This paper determines the conditions under which stochastic orderings of random variables, e.g., stochastic dominance and the monotone likelihood ordering, are preserved or reversed by conditioning on competitive selection. A new stochastic order over unconditional distributions is introduced—geometric dominance—which is sufficient for a random variable, conditioned on competitive selection, to be stochastically dominant and both necessary and sufficient for it to be dominant under the monotone likelihood ratio ordering. Using geometric dominance, we provide an "anatomy of selection bias" by identifying the conditions under which competitive selection conditioning preserves and reverses unconditional stochastic order relations. We show that, for all standard error distributions (e.g., Normal, Logistic, Laplace), competitive selection preserves stochastic order relations. One implication of this result is that, even in the presence of self-selection bias, the sign of treatment affects can be identified by standard uncorrected OLS and Logit/Probit models. Another is that, for almost all "textbook" distribution families, MLRP ordering is preserved by competitive selection.


: Purpose: The article analyzes the issue of substantiating the impact of the spatial organization of the territory of the Russian Federation on the public management at the level of macroeconomic systems. Design/Methodology/Approach: The federal districts were chosen as the object of the study as macro-regional socio-economic systems, the Southern Federal District and its constituent regions (subjects of the Russian Federation). The article investigates the main transformational processes taking place in the RF spatial development, concerning the development of the regional systems of the public management and the necessity of their consistency at the supra-regional (macro-regional) level. Findings: The authors propose a set of measures to form supra-regional system to coordinate the regional development priorities considering the peculiarities of the spatial transformation of Russia's territory and the position of the Southern macro-region in the spatial system of the country. This system formation allows involving as many interested parties as possible. Practical Implications: The results may be implemented into macro-region public administration to maximize the advantages of the geo-economic and strategic position, natural and climatic conditions of Russian regions' development. Originality/Value: The main contribution of this study is a tailored approach to the public administration of the social and economic development of the macro-regions in the context of the spatial transformation


Fragrance materials, such as acetyl cedrene (AC), are of environmental concern because they are continuously released to aquatic systems down the drain. In the present study, Capitella teleta (formerly Capitella capitata species I) was exposed to AC‐amended sediment at two population densities corresponding to 44,000 and 88,000 worms/m2. The fate of AC in systems with worms was compared to that in identical systems without worms. We examined the toxicity of AC on worm survival, growth, and feeding rate, and quantified the fate of AC in exposure systems by mass balance. Worm survival was close to 100% in all treatments. Acetyl cedrene had some positive effects on worm growth, but not feeding, whereas density had negative effects on both growth and feeding rates. After 14 d, the sediment concentration of AC was reduced by 88 to 99% in the presence of worms, whereas sediment AC concentration was reduced by 13 to 31% or less in the absence of worms. Acetyl cedrene was detected in fecal pellets, at low concentrations compared to the initial concentration in the sediment, but not in worm tissue, suggesting that ingested AC is bioavailable to Capitella teleta and that worms can biotransform sediment‐associated AC effectively. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2012; 31: 2639–2646. © 2012 SETAC


Amphipods of the family Talitridae form an important part of the cryptozoa of Tasmanian forests .. The terrestrial amphipod fauna of the Tasmanian mainland consists of fifteen species. The previously widely used grouping of land amphipods into the genera Orchestia and Talitrus is considered unsatisfactory and consequently a number of genera are created to receive the Tasmanian species. Three new genera, Neorchestia, Orchestiella and Tasmanorchestia, are described, and Mysticotalitrus, Arcitalitrus and Keratroides are raised to generic status. Twelve new species, Austrotroides longicornis, A. leptomerus, A. maritimus, Neorchestia plicibrancha. Mysticotalitrus cryptus, Arcitalitrus bassianus, Keratroides albidus, K. rex, K. pyrensis, Orchestiella neambulans, O. quasimodo and Tasmanorchestia annulata, are described. Mysticotalitrus tasmaniae is redescribed, and a description of the male is given. Keratroides vulgaris and K. angulosus are also recorded from Tasmania, and Protaustrotroides victoriae from King Island. Talitrus assimilis is considered a doubtful species. Among the Tasmanian fauna (excluding P. victoriae), four of the seven genera, but only one of the fifteen species also occurs on the Australian mainland. Examination of geological and paleoclimatic data suggests that this is due to the conditions which prevailed on the Bassian isthmus during Tertiary and late Quaternary times.


Organisation and heterogeneous photoreactivity of water-soluble zinc meso-tetrakis(4-carboxyphenyl) porphyrin (ZnTPPC) were investigated at polarisable liquid / liquid interfaces by systematically varying the organic phase solvent. The remarkable affinity of ZnTPPC for the molecular interfacial boundary manifested itself by modulations in the surface excess charge. Potential dependence of interfacial coverage of the porphyrin appeared to be affected by the nature of the organic phase solvent. Heterogeneous photoinduced ET between the specifically adsorbed porphyrin molecules and the redox species present in the organic solvent manifests itself as photocurrent responses. Photocurrent responses are also found to be strongly dependent on the nature of the organic phase solvent. Variations in the photocurrent magnitude were rationalised in terms of the interfacial organisation of the porphyrin and the phenomenological electron transfer rate constant using a modified Marcus model. Formation of a self-assembled monolayer of 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA) on gold electrode was investigated by Kelvin probe technique and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy as a function of immersion time in thiol solution. Kelvin probe measurements exhibited a monotonic increase in surface potential with immersion time. The increase in surface potential was attributed to the formation of gold-thiolate bonding. Maximum coverage of thiol molecules were obtained after an immersion time of 10 h. Double-layer capacitance (Cdl) values of thiol modified electrodes were extracted from the impedance measurements as a function of immersion time. Furthermore, Cdl values dropped significantly and reached a constant value within a short immersion time in thiol. Multilayer film of pLys and pGlu was fabricated on MUA modified gold electrodes. Polyelectrolyte modified electrodes displayed characteristics electrochemical features of diffusion through pinholes. Photocurrent responses originating from the porphyrin sensitised ultrathin polyelectrolyte multilayer assembly is investigated as a function of bias potential and illumination light intensity. Redox couples incorporated within the multilayer assembly act as carriers of the photogenerated charges across the film. The incident photon to current conversion efficiency (IPCE) of porphyrin sensitised multilayer assemblies is estimated to be 0.02%. Finally, electrochemical and optical properties of metal nanoparticle architectures on pLys modified gold electrodes were investigated. Monodispersed randomly distributed arrays of Au nanoparticles were formed upon electrostatic deposition from solution. Kelvin probe measurements exhibited a steady increase in compensation potential difference (CPD) with deposition time which reached a plateau after 4 h. From the scanning electron micrographs, we estimated maximum particle coverage of 8.6 × l010cm-2 separated by an average edge-to-edge separation of 25 nm from the nearest neighbour. The plasmon resonance band of Au nanoparticles in the ensemble featured a shift to longer wavelengths and were broader compared to that of colloidal particles in aqueous solution. Cyclic voltammetry and impedance measurements indicated strong electronic coupling between the nanoparticles in the ensemble and the electrode. Furthermore, fabrication of a three-dimensional assembly of metal nanoparticles and pLys using electrostatic layer-by-layer method is also illustrated.


This text traces the career of Ana Maria Pacheco, a sculptor-painter-printmaker, from her origins and education in Brazil, through her arrival in England as a British Council scholar at the Slade in 1973, and her development into one of the most renowned figurative artists of her time, with a career crowned by a residency at the National Gallery, London in 1999. The book explores the strands of the Baroque, the magical and the humane in her imagery and relates these to the culture of post-colonial Brazil as well as to the visual language of power and potency in Europe. At a time when most artists shy away from literature and myth, Pacheco meets them head on and draws sustenance from the fields of reference they provide. By following the progress of her imagination through the various media in which she works, the book reveals the scale of Pacheco's vision and highlights the streams of visual narrative that make her a unique figure; one uniting the sensibility of South America with that of Western Europe.


The lack of specialized professionals in network management and the growing complexity of this task has been aiming the need for developing tools to give support to the network administrator task. The construction of such tools requires an intense process of knowledge acquisition from experts in the area as well as the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. A number of different approaches have been proposed, evolving from rule-based systems through case-based systems, to more recent modelbased systems [6] [7] [8] [9] [1 i]. A special attention has been given to propose systems to solve two main network management tasks: the fault diagnosis and performance management. The aim of this paper is to specify a Communication Fault Diagnostic System applying the AI Model Based approach.. We claim that this approach provides a foundation for exchanging behavioral, structural and control information between the sub-tasks of such complex systems. We also show what are the main aspects to be considered when constructing such systems: the construction of an automatic network discovery system and a configuration diagnosis system, both to support the construction of the network configuration model, and a network status gathering system to allow the diagnosis system to observe the network.


