The visual system of domestic poultry evolved in natural light environments, which differ in many respects from the artificial light provided in poultry houses. Current lighting systems are designed mainly around human vision and poultry production, ignoring the requirements of poultry vision and the functional development of visual abilities during rearing. A poor correlation between the light provided and that required for effective vision may influence visually mediated behaviours such as feeding and social interaction, leading to distress and poor welfare. To understand fully the impact of the light environment on the behaviour and welfare of domestic poultry we need (i) to measure the physical properties of the light environment in a standard and relevant manner; (ii) to identify the limits of visual abilities in various light environments; (iii) to determine how light environments during rearing may disrupt the functional development of vision; and (iv) to resolve how visual abilities and lighting interact to affect visually mediated behaviour. Some conclusions can be drawn about the impact of current lighting regimes on bird welfare but there remains a pressing need to resolve various issues in this interaction. We propose, first, that dark periods should have a minimum duration of six hours; second, that bright light should be used in cases where pecking damage and cannibalism do not pose a problem; and third, that it is unlikely that the 100 Hz flicker associated with fluorescent light can be perceived by poultry. With less certainty, we can suggest that ultraviolet-supplemented lighting may have some welfare benefits, and that very dim lighting may adversely affect ocular development. We can only speculate on other issues, such as preferences and motivations for different coloured lighting or the ways in which lighting affects recognition of conspecifics. Several organisations and authorities have issued guidelines for poultry house lighting that strive to safeguard welfare and that are consistent with our current, but limited, understanding. One omission is a standard system for measuring light levels in poultry houses. Illumination with natural daylight would be an ideal solution to many lighting problems. Although some systems require artificial lighting for production purposes, we argue that it may be possible to rear birds humanely in artificial environments that contain some features of natural light. These features should be those for which poultry show some motivation, or whose exclusion would damage visual development.


This paper studies nonparametric identification in market level demand models for differentiated products. We generalize common models by allowing for the distribution of heterogeneity parameters (random coefficients) to have a nonparametric distribution across the population and give conditions under which the density of the random coefficients is identified. We show that key identifying restrictions are provided by (i) a set of moment conditions generated by instrumental variables together with an inversion of aggregate demand in unobserved product characteristics; and (ii) an integral transform (Radon transform) that maps the random coefficient density to the aggregate demand. This feature is shown to be common across a wide class of models, and we illustrate this by studying leading demand models. Our examples include demand models based on the multinomial choice (Berry, Levinsohn, Pakes, 1995), the choice of bundles of goods that can be substitutes or complements, and the choice of goods consumed in multiple units.


Introduction: Cerebral circulation receives 15-20% of the cardiac output Cerebral angiography is the main diagnostic method for cerebrovascular pathologies, however, is associated with invasiveness and the risk of dangerous complications after use of contrast media. Objective: To evaluate the techniques of transcranial dopplerography in triplex mode and to study the quantitative parameters of blood flow in the main arteries in the circle of Willis in healthy middle-aged people. Materials and methods: Transcranial Dopplerography (TCDG) was performed in color and energy Doppler mapping (CDM and EDM). The examination was conducted in 48 patients with unchanged carotid arteries, normal blood pressure and without any cardiovascular diseases. The age of the subjects was 41-60 years, among them 25 men and 23 women. Results: In 3 (6.25%) cases, the transtemporal window was not accessible from one side: in two 59 and 60 years old women and in one man aged 57. In 1 (2,08%) case the transtemporal window was absent from two sides in one man of 58 years. With the help of compression probes, the consistency of the connective arteries was evaluated. Venus Galen was able to visualize in 36 (75%) cases, Rosenthal vein - in 29 (60%), and direct sinus in 31 (64.5%) cases. All the main arteries had a monophasic spectrum with a narrow incision at the beginning of the diastole. Conclusion: Transcranial dopplerography in triplex mode justify the non-invasive approach to obtain quantitative parameters of blood flow, which can be used in various pathological conditions leading to disruption of cerebral hemodynamics.


We analyze a Gedankenexperiment previously considered by Mari et al. [Sci. Rep. 6, 22777 (2016).] that involves quantum superpositions of charged and/or massive bodies (``particles'') under the control of the observers, Alice and Bob. In the electromagnetic case, we show that the quantization of electromagnetic radiation (which causes decoherence of Alice's particle) and vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field (which limits Bob's ability to localize his particle to better than a charge-radius), both are essential for avoiding apparent paradoxes with causality and complementarity. We then analyze the gravitational version of this Gedankenexperiment. We correct an error in the analysis of Mari et al. [Sci. Rep. 6, 22777 (2016).] and of Baym and Ozawa [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 3035 (2009).], who did not properly account for the conservation of center of mass of an isolated system. We show that the analysis of the gravitational case is in complete parallel with the electromagnetic case, provided that gravitational radiation is quantized and that vacuum fluctuations limit the localization of a particle to no better than a Planck length. This provides support for the view that (linearized) gravity should have a quantum field description.


This is a comprehensive, authoritative and innovative account of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, one of the most enigmatic and influential philosophies in the West. In twenty-one chapters covering a timespan from the sixth century BC to the seventeenth century AD, leading scholars construct a number of different images of Pythagoras and his community, assessing current scholarship and offering new answers to central problems. Chapters are devoted to the early Pythagoreans, and the full breadth of Pythagorean thought is explored including politics, religion, music theory, science, mathematics and magic. Separate chapters consider Pythagoreanism in Plato, Aristotle, the Peripatetics and the later Academic tradition, while others describe Pythagoreanism in the historical tradition, in Rome and in the pseudo-Pythagorean writings. The three great lives of Pythagoras by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus are also discussed in detail, as is the significance of Pythagoras for the Middle Ages and Renaissance.


Abstract The coupled task scheduling problem concerns scheduling a set of jobs, each with at least two tasks and there is an exact delay period between two consecutive tasks, on a set of machines to optimize a performance criterion. While research on the problem dates back to the 1980s, interests in the computational complexity of variants of the problem and solution methodologies have been evolving in the past few years. This motivates us to present an up-to-date and comprehensive literature review on the topic. Aiming to provide a complete road map for future research on the coupled task scheduling problem, we discuss all the relevant studies and potential research opportunities. In addition, we propose several sets of benchmark instances for the problem in various settings and provide a detailed evaluation of all the available mathematical models with a view to facilitating future research on the solution methods.


Evidence for a c. 600 Ma rifted passive margin in eastern Australia exists in the form of multiple belts of mafic volcanic rocks preserved along the western margin of the Tasman Fold Belt System, and giving rise to elongate magnetic anomalies. Outcrop, drillhole and geophysical evidence points to piles of lavas, volcaniclastic and intrusive rocks up to 6 km thick, extending for strike lengths of hundreds of kilometres in individual segments. The distinctive, unifying characteristics of these piles are apparent common formation ages (600–580 Ma), presence of early more landward transitional alkaline basalts, and more seaward abundant rift tholeiites, with high-temperature picrites and olivine-rich basalts at most localities. Despite later structural reorganization, these belts have close geochemical, geometric and lithological affinities with Mesozoic seaward-dipping reflector sequences along the North Atlantic, and northwestern Australian volcanic passive margins, and strongly imply the formation of a volcanic passive margin in eastern Gondwanaland at the close of the Neoproterozoic. Recognition of this event has implications for the position of an implied earlier rifted margin related to the break-up of Rodinia around 780 Ma. A rifting event at 600 Ma in eastern Gondwanaland helps explain both the lack of evidence for volcanism from Rodinia break-up, and a widespread 600 Ma population of inherited zircons within rocks of the Lachlan Orogen, which developed outboard of the passive margin in earliest Palaeozoic time.


We investigate the role of search frictions in markets with price competition and how it leads to sorting of heterogeneous agents. There are two aspects of value creation: the match-value when two agents actually trade, and the probability of trading governed by the search technology. We show that positive assortative matching obtains when complementarities in the former outweigh complementarities in the latter. This happens if and only if the match-value function is root-supermodular, i.e., its n-th root is supermodular, where n reflects the elasticity of substitution of the search technology. This condition is weaker than the condition required for positive assortative matching in markets with random search.


Prevailing opinion for many years has held that Shakespeare's long plays cannot have been performed in his own time without substantial cuts. However, a careful review of the evidence shows that those plays could have been, and probably were, performed essentially as written. The typical Elizabethan theatrical event lasted almost four hours. That duration remained consistent, even as the times of day at which an event began and ended shifted in the middle 1590s. But the theatrical event was a flexible vehicle, accommodating plays of substantially varying lengths. Plays were intermixed with several forms of incidental entertainment. Time allocated to this entertainment varied in inverse proportion to that devoted to the plays. Audiences probably wanted to see longer plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, so when acting companies performed those plays, relatively little time would be spent on other entertainment. The maximum time available for a play was about three and one-quarter hours. That was sufficient time, at the speed at which Elizabethan plays likely were delivered, to perform even Shakespeare's longest plays without cuts. Some cuts were made for local editorial reasons, but not for the principal purpose of reducing a play's length.


