden on mothers and, in particular, single parent mothers.


Low-temperature fluorescence spectra and results of conformational studies with trans-syn-, cis-syn-, trans-anti-, and cis-anti-dibenzo[a,l]pyrene diol epoxide (DB[a,l]PDE)-derived deoxyadenosine (dA) adducts are presented and compared with those previously obtained for the stereoisomeric DB[a,l]P tetrols [Jankowiak, R., et al. (1997) Chem. Res. Toxicol. 10, 677-686]. In contrast to DB[a,l]P tetrols, for which only trans isomers exhibited two conformers, all stereoisomeric dA adducts adopt two different conformations with either half-chair or half-boat structures for the cyclohexenyl ring, and an "open"- or "folded"-type configuration between dA and the DB[a,l]P moiety. The major conformations observed for trans-syn-, cis-syn-, and cis-anti-DB[a,l]PDE-14-N(6)dA could be assigned on the basis of the previous calculations for the DB[a,l]P tetrols. The major conformers of the trans-syn- and cis-syn-DB[a, l]PDE-14-N(6)dA adducts exist in conformations I and II, with their fluorescence origin bands at approximately 382 and approximately 389 nm, respectively. In conformation I, the cyclohexenyl ring adopts a half-boat structure with dA in a pseudoaxial position (an open configuration), whereas the cyclohexenyl ring in conformation II adopts a half-chair structure with dA in pseudoequatorial position (a folded configuration). The major conformation of cis-anti-DB[a, l]PDE-14-N(6)dA, with its origin band at approximately 389 nm, was also assigned as a folded-type configuration with a half-chair structure in the cyclohexenyl ring. Molecular mechanics and dynamical simulations were performed for interpretation of the low-temperature fluorescence spectra and (1)H NMR coupling constants observed for the trans-anti-DB[a,l]PDE-14-N(6)dA adduct. The major conformer of this adduct has a half-chair structure in the cyclohexenyl ring, but a deviation from planarity in the fjord region different from that of conformer II of cis-anti-DB[a, l]PDE-N(6)dA. This new structure is labeled as conformer II'. Its (0, 0) fluorescence band is at 388.1 and 388.3 nm in ethanol and glycerol/water glasses, respectively, consistent with the folded-type configuration revealed by the calculations. The fluorescence line-narrowed spectra reveal that the trans-syn-, cis-syn-, trans-anti-, and cis-anti-DB[a,l]PDE-14-N(6)dA adducts can be distinguished. Thus, their spectra should prove useful for identification of DB[a,l]P-DNA adducts formed at low levels in biological samples.


The study examined the profit function and structural performance of cashew nut marketing in Enugu State, Nigeria. Six markets were selected from three Local Government Areas where there is high production and sale of cashew nuts in the State. Data were collected from 120 cashew nut sellers, randomly selected from the six markets. Analytical tools employed were the multiple regression analysis to measure the profit function of cashew nut marketing inputs, Marketing margin, Lorenz curve, and Gini coefficient to measure the structural performance. The study revealed a high gross margin of 36.79% of sales receipt or 58.19% of total variable cost (TVC). This implies that cashew nut marketing was profitable in the area. The marketing margin was also high being 37.50% of sales receipt or 59.32% of TVC. The profit function measurement showed that cashew nut marketing was in a stage of inefficient allocation and utilization of resources. Therefore, cashew nut marketing in the study area though profitable was grossly inefficient from the viewpoint of market structure and profit function measurement. Policy measures that will improve credit advancement to small-scale/micro business concerns and reduce transportation cost are advocated.


The author has studied the origins of the
modern movement in England, which he found
extremely complex. Wells Coates was one of its
leading protagonists: he played a great part in
the various attempts to establish the resistance
movement against 'ancestor-worship in design'
out of which modern architecture has grown. He
devoted his powers and passions to the growth
of the movement in England, at a time when there
was a mass of traditionalism and prejudice to be
cleared away.
Wells Coates was an engineer and scientifically
minded; he was also able to express his profound
belief in certain architectural principles. Through
the 20th Century Group, and other groups, he
helped to bring modern ideas in art as well as
architecture to the British scene. His part in
MARS and CIAM was especially directed at exploring
the common ground between architecture and
engineering; at the same time he was fascinated by the affinity between architecture and the
fine arts and was one of the founders of Unit
One. These ideas occupied his mind to the end
of his life, when he envisaged a new organisation
- 'CAUSA' and 'OUTLINES' - which would assemble
all the branches of the visual arts against the
central problems confronting contemporary architects,
engineers, planners and designers.
The same combination of qualities went into
his architecture, with the addition of an equally
profound habit of enquiry into the social as well
as the technical functioning of his buildings.
Acknowledging Wells Coates is, I think, vital.
This study has been built up mostly from Wells
Coates's own diaries, notes, letters, lectures
and various memoranda; and from correspondence
and meetings with some of his contemporaries and
clients.