In this first comprehensive history, Andrea Olmstead takes us behind the scenes and into the practice rooms, studios, and offices of one of the most famous music schools in the world. The roster of Juilliard faculty and their students reads like a veritable who's who of the performing arts world. The music school has counted Josef and Rosina Lhevinne and Olga Samaroff Stokowski among its faculty, with students including Richard Rodgers, Van Cliburn, James Levine, Leontyne Price, Miles Davis, and Itzhak Perlman. The dance faculty has included Jos Limn, Anna Sokolow, and the venerable Martha Graham, while such bright lights as Robin Williams, Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, and Mandy Patinkin have emerged from the youngest department in the school, the Drama Division. What is it really like to be immersed in the rarefied, ultra-competitive conservatory atmosphere of Juilliard? Olmstead has pored over archival records and ephemeral material and conducted dozens of unprecedented interviews to paint a true picture of the school's private side and the accomplishments and foibles of its leaders. Through its various incarnations as the Institute of Musical Art, the Juilliard Musical Foundation, the Juilliard School of Music, and The Juilliard School stormy directorships and controversies have left their mark: Augustus Juilliard's multi- million-dollar bequest in 1919, the expensive move to the Lincoln Center complex, and dozens of episodes of power-brokering, arrogance, intimidation, secrecy, and infighting. Balanced against these are the vision, dedication, talent, and determination of generations of gifted teachers, students, and administrators. For nearly a century, Juilliard has trained the artists who compose the elite corps of the performing arts community in the United States. "Juilliard: A History" affirms the school's artistic legacy of great performances as the one constant amid decades of upheaval and change.


This case study investigated students' engagement and learning experiences in online courses through Blackboard CE6 (Course Management System). The meaning that students gave to their learning experiences and the problems they encountered were also investigated in order to understand how students learn in a technology-enriched learning environment. Data were collected through open-ended survey questions, participant observations, and document analyses from three online instructional technology graduate courses where students used threaded discussion, live classroom, chat room, and email for online communication and interaction. Findings indicated that students' engagement was promoted by using various communication tools although student preferred discussion board and email to other tools. This study also illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of each tool and discussed the issues of using these tools as well as student' perspectives on using these tools to promote their interaction and collaboration.


Numerous sophisticated algorithms exist for discovering reoccurring patterns in financial time series. However, the most accurate techniques available produce opaque models, from which it is impossible to discern the rationale behind trading decisions. It is therefore desirable to sacrifice some degree of accuracy for transparency. One fairly recent evolutionary computational technology that creates transparent models, using a user-specified grammar, is grammatical evolution (GE). In this paper, we explore the possibility of evolving transparent entry- and exit trading strategies for the E-mini S&P 500 index futures market in a high-frequency trading environment using grammatical evolution. We compare the performance of models incorporating risk into their calculations with models that do not. Our empirical results suggest that profitable, risk-averse, transparent trading strategies for the E-mini S&P 500 can be obtained using grammatical evolution together with technical indicators.


This study began with a question of whether the existing social buttons are able to evaluate the quality of news comments. Most social buttons adopt a holistic approach by using only one button. The current simplified method of evaluating news comments makes it difficult to reflect at least two different perspectives of information value—utilitarian and hedonic. Having only single button muddles the reasons why people recommended the news comment and complicates efforts to assess the quality of comments. To address this problem, social buttons for a system of online news comments need to undergo improvements to permit proper assessment of comments and of their informational value. This research will identify the problems social buttons pose for news comments and also will design and evaluate solutions to these problems through a design workshop. We adopted design science as a research method and will develop and evaluate a new button design in an iterative manner. We found through literature reviews two important dimensions of comment value, informational value and sentimental value, that will be accommodated by the newly proposed social button.


Abstract Dynamics of the compression of a magnetized plasma target by a heavy liner made of partially ionized high-Z material is discussed. A soft-landing (shockless) mode of the liner deceleration is analyzed. Conclusion is drawn that such mode is possible for the liners whose thickness at the time of the first contact with the target is smaller than ~10% of the initial (uncompressed) target radius. A combination of the plasma liner with one or two glide cones allows for direct access to the area near the center of the reactor chamber. One can then generate a plasma target inside the plasma liner at the optimum time. The other advantage of the glide cones is that they can be used to deliver additional fuel to the center of the target near the point of maximum compression and thereby increase the fusion yield.


There is growing interest in uncovering the viral diversity present in wild animal species. The remote Antarctic region is home to a wealth of uncovered microbial diversity, some of which is associated with its megafauna, including penguin species, the dominant avian biota. Penguins interface with a number of other biota in their roles as marine mesopredators and several species overlap in their ranges and habitats. To characterize the circular single-stranded viruses related to those in the phylum Cressdnaviricota from these environmental sentinel species, cloacal swabs (n = 95) were obtained from King Penguins in South Georgia, and congeneric Adélie Penguins, Chinstrap Penguins, and Gentoo Penguins across the South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula. Using a combination of high-throughput sequencing, abutting primers-based PCR recovery of circular genomic elements, cloning, and Sanger sequencing, we detected 97 novel sequences comprising 40 ssDNA viral genomes and 57 viral-like circular molecules from 45 individual penguins. We present their detection patterns, with Chinstrap Penguins harboring the highest number of new sequences. The novel Antarctic viruses identified appear to be host-specific, while one circular molecule was shared between sympatric Chinstrap and Gentoo Penguins. We also report viral genotype sharing between three adult-chick pairs, one in each Pygoscelid species. Sequence similarity network approaches coupled with Maximum likelihood phylogenies of the clusters indicate the 40 novel viral genomes do not fall within any known viral families and likely fall within the recently established phylum Cressdnaviricota based on their replication-associated protein sequences. Similarly, 83 capsid protein sequences encoded by the viruses or viral-like circular molecules identified in this study do not cluster with any of those encoded by classified viral groups. Further research is warranted to expand knowledge of the Antarctic virome and would help elucidate the importance of viral-like molecules in vertebrate host evolution.


Despite increasing provision of school sex education teenage sexual health in the United Kingdom is in overall decline with increasing rates of terminations and sexually transmitted infections in under 18s outweighing recent modest reductions in conception rates in this age group. Counterintuitively rather than improving sexual health sex behaviour interventions can make it worse. Most studies on sex education programmes in schools examine intermediate outcomes only such as pupil satisfaction or reported condom use. This often facilitates premature false claims of success whereas more robust outcome measures such as rates of terminations unplanned conceptions and sexually transmitted infections show no benefit. In this weeks BMJ Henderson and colleagues report the effect of a theoretically based teacher delivered sex education programme (SHARE) on registered conceptions and terminations. The trial found no significant difference between the intervention and control groups in National Health Service registered conceptions (per 1000 pupils: 300 SHARE v 274 control; difference 26 95% confidence interval -33 to 86) or terminations (127 SHARE v 112 control; difference 15 -13 to 42) between ages 16 and 20. (excerpt)


This study is concerned with the manner in which households create strategies to mitigate
environmental risks in informal settlements for example Lacey Road which is located in Sydenham in
the eThekwini metropolitan area of KwaZulu‐Natal. Informal settlements result from migration and
urbanisation trends whereby people from rural areas migrate to the city in search of job
opportunities and a better life. Many fail to find the formal employment opportunities they seek and
find themselves having to provide their own shelter. These circumstances culminate in the
construction of informal settlements in and near the city. People settle on land that is often
undesirable for development because of geological or environmental pressures e.g. it has unstable
soils, the land is located within flood plains or on very steep slopes.
The vulnerability approach and political ecology framework underpin this study. These two
approaches have been used in order to understand the capabilities of informal settlers to cope with
risks they are faced with. They have been also used to understand how human activities and political
systems may be linked to the spread of environmental degradation and risks. Household survey and
key informants interviews were used to conduct this study.
The findings of the research show that Lacey Road informal settlement is exposed to various risks
such as floods, fire, waste disposal, and indoor air pollution and other health risks. It is clear that residents from Lacey Road are regularly exposed to the harsh realities of spatial and environmental
marginalisation. The main reason for their vulnerability is the lack of service delivery by the
municipality. This is due to a unique set of power relations where the community does not have
profile to force the municipality to provide access to basic services.
It is within this context that the researcher sought to analyse and explore the interface between
environmental risk management and coping strategies of residents within informal settlements.
Whilst there are general risks that face all residents of informal settlements, the researcher also
considered what is specific to the Lacey Road settlement in Sydenham. The intention of this research
is to identify environmental risks being experienced in Lacey Road informal settlements. Furthermore,
to understand household strategies employed to mitigate those environmental risks at Lacey Road.


Non-autoregressive text-to-speech (NAR-TTS) models such as FastSpeech 2 and Glow-TTS can synthesize high-quality speech from the given text in parallel. After analyzing two kinds of generative NAR-TTS models (VAE and normalizing flow), we find that: VAE is good at capturing the long-range semantics features (e.g., prosody) even with small model size but suffers from blurry and unnatural results; and normalizing flow is good at reconstructing the frequency bin-wise details but performs poorly when the number of model parameters is limited. Inspired by these observations, to generate diverse speech with natural details and rich prosody using a lightweight architecture, we propose PortaSpeech, a portable and high-quality generative text-to-speech model. Specifically, 1) to model both the prosody and mel-spectrogram details accurately, we adopt a lightweight VAE with an enhanced prior followed by a flow-based post-net with strong conditional inputs as the main architecture. 2) To further compress the model size and memory footprint, we introduce the grouped parameter sharing mechanism to the affine coupling layers in the post-net. 3) To improve the expressiveness of synthesized speech and reduce the dependency on accurate fine-grained alignment between text and speech, we propose a linguistic encoder with mixture alignment combining hard inter-word alignment and soft intra-word alignment, which explicitly extracts word-level semantic information. Experimental results show that PortaSpeech outperforms other TTS models in both voice quality and prosody modeling in terms of subjective and objective evaluation metrics, and shows only a slight performance degradation when reducing the model parameters to 6.7M (about 4x model size and 3x runtime memory compression ratio compared with FastSpeech 2). Our extensive ablation studies demonstrate that each design in PortaSpeech is effective.