Cardiovascular side effects after electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are rare but can potentially lead to significant morbidity and mortality. The authors present a case involving a 67-year-old woman who developed Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TC) with left ventricular (LV) thrombus eight days after her last ECT. She received six ECT treatments for active suicidal ideation after prophylaxis with oral metoprolol and intravenous esmolol and was discharged home. She presented to the emergency room with altered mental status, where an electrocardiogram revealed anterior ST segment elevation compatible with an ST segment elevation myocardial infarction. Emergent coronary angiogram was normal. Left ventriculogram showed characteristic apical dyskinesis compatible with TC. Echocardiogram revealed an apical LV thrombus. The patient was placed on anticoagulant therapy. Repeat echocardiogram eight weeks later showed normal LV function with resolution of thrombus. Physicians managing ECT patients should be aware of the possibility of TC with LV thrombus as a complication of this procedure. The authors review the medical literature and provide recommendations for peri-ECT management of patients with previous TC.


Model adaptation techniques are an efficient way to reduce the mismatch that typically occurs between the training and test condition of any automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. This work addresses the problem of increased degradation in performance when moving from speaker-dependent (SD) to speaker-independent (SI) conditions for connectionist (or hybrid) hidden Markov model/artificial neural network (HMM/ANN) systems in the context of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). Adapting hybrid HMM/ANN systems on a small amount of adaptation data has been proven to be a difficult task, and has been a limiting factor in the widespread deployment of hybrid techniques in operational ASR systems. Addressing the crucial issue of speaker adaptation (SA) for hybrid HMM/ANN system can thereby have a great impact on the connectionist paradigm, which will play a major role in the design of next-generation LVCSR considering the great success reported by deep neural networks - ANNs with many hidden layers that adopts the pre-training technique - on many speech tasks. Current adaptation techniques for ANNs based on injecting an adaptable linear transformation network connected to either the input, or the output layer are not effective especially with a small amount of adaptation data, e.g., a single adaptation utterance. In this paper, a novel solution is proposed to overcome those limits and make it robust to scarce adaptation resources. The key idea is to adapt the hidden activation functions rather than the network weights. The adoption of Hermitian activation functions makes this possible. Experimental results on an LVCSR task demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


This study attempts to quantify the interface between flow domains in macroscopic dual‐porosity flow and transport models. For a structured soil, this interface could be related to the surfaces of soil aggregates and biopores that may serve as preferential flow paths. Mass exchange with the soil matrix domain across this interface requires including the combined effect of various structural shapes and sizes, which has not yet been properly defined. The objective was to test an approach for independent soil structure quantification by characterizing domain interfaces based on surface area/volume ratios using two soil samples with contrasting structures. X‐ray computed tomography data from undisturbed soil cores from a medical scanner were analyzed. For a range of density threshold values, surface areas were identified on a voxel basis. The resulting functions were found to be characteristic for the subsoil sample with cylindrical pinhole pores as well as for the aggregated topsoil sample. The results suggest that the interdomain interface area could be used for deriving mass exchange coefficients and a macroscopic characteristic related to visual inspection of the soil structure. The approach, representing an upscaling of individual structural features to the macroscopic scale, may improve the applicability of two‐domain models by finding a way to obtain relatively simple estimates of the geometry coefficient from qualitative soil structure information given in soil protocols. Although this analysis did not allow determination of a well‐defined interface between porous domains, it enabled narrowing of the range of possible values in a physically plausible region. Still more effort is required to identify specific types of structural surfaces among other features.


The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause does not prevent the federal (or a state) government from taking private property. It merely sets as a condition that the government pay the owner "just compensation" for the taking. Precisely what constitutes just compensation, however, is a tricky matter. One method for determining just compensation is the "market-value" method, which requires the government to pay the owner the property's market value. But where a taking is only partial, that is, where the government takes only a portion of private property, the property that remains with the owner may see an increase or decrease in its value. A line of Supreme Court cases suggests that these incidental benefits (or harms) should be set off from the ultimate amount the government pays. In Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the Supreme Court adhered to the market-value method even though the regulation at issue required that raisin growers turn over only a portion of their raisin crop each year. Indeed, the program was specifically designed to stabilize prices and afford raisin farmers myriad market benefits. While adhering to the market-value standard provided the Court with a measure of expediency, this Note argues that the Court's decision may spell trouble for future regulation. If regulators cannot consider incidental economic benefits to private property owners in determining costs, the government may be forced to pay artificially inflated prices for regulations that involve takings. Such a result would make regulation overall more costly, or worse, discourage it entirely.


Abstract Why is transnational organized crime so difficult to dismantle? While organized crime networks within states have received some attention, actual transnational operations have not. In this article, we study the transnational drug and gun trafficking operations of the Shower Posse, a violent international organized crime syndicate based in Jamaica, whose resilience proves particularly puzzling. We were curious to know whether there is any evidence that international borders have an effect on the structure of illicit networks that cross them. It turns out that transnational drug distribution networks such as the Shower Posse rely on a small number of brokers whose role is to connect otherwise distinct domestic markets. Due to the high transaction costs associated with developing and maintaining transnational movement, the role of such brokers appears particularly important in facilitating the flow of illicit commodities across national borders. These brokers coordinate their own smaller subnetworks, while still maintaining the communication and collaboration necessary to ensure that the overall aims of the network are achieved.


Background : The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between golf performance (handicap, drive ball speed, approach and putting accuracy), anthropometrics and muscular strength and power in young elite golfers.
Type of study : Observational, descriptive and transversal study, with accidental sampling (non-randomised).
Methods : Forty-four male golfers participated in the study and the following information was obtained: anthropometrics, drive ball speed, approach accuracy, putting accuracy, medicine ball throwing speed, countermovement jump, bench press and parallel full squat. The relationship between these variables was assessed using Pearson's correlation coefficient, while a regression analysis was performed to assess which parameters were the best predictors of handicap.
Results : The main results showed that peak and average drive ball speeds were the only golf performance indicators significantly correlated to handicap (r = -0.58 to -0.61, P<0.001). Significant correlations were observed between drive ball speed and body mass (r = 0.4, P<0.01). In addition, handicap and drive ball speed correlated significantly with muscular strength and power, even when adjusted with the anthropometric characteristics (r = 0.50 to 0.70; P<0.01). Finally, the regression analysis showed that 68.7% of the total variance in handicap was explained by height, drive ball speed average and medicine ball throwing performance.
Conclusions : The high correlations found between drive ball speed, handicap and upper- and lower-body strength suggest that muscular strength and power are important. These results have important applications as it could help coaches with optimal development of physical and sport-specific conditioning and golf training programmes.


The possibilities to improve households' eligibility for long-term housing loans at fixed interest rates has been a current topic of public discussion.Yet, credit institutions have difficulties in granting such loans, unless they themselves can acquire fixed-rate funding.In many cases, the only feasible way for them to raise such funding is to issue bonds.In a number of countries, such arrangements are already in use. In this paper we present a cross-country study of housing finance by mortgagebacked bonds.The paper describes and analyses mortgage credit markets in Denmark, Sweden and the United States of America with respect to the institutional structure, loans and bonds characteristics, legal framework and the security underlying the system.We have found that all three markets differ and that these differences originate from the respective countries' national characteristics and financial histories.In Sweden and the United States in particular, the public sector has been involved in developing the system. Generally, long-term credit is offered in all three countries through relatively well-functioning, efficient markets. However, certain problems are common to all.First, the number of outstanding bond series is relatively large.Second, in many housing loans, the borrower has the option to repay the debt prematurely.In these cases, the credit institution may have to avoid maturity matching problems by issuing bonds with unknown maturity. We briefly review the history and present circumstances of Finnish bond issuing credit institutions to elucidate why such institutions play a marginal role.Long ago, bond-issuing mortgage institutions were an essential part of the Finnish financial market, but legislative obstacles to their operations almost killed the industry after World War II.The tax system favoured ordinary banks, and bond emissions were restricted by government regulations.Now, these legal obstacles have been abolished.In the light of both foreign and past domestic experience, such institutions have a market niche.Finally, we discuss some of the problems related to setting up a bond- financed mortgage credit market in Finland. Key words: Housing loans, bonds, mortgage banks


STUDY OBJECTIVES
We hypothesized that alterations in cardiac hemodynamics associated with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea (OSAH) would be reflected in higher natriuretic peptide levels. We examined the association of OSAH with natriuretic peptides in a community-based sample.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional, retrospective, observational study.

SETTING
Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort and Sleep Heart Health Study.

PARTICIPANTS
Community-based sample of 623 individuals.

MEASUREMENTS
Full-montage home polysomnography was used to determine apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) and percentage of time with an oxyhemoglobin saturation < 90% (PctLt90). Sensitive immunoradiometric assays were used to measure plasma B-type (BNP) and N-terminal pro-atrial natriuretic peptide (NT-ANP). Multivariable regression was used to examine the relations between natriuretic peptides and indicators of OSAH, adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, and clinical covariates.

RESULTS
No statistically significant relations between OSAH indices and BNP were observed in the multivariable model. Compared with an AHI < 5, relative levels of 1.20, 0.88, and 0.91 were observed forAHI categories 5-15, 15-30, >30 events per hour, respectively. For NT-ANP, no significant relations were seen with AHI in the multivariable model (relative levels of 0.98, 0.91, and 0.90). An inverse association was observed between NT-ANP and PctLt90 in age- and sex-adjusted models (relative levels of 0.93, 0.87, and 0.80), although this association became statistically nonsignificant after adjusting for body mass index.

