A continuing cause for concern in higher education institutions is the poor core mathematical skills of incoming students. Many institutions now offer mathematics support services such as drop-in centres, online resources and short 'refresher courses' in an attempt to alleviate the problem. The majority of third level institutions in Ireland and internationally now make use of diagnostic testing of incoming first year students that both predict subsequent success and select groups for remediation. This project was developed to explore the issues around diagnostic testing and follow-up support for incoming students in the College of Sciences and Health. A large cohort of first year science students was tested and those who failed to achieve 50% on the test were offered support. This support came in the form of peer-assisted student led tutorials during which students had the opportunity to revise basic areas of mathematics. On comparison of the scores on the diagnostic test with the end of module results we have noticed a correlation between students who scored poorly on the diagnostic test and students who failed the Semester 1 mathematics module. The key recommendations arising from this study are; diagnostic testing provides useful information about the cohort as a whole and provides lecturers with information about gaps in the prior knowledge of the group allowing them to take particular care when introducing new topics, diagnostic testing helps to identify those students who are significantly weaker than the rest of the cohort and thus enables them to be targeted with support and attention. Furthermore, by carrying out diagnostic testing over an extended period of time, trends can be observed. This information 1 Sheridan: How much do our incoming first year students know Published by ARROW@DIT, 2013 can then be used by Schools or Departments in an attempt to cope with diversity and ensuring that follow-up support is adequately provided.


This study investigates the impacts of working time on life satisfaction using data from original large-scale survey questionnaires in Japan. The previous studies dealing with the relationship between working time and life satisfaction are limited to a study in Germany by Ratzel (2012), thus it is considered that an accumulation of studies in this field is necessary. Our study takes consideration of non-linearity in the relationship between working time and life satisfaction that was not considered in the previous study, using a semi-parametric method. In addition, taking advantage of the large-scale survey data, we investigate relationships by samples to find whether or not they are dependent upon respective individual characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, and whether or not both the husband and wife are working. Moreover, income, form of employment (regular employees, non-regular employees, self-employed, part-time, etc.), and business and industry categories are considered. Our results suggest that the relationship depends upon the individual attributes, the form of employment, and that it varies with each category in business, as well as each industry.


We have measured the rate v at which negative ions nucleate charged vortex rings in isotopically pure superfluid 4He for pressures, P, temperatures, T, and electric fields, E, within the ranges: 15 < P <25 bar; 0.3 < T < 0.9 K; 5 x 104 < E < 106 V m-1. The measurements were done by a novel electrostatic induction technique specially developed for the purpose, and this is described in some detail. It was found that: at fixed E and P, v increases rapidly with T for T ca. 0.5 K, but approaches a temperature-independent limiting value vs for T < 0.5 K; at fixed P and T, v at first increases rapidly with E but then passes through a maximum at ca. 7 x 105 V m-1 and decreases again for larger values of E ;at fixed E and T, v increases rapidly with decreasing P until, below ca. 15 bar, the signal becomes too small to use. In all cases, v was found to be considerably smaller than had been measured for low E by earlier workers using helium of the natural isotopic ratio (ca. 2 x 10-7). The same signals were also used for measuring ionic drift velocities, v for v < ca. 3 x 1O4 s-1. Values of the matrix element for roton pair emission have been deduced from the v(E) measurements for several pressures in the range 17 < P < 25 bar. The pressure dependence of the Landau critical velocity was measured and is compared with predictions based on accepted values of the roton parameters. Analysis of the nucleation data showed that, at fixed v and P,(v—vs) oc nr,where nr is the thermal roton density, suggesting that v is the sum of contributions from two independent nucleation mechanisms: a spontaneous mechanism responsible for vs and a roton driven mechanism responsible for the increase in v with T above 0.5 K. The existence of a maximum in v(E) appears to be inconsistent with the peeling model of vortex nucleation; but it is entirely to be expected on the basis of the quantum transition model. It is shown that all the nucleation rate measurements reported herein are consistent with the quantum transition model, provided that due account is taken of the possibility that roton absorption may give rise to a critical velocity vr that is smaller than the critical velocity vv characteristic of the spontaneous nucleation mechanism. Values of vv and vr are deduced from the experimental data for several pressures. The fact that exponential decay of the bare ion signal still occurs even when v > vv (or vr) constitutes the first experimental evidence that the microscopic mechanisms responsible for vortex nucleation are probabilistic in nature.


The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains in the 1990s. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with declines in wages. However, a basic contracting model predicts effects on effort rather than on wages, which is what this analysis finds: nurses experienced few declines in wages following takeovers, but did see increases in the number of patients per nurse, the measure of effort used here. The authors show that their results are also consistent with an extended version of the monopsony model that considers effort and allows for revenue shifts following a takeover. Finally, they find that these changes were similar in the largest for-profit and non-profit chains, suggesting that market forces are more important than institutional form.