Typical businesses have limited expertise in handling disasters; thus, it makes business sense to use external business continuity services. Existing practice is for the business to determine its critical business processes, perform a risk assessment, mitigate as many of these risks as possible, define a continuity plan, and then periodically test this plan at a local IT (information technology) or work-area recovery site. This practice, however, typically imposes limitations as discussed in this paper. We offer enhancements to mitigate these limitations, including the close interlock between the customer and service provider's processes, a shared representation of a customer's environment, and a recovery infrastructure integrating both automation and virtualization. We capture the customer's IT inventory as a recovery configuration and analyze the requirements and available recovery resources to optimize the test schedule of the recovery center and automatically map recovery requirements to resources. We orchestrate recovery deployment through automation. Based on the recovery configuration, we can also determine to what degree the customer can recover within a virtual environment and automatically map the customer to this environment, thereby accruing the benefits of virtualization. These capabilities enhance the client's recovery experience and provide increased flexibility and resource utilization in the recovery data centers.


This paper is concerned with a narrative of community psychology broadly viewed as a story of intervention in the unfolding communal world of the psyche. The narrative has international, national and regional themes in keeping with North American, South African and Zululand contexts. A universal and perennial, yet new and changing narrative of community psychology emerges with special reference to recent developmental in South Africa in general and Zululand in particular.


Studies conducted since the late 1970s have estimated the net energy value (NEV) of corn ethanol. However,
variations in data and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide range of estimates. This study identifies
the factors causing this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate. We conclude that the NEV of corn ethanol
has been rising over time due to technological advances in ethanol conversion and increased efficiency in farm production.
We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient, as indicated by an energy output:input ratio of 1.34 and 1.53 under a best–case
scenario.


Animal welfare considerations are becoming increasingly important for producers of animal-derived agricultural products. Recent media attention on issues of housing conditions for intensively reared livestock and induced calving in dairy production make it clear that some members of the public feel strongly about the overall welfare of farm animals. In many cases, practices that are now perceived as welfare unfriendly are also associated with lower per-unit costs of production, creating a 'classic' economic trade-off between production and welfare objectives. In this paper a relatively simple partial equilibrium model is used to illustrate that the distributional impacts of animal welfare regulations (for both humans and animals) depend critically on whether the domestic market is open to international competition. A preliminary case study involving housing options for sows in New Zealand provides an empirical illustration of the possible magnitude of the costs of welfare enhancing policies in a small open economy when the country is a net importer. The fact that welfare enhancing policy is driven by consumers who do not share the resulting economic burden raises important philosophical questions about how society defines what is acceptable on welfare grounds, and whether there is any economic justification for mitigating the costs when they accrue only to one sector of the economy.


Humans interpret others' behaviour as intentional and goal-directed, expecting others to take the most energy-efficient path to achieve their goals. Recent studies have shown that these expectations of efficient action provide a perceptual prediction of an ideal efficient trajectory, against which the observed action is evaluated, resulting in a distorted perceptual representation of unexpected inefficient actions. Here we show that these predictions rely on the inferred intentionality of the stimulus. Participants observed an actor reach for an object with a straight or arched trajectory. The actions were made efficient or inefficient by adding or removing an obstructing object. The action disappeared mid-trajectory and participants reported the last seen position of the hand on a touch screen. Replicating previous research, judgments of inefficient actions were biased toward the efficient prediction (straight trajectories upward to avoid the obstruction, arched trajectories downward towards the target) In two further experiments, we removed intentional cues by replacing the hand with a non-agentive ball (Exp 2), and by removing the biological profile of the motion by depicting it move at a constant speed (Exp 3). Perceptual biases were substantially reduced when intentional cues were removed. Predictions of efficient action are at least partially perceptually represented and influence perceptual judgments of others actions, biasing them towards these expectations. These predictions emerge from attributions of intentionality to the observed actor, triggered by the perception of agency and kinematics that follow biological motion profiles.


Abstract This paper examines problems in financing pension and unemployment insurance under China's economic transition. Before the economic reform, the state government provided social safety programs that were financed through an economic plan. Contributions to these social programs were implicitly transferred to the State through profit of state-owned-enterprises (SOEs). The economic reform shifts financial responsibility of these programs from the government to enterprises. Because many SOEs are unable to finance pension and unemployment insurance, middle-aged and retired SOE employees lost benefits from those programs although they contributed before the economic reform. This created a historical debt. This paper shows that historical debt is the key to solve financing problems in unemployment insurance and pension. Without wealth redistribution through both central and local governments, a large number of middle-aged and retired SOE employees would become victim of the economic reform. Introduction Since 1978 when economic reform began, China's economy has been growing rapidly. From 1981 through 1990, the annual average increase in Gross Domestic Product was 10.1%; from 1991 through 1995, the average increase was 11.6% (China National Statistics Bureau, 1996: p. 30). Although reform has improved considerably the average standard of living, it also profoundly changed the country's industrial structure. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have declined in productivity while other types of enterprises (private, collective, foreign investment) have grown dramatically (Tian, 1997: pp. 219-231). Among the enterprises registered at township or higher government levels, SOEs accounted for 72% of total output in 1985, but only 47% in 1995. During the same period, the total share of output by enterprises with foreign investment, including investment from Hong Kong and Taiwan, jumped from almost zero to 16.5% (China National Statistics Bureau, 1996: p. 30). Implications under such a sharp change in economic structure are far beyond the boundary of economic reform. The political legitimacy has shifted from communist ideology to economic performance (Wu, 1999: p. 1). The unemployment and social security programs discussed in this paper reflects one of many aspects affected by changes of political legitimacy. Under the old socialist regime, financing social safety programs was built into the central planned economy. The political legitimacy was very simple: everyone contributed to the State and the government would take care of everyone through a centrally planned economy. When the political legitimacy is shifted, financing policy for social safety programs was completely changed. The middle-aged and older generations suffered substantially from such a sharp policy shift. The major policy change in financing social safety programs is shifting financial responsibility from the government into enterprises. Because enterprises owned by private, collective, or foreign investors are new and have much younger employees than SOEs, this policy shift created a heavy burden to SOEs. According to Xinhua News, in Shanghai, for every 100 yuan paid to an employee by SOEs, the SOEs must pay 46 yuan for fringe benefits including pension contributions, unemployment insurance, health insurance, housing fund contribution, public transportation restructuring, etc (Zhong and Luo, 1997: p. 1). Management of the government and SOEs in Shanghai is the most efficient in the nation. If SOEs in Shanghai can barely support the social programs, other SOEs across China may not be able to afford such a system at all. Under the new economic policy, many SOEs are in financial insolventy and unable to support social safety programs for their employees (Li, 1998: pp. 4-7). A large number of middle-aged and older employees are laid off and many retired SOE employees are left without pension (Yang, et al., 1998: p. …


The UK government claims to exercise a responsible arms export policy and to be committed to considering sustainable development concerns in arms export licensing. Yet in December 2001, it granted BAe Systems a licence for the sale of a £28 million air-traffic-control system to Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries. This export failed the conditions of UK export guidelines in three major ways. This article explores why the government ignored its commitments, arguing that the relationship between Labour and the arms industry lies at the heart of UK export policy. A critical analysis of the development agenda shows that the issue is not simply to get the government to stick to its declared commitments, difficult as this is, as the neo-liberal development agenda promoted by the Labour government is itself fundamentally flawed. Assessing the effectiveness of NGO activity on UK arms export issues thus requires an interrogation of their vision of sustainable development as well as their critique of government actions.


Two-photon excitation fluorescence (TPEF) and second-harmonic generation (SHG) are detected through multiphoton microscopy (MPM). The major signals have the potential to monitor the process of tissue changes. TPEF and SHG are used to monitor the skin photo-thermal response to irradiation with intense pulsed light sources (\lambda is in the range of 560?1200 nm) and trace the process of skin remodeling in vivo at different time intervals. TPEF intensity is nearly unchanged at different time intervals after irradiation, whereas SHG intensity changes considerably. The results reveal the photo-thermal effect of nonablative light sources and the process of collagen remodeling at the sub-micron level.


Modern neural networks often have great expressive power and can be trained to overfit the training data, while still achieving a good test performance. This phenomenon is referred to as"benign overfitting". Recently, there emerges a line of works studying"benign overfitting"from the theoretical perspective. However, they are limited to linear models or kernel/random feature models, and there is still a lack of theoretical understanding about when and how benign overfitting occurs in neural networks. In this paper, we study the benign overfitting phenomenon in training a two-layer convolutional neural network (CNN). We show that when the signal-to-noise ratio satisfies a certain condition, a two-layer CNN trained by gradient descent can achieve arbitrarily small training and test loss. On the other hand, when this condition does not hold, overfitting becomes harmful and the obtained CNN can only achieve a constant level test loss. These together demonstrate a sharp phase transition between benign overfitting and harmful overfitting, driven by the signal-to-noise ratio. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that precisely characterizes the conditions under which benign overfitting can occur in training convolutional neural networks.