CONCLUSION
Lack of association of natriuretic peptides with OSAH indices suggests that undiagnosed OSAH may not be associated with major alterations in left ventricular function, as reflected in morning natriuretic peptide levels.


The covid-19 crisis and the ensuing closure of borders has profoundly affected the mobility of migrant seasonal workers. As some European agricultural sectors highly depend on these workers, governments in EU countries have urgently adopted different strategies to avoid disruptions due to their absence. Alternatives seeking to cope without this experienced foreign seasonal labour force, pose two difficulties: their effectiveness is not guaranteed and/or they are accompanied by a significant increase in production costs and therefore in prices. As this large-scale temporary shock may lead to longer-term structural changes in the agricultural sectors concerned, we draw on the UK's post-Brexit vote experience to discuss alternatives to foreign migrant seasonal workers. The covid-19 pandemic may well accelerate the adoption of robots for picking fruits and vegetables in the EU fields. After Covid-19, will seasonal migrant agricultural workers in Europe be replaced by robots? No 33 – June 2020


Over the past decade, an amazing trend has taken hold across the country — municipalities have begun providing their own Internet access. Many areas of the United States, rural areas especially, are being left without privately provided Internet access, and therefore must do something to prevent being left behind as the Internet increasingly becomes the means by which society communicates, participates, and influences. But, not every municipality should provide such a network. Many are served by private providers. The factual circumstances change from city to city. Therefore, municipalities considering their own network should look to case studies to gain important insight into this endeavor. This article intends to provide a glimpse into the world of municipal broadband.This article will detail the stories of five municipal networks and elicits lessons to be learned from them. First, three success stories will be discussed: Bristol, Va., Corpus Christi, Tex., and Santa Monica, Cal. A discussion of the failures in Philadelphia, Pa., and St. Cloud, Fla, will follow. From these discussions, lessons regarding business models and growth of the network can be gleaned. Both are important to understand fully when determining whether to pursue a municipal broadband network, and both can cause the demise of the network if not handled carefully. After reading these case studies and giving the issues discussed herein full attention, municipalities hopefully will not make the same mistakes as their predecessors.


When Rochdale Village opened in southeastern Queens in late 1963, it was the largest housing cooperative in the world. When fully occupied its 5,860 apartments contained about 25,000 residents. Rochdale Village was a limited-equity, middle-income cooperative. Its apartments could not be resold for a profit, and with the average per room charges when opened of $21 a month, it was on the low end of the middle-income spectrum. (3) It was laid out as a massive 170 acre superblock development, with no through streets, and only winding pedestrian paths, lined with newly planted trees, crossing a greensward connecting the twenty massive cruciform apartment buildings. Rochdale was a typical urban post-war housing development, in outward appearance differing from most others simply in its size. It was, in a word, wrote historian Joshua Freeman, "nondescript." (4) Appearances deceive. Rochdale Village was unique; the largest experiment in integrated housing in New York City in the 1960s, and very likely the largest such experiment anywhere in the United States (5). It was located in South Jamaica, which by the early 1960s was the third largest black neighborhood in the city. Blacks started to move to South Jamaica in large numbers after World War I, and by 1960 its population was almost entirely African American. It was a neighborhood of considerable income diversity, with the largest tracts of black owned private housing in the city adjacent to some desperate pockets of poverty. In the late 1950s, there was an exodus of at least 25,000 whites from some of the few remaining mixed areas in South Jamaica. (6) Despite that, at least 80% of the original families in Rochdale were white, the overwhelmingly majority of those were of Jewish background. (7) I was a member of one of those Jewish families, and lived in Rochdale from 1964, when I was ten years old, until 1973. Rochdale was not isolated from its surrounding community. School children from Rochdale and the surrounding neighborhoods attended racially balanced schools, and their parents shopped in Rochdale's malls and its cooperative supermarkets, the first in South Jamaica. Historian Joshua Freeman notes, "Rochdale seemed to embody everything the civil rights movement ... called for." (8) This was widely recognized at the time. A lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine in 1966 by the veteran radical journalist Harvey Swados sensitively analyzed the problems and promises of integration in Rochdale, concluding, that Rochdale was providing the largest and most important practical test in New York City, of the dominant question of the era--"could blacks and white live together?" (9) This hope was very much of its time and place. Rochdale Village was one of the most tangible products of a period in New York City's history, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960, that can be seen, in retrospect, as the apogee of the belief in integration, in theory and in practice. To be sure, support for integration was often shallow and tentative; the opposition was often effective and tenacious; and the final results were in many ways frustratingly meager. Nonetheless, there was a surprisingly wide consensus, often starting from vastly differing perspectives, that reached the conclusion that integration was possible, practical, and necessary, and was the best way to resolve the city's growing racial tensions. In the end, the imbalance between the high-minded rhetoric and the paucity of positive results helped bring this optimistic time to an end. For a variety of reasons, Rochdale Village was an important exception to this pattern, a concrete achievement of the era of integration. (10) Integration was one of the dominant liberal ideals of the 1950s--at its heart is the conviction that to achieve full incorporation of blacks into American society as equals, persons of different races had to work, learn, play, and live together. As such it was commended by a wide and unstable coalition, ranging from ex-Communists, independent leftists, New Deal Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans, as well as some hard-nosed and utterly pragmatic government officials and business executives. …


Centerstone, a large, community-based behavioral health and addictions services provider in Tennessee, has further developed its Crisis Care Services. Two new, statewide suicide prevention grants from SAMHSA are funding this effort with the goals of decreasing suicide deaths and attempts, and promoting long-term connection with mental health services among youth and young and working-age adults who are suicide attempt survivors. Enhanced follow-up services will be provided that will include both face-to-face and telephone contact. According to Jennifer Armstrong, director of Crisis Care Services at Centerstone, "With our new enhanced services, we're increasing our reach, partnering with local hospitals and taking an in-depth approach to outreach and follow-up support that reduces relapse, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Our goal is to support our clients until we're confident they are safely supported beyond our care." Early results from pilot sites show success. More clients have been connected to follow-up care, no additional suicide attempts have occurred, and the number of partnerships with other providers across the state is growing.


There is a growing interest in broadening the measurement scope of innovation and considering "creative" activities, meaning that the usual indicators of innovation satisfy neither scholars nor policy makers. Conceptually, there is not much difference between innovative and creative activity: but to what extent are current measures that capture innovation relevant for creativity? Can the new measures for creativity benefit from the experience accumulated through R&D and innovation? Our article provides insights and lessons learned from using measures of innovative activities for scholars who are interested in capturing creative activities. We underscore the difficulties faced when measuring innovation and draw some parallels of these difficulties with the efforts undertaken to measure creativity.


This paper compiles the draft chapter abstracts of my book entitled, 'Application of Most-Favoured-Nation Clauses by Investor-State Arbitral Tribunals. International Law and the Global South (Perspectives from the Rest of the World). Springer, Singapore, 2020. This book comprehensively examines various issues regarding the scope of Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) Clauses in International Investment Agreements (IIAs), and addresses the reform, interpretation, and enforcement of IIAs with a specific focus on the MFN clause. The book begins with a study of the history and evolution of the MFN. It then presents a substantive analysis focusing on the drafting style and how it affects the scope of the MFN; rules of interpretation and arbitral case law on the scope of the MFN, procedural prerequisites to arbitration and jurisdiction of arbitral tribunals, and the implications of adopting an expansive approach to the MFN clause.

The book's argument centres on the need for arbitral tribunals to interpret the MFN in a manner that reflects the expressed intent of the parties. This requires taking into consideration the text of the MFN, its purpose, and the overall context of the IIA, rather than relying on values and assumptions that have nothing to do with the original intent of the parties. In making this argument, the book draws on Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and other interpretative rules. What sets the book apart is its comprehensive coverage of issues concerning the interpretation and application of the MFN in IIAs. At the same time, it addresses issues in connection with an expansive interpretation of MFN clauses, as well as concerns regarding the legitimacy crisis in investor-state arbitration. Accordingly, it contributes to future Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) reform, while also offering a wealth of theoretical and practical insights for future treaty drafters, arbitrators, and policymakers.


Abstract. We have implemented the sectional aerosol dynamics model SALSA (Sectional Aerosol module for Large Scale Applications) in the European-scale chemistry-transport model MATCH (Multi-scale Atmospheric Transport and Chemistry). The new model is called MATCH-SALSA. It includes aerosol microphysics, with several formulations for nucleation, wet scavenging and condensation. The model reproduces observed higher particle number concentration (PNC) in central Europe and lower concentrations in remote regions. The modeled PNC size distribution peak occurs at the same or smaller particle size as the observed peak at four measurement sites spread across Europe. Total PNC is underestimated at northern and central European sites and accumulation-mode PNC is underestimated at all investigated sites. The low nucleation rate coefficient used in this study is an important reason for the underestimation. On the other hand, the model performs well for particle mass (including secondary inorganic aerosol components), while elemental and organic carbon concentrations are underestimated at many of the sites. Further development is needed, primarily for treatment of secondary organic aerosol, in terms of biogenic emissions and chemical transformation. Updating the biogenic secondary organic aerosol (SOA) scheme will likely have a large impact on modeled PM2.5 and also affect the model performance for PNC through impacts on nucleation and condensation.