The growth of the global economy has made it imperative for many organizations to expand in size and resources. Firms seek overseas for market opportunities to sustain competitive advantage. By launching a subsidiary or associate company, agreeing on a merger or joint venture with a local company, or acquiring a controlling interest, multinational firms are becoming increasingly involved in local business. The reality for these multinational firms is that they must find an effective and efficient way to create competitive advantage. Enterprises need to understand the national cultures with a managerial focus, in order to adapt their management and leadership practices to achieve high business performance. Advice to executives who run multinational firms should be specific enough to help them understand how to perform in different cultural settings. This dissertation focuses on the leadership issues in different cultural settings. Our study provides a source for those interested in the influence of Western leadership tools in China and how Chinese traditional philosophies affect expatriate leadership behaviors. Chapter 2 provides an overview of international leadership (IL) research. By identifying the research limitations, we examined what we believe is vital in more detail with four empirical articles. In general, managers need to understand how and which culturally dominant leadership dimensions play a key role in influencing the outcome of employing different management practices. We evidenced that the link between different management practices (strategic, operational, and human resource management) and productivity are culturally specific by analysing the joint database of World Management Survey and GLOBE in Chapter 3. We gain insight into how leadership clusters at national level enhances/inhibits the outcome of standard management practices in individual firms. Additionally, researchers question the transferability of models from U.S. or other Western management research to non-Western cultures. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate the outcome of Western leadership tools (e.g., ethical leadership and transformational leadership) in China and interpret how the unique Chinese culture influences leadership effectiveness. Specifically, Chapter 4 shows that employee-perceived ethical leadership is more positively related to employee-perceived leadership effectiveness when the ethical climate is more favorable in a team. Extending the ethical leadership literature, our study unveils a cross-level mediated moderation model regarding the functioning of ethical leadership in teams. We find a three-way cross-level interaction effect of employee-perceived ethical leadership, team ethical climate, and employee traditionality on employee-perceived leadership effectiveness. Using a multi-level structural equation model, Chapter 5 demonstrates that team conflict and knowledge sharing serve as two sequential mediators between the cross-level links. This study highlights the critical role of transformational leadership as a cross-level enabler for employee creativity. Limited attention has been paid to expatriate managers from emerging economies who work in developed Western countries. Chapter 6 identifies the features of Chinese traditional leadership ideologies in the Netherlands. We will not repeat all the discussions here. Instead, this chapter summarizes the findings and contributions and provides avenues for future research in a general sense.


With four ecological migration zones in Huamachi Town of Yanchi County in Ningxia Autonomous Region as the object of study, we carry out the evaluation of ecological benefits in ecological migration zone. Using the SPOT satellite remote sensing image in 2008 and UAV aerophotographic image in 2013, we first monitor and analyze the land use change over five years in the study area, and then adopt ecological green equivalent evaluation model for the evaluation of ecological benefits in the ecological migration zone. Studies have shown that: (i) from 2008 to 2013, the ecological green equivalent in the study area was increased and the ecological environment was improved; (ii) the ecological green equivalent in the study area was less than 1 in 2008 and 2013, and ecological environment was still fragile in the migration zone; (iii) the forest coverage rate of the study area was 20% less than the minimum forest coverage rate of the United Nations, but 15% higher than the forest coverage rate of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. There is a large gap between the forest coverage rate based on ecological green equivalent and optimal forest coverage rate, suggesting that the land use still needs to be adjusted in study area, and it is necessary to increase efforts to strengthen ecological restoration and continue to implement forest conservation, returning land for farming to forestry and other measures.


The actual essence of the creator's objective was to able to visualize beauty of nature through the use of metal, may it be expressing something of infinity or for only a season, perhaps bold or minute. Growth and decay, both having beauty in their own right, and both having a time of visual existence, suggested ideas to the sculptor. The flexibility of welding rod best expresses the beauty of nature for the sculptor rather than sheet steel because he was able to obtain a growth-like quality of nature, not only of plant life, but of growth and decay of nature herself. The sculptor also found that accidents which occur in some mediums were not experienced in the use of metal; thus he believes that the experiences which he has had were pure experiences. Unlike water color, ceramic glazes, or some graphic processes which can produce effects contrary to the creator's ideas, welding with steel produces only that which the creator intends. "Varied Passage", the third sculpture which the sculptor developed seemed to create more difficulty than any other sculptural form. Perhaps the problem arose because of the sculptor's attempt to express the same theme, that of recline, in another form. Not until "Varied Passage" was completed did it become evident that a previous piece, "Formation", more clearly communicated the sculptor's feelings concerning this theme. Through intense study of the materials used by the sculptor, he was better able to use ideas, thoughts, and personal emotions which were suggested to him by previous works he had done. Such suggestions as textures, line, and space helped provide ideas for the different pieces created for this study. The development of expressions of nature, may it be something concerning growth or decay, or both, is something which could be approached in many different ways. The sculptor believes that creating a sculpture using some interpretation of a facet of nature is best done through the use of a material such as steel which offers the variation of form and tensile strength associated with nature.


Many fundamental questions in theoretical neuroscience involve optimal decoding and the computation of Shannon information rates in populations of spiking neurons. In this paper, we apply methods from the asymptotic theory of statistical inference to obtain a clearer analytical understanding of these quantities. We find that for large neural populations carrying a finite total amount of information, the full spiking population response is asymptotically as informative as a single observation from a Gaussian process whose mean and covariance can be characterized explicitly in terms of network and single neuron properties. The Gaussian form of this asymptotic sufficient statistic allows us in certain cases to perform optimal Bayesian decoding by simple linear transformations, and to obtain closed-form expressions of the Shannon information carried by the network. One technical advantage of the theory is that it may be applied easily even to non-Poisson point process network models; for example, we find that under some conditions, neural populations with strong history-dependent (non-Poisson) effects carry exactly the same information as do simpler equivalent populations of non-interacting Poisson neurons with matched firing rates. We argue that our findings help to clarify some results from the recent literature on neural decoding and neuroprosthetic design.


What was the Home Guard? Who were the men and women who served in it? And what can be said of their real role and significance once the popular myths have been stripped away?
Despite the fame of the Home Guard – of Dad's Army – the true story of this wartime organization tends to be neglected. The myths obscure the reality. Stephen Cullen's aim in this thoroughgoing new study is to cut through the misunderstandings in order to reassess the Home Guard and its contribution to Britain's war effort – and to deepen our understanding of the men and women who were members of it.
He sets the Home Guard in the long historical context of domestic defence planning, then focuses on the preparations made before the outbreak of the Second World War. In detail he traces the changing role of the Home Guard during its wartime existence as it adapted to meet the multitude of challenges it faced – from civil defence and intelligence gathering to training for guerrilla warfare.
Using vivid eyewitness testimony and oral history, he takes a grassroots look at the men - and women – from all ages and social backgrounds who made up this national defence force. The equipment, uniforms, weapons and vehicles they used and the field defences they manned are described as their role developed over the course of the war.
He also examines the evolution of popular views of the Home Guard from wartime days to the present – the notion of the People's Army, the thinking of early Home Guard commentators like George Orwell, and the writings of more recent historians who have sought to explain an organization that retains such an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination.


While deep learning has enabled tremendous progress on text and image datasets, its superiority on tabular data is not clear. We contribute extensive benchmarks of standard and novel deep learning methods as well as tree-based models such as XGBoost and Random Forests, across a large number of datasets and hyperparameter combinations. We define a standard set of 45 datasets from varied domains with clear characteristics of tabular data and a benchmarking methodology accounting for both fitting models and finding good hyperparameters. Results show that tree-based models remain state-of-the-art on medium-sized data ($\sim$10K samples) even without accounting for their superior speed. To understand this gap, we conduct an empirical investigation into the differing inductive biases of tree-based models and Neural Networks (NNs). This leads to a series of challenges which should guide researchers aiming to build tabular-specific NNs: 1. be robust to uninformative features, 2. preserve the orientation of the data, and 3. be able to easily learn irregular functions. To stimulate research on tabular architectures, we contribute a standard benchmark and raw data for baselines: every point of a 20 000 compute hours hyperparameter search for each learner.


Graduate students compose an important segment of university and college populations. However, institutions of higher education often have not addressed adequately their status as adult students with different developmental and life issues and concerns. This article defines and describes the needs of graduate students, discusses implications, and makes recommendations for college counselors to more effectively address their range of needs.


SUMMARY: SGPL1 encodes sphingosine-1-phosphate lyase, the final enzyme of sphingolipid metabolism. In 2017, a condition featuring steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome and/or adrenal insufficiency associated with pathogenic SGPL1 variants was reported. In addition to the main features of the disease, patients often exhibit a range of neurologic deficits. In a handful of cases, brain imaging results were described. However, high-quality imaging results and a systematic analysis of brain MR imaging findings associated with the condition are lacking. In this study, MR images from 4 new patients and additional published case reports were reviewed by a pediatric neuroradiologist. Analysis reveals recurring patterns of features in affected patients, including isolated callosal dysgenesis and prominent involvement of the globus pallidus, thalamus, and dentate nucleus, with progressive atrophy and worsening of brain lesions. MR imaging findings of abnormal deep gray nuclei, microcephaly, or callosal dysgenesis in an infant or young child exhibiting other typical clinical features of sphingosine-1-phosphate lyase insufficiency syndrome should trigger prompt genetic testing for SGPL1 mutations.


The Rice-wheat (RW) cropping system is one of the major agricultural production systems in four IndoGangetic Plains (IGP) countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal of South Asia covering about 32% of the total rice area and 42% of the total wheat area. The excessive utilization of natural resource bases and changing climate are leading to the negative yield trend and plateauing of Rice-wheat (RW) system productivity. The conservation agriculture based efficient and environmental friendly alternative tillage and crop establishment practices have been adopted by the farmers on large scale. A few tools have been evolved to simulate the different tillage and crop establishment. In the present study, InfoRCT (Information on Use of Resource Conserving Technologies), a excel based model integrating biophysical, agronomic, and socioeconomic data to establish input-output relationships related to water, fertilizer, labor, and biocide uses; greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; biocide residue in soil; and Nitrogen (N) fluxes in the rice-wheat system has been validated for farmer participatory practices. The assessment showed that double no-till system increased the farmer's income, whereas raised-bed systems decreased it compared with the conventional system. The InfoRCT simulated the yield, wateruse, net income and biocide residue fairly well. The model has potential to provide assessments of various cultural practices under different scenarios of soil, climate, and crop management on a regional scale.


Abstract The role of chlorine (III) compounds, i.e. chlorous acid (HClO2) and chlorite (ClO2 -), in chlorine dioxide bleaching were investigated by treating different pulps with Cl(III). It was discovered that in addition to its fully inorganic reactions, chlorous acid is consumed by organic structures present in the pulp. These structures were assumed to be aldehydes. The aldehydes might exist already in unbleached pulps, but chlorine dioxide bleaching was also found to generate new aldehyde groups. The reactive groups were concluded to originate both from carbohydrates and lignin.


Selectivity constitutes a sine qua non condition of application of Article 87(1) EC. Therefore, in theory, general measures open to all undertakings do not constitute State aid. This article tries to explore and clarify the notion of general measures, by reviewing and analysing the relevant ECJ case law, Commission decisions and communications. The analysis shows that there is a grey area, where there are no coherent borders between general and selective measures. It may appear in practice that the ECJ case law limits to a large degree the scope of general measures, and almost every State measure, even that of general economic policy, can ultimately be found selective and constitute State aid.
The question of where to draw the line between general and selective measures is addressed. It is argued that it should be accepted that there is no such a thing as a measure that affects all undertakings identically. Some undertakings will always profit more from the measure than others. This should not, however, make such measures automatically selective. More coherent approach to general measures by all actors is needed in order to make sure that the notion is not stretched too far, at the same time avoiding virtually all economic policy actions involving State resources being brought under the scope of Article 87(1) EC.


"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me: you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my com pass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what in strument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me."


This paper examines the potential economic impact of the Irish government strategy for the development of the seafood sector in Ireland, Food Harvest 2020 (FH2020). The seafood industry accounts for a large proportion of income and employment in peripheral coastal areas. Many of these regions are predominantly rural and they are largely dependent on the primary fisheries sector. Moreover, the services and retail businesses in these areas are heavily dependent on direct spending from the fisheries, aquaculture and seafood processing sectors. A social accounting matrix (SAM) approach with (1) set to zero purchase coefficients for all directly impacted industries and (2) changes in output converted to final demand shocks is used to calculate the economic and employment impact on the rest of the economy from an increase in the output in the fisheries, aquaculture and seafood processing sectors in Ireland. The results suggest fisheries sectors have strong links with the rest of the economy hence an important economic impact from a policy perspective.


Female sex workers (FSWs) experience elevated risk for HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) through unprotected sex with male clients, yet the complexity of these commercial relationships remains understudied. From 2010 to 2011, we explored FSWs' conceptualizations of various client types and related risk behavior patterns using semistructured interviews with 46 FSWs in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where FSWs' HIV/STI prevalence is increasing. Our grounded theory analysis identified four types of commercial relationships: nonregular clients, regular clients and friends, clients who "fell in love" with FSWs, and long-term financial providers who often originated from the United States. As commercial relationships developed, clients' social and emotional connections to FSWs increased, rendering condom negotiation and maintaining professional boundaries more difficult. Drug abuse and poverty also influenced behaviors, particularly in Ciudad Juárez, where lucrative U.S. clients were increasingly scarce. While struggling to cultivate dependable relationships in a setting marked by historical sex tourism from a wealthier country, some FSWs ceased negotiating condom use. We discuss the need for HIV/STI research and prevention interventions to recognize the complexity within FSWs' commercial relationships and how behaviors (e.g., condom use) evolve as relationships develop through processes that are influenced by local sociopolitical contexts and binational income inequality.


In this paper the authors describe an Information Systems course where paired programming was trialled in the hope of improving both the assessment outcomes and the resourcing of an existing systems design course which incorporated a capstone project. The authors found that it did offer a significant improvement, but the improvements did not match the predicted outcomes, with a number of weaknesses to the model being highlighted. In particular, it was found that paired programming did not reduce teaching load when the group size was reduced.


Welcome to the Library guide for History and Ancient Culture. Here you will find a OneStop service to assist you in your studies or research at the NWU.


In this dissertation, we propose new approaches to the surface registration problem by coupling continuous geometry-based methods and combinatorial graph-based methods. On the one hand, geometry-based methods explore the intrinsic properties of the surfaces to simplify the search of correspondences among surfaces undergoing very large deformations. However, these methods are usually based on certain ideal assumptions on the qualities of the input, such as noise-free or no occlusions. Hence they are usually sensitive to uncertainties from the input that are common in real-world data. On the other hand, graph-based methods are better at dealing with uncertainties due to their statistics nature. Nevertheless, without exploring the geometric properties of the surface, discrete graph-based methods usually suffer from discretization error and high computational complexity. Thus, by exploring the relation between the two approaches, we show that our new approaches deal with surface registration problems under very challenging situations. To this purpose, three distinct approaches are explored in this thesis that achieves dense surface registration in different scenarios.
In the first approach, we cast the surface registration into a high-order graph matching problem, through the minimization of an energy function based on multiple measurements of geometric/appearance similarities and deformation priors. Our method takes advantage of conformal mapping based method which derives a closed-form solution to dense surface matching. To this end, we design an efficient way to select a finite number of matching candidates for each point of the source surface based on the a sparse set of correspondences, which naturally induces an efficient two-stage optimization approach for the dense surface registration problem. In the sparse matching stage, the high-order interactions among a sparse set of feature points on the surfaces are used to encode the isometric deformation error using conformal mapping. In the dense registration stage, the high-order interactions of a dense set of sampling points are considered to encode the isometric deformation error as well as orientation consistency. Meanwhile, we also propose the first solution to the high-order graph matching problem that solves partial matching. Our method is validated through a series of experiments demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency, notably in challenging cases of large and/or non-isometric deformations, or meshes that are partially occluded.
In the second approach, we propose a graph-based formulation for tracking surfaces in a sequence. In order to deal with noises in the input, we propose a robust metric for the cost of matching arbitrary correspondences, which is defined as the lowest feature differences across this set of matchings that cause the particular correspondence to match. We show that for surface tracking applications, the matching cost can be efficiently computed in the conformal mapping domain. Such a matching cost is then integrated into a complete probabilistic tracking framework that enforces spatial and temporal motion consistencies, as well as error drifts and occlusions. Compared to previous 3D surface tracking approaches that either assume isometric deformations or consistent features, our method achieves dense, accurate tracking results, which we demonstrate through a series of dense, anisometric 3D surface tracking experiments.
In the third approach, we accurately characterize arbitrary deformations between two surfaces and propose a high-order graphical model for the surface registration problem. From Riemannian geometry, the local deformation at each point of a surface can be characterized by the eigenvalues of a special transformation matrix between two canonically parameterized domains. This local transformation is able to characterize all the deformations (i.e., diffeomorphisms) between surfaces while being independent of both intrinsic (parametrization) and extrinsic (embedding) representations. In particular, we show that existing deformation representations (e.g., isometry or conformality) can be viewed as special cases of the proposed local deformation model. Furthermore, a computationally efficient, closed-form solution is derived in the discrete setting via finite element discretization. Based on the proposed deformation model, the shape registration problem is formulated as a high-order Markov Random Field (MRF) defined on the simplicial complex (e.g., planar or tetrahedral mesh). An efficient high-order MRF optimization algorithm is designed for such a special structured MAP-MRF problem, which can be implemented in a distributed fashion and requires minimal memory. Finally, we demonstrate the speed and accuracy of the proposed approach in the applications of shape registration and tracking.


Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is a relatively new method of medical imaging. MR studies on the normal canine central nervous system were performed using a low field MR scanner. The regions of interest were the head, neck, and lumbar region. The MR findings in two patients with brain atrophy and cervical neck disc protrusion were also evaluated. Based on our findings it appears that low-field scanners will be satisfactory for use in veterinary diagnostic imaging.