When the topic of bullying comes up, it is often in the context of schoolyard bullying and is often perceived as an interpersonal conflict. However, bullying occurs in the workplace as well, and workplace bullying has drawn increased attention in recent years. Historically, most bullying research focused on the targets of bullying and attempted to explain how bullies select their targets and how bullying impacts targets. In contrast, this paper will focus on the bullies themselves. While bullying can occur at any level in the organization, this paper focuses on leaders who bully and explains why bullying is not a personality conflict; rather, there are both individual and organizational factors that tolerate, if not encourage, leader bullying. Based on the published literature, this paper will present an overview of the history and development of research related to workplace bullying; the current definition of bullying and characteristics of bullies; an analysis of Adlerian concepts applied to leader bullying; an explanation of why bully leaders are promoted in organizations; an analysis of how leader bullying impacts organizations; and what executive leaders can do to eliminate bullying. This paper will also identify areas where further research is necessary to better understand how and why leaders bully, and what can be done to both stop and prevent this destructive behavior. ELIMINATING LEADER BULLYING IN ORGANIZATIONS 3


Richard Sulik, a controversial Slovak political leader, embodies the conflicting nature of Slovak nationalism(s) since 1989. It has been argued that the process of post-communist transition in Central Europe has been driven by contradictory forces of liberal/illiberal, civic/ethnic and Eastern/Western nationalisms. Slovakia is no exception. Sulik's personal story and his political career shed light on these developments. This is in line with the expectations, articulated by Jonathan Hearn in this issue, that 'no matter how unique, individual, personal cases of national identity, in all their specificity, will provide clues to how more general social patterns of national identification are formed'.1 Sulik's short political career to date has reflected and shaped Slovak self-understanding.This article takes as its point of departure Hearn's typology of 'moods', by situating its protagonist as someone who acted self-consciously 'against the flow', even paying a significant political price for his convictions (though with a clear expectation that he would 'be ultimately justified').2 Through his lived experience, murtilingualism and outlook, Sulik could be viewed as a perfect example of a modern European politician. Like a majority of Slovaks, he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of Slovakia's membership of the European Union, including its membership in the single currency. His enthusiasm turned to scepticism when his hopes about Europe as an anchor of stability were disappointed. Sulik's determined stance towards one of the defining issues of contemporary Europe - the eurozone crisis that threatens the European project at large - led to his political isolation in Slovakia, and earned him a mixture of admiration and contempt in Germany, where he spent his formative years as an adolescent. As a result of his uncompromising views on euro-rescue policies, Sulik has been criticised as a populist, or even an extreme nationalist, particularly after the October 2011 vote on the increase of the eurozone bailout fund in the Slovak Parliament, which brought down the Government, necessitating early elections. Undeterred, Sulik revelled in his Europe-wide reputation as an 'oddball',5 and though his popularity amongst Slovak voters has not increased, his political prospects may yet benefit from further deterioration of the eurozone crisis.Nationalism and Biography in Central EuropeThere is an obvious connection between biography and nationalism in the postcommunist world. Strong personalities matter for any 'imagined community',4 but during times of radical change nations are even more likely to depend on charismatic leadership. As George Schopflin astutely observed immediately after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe:Almost hypnotically, people turned to personalities, virtually without regard to their political programmes, as a repository for society's hopes and desires in particular, because persons were felt to be more reliable, more authentic and thus more likely to embody what the individual wanted. In this way personalities were invested with what amounted to a suprapolitical status.5The post-1989 ideological vacuum could not have been filled by robust institutions (which were yet to be created) or alternative ideologies (which were yet to be articulated to harness public support); it was hence filled by strong leaders, spaning from enlightened, liberal and pro-Western leaders such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and, after 1993 in the Czech Republic, to narrow-minded, chauvinistic demagogues such as Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia.6 Indeed, one of the pathologies of post-communist societies was people's proclivity to support populist leaders whose all too often rather incoherent political programs were far less important than their personal charisma. Sulik is not charismatic,7 and he is, in fact, unlikely to ever become as influential as the likes of Havel or Meciar. Yet, his story is revealing about Slovak nationalism in the way in which his position towards Europe highlighted new divisions within Slovak society. …


This paper provides an action research account of why and how UML use cases and socio-technical analysis were combined and used to support the development of an information system, using Multiview/WISDM as the framework of ideas. Significant learning points from, and the motivation for, the research is that a focus on task satisfaction and socio-technical evaluation, rather than on the broader concept of job satisfaction and a full, traditional socio-technical analysis, was more acceptable in practice as it related more clearly to the IS domain. The paper presents a socio-technical evaluation (STE) process, reflects on its application to a particular web-based project, and makes recommendations for its use in future ISD projects. The STE process consists of a task satisfaction survey (TSS), which draws on use cases as a template for investigating users' perceptions of task efficiency, effectiveness, and enjoyment, supported by qualitative interviews in order to systematically identify, verify, and discuss the users' problems and improvement proposals before and after IT implementation. The use cases constitute the context-specific, development-oriented link between the work system, systems development, and the STE process, which in turn helps ensure that the main goal of supporting and improving the work system through continuous development and deployment of an IT system is kept in mind.


The resource contention problem is critical in Just-Enough-Time (JET) based optical burst switching (OBS) networks. Although deflection routing (DR) reduces the contention probability in some degree, it does not give much improvement under heavy traffic load. This paper analyzed the inducement causing contention in OBS networks, and proposed Resource Information Sharing Enhancement (RISE) scheme. Theoretical analysis shows that this scheme achieves shorter length of the detour path than normal DR. We simulated this scheme on both full mesh network and practical 14-node NSFNET. The simulation results show that it gives at best 2 orders magnitude improvement in reducing the burst contention probability over its previous routing approaches.


This paper analyses an opportunity to integrate remote sensing data in a forecasting scheme of river inflow to the Krasnodar reservoir. MODIS MOD10A2 eight-day composite snow cover data was selected as the basic remote sensing information. Based on these data, a database which consists of maximal snow extent maps covering the Kuban river basin over the period from March 2000 to the present, along with the technique of operative monitoring of the maximal snow covered area for the main basins of the rivers flowing into the Krasnodar reservoir were developed. It was revealed that the snow cover distribution data could be useful in the prediction of flooding in the basin. In addition, the Snowmelt Runoff model, application of which is based on snow cover remote sensing data as the input information, was tested as a short-term forecasting model. The obtained results enable us to conclude that the model can be used for short-term runoff forecasts in the mountain and foothill areas of the Krasnodar reservoir basin.


Parka is a symbolic, semantic network knowledge representation system that takes advantage of the massive parallelism of supercomputers such as the Connection Machine. The Parka language has many of the features of traditional semantic net/frame-based knowledge representation languages but also supports several kinds of rapid parallel inference mechanisms that scale to large knowledgebases of hundreds of thousands of frames or more. Parka is intended for general-purpose use and has been used thus far to support A.I. systems for case-based reasoning and data mining. This document is a user manual for the current version of Parka, version 3.2. It describes the Parka language and presents some examples of knowledge representation using Parka. Details about the parallel algorithms, implementation, and empirical results are presented elsewhere.


The 3D clothing fitting on a body model is an important research topic in the garment computer aided design (GCAD). During the fitting process, the match between the clothing and body models is still a problem for researchers. In this paper, we provide a 3D clothing fitting method based on the feature point match. We firstly use a new cubic-order weighted fitting patch to estimate the geometric properties of each vertex on two mesh models. Feature points are then extracted from two models and a new matching function is constructed to match them according to curvature and torsion. We interactively select several key feature points from two limited feature point sets to compute the transformation matrix of the clothing model. Finally the second match is performed to achieve the precise match between the clothing and body models. The experimental results show that our 3D clothing fitting method is simple and effective.


Employer defined benefit pension plans have long been an important component of the U.S. retirement system. Although these plans are disappearing in the private sector – replaced by 401(k)s – they remain the prevalent retirement plan arrangement in the public sector. But these public sector defined benefit plans are currently under financial pressure, as two financial crises since the turn of the century have caused liabilities to soar and assets to plummet. The response so far among state and local plan sponsors has been to suspend or eliminate cost-of-living adjustments, cut back sharply on benefits for new employees, and raise employee contributions. Some states have also introduced a defined contribution component. While the cutbacks have sharply reduced future costs, they have been ad hoc and unexpected. The question is whether a more orderly and predictable way can be devised to share risks, and perhaps head off trouble in advance. The Netherlands certainly offers one model of risk sharing; this brief discusses an adaptation of the Dutch approach closer to home –namely New Brunswick's Shared Risk Pension Plan introduced in May 2012. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section reviews the problem of risk in employer defined benefit plans. The second section describes New Brunswick's response – the Shared Risk design and the regulatory framework for supervising such plans. The third section discusses the response of union representatives of workers covered by the new program. The fourth section considers what lessons U.S. plans can draw from the New Brunswick approach. The final section concludes that the Shared Risk approach is an important evolutionary step, and potentially an attractive alternative to the traditional defined benefit plan design.


When it comes to creating a home, "Thrifty Chic" shows you how to reuse and restore, revive and revamp, and recycle and reclaim, in order to create a stylish yet individual home without spending a small fortune. Room by room, the book explains how to give old furniture a new lease of life and how to bring a vintage charm to a room through an inspired use of fabrics and paints. There are ideas for window dressings as well as bed and table linens. There are projects for jazzing up old wooden furniture for both house and garden, and suggestions for pulling together mismatched items into cohesive schemes.The all-important finishing touches - display, china and ceramics, glassware, paintings and frames, fabrics and trims - are covered in detail, and you can learn how to create a variety of stylish accessories for your home. Get insider's tips on what to look for at antique markets and in charity shops, and how to care for and restore your bargain purchases. Whether you are creating your first home on a tight budget, or wanting to give your existing home a new look, "Thrifty Chic" contains a treasure trove of irresistible ideas.


For many classic structured prediction problems, probability distributions over the dependent variables can be efficiently computed using widely-known algorithms and data structures (such as forward-backward, and its corresponding trellis for exact probability distributions in Markov models). However, we know of no previous work studying efficient representations of exact distributions over clusterings. This paper presents definitions and proofs for a dynamic-programming inference procedure that computes the partition function, the marginal probability of a cluster, and the MAP clustering---all exactly. Rather than the Nth Bell number, these exact solutions take time and space proportional to the substantially smaller powerset of N. Indeed, we improve upon the time complexity of the algorithm introduced by Kohonen and Corander (2016) for this problem by a factor of N. While still large, this previously unknown result is intellectually interesting in its own right, makes feasible exact inference for important real-world small data applications (such as medicine), and provides a natural stepping stone towards sparse-trellis approximations that enable further scalability (which we also explore). In experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach over approximate methods in analyzing real-world gene expression data used in cancer treatment.


We develop a model in which individual and institutional reputation concerns conflict with one another to study why investment bank reputation concerns may have diminished in recent years. Unproven but talented bankers have incentive to signal their ability through actions that may or may not best serve their clients. In the spirit of Kreps (1990), we treat the bank as a hierarchical firm whose only asset is its institutional reputation for curbing behavior that is suboptimal for the client. The conflict between individual and institutional reputation concerns is more likely to resolve in favor of institutional reputation when firms recruit only the most talented people, and less so when unique ability is especially valuable. We discuss how technological change has contributed to a "star" culture that is unfavorable toward preservation of institutional reputation.


In 1985, when Kate Grenville's novel about a fat, unlovely bag lady appeared on the Australian literary landscape, Lilian's Story was celebrated as a feminist and postcolonial text. By locating Lilian as ex-centric to the nation, to inhabit the abjected zones of the colony—the bush, the asylum, the streets of post-Federation Sydney—Grenville is commonly read as a feminist writer intervening into the gender politics that shaped Australia. Feminists celebrate the ways in which she carves out discursive spaces for women who have existed largely in the interstices between public memory and official history. Postcolonial critical interpretations of Lilian being 'colonised' by her father, provoked by the rape narrative, have tended to reproduce the postcolonial trope of Australia's shift from a colonial relationship to a national structure. Such readings largely neglect the colonial violence of Australian patriarchy, and the skewed gender norms that result when a host culture is transplanted to an imperial outpost. Taking up the colonial metaphor structuring the relationship between Lilian and her father, I read Lilian's 'madness' as a response to discourses of 'race' and gender that circulate in the colonial Imaginary to position women as the site for racial anxiety about colonial 'dirt', contamination and disorder.  While Lilian approaches the rebellious female grotesque celebrated in postcolonial feminist theorising, her obese body also signifies the devouring nature of colonialism. This paper engages with the white politics of women's 'belonging' inscribed in Lilian's Story to disinter the schizoid nature of white women's relationship to colonial patriarchy.


The inclusion of non-ipsative measures of party preference (in essence ratings for each of the parties of a political system) has become established practice in mass surveys
conducted for election studies. They exist in different forms, known as thermometer ratings or feeling scores, likes and dislikes scores, or support propensities. Usually only one of these is included in a single survey, which makes it difficult to assess the relative merits of each. The questionnaire of the Irish National Election Study 2002 (INES2002) contained three different batteries of non-ipsative party preferences. This paper investigates some of the properties of these different indicators. We focus in particular on two phenomena. First, the relationship between non-ipsative preferences and the choices
actually made on the ballot. In Ireland this relationship is more revealing than in most other countries owing to the electoral system (STV) which allows voters to cast multiple
ordered votes for candidates from different parties. Second, we investigate the latent structure of each of the batteries of party preferences and the relationships between them.

We conclude that the three instruments are not interchangeable, that they measure different orientations, and that one –the propensity to vote for a party– is by far preferable if the purpose of the study is the explanation of voters' actual choice behaviour. This
finding has important ramifications for the design of election study questionnaires.


Educational choices made by 15 year olds represent a high stake moment in the Swiss highly differentiated tracked school system. This thesis thus proposes an empirical analysis of upper secondary school transitions under four different angles using exhaustive registry data for a single Swiss Canton, Geneva. Chapter 3 assesses how transition opportunities are affected (and constrained) by social capital endowments and migration background. Chapter 4 looks at the impact of the age at first tracking on the smoothness of subsequent upper secondary school transitions. Chapter 5 focuses on transitions to apprenticeship training and examines apprentices' pathways. Chapter 6 deals with transitions across modes of training within vocational education and training, examining the impact of changing modes of training on the qualification probability on the one hand, and on the number of years necessary to qualify on the other.


This paper reports a comparison of user performance (time and accuracy) when controlling a popular arcade game of Tetris using speech recognition or non-speech (humming) input techniques. The preliminary qualitative study with seven participants shows that users were able to control the game using both methods but required more training and feedback for the humming control. The revised interface, which implemented these requirements, was positively responded by users. The quantitative test with 12 other participants shows that humming excelled in both time and accuracy, especially over longer distances and advanced difficulty levels.


Abstract:In this set of three discussions, the contributors look at Hall's work on modernisation and its meanings; post-Fordism and disorganised capitalism; and race and migration. Hall's discussions of post-Fordism, regarded by some as representing modernity (though characterised by others as disorganised capitalism), were informed by the view that this was an age to which either a progressive or a regressive politics could be articulated. Reactionary responses have been in the ascendant in Britain in the last few years, and modernity has been too often experienced as neoliberal globalisation. The British left has yet to find a strong counter-narrative, including on the question of nation. It needs to find a narrative capable of including both social liberals and more traditional left voters, and the progressive elements in both the middle and working classes. This cannot be done without a democratic sense of nation. The left is better at addressing questions of inequality and social justice than it is in connecting to progressive ideas about identity and the nations of the UK. It also needs to tackle the racist framing of much of the debate on migration, including the subliminal (though sometimes overt) message that all black and Asian people are 'immigrants', regardless of how long they and their families have lived in the UK.


In this paper, a frequency domain Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based channel estimation algorithm for Space Time Block Coded-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) systems is investigated to support higher data rate applications in wireless communications. The computational complexity of the frequency domain EM-based channel estimation is increased when higher order constellations are used because of the ascending size of the search set space. Thus, a search set reduction algorithm is proposed to decrease the complexity without sacrificing the system performance. The performance results of the proposed algorithm is obtained in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Mean Square Error (MSE) for 16QAM and 64QAM modulation schemes.


BACKGROUND
Immediate as well as delayed-type hypersensitivity immune reactions to pet-borne allergens are commonly observed in atopic diseases. Further on in atopic dermatitis (AD), cross-reactivity to self-proteins is discussed to contribute to the disease. Human cystatin A and the cat allergen Fel d 3 belong to the cystatin family, an evolutionary conserved protein family. The objective of the present study was to assess cross-reactivity between mammalian cystatins and to analyze T cell responses to cystatin in AD patients sensitized to pet dander.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
cDNA coding for dog cystatin was cloned from dog skin. Sera of 245 patients with IgE-sensitization to cat and dog dander were tested for IgE-binding to recombinantly expressed feline, canine, and human cystatin, respectively. Of these, 141 were also diagnosed for AD.

RESULTS
Cystatin-specific IgE was detected in 14.7 %(36) of patients, of which 19 suffered from AD. Within the AD patients, 9 carried measurable IgE against all three cystatins. Cystatin-sensitized AD patients did not differ from non-cystatin sensitized patients in terms of disease severity, age or total IgE levels. T cell cytokine measurements showed elevated IL-4 levels after stimulation with feline and human cystatin.

CONCLUSION
The humoral response suggests that next to Fel d3 also the homologous protein from dog might play a role in allergy. Further on, the human cystatin appears to be capable of driving a type2 immune response in sensitized AD patients and may therefore be considered a so-called autoallergen, as it has been proposed for other evolutionary conserved proteins.


This paper is concerned with the prediction of clicking an ad in sponsored search. The accurate prediction of user's click on an ad plays an important role in sponsored search, because it is widely used in both ranking and pricing of the ads. Previous work on click prediction usually takes a single ad as input, and ignores its relationship to the other ads shown in the same page. This independence assumption here, however, might not be valid in the real scenario. In this paper, we first perform an analysis on this issue by looking at the click-through rates (CTR) of the same ad, in the same position and for the same query, but surrounded by different ads. We found that in most cases the CTR varies largely, which suggests that the relationship between ads is really an important factor in predicting click probability. Furthermore, our investigation shows that the more similar the surrounding ads are to an ad, the lower the CTR of the ad is. Based on this observation, we design a continuous conditional random fields (CRF) based model for click prediction, which considers both the features of an ad and its similarity to the surrounding ads. We show that the model can be effectively learned using maximum likelihood estimation, and can also be efficiently inferred due to its closed form solution. Our experimental results on the click-through log from a commercial search engine show that the proposed model can predict clicks more accurately than previous independent models. To our best knowledge this is the first work that predicts ad clicks by considering the relationship between ads.