Acoustic feedback is a well-known phenomenon in hearing aids and public address systems. Under certain conditions it causes the so-called howling effect, which is highly annoying for the hearing aid user and limits the maximum amplification of the hearing aid. The most common choice to prevent howling is the adaptive feedback cancellation algorithm, which is able to completely eliminate the feedback signal. However, standard adaptive feedback cancellation algorithms suffer from a biased adaptation if the input signal is spectrally colored, as it is for speech and music signals. Due to this bias distortion artifacts (entrainment) are generated and consequently, the sound quality is significantly reduced.
Most of the known methods to reduce the bias have focused on speech signals. However, those methods do not cope with music, since the tonality and correlation are much stronger for such signals. This leads to a higher bias and consequently, to stronger entrainment for music than for speech. Other methods, which deal with music signals, work only satisfactorily when using a very slow adaptation speed. This reduces the ability to react fast to feedback path changes. Hence, howling occurs for a longer time when the feedback path is changing.

In this thesis, a new sub-band adaptive feedback cancellation system for hearing aid applications is proposed. It combines decorrelation methods with a new realization of a non-parametric variable step size.
The adaptation is realized in sub-bands which decreases the computational complexity and increases the adaptation performance of the system simultaneously.
The applied decorrelation methods, prediction error filter and frequency shift, are well known approaches to reduce the bias. However, the combination of both is first proposed in this thesis.
To apply the proposed step size in the context of adaptive feedback cancellation, a method to estimate the signal power of the desired input signal, i.e., without feedback, also referred to as source signal power is necessary. This estimate is theoretically derived and it is demonstrated that it is a reliabe estimate if the decorrelation methods are additionally applied.
In order to further improve the performance of the system three additional control methods are derived: The first one is an impulse detection to detect wideband impulses, which could lead to misadaptation. Secondly, a modified estimate of the source signal power to stabilize the system in case of jarring voices is proposed. Lastly, a correlation detection, which is applied to improve the trade-off between adaptation stability and tracking behavior, is developed.

The complete system is optimized and evaluated for several speech and music signals as well as for different feedback scenarios in simulations with feedback paths measured under realistic situations. Additionally, the system is tested by real-time simulations with hearing aid dummies and a torso and head simulator. For both simulation setups hearing loss compensation methods as applied in realistic hearing aids are used. The performance is measured in terms of being able to prevent entrainment (adaptation stability) and reacting to feedback path changes (tracking behavior).
The complete adaptive feedback cancellation system shows an excellent performance. Furthermore, the system relies only on few parameters, shows a low computational complexity, and therefore has a strong practical relevance.


In dance, the goals of actions are not always clearly defined. Investigations into the perceived quality of dance actions and their relation to biomechanical motion should give insight into the performance of dance actions and their goals. The purpose of this review was to explore and document current literature concerning dance perception and its relation to the biomechanics of motion. Seven studies were included in the review. The study results showed systematic differences between expert, non-expert, and novice dancers in biomechanical and perceptual measures, both of which also varied according to the actions expressed in dance. Biomechanical and perceptual variables were found to be correlated in all the studies in the review. Significant relations were observed between kinematic variables such as amplitude, speed, and variability of movement, and perceptual measures of beauty and performance quality. However, in general, there were no clear trends in these relations. Instead, the evidence suggests that perceptual ratings of dance may be specific to both the task (the skill of the particular action) and the context (the music and staging). The results also suggest that the human perceptual system is sensitive to skillful movements and neuromuscular coordination. Since the value perceived by audiences appears to be related to dance action goals and the coordination of dance elements, practitioners could place a priority on development and execution of those factors.


Reachability query is one of the fundamental queries in graph database. The main idea behind answering reachability queries is to assign vertices with certain labels such that the reachability between any two vertices can be determined by the labeling information. Though several approaches have been proposed for building these reachability labels, it remains open issues on how to handle increasingly large number of vertices in real-world graphs, and how to find the best tradeoff among the labeling size, the query answering time, and the construction time. In this article, we introduce a novel graph structure, referred to as path-tree, to help labeling very large graphs. The path-tree cover is a spanning subgraph of G in a tree shape. We show path-tree can be generalized to chain-tree which theoretically can has smaller labeling cost. On top of path-tree and chain-tree index, we also introduce a new compression scheme which groups vertices with similar labels together to further reduce the labeling size. In addition, we also propose an efficient incremental update algorithm for dynamic index maintenance. Finally, we demonstrate both analytically and empirically the effectiveness and efficiency of our new approaches.


Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common causes of persisting disability in young adults. Its clinical course can be heterogeneous with a varying extent of inflammatory central nervous system (CNS) lesions, demyelination and axonal loss accumulating over time. Earlier concepts assumed that MS is primarily a T cell driven disease. Current evidence suggests that B cells may play an equally important role in MS pathogenesis. This notion was boosted by the extensive and rapid benefit of B cell depletion via anti-CD20 antibodies in recent clinical trials in patients with relapsing, remitting MS. Notwithstanding these results, it is currently not clear whether patients with MS and related disorders need to be permanently depleted of B cells to maintain clinical stabilisation. As the related mechanistic question, it is thus far unknown when B cells reappear in compartments other than the blood and in particular, in what functional status B cells return upon cessation of anti-CD20 treatment. To address these questions, we utilized two murine MS models of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), one in which B cells remain naive, and one on which B cells get actively involved in a pathogenic manner. Using these opposing models, we monitored reappearance of B cells as well as their functional phenotype in bone marrow, spleen, lymph node, blood as well as the CNS. First, and independent of the model used, we observed that B cells reappeared in bone marrow and spleen substantially prior to the blood, which indicates that monitoring B cells in the blood of patients may not be a suitable strategy to assess B cell reappearance. Second, we observed that despite extensive anti-CD20 treatment, a population of CD20+ B cells remained un-depletable in the spleen of mice with EAE. These B cells were found to be differentiated and antigen-experienced germinal center B cells, while naive B cells were rarely detected. Of note, this finding was pronounced in the EAE model in which B cells are activated. Upon recovery from anti-CD20 treatment, this population strongly expanded in vivo in parallel to de novo generation of naive B cells in the bone marrow. I consequence, we observed that upon return of B cells, mice which had received the B cell-involving EAE induction regimen contained a higher ratio of antigen-activated / naive B cells when compared to the EAE model in which B cells remain naive. Functionally, this translated into an enhanced antigen-presenting function of reappearing B cells in the B cell-EAE model. These findings indicate that in a B cell activating milieu, remaining antigen-experienced B cells can expand in secondary organs after anti-CD20 treatment, which may result in a relative shift towards pro-inflammatory B cell function when compared to the status of B cells prior to depletion.
Recent findings suggest that besides B cells, a small population of differentiated human T cells express CD20. To date it is not clear whether these T cells play a pathogenic role in MS. Following this observation mechanistically, we could detect that mice with EAE indeed contain a population of CD20+ T cells, which is rapidly depleted upon anti-CD20 treatment. Paralleling the compartment-specific repletion of B cells, CD20+ T cells sequentially reoccurred in spleen, lymph nodes and blood after anti CD20 treatment. Further studies aim to dissect to what extent depletion of these T cells may possibly contribute to the clinical benefit of anti-CD20 treatment independent of B cells.


In both Spanish and Catalan, narrow contrastive focus and presentational broad focus in nuclear position have different pitch accent choices, namely a rising or a falling pitch accent, respectively. In words with final stress, narrow contrastive focus displays a rise-fall complex pitch gesture in the last syllable of the utterance. This article investigates the effects of the complexity of such a pitch pattern on the durational properties of the syllables in both languages when compared to the simpler falling pitch movement. The results of the production experiment reveal that, in general, the presence of a complex pitch pattern tends to have a lengthening effect on the target syllable. Yet we also find that some instances of this complex contour can be partially truncated, in which case it does not trigger lengthening. In sum, even though truncation and compression have been claimed to be language- and dialect-specific strategies (Ladd 1996; Grabe 1998; Grabe et al. 2000), in our data, truncation can be considered a speaker phonetic realization strategy that interacts with timing in such a way that there is a trade-off relationship between the two factors.


The original edition of this book published by M. N. Özişik as single author in 1994 was a textbook intended for advanced or graduate courses. It has been widely used over several decades by many students, researchers and educators in the area of thermal engineering.
Considering the high quality of the book, the growing importance of the computational methods that became common engineering tools, and the significant evolution of that methods for the solution of heat transfer problems, CRC Press placed bets on a new updated edition. It is not common nor easy to update, refresh and supplement an outstanding book several years after the author's death. Who else than the three additional co-autors invited by the publisher to prepare the new edition had been more appropriate to take over the task, modifying the original work and adding new material without losing the features of the original work? Two of them, HRBO and RMC, were PhD students and then co-workers of Professor Özişik. All three are outstanding scientists and educators worldwide recognized in the areas of Heat Transfer and computational methods in Heat Transfer.
A parallel reading of the two editions shows that the new edition has kept the main qualities of the original book which are the clear, comprehensive and detailed presentations of methods aimed to be readily applied by the reader, with mathematical derivations kept to a minimum.