The ubiquitin (Ub)-dependent N-end rule relates the in vivo half-life of a protein to the identity of its N-terminal residue. A substrate with destabilizing N-terminal residue is recognized by a family of mammalian E3 ubiquitin ligases of the N-end rule pathway, including UBR1 and UBR2. However, little is known about their roles in biological processes. The aim of this dissertation is to understand the physiological functions and underlying molecular mechanisms of the E3 ubiquitin ligases in the N-end rule pathway. First, I find that UBR2, a recognition E3 component of the N-end rule pathway, localizes to the meiotic chromatin, where it mediates the transcriptional silencing through histone ubiquitylation in a spatiotemporal manner. UBR2-lacking spermatocytes show impaired global ubiquitylation, including ubiquitylation of histone H2A, a histone modification often associated with transcriptional inactivation. HR6B, an E2 conjugating enzyme of the N-end rule pathway, interacts with UBR2 as an E2-E3 complex and cooperatively mediate H2A monoubiquitylation in vitro. Impaired H2A ubiquitylation in UBR2-deficient spermatocytes correlates to defects in transcriptional silencing. Furthermore, I provide evidences that UBR2 is involved in DNA damage response (DDR) pathway through protein ubiquitylation presumably to maintain genome integrity. UBR2 is exclusively associated with non-heterochromatin throughout nucleus and responds to genotoxic stress via post-translational modification. Ubiquitylation induced by DNA damage are significantly impaired in UBR2-deficient cells. UBR2-/- mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) show increased vulnerability to the genotoxic agents and abnormality of chromosomes. Moreover, I show that divergent and cooperative functions of the E3 ligases of N-end rule pathway. UBR1 and UBR2 are 46% identical, and appear to be indistinguishable in their recognition of N degrons, yet show different physiological implications in mutant mice. UBR1-/-UBR2-/- embryos die at midgestation, with defects in neurogenesis and cardiovascular development. These defects include reduced proliferation as well as precocious migration and differentiation of neural progenitor cells. The expression of regulators such as D type cyclins and Notch1 is also altered in UBR1-/-UBR2-/- embryos. Overall, my dissertation suggests that the E3 Ub-ligases of the N-end rule pathway are required in meiosis, DDR pathway, and embryogenesis.


ABSTRACT Implementation in the late nineties of Transmilenio, a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) based transportation policy in Bogotá (Colombia), marked an inflection milestone for the replication processes of such urban transportation policies. Multiple actors and actions brought the Transmilenio model to numerous cities worldwide, first replicated in other Colombian and Latin American cities later it reached Turkey, China and India and then spread all over the world. This article explores the role of think tanks steering and promoting BRT policies during complexes processes and interactions of power among multiple scales. In doing so, the article situates itself within the research arenas studying linkages between local interests, demands and needs and the global neoliberal allocation of capital and expertise via consulting, advising commerce and construction activities. I argue that BRT promotion think tanks have emerged as powerful mechanisms mobilizing specific transportation policies acting as facilitators of movements via 'policy translators', promoters and network developers among the plethora of actors and interests. Methodology utilized is based on data from policy reports, archives and in-depth interviews exploring networked interactions while tracing linkages between think tanks and policy actors and observing knowledge dissemination arenas. This research contributes to the exploration of urban transportation epistemic communities and its role in urban change under a neoliberal global context and underlines the role of emerging policies from the south that permeate global policy arenas, traditionally dominated by actors from developed economies and discusses the mediation of global north institutions in the global south urban policy mobilities landscape.


Background Despite the current availability of diagnostic image tests with excellent diagnostic and prognostic accuracy, exercise stress testing (EST) remains as the procedure most commonly used for the evaluation, diagnosis and risk stratification of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Objectives 1) To investigate the clinical usefulness of significant exercise-induced ST-segment depression (ST-d) occurring or increasing during the recovery phase of exercise stress test and to compare it with significant ST-segment depression presenting during the active phase of exercise; 2) to evaluate the clinical data and the information provided by EST and coronary angiography. Material and Methods Clinical and EST data from 147 patients with positive stress test were analyzed. All patients had significant ST-segment depression and were divided into three groups: GI, 94 patients with ST-d during exercise; GII, 29 patients with ST-d only during the recovery phase; and GIII, 24 patients with borderline ST-d during exercise which became significant during the recovery phase. The results of the EST were correlated with the coronary angiography findings in each group. Results A diagnosis of significant CAD was made in 78 patients in GI (82.9%), in 22 in GII (75.8%) and in 21 in GIII (87.5%)  (p = 0.52). Patients in GIII were older, with high prevalence of dyslipemia, history of previous infarction and three-vessel and/or left main coronary artery disease. GII presented the higher number of asymptomatic patients with one-vessel disease and high prevalence of CAD. Conclusions There were no statistical differences in the percentage of patients with significant CAD among the groups. Patients in GIII had high prevalence of significant and severe CAD. A proper evaluation of ST-d occurring or becoming significant during the recovery phase provided additional clinical information to the results of the EST.


Since the late 1950s Milan appears in many Italian songs: from the outskirts portrayed in the songs by Jannacci, Gaber, and Celentano, to the center, which appears in four songs from the mid-1960s, the city epitomizes the country's contradictions during the years of the economic boom. The melancholic feeling of the French song meets the American rock and roll, but in Italian popular music the propensity to escape from the frenzy still prevails until the 1970s, when the characteristic attributes of Milan (fog, greyness) – until then seen as the objective correlative of the singer's romantic attitude as an outsider – begin to be interpreted in a positive way (Finardi, Fortis). Even the alienation of immigrants can look funny.


Learn about the technologies that drive fast broadband access in the first mile and master the design of first mile access networks Understand the motivating forces behind first mile access networks and learn about the technology and business requirements for first mile access solutions Master the design of passive optical networks (PON) Build EPON solutions and differentiate them from BPON and GPON Enhance bandwidth capacity in the access area using CWDM technology Learn about and design DSL and power-line communication (PLC) networks Discover the use of WiFi in the first mile and study the subsystems involved in a WiFi solution Learn the importance of management in first mile access networks and create a business case for diverse first mile access networksFirst Mile Access Networks and Enabling Technologies provides a platform for showcasing first mile access technologies and associated network solutions. Using this book, you learn about the bandwidth bottleneck within the first mile and explore the resulting business prospects. Benefit from a thorough and thoughtful discussion of the business case for the first mile, which helps you approach the issue from multiple perspectives. Examine multiple access technologies, understand the diversity of solutions within this area, and take your solutions further using sound and unique management techniques. Utilize the solid and tested implementation method provided by this book to remove networking anomalies, such as the digital divide. This book helps you understand and capitalize on the market opportunity presented by the first mile.First Mile Access Networks and Enabling Technologies covers multiple technologies, protocols, and business methods and can be used to understand the growth of first mile access networks and resulting business opportunities.This book is part of the Networking Technology Series from Cisco Press, which offers networking professionals valuable information for constructing efficient networks, understanding new technologies, and building successful careers.


Table tennis playing involves complex spatial movement of the racket and human body. It takes much effort for the novice players to better mimic expert players. The evaluation of motion patterns during table tennis training, which is usually achieved by coaches, is important for novice trainees to improve faster. However, traditional coaching relies heavily on coaches qualitative observation and subjective evaluation. While past literature shows considerable potential in applying biomechanical analysis and classification for motion pattern assessment to improve novice table tennis players, little published work was found on table tennis biomechanics. To attempt to overcome the problems and fill the gaps, this research aims to quantify the movement of table tennis strokes, to identify the motion pattern differences between experts and novices, and to develop a model for automatic evaluation of the motion quality for an individual.

Firstly, a novel method for comprehensive quantification and measurement of the kinematic motion of racket and human body is proposed. In addition, a novel method based on racket centre velocity profile is proposed to segment and normalize the motion data. Secondly, a controlled experiment was conducted to collect motion data of expert and novice players during forehand strokes. Statistical analysis was performed to determine the motion differences between the expert and the novice groups. The experts exhibited significantly different motion patterns with faster racket centre velocity and smaller racket plane angle, different standing posture and joint angular velocity, etc. Lastly, a support vector machine (SVM) classification technique was employed to build a model for motion pattern evaluation. The model development was based on experimental data with different feature selection methods and SVM kernels to achieve the best performance (F1 score) through cross-validated and Nelder-Mead method. Results showed that the SVM classification model exhibited good performance with an average model performance above 90% in distinguishing the stroke motion between expert and novice players.

This research helps to better understand the biomechanical mechanisms of table tennis strokes, which will ultimately aid the improvement of novice players. The phase segmentation and normalization methods for table tennis strokes are novel, unambiguous and straightforward to apply. The quantitative comparison identified the comprehensive differences in motion between experts and novice players for racket and human body in continuous phase time, which is a novel contribution. The proposed classification model shows potential in the application of SVM to table tennis biomechanics and can be exploited for automatic coaching.


An extensive empirical literature has examined the behavior of crop yields over time. Corn yields have been characterized by signficant increases reflecting an array of technological developments that have substantially boosted productivity. While much of the focus has been on modeling deterministic and possibly stochastic trends in yields over time, an equally important question involves the extent to which yield changes may occur in response to price. This paper addresses two dimensions of this issue. We first look at the extent to which realized yields (i.e., at harvest) tend to be influenced by planting{time quotes of post{harvest futures contracts. Second, we examine the potential for intra{seasonal responsiveness of yields to significant price swings. The latter response is especially important in light of recent arguments that weather offers identification through instruments that are completely exogenous to market conditions; a view often expressed in terms of a "natural experiment." We challenge this argument by finding that the potential does exist for yields to be affected by significant price changes that occur early in the growing season.


IPV refuges are an important resource for those wishing to free themselves from IPV violence, but only if they truly empower the IPV survivor by not replicating the control and power differentials from which they are fleeing. Early feminist grassroots activists actively fostered empowering helping relationships in the organizational model of collectives which espoused equality, participatory decision making, and interpersonal relationships. Due largely to funding pressures, collectives were gradually replaced by the hierarchal organizational model found in refuges today. Many worry that most IPV organizations today may actually pose a barrier to the empowerment of survivors. This research project explored the question "What would an organizational work model for an IPV refuge look like that could provide sustainably funded, best practice services to survivors while holding paramount the early battered women's movement ideals of equality, inclusive decision making, and empowerment?" The conceptual framework that was used to inform this study was empowerment; operationally defined as the process of acquiring power to direct and control one's own life. The research design was a qualitative structured theoretical analysis, drawing heavily from the systematic review methodology. A search of the literature was performed after specific inclusion criteria and search strategies were defined. Findings included major and minor themes related to helper relationships, and an analysis of sustainable funding models. A theoretical model of an IPV refuge was created from the findings, and implications for social work practice and further research was discussed. A call was made for taking the next step by developing a social enterprise business plan and seeking funding to test the model. SUSTAINABLE, EMPOWERING MODEL FOR IPV SERVICES 3


The humphead wrasse Cheilinus undulatus is an iconic, ecologically important and Endangered fish species associated with coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific region. Due to its large size and complex life history characteristics, it is vulnerable to overfishing and has undergone substantial population declines in parts of its range. Knowledge of the species' movement ecology is currently limited to only 2 previous studies, and very little is known about populations in the western Indian Ocean. The present study aimed to use passive acoustic telemetry to investigate the importance of a remote coral reef to a population of humphead wrasse in the Republic of Seychelles, and subsequently assess the efficacy of a proposed marine protected area at this location for protection of the species. Tagged fish (n = 20) exhibited persistent (>500 d) site fidelity, with low dispersal distances (mean ± SD: 6.44 ± 4.0 km) and restricted core activity spaces (50% Brownian bridge kernel utilization density: 0.91 ± 0.61 km2). Additionally, the study site was home to a group of large (total length 97.9 ± 20.6 cm) and currently unexploited humphead wrasse that showed longterm predictable site fidelity and thus could be vulnerable to over-exploitation. The establishment of a proposed no-take marine protected area at the study site would encompass the core home range area of all tagged humphead wrasse and could effectively conserve this stronghold of Endangered fish to ensure the persistence of the species in Seychelles waters.


Objectives: Posterior fossa brain arteriovenous malformations (PFbAVMs) are rare lesions. Management is complicated by eloquence of adjacent neurological structures, multimodality treatment is often necessary, and obliteration is not always possible. We describe a 15-year experience in the management of posterior fossa brain AVMs with a focus on clinical outcome. Methods: From 1989 to 2004, prospectively collected information on 106 patients with diagnosis of a PFbAVMs was obtained. Clinical and angioarchitectural characteristics, management options and complications are described and reviewed to evaluate their impact on final outcome as measured by the Modified Rankin Score (mRS). Results: Ninety-eight patients were followed for an average of 3.3 years (1–14.6). The male-to-female ratio was 1:1. Ninety-five out of 98 patients (96.9%) were symptomatic at presentation, with 61 (62.2%) intracranial haemorrhages. Sixty-two patients were treated (46 cerebellar, 16 brainstem). Ten haemorrhages occurred in follow-up (4.1%/year). The mRS was obtained in 62 patients and was classified as low (good, mRS⩽2) or high (poor, mRS⩾3). Haemorrhage was the only predictor of poor mRS at presentation (p = 0.0229). A poor clinical outcome was correlated with the presence of AA (p = 0.0276), a poor initial mRS (p<0.0001) and the number of treatments needed (p = 0.0434). Patients were significantly more likely to improve than to deteriorate over time (p = 0.0201). Conclusion: The final clinical outcome in PFbAVMs relates directly with the presence of associated aneurysms, number of treatments needed to obliterate the AVM and mRS at presentation. Despite the fact that patients tend to improve after brain AVM haemorrhage, the relationship of MRS at presentation and final outcome suggests that an expedited, more definitive treatment is probably a better choice, especially in patients with good grades after the initial bleeding.


In this speech, the Honorable Lewis A. Kaplan discusses one problem in the legal system created by advances in technology the tension between the privacy interests of litigants and the increased availability of information in modern society. Although openness is a central tenet of the legal system, until recent advancements in information technology, significant logistical difficulties in obtaining records on all but the most notable cases made most information unavailable to the public. However, advances in technology have greatly facilitated access to the universe of legal doents. Judge Kaplan explores the potential consequences of increased availability of information in a number of contexts and argues that it imposes an important responsibility on Courts to rethink the boundaries between public and private in litigation and to exercise increased caution in dealing with processes that touch on these boundaries. Cite as: 4 YALE SYMP. L. & TECH. 1 (2001)


Detailed sampling of the Upper Triassic atoll-type carbonates of the Sambosan Accretionary Complex throughout South- west Japan yielded highly abundant and diversified porcelaneous, microgranular, agglutinated and hyaline foraminifers of Carnian- Rhaetian age, as well as some microproblematica and ostracods. The foraminiferal assemblages were collected from shallow-water car- bonates originated upon volcanic seamounts surrounded by deep-water radiolarian chert in a mid-open oceanic realm of the Panthalassan Ocean during Triassic time. Because most studies of the Upper Triassic microfauna come from the former Tethys, counterparts of the Panthalassan Ocean are pivotal to decipher the micropalaeontological biodiversity of the western circum Pacific, as well as to evaluate the distribution patterns of organisms and their evolution trends throughout the Tethys and Panthalassa. This study reports on 42 genera and 60 species whose associations can be used as sedimentary facies indicators of carbonate buildup environments. Japanese specimens show a strong Tethyan affinity, and especially with the Peri- and Southern Tethyan forms. A palaeobiogeographic distribution analysis using a large foraminiferal database is led, in order to evaluate the extraordinary spreading of these Upper Triassic foraminifers between the Neo-Tethys and the Panthalassa. Data are finally integrated in a new plate tectonic model, where six faunistic provinces are defined, each containing a characteristic foraminiferal assemblage. This map provides for the first time a useful and visual synthesis of the Upper Triassic foraminifer palaeobiogeographic distribution.


[1] Coulomb stress maps are produced by computing the tensorial stress perturbation due to an earthquake rupture and resolving this tensor onto planes of a particular orientation. It is often assumed that aftershock fault planes are "optimally oriented"; in other words, the regional stress and coseismic stress change are used to compute the orientation of planes most likely to fail and the coseismic stress is resolved onto these orientations. This practice assumes that faults capable of sustaining aftershocks exist at all orientations, an assumption contradicted by the observation that aftershock focal mechanisms have strong preferred orientations consistent with mapped structural trends. Here we systematically investigate the best planes onto which stress should be resolved for the Landers, Hector Mine, Loma Prieta, and Northridge earthquakes by quantitatively comparing observed aftershock distributions with stress maps based on optimally oriented planes (two- and three-dimensional), main shock orientation, and regional structural trend. We find that the best model differs between different tectonic regions but that in all cases, models that incorporate the regional stress field tend to produce stress maps that best fit the observed aftershock distributions, although not all such models do so equally well. Our results suggest that when the regional stress field is poorly defined, or in structurally complex areas, the best model may be to fix the strike of the planes upon which the stress is to be resolved to that of the main shock but allow the dip and rake to vary.


Drying of thin layer white mulberry fruits was studied using a solar tunnel dryer under the ecological conditions of Isparta, Turkey. An experimental solar dryer with a flat plate solar collector has been constructed at the Department of Agricultural Machinery and Technologies Engineering at Suleyman Demirel University. In this work, the effects of solar tunnel drying on drying time, drying ratio of white mulberry were investigated. During the drying process, solar irradiation, drying air temperature, relative humidity, and air velocity were measured constantly in different parts of the dryer. The change of white mulberry fruits mass was measured daily. In this study, the fresh white mulberry fruit samples were selected, sorted, washed in water. The drying characteristic curves were evaluated against ten mathematical models and the Midlli-Kucuk was found to be the best descriptive model for solar tunnel drying of thin layer white mulberry fruit samples.