The Western Australian Court Diversion Service (CDS) is a post‐conviction / pre‐sentence program that aims to divert substance‐using offenders from the prison system and into treatment programs. It has been in operation since 1988, though a formal evaluation has not been conducted. The present study evaluated the outcomes for offenders referred to the program in relation to program completion, sentencing and re‐offending. It utilised a quasi‐experimental within groups design using data from client files from January 1998 to June 1999. Offenders who had higher motivation, attended treatment regularly and had less than 20 prior convictions were more likely to complete the program. A custodial sentence was more likely if the offender was male, had committed a serious offence, had more than 30 prior convictions, had lower motivation and had not completed the CDS program. Predictors of re‐offending included lower motivation and a previous custodial sentence. The offender's level of motivation to change and number of prior convictions were significant predictors of all three outcomes: program completion, sentencing and re‐offending. The findings highlight the importance of considering offender characteristics when assessing eligibility for diversion programs, addressing offender motivation within diversion programs and considering issues of which offenders are most likely to benefit from which programs.


ABSTRACT Background and Objectives: Stress and stress-related mental health complaints are common and increasing among adolescents, especially girls. Identifying typical sources of stress as well as central intervention targets is an important effort in the development of effective prevention and treatment protocols. This study investigated worry as potential mediator in the development of mental health problems in response to common stressors in adolescence. We also examined to what sources adolescents ascribe their stress over the years from the 7th through the 9th grade. Design: Prospective cohort study. Methods: Self-reported subjective stressor load, worry, anxiety and depressive symptoms were assessed in a sample of Swedish 7th graders (N = 1137; 46% girls, mean age 13.2) with follow-up assessments one and two years later. Results: School was the most common source of stress across all time-points, with girls reporting considerable more stress than boys. Worry mediated the relationship between overall stressor load and depressive symptoms and anxiety over time and was not moderated by gender. Conclusions: Worry may be an important target in stress prevention and efforts to prevent stress-related problems would benefit from focusing on early adolescence as especially school stress is already relatively common in grade 7.


Climate change is predicted to bring changes in weather and water availability. The effect on agriculture depends on the ability of producers to modify their practices in response to changing distributions. We develop a two-stage theoretical model of planting and irrigation decisions and use a unique dataset to empirically estimate how producers respond to changes in expected water availability and deviations from expectations. As water supplies decrease, producers respond by planting fewer acres and concentrating the application of water. Highlighting the importance of adaptation in this context, failure to account for this behavioral response overstates climate change impacts by 17%. (JEL Q15, Q25)


Abstract Of the three major Neoproterozoic supracrustal units in the Scottish and Irish Highlands (the Torridonian, Moine and Dalradian Supergroups), only the latter contains evidence of Neoproterozoic glaciations. The Dalradian is siliciclastic-dominated and constitutes much of the Scottish–Irish Highlands between the Great Glen and Highland Boundary Fault Zones, and their correlatives in Ireland. At the time of writing, three stratigraphically distinct glacial intervals in the Dalradian have been documented in the literature. The oldest is the Port Askaig Formation (Fm.) at the base of the Argyll Group (see Arnaud & Fairchild 2011). It ranges from several tens to many hundreds of metres in thickness and occurs in numerous localities in Scotland and the north of Ireland. A second glacial is recorded in the middle part of the Argyll Group (Easdale Subgroup) and consists of localised sedimentary breccias as well as pelites and schists containing dropstone/lonestone units inferred to be ice-rafted debris; these rocks are patchily preserved and typically a few metres or less in thickness. It is sharply overlain by a variably developed carbonate unit that is marked by a 1–7-m-thick, light-coloured, basal dolostone or dolomitic limestone interpreted as a cap carbonate. This succession is best preserved in Donegal, Ireland, as the Stralinchy–Reelan glacial and Cranford cap-carbonate sequence. A correlative cap carbonate, the Whiteness Limestone, has been identified in the Shetland Islands. The third and youngest glacial is represented by locally preserved dropstone and polymict diamictite beds ranging in thickness from several to a few tens of metres in thickness in the lower Southern Highland Group. These include the MacDuff and Loch na Cille Boulder Beds in, respectively, NE and SW Scotland, and the Inishowen Beds in Donegal, Ireland.


Azoles and Succinate Dehydrogenase Inhibitors (SDHIs) are the main fungicides available for septoria tritici blotch control, causal agent Zymoseptoria tritici. Decline in azole sensitivity, in combination with European legislation, poses a threat to wheat production in Ireland. Azole fungicides select CYP51 mutations differentially; it was hypothesised that using combinations of azoles could be an effective anti-resistance tool. Naturally inoculated field experiments were carried out in order to understand the impacts of using combinations of azoles, epoxiconazole and metconazole, on azole sensitivity. Approximately 3700 isolates were isolated and their sensitivity to both azoles analysed. Findings showed that limiting the
number of applications, by alternating each fungicide, slowed selection for reduced azole sensitivity. Limiting azole use by reducing doses did not reduce selection for decreased azole sensitivity. Although not complete, cross-resistance was observed between the two azoles,
which will lead to general reduction in azole sensitivity. A sub-selection of isolates from each treatment at each location were analysed for changes in the CYP51 gene. Sequence analysis identified 49 combinations of mutations in the CYP51 gene, and three different inserts in the CYP51 promoter. Intragenic recombination also featured in these populations.
Baseline studies of five new SDHIs were carried out on 209 naturally infected, non-SDHI-treated isolates. With the exception of fluopyram, cross-resistance was apparent
between the SDHIs. Analysis of 2300 isolates found that when compared to the solo products, mixing the SDHI isopyrazam and the azole epoxiconazole increased epoxiconazole sensitivity, but had no apparent effect on isopyrazam sensitivity. SDHI resistance-conferring
mutations were absent in the baseline and experimental isolates. As long as azoles are used, Z. tritici populations will continue to evolve towards resistance. Combining different modes-of-action, SDHIs and multi-sites, with azoles will relieve some of that selective pressure. To get the best out of available fungicides, they should be used in combination with host resistance and good crop management practices.


Glossolalia is a very important element in the life of Pentecostal Churches and is at the centre of their spirituality. This paper examines the gift of speaking in tongues from a psychological perspective in order to find out what psychologists say about this very important gift of the Holy Spirit. The paper begins by looking at the history of speaking in tongues in the Church from the day of Pentecost and how it has become the symbol of God's presence in the life of believers in Pentecostal Churches in Botswana today. The paper interrogates glossolalia on whether it is divine language or human language spoken by people who are emotionally charged. this research was undertaken in order to understand glossolalia better, since it is a contested area not only among Christians but also in other world religions where this phenomenon is widely manifested. The present work shows that while theologians are justified to consider glossolalia as divine language, there are indications that in some instances speaking in tongues can be a result of anxiety and human attempts to prove that the Holy Spirit is truly present in one's spiritual life. This conclusion has been reached especially in cases where it has been found that glossolalia is a learned language.


Existing drugs are slow to eradicate Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) in patients and have failed to control tuberculosis globally. One reason may be that host conditions impair Mtb's replication, reducing its sensitivity to most antiinfectives. We devised a high-throughput screen for compounds that kill Mtb when its replication has been halted by reactive nitrogen intermediates (RNIs), acid, hypoxia, and a fatty acid carbon source. At concentrations routinely achieved in human blood, oxyphenbutazone (OPB), an inexpensive anti-inflammatory drug, was selectively mycobactericidal to nonreplicating (NR) Mtb. Its cidal activity depended on mild acid and was augmented by RNIs and fatty acid. Acid and RNIs fostered OPB's 4-hydroxylation. The resultant 4-butyl-4-hydroxy-1-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-2-phenylpyrazolidine-3,5-dione (4-OH-OPB) killed both replicating and NR Mtb, including Mtb resistant to standard drugs. 4-OH-OPB depleted flavins and formed covalent adducts with N-acetyl-cysteine and mycothiol. 4-OH-OPB killed Mtb synergistically with oxidants and several antituberculosis drugs. Thus, conditions that block Mtb's replication modify OPB and enhance its cidal action. Modified OPB kills both replicating and NR Mtb and sensitizes both to host-derived and medicinal antimycobacterial agents.


The realization of the deposits of composite with nickel, on copper substrata, as well as their characterization were made essentially at the level of the Laboratory of electrochemistry, corrosion and environment, Faculty of science, university IBN TOFAIL KENITRA MOROCCO. Knowing that Morocco's largest producer of phosphoric acid in the world. The barrels used for storage and transportation of this product are subject to severe corrosion. For this reason we have sought to develop Ni-P-TiO2 composite coatings on copper substrates. The corrosion resistance of the composite Ni-P-TiO2 composite coatings was estimated in a very aggressive environment 4 mol/L (4M) of H3PO4 by using the techniques of polarization and the spectroscopy of impedance confirmed by those obtained by using non-electrochemical methods (Energy of dispersal of the X-rays and the electronic microscopy with sweeping). The results showed that the incorporation of TiO2 in the cover pulls an increase of the corrosion resistance and the improvement of the morphology of surface.


In international tax policy debate, it is usually assumed that, if one chooses not to exempt residents' foreign source income, the preferred system would offer foreign tax credits. This assumption is mistaken, given the bad incentives created by the credits' marginal reimbursement rate (MRR) of 100 percent and the unpersuasiveness of common rationales for granting them, such as those based on aversion to "double taxation" or support for capital export neutrality. While taxing foreign source income at the full domestic rate with only deductions for foreign taxes would over-tax outbound investment, at least in principle creditability is dominated by a burden-neutral shift to deductions plus a reduced tax rate for such income. And even if such a shift is unfeasible or unwise, the incentive problems resulting from a 100 percent MRR for foreign taxes paid may illuminate various more practical tax issues, such as (1) the merits of shifting to an exemption system, which features implicit deductibility, and (2) the merits of various proposed reforms, such as removing disincentives in subpart F for foreign tax planning by U.S. multinationals.


Purpose
The use of "open data" can help the public find value in various areas of interests. Many governments have created and published a huge amount of open data; however, people have a hard time using open data because of data quality issues. The UK, the USA and Korea have created and published open data; however, the rate of open data implementation and level of open data impact is very low because of data quality issues like incompatible data formats and incomplete data. This study aims to compare the statuses of data quality from open government sites in the UK, the USA and Korea and also present guidelines for publishing data format and enhancing data completeness.

Design/methodology/approach
This study uses statistical analysis of different data formats and examination of data completeness to explore key issues of data quality in open government data.

Findings
Findings show that the USA and the UK have published more than 50 per cent of open data in level one. Korea has published 52.8 per cent of data in level three. Level one data are not machine-readable; therefore, users have a hard time using them. The level one data are found in portable document format and hyper text markup language (HTML) and are locked up in documents; therefore, machines cannot extract out the data. Findings show that incomplete data are existing in all three governments' open data.

Originality/value
Governments should investigate data incompleteness of all open data and correct incomplete data of the most used data. Governments can find the most used data easily by monitoring data sets that have been downloaded most frequently over a certain period.


National security is traditionally considered to have two dimensions : national defence against external aggressors and internal security against domestic enemies. States therefore pursue weapons and alliances to attain security with military procurement being an integral part of the pursuit of national security. Climate change has modified this state of affairs because it poses unique challenges to the regional security of Africa, and to general security on a global scale : it is a non-temporal threat, with no clearly defined parameters, and cannot be tackled by military means. In addition, it threatens not only the security of a state but the security of communities or entire portions of a state's population. It is therefore a risk to both national and human security. The advent of nuclear weapons has dramatically changed international relations in the 20th century and modified security relations amongst nations. Now climate change processes are redefining security in the 21st century. The security implications for Africa are the most dramatic and urgent.
This paper explores the climate divide produced by climate change processes, particularly with regard to consequences of and effects on national and human security. To complement this analysis, two areas of security are examined, the first being the relationship between climate change and conflict and the second the security stressors in Africa that compound climate change and imperil security. In conclusion, the climate change scenario in Africa is linked to the pursuit of energy, conservation of forests and resolution of conflicts. The author also situates the African challenges in the multilateral processes of climate change.


We report a theoretical study of lasing when plasmonic metallic structures are embedded in a gain medium. The model used is a dynamic semi-quantum approach that accounts for stimulated and spontaneous emission wherein molecules constituting the laser dye are described using a four-level rate equation model, which is coupled to an electrodynamics description of the entire system including metal particles. Based on 3D simulations in which electromagnetic fields for both the pump and emitted photons are accurately determined for an array of elliptical gold nanorods, we numerically demonstrate lasing action above an intensity threshold for a narrow range of wavelengths close to the plasmon maximum. We also show numerically that this lasing action clamps the population inversion above threshold. The dye molecule photophysics near the nanoparticle was also studied, and it is demonstrated that stimulated emission dominates over spontaneous emission above threshold, with most of the stimulated emission being associated with the near-field region near the metal nanorods. The effect of the Purcell factor on the lasing action is also studied. This theoretical work provides the basic framework for investigation and optimization of light emission arising from the coupling of gain media and plasmonic nanostructures.


Optimal foraging theory predicts that foragers should leave a patch when the expected value from staying falls below the expected value from leaving, and this strategy has been observed across various simple foraging tasks (Charnov, 1976; Oaten, 1977; McNamara, 1982). However, it can be difficult to apply foraging models to more complex tasks like search in real-world scenes, where scene context and target features can be used strategically. We investigated quitting times in a map search task that preserves the complexity of scene search but makes it easier to apply standard foraging models. In our online experiments, Amazon Mechanical Turk participants searched for small targets (gas stations) in large satellite images using one of three magnifying interfaces (there were no significant differences between interfaces). Participants were paid based on the number of gas stations they found. We ran two versions of the experiment: in Exp. 1, maps had 0-10 targets and participants completed as many trials as they wished; in Exp. 2, all participants searched the same set of 24 maps containing 1-9 targets. We modeled quitting times with a Bayesian model that incorporates prior beliefs about the number of targets in each map and average search performance, and updates these beliefs as it searches the map. Leaving times were measured in number of search actions (clicks) on the map. Participants had fairly consistent leaving time strategies, quitting the current map when their expected rate fell to 0.019 targets/click (Exp. 1) or 0.015 targets/click (Exp. 2). This is lower than predicted for a rate-maximizing forager, meaning that people searched longer than they should have in each map. There are many possible reasons for this behavior; for example, people may have been trying to maximize total payment or their hourly wage across multiple tasks on the Mechanical Turk website. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Currently, prominent 4G wireless networking technologies receive increasing attention from the research community. Represented by 3GPP LTE and IEEE 802.16 cellular standards, they support both stationary and mobile users. Due to the limited power budget of the latter, the energy efficient behavior is becoming of primary importance. In order to save power and maximize battery lifetime (without recharging) of battery-driven mobile devices, either 4G cellular standard defines a power saving mode. It is termed Discontinuous Reception (DRX) by 3GPP LTE and Sleep Mode by IEEE 802.16. In this paper, we compare energy efficient properties of the two modes when users receive various traffic.


Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS)-based micro-heat pipes, as a novel heat pipe technology, is considered as one of the most promising options for thermal control applications in microelectronic circuits packaging, concentrated solar cells, infrared detectors, micro-fuel cells, etc. The operating principles, heat transfer characteristics, and fabrication process of MEMS-based micro-grooved heat pipes are firstly intro‐ duced and the state-of-the-art of research both experimental and theoretical is thoroughly reviewed. Then, other emerging MEMS-based micro-heat pipes, such as micro-capillary pumped loop, micro-loop heat pipe, micro-oscillating heat pipe, and micro-vapor chamber are briefly reviewed as well. Finally, some promising and innovatory applications of the MEMS-based micro-heat pipes are reported. This chapter is expected to provide basic reference for future researches.


The use of web 2.0 is becoming the essential part of present day life. People are spending time for many purposes and academic activities among these uses of web 2.0 social media services by users are prominent for searching, sharing, discussing, and messaging of scholarly content. The wider use of social media has given birth to various buzz words and 'altmetrics' is one of them. In simple words, altmetrics provides online measurement of scholars or scholarly content derived from the web 2.0 social media platforms. Altmetrics is diversified in nature and categorised in five categories i.e. (i) recommended (ii) cited (iii) saved (iv) discussed and (v) viewed. Altmetrics are becoming widely used by publishers (for showcasing research impact of authors over readers), librarians and repository managers (for adding value to their libraries and institutional repositories) and by the researchers (for complementing reading by instantly visualising papers online attention).


OBJECTIVE
To describe the ambulatory care utilization by patients with gouty arthritis (gout) in the United States using a nationally representative sample.

METHODS
A cross-sectional survey design based on the ambulatory care data from the 2002 US National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey was used to examine the ambulatory care burden for gout, the characteristics of gout patients, the types of providers who see gout patients, and prescribing patterns associated with the management of gout. Weighted analyses were performed to estimate the effect of age, sex, and ethnicity on the association with gout and prescription of allopurinol.

RESULTS
Of the 973 million ambulatory care visits in the United States, 3.9 million were for gout. The majority of visits were for men. The average age for men with gout was lower than that for women with gout (65 vs 70 years of age). Over two-thirds of these gout visits were attended to by primary care providers, whereas visits to rheumatologists constituted only a very small proportion of these visits (1.3%). There were 2.8 million prescriptions for allopurinol, 700,000 prescriptions for nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, 381,000 prescriptions for colchicine, and 341,000 prescriptions for prednisone. After adjusting for age and sex, Asians were 2.7 times more likely than Caucasians to have a gout visit. Yet these patients had lower probability of receiving allopurinol (odds ratio 0.04, 95% confidence interval 0.01-0.27).

CONCLUSION
The majority of patients with gout are seen by generalist physicians. Asian ethnicity is associated with higher number of visits for gout, but a lower frequency of allopurinol treatment.


Wages grow and become more unequal as workers age. Economic theory focuses on worker investment in human capital, search for employers, and residual wage shocks to account for these life cycle wage dynamics. We highlight the importance of jobs: collections of tasks and duties defined by employers within the production process. We provide empirical evidence that climbing the career ladder toward jobs characterized by more responsibility, complexity, and autonomy accounts for the largest part of life cycle wage dynamics. It accounts for 50% of average wage growth, 50% of rising differences between gender, and virtually all of rising dispersion within gender over the life cycle.