The rise of the internet and mobile telecommunications has created the possibility of using large datasets to understand behavior at unprecedented levels of temporal and geographic resolution. Online social networks attract the most users, though users of these new technologies provide their data through multiple sources, e.g. call detail records, blog posts, web forums, and content aggregation sites. These data allow scholars to adjudicate between competing theories as well as develop new ones, much as the microscope facilitated the development of the germ theory of disease. Of those networks, Twitter presents an ideal combination of size, international reach, and data accessibility that make it the preferred platform in academic studies. Acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing these data, however, require new tools and processes. This Element introduces these methods to social scientists and provides scripts and examples for downloading, processing, and analyzing Twitter data. 1 Department of Public Policy, University of California Los Angeles 337 Charles Young Drive East Los Angeles, CA 90095 ∗To whom correspondence should be addressed: zst at luskin dot ucla edu


Post-apartheid South Africa can lay claim to having substantially increased access to piped drinking water for all. Virtually all urban households and most rural households now have access to piped drinking water, with the remaining deprived communities located in more remote rural areas and in urban informal settlements. While drinking water may not necessarily be safe (or consistently available) in rural communities, there has been no recurrence of waterborne epidemics on the scale of the cholera epidemic of 2000-2001. However, child under-five diarrhoea case fatality rates indicate ongoing health issues in rural communities deprived of water services.
Water-related health issues are emerging due to conditions of water stress and climate change. Constraints on supply call for greater water re-use and better management of treatment plants to ensure river health and safe drinking water. The process of eutrophication is degrading water and habitat quality, and the results are difficult to treat. With climate change, existing microbial diseases could become more prevalent which is especially disturbing as water treatment plants are discharging insufficiently treated effluent into rivers. Contamination of groundwater and surface water from acid mine drainage requires specialised treatment. All of these factors indicate the need for improved water and health management, with greater surveillance of water quality and the delivery of universal water services to ensure health and prevent disease outbreaks.
The water-related Sustainable Development Goals extend the range of commitment beyond access to basic water services, and include improved water quality, enhanced water use and re-use and better water-related ecosystems. These commitments will demand a well-integrated approach and close public monitoring.


The characteristic, or natural, length scales of a spatially dynamic ecological landscape are the spatial scales at which the deterministic trends in the dynamic are most sharply in focus. Given recent development of techniques to determine the characteristic length scales (CLSs) of real ecological systems, I explore the potential for using CLSs to address three important and vexing issues in applied ecology, viz. (i) determining the optimum scales to monitor ecological systems, (ii) interpreting change in ecological communities, and (iii) ascertaining connectivity between species in complex ecologies. In summarizing the concept of characteristic length scales as system-level scaling thresholds, I emphasize that the primary CLS is, by definition, the optimum scale at which to monitor a system if the objective is to observe its deterministic dynamics at a system level. Using several different spatially explicit individual-based models, I then explore predictions of the underlying theory of CLSs in the context of interpreting change and ascertaining connectivity among species in ecological systems. Analysis of these models support predictions that systems with strongly fluctuating community structure, but an otherwise stable long-term dynamic defined by a stationary attractor, indicate an invariant length scale irrespective of community structure at the time of analysis, and irrespective of the species analyzed. In contrast, if changes in the underlying dynamic are forcibly induced, the shift in dynamics is reflected by a change in the primary length scale. Thus, consideration of the magnitude of the CLS through time enables distinguishing between circumstances where there are temporal changes in community structure but not in the long-term dynamic, from that where changes in community structure reflect some kind of fundamental shift in dynamics. In this context, CLSs emerge as a diagnostic tool to identify phase shifts to alternative stable states associated with loss of resilience in ecological systems and thus provide a means to interpret change in community composition. By extension, comparison of the CLSs of ostensibly similar communities at different points in space can reveal whether they experience similar underlying dynamics. Analysis of these models also reveals that species in the same community whose dynamics are largely independent indicate different length scales. These examples demonstrate the potential to apply CLSs in a decision-support role in determining scales for monitoring, interpreting whether change in community structure reflects a shift in underlying dynamics and therefore may warrant management intervention, and determining connectivities among species in complex ecological systems.


Previous research shows that dividing attention between multiple targets in the visual field occurs frequently in everyday activities. The cost of dividing attention has been found to be affected by various environmental factors. One such factor is the contrast of the targets from their background (Plummer & Ni, 2014), which has important applications for activities such as nighttime driving. In the current study, contrast was manipulated to examine its effect on the cost of dividing attention. Eighteen younger adults participated in the study, whose contrast sensitivity thresholds were first measured on a contrast detection task. They then completed a modified version of the UFOV test (Richards, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2006), which consisted of measures of peripheral-focused attention and divided attention thresholds at three eccentricity locations (4, 12, and 20 degrees) from the center of the screen. These measures were carried out at 5 different contrast levels, with the high set at .3 Michelson contrast, the low at each participant's contrast detection threshold, and the other three intermediate levels evenly distributed along a logarithmic scale. The threshold of display duration was derived using the best PEST procedure for each eccentricity under each contrast level. Attention cost was calculated by subtracting the threshold scores of the peripheral-focused attention from those of the divided attention task. The results showed that, for both tasks, thresholds increased with increased eccentricity and decreased contrast. The interaction between contrast and eccentricity was significant for the peripheral-attention task, but not for the divided attention task. Consistent with previous research, the current study found increased cost of dividing attention under low contrast conditions. Our results might explain the increased accident risks associated with driving under low visibility conditions, such as at night or in fog. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


The "Level of Use of an Innovation" (LoU) and "Stages of Concern" (SoC) assessments are key components of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM). These tools can provide a clear articulation and characterization of the level of adoption of an organizational innovation in educational technology. An adaptation of the LoU was used to assess changes in understanding of and competence with educational technologies by participants in a graduate level course focused on the use of emergent technologies in professional development. The instrument reflected the criteria framework of the original LoU assessment tool, but was adapted to utilize a specifically structured self report scale of the "level of use" index to promote collaborative self-reflection. Growth in knowledge of, and confidence with, specific emergent technologies is clearly indicated by the results, thus supporting the use of collaborative reflection and assessment of the professional development process to foster professional growth.


The antibiotic defense substance allicin (diallylthiosulfinate) is produced by garlic (Allium sativum L.) after tissue damage, giving garlic its characteristic odor. Allicin is a redox-toxin that oxidizes thiols in glutathione and cellular proteins. A highly allicin-resistant Pseudomonas fluorescens strain (PfAR-1) was isolated from garlic, and genomic clones were shotgun electroporated into an allicin-susceptible P. syringae strain (Ps4612). Recipients showing allicin-resistance had all inherited a group of genes from one of three similar genomic islands (GI), that had been identified in an in silico analysis of the PfAR-1 genome. A core fragment of 8-10 congruent genes with redox-related functions, present in each GI, was shown to confer allicin-specific resistance to P. syringae, and even to an unrelated E. coli strain. Transposon mutagenesis and overexpression analyses revealed the contribution of individual candidate genes to allicin-resistance. Moreover, PfAR-1 was unusual in having 3 glutathione reductase (glr) genes, two copies in two of the GIs, but outside of the core group, and one copy in the PfAR-1 genome. Glr activity was approximately 2-fold higher in PfAR-1 than in related susceptible Pf0-1, with only a single glr gene. Moreover, an E. coli Δglr mutant showed increased susceptibility to allicin, which was complemented by PfAR-1 glr1. Taken together, our data support a multi-component resistance mechanism against allicin, achieved through horizontal gene transfer during coevolution, and allowing exploitation of the garlic ecological niche. GI regions syntenic with PfAR-1 GIs are present in other plant-associated bacterial species, perhaps suggesting a wider role in adaptation to plants per se.


Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) demonstrated a link between movement and the metrical interpretation of rhythm patterns in 7-month-old infants. Infants bounced on every second beat of a rhythmic pattern with no auditory accents later preferred to listen to an accented version of the pattern with accents every second beat (duple or march meter), whereas infants bounced on every third beat of the same rhythmic pattern preferred to listen to a version with accents every third beat (triple or waltz meter). The present study compared infants participating in Kindermusik classes with infants not participating in music classes. In Kindermusik classes infants receive enriched experience moving to music. Following Western musical norms, the majority of the music samples in the classes are in duple meter. During the preference test, Kindermusik infants listened longer overall, indicating heightened interest in musical rhythms. Both groups listened longer to the accented version that matched how they had been bounced, but only the Kindermusik group showed a stronger preference in the case of duple bouncing than in the case of triple bouncing. We conclude that musical classes for infants can accelerate the development of culture-specific metrical perception.


I characterize a dynamic economy under general distributions of households' risk tolerance, endowments, and beliefs about long-term growth. As the economy expands and the stock market rises (a) the fraction of households with declining consumption-share increases; (b) the wealth-share of high risk-tolerant households increases; (c) richer households' wealth display a higher CAPM beta; and (d) households' portfolios change qualitatively. A log-utility investor for instance borrows in contractions but lends in expansions. Variations in uncertainty and expected growth generate trading volume due to risk sharing. Higher uncertainty increases stock prices, risk premiums, volatility, wealth inequality and the dispersion of portfolio holdings, consistently with the events in the late 1990s.