Despite being a consolidated democracy with free and fair elections and having a political system with intense party competition, a relatively vibrant civil society, and a functioning federal set-up, India still ranks poorly in terms of the coverage, generosity, efficiency, and quality of its social protection. This is difficult to explain based on the factors usually advanced for the implementation of generous social policies. A second puzzle is the predominantly protective nature of welfare policies in India in the current era of globalisation, which should necessitate policies enabling workers to participate successfully in a more demanding economic environment. These puzzles may be explained partly by (a) the long-term insulation of the Indian economy from international competition, (b) the low share of industry and modern services in GDP until recently, (c) the precedence of identity policies, (d) the fragmentation of the political sphere, and (e) the meagre empowerment of women in India. We should, however, acknowledge that change is underway and that the picture is not bleak across India as a whole - being supported by economic reforms and growth, a greater degree of decentralisation and party competition within the country, increasingly discerning voters, and progress on female education and employment opportunities.


The phenomenon of a remarkable conservation of the X chromosome in eutherian mammals has been first described by Susumu Ohno in 1964. A notable exception is the cetartiodactyl X chromosome, which varies widely in morphology and G-banding pattern between species. It is hypothesized that this sex chromosome has undergone multiple rearrangements that changed the centromere position and the order of syntenic segments over the last 80 million years of Cetartiodactyla speciation. To investigate its evolution we have selected 26 evolutionarily conserved bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones from the cattle CHORI-240 library evenly distributed along the cattle X chromosome. High-resolution BAC maps of the X chromosome on a representative range of cetartiodactyl species from different branches: pig (Suidae), alpaca (Camelidae), gray whale (Cetacea), hippopotamus (Hippopotamidae), Java mouse-deer (Tragulidae), pronghorn (Antilocapridae), Siberian musk deer (Moschidae), and giraffe (Giraffidae) were obtained by fluorescent in situ hybridization. To trace the X chromosome evolution during fast radiation in specious families, we performed mapping in several cervids (moose, Siberian roe deer, fallow deer, and Pere David's deer) and bovid (muskox, goat, sheep, sable antelope, and cattle) species. We have identified three major conserved synteny blocks and rearrangements in different cetartiodactyl lineages and found that the recently described phenomenon of the evolutionary new centromere emergence has taken place in the X chromosome evolution of Cetartiodactyla at least five times. We propose the structure of the putative ancestral cetartiodactyl X chromosome by reconstructing the order of syntenic segments and centromere position for key groups.


The construction sector is in transition. All related manufacturing industries face the challenge to improve the processes within the whole sector. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could be a tool to make production and control chains more efficient (Verbaan, 2013). The question that is being answered her is: What are the business enabling capabilities regarding efficiency and effectivity of BIM in the domain of project development in the built environment for architects and project developers in the context of the current reality of the Dutch built environment? The answer to this question is found through literature research. These findings were validated through five interviews with BIM experts. The business enabling capabilities regarding efficiency and effectivity of BIM are: (1) planning / delivering on time and within budget, (2) communication, (3) coordination, (4) integrating sustainability, (5) decrease failure cost. However, the introduction of BIM requires a change in mind-set amongst all companies within the whole built environment, but also in understanding the processes of other construction related companies. It requires collaborating with other companies and altering the project exceeding chain of processes, making these processes Lean, and sharing knowledge for mutual gains. However, this is still in the future, the construction industry needs to undergo radical change. This research was conducted within a limited amount of time, therefore a limited amount of interviews have been taken. In order to give a proper answer to the research question, more interviews need to be done and more information has to be gathered on the current and future business processes within the built environment.


Reactive aldehyde species are important byproducts of lipid peroxidation and oxidative stress due to their role in the secondary damage caused by traumatic events such as epileptic seizures and brain injury. In this study, a liquid chromatography/fluorescence method was developed to determine 4-hydroxynonenal, acrolein, and malondialdehyde in urine samples. These analytes react with dansylhydrazine to produce fluorescent dansyl derivatives with experimentally determined excitation and emission wavelengths of 250 and 550 nm, respectively, which were dependent on the organic composition of the mobile phase. Using a solid-phase extraction pre-concentration method prior to LC-FL resulted in limits of detection ranging from 6 nM to 200 nM for the three compounds. This method was then demonstrated for the detection of the compounds in urine samples. The method was then applied to the analysis of rat urine samples obtained following a chemically induced seizure. A statistically significant increase in acrolein concentration was observed. There was no change in 4-hydroxynonenal concentration, and the results for malondialdehyde were inconclusive. The method will be applied in the future to monitor lipid oxidation in different brain regions using microdialysis sampling during epileptic seizures.


The energy-loss rate of a fast particle in graphene is studied. The energy-loss rate always increases with increasing incident particle energy, which is quite unusual when compared to electron gas in normal metal. Graphene exhibits a "discriminating" behavior where there exists a low energy cut-off below which the scattering process is strictly forbidden, leading to lossless traverse of an external particle in graphene. This low energy cutoff is of the order of nearest neighbor hopping bandwidth. Our results suggest that backscattering is also absent in the external particle scattering of graphene.


In this paper, we present a 3-D FVPM which features rectangular top-hat kernels. With this method, interaction vectors are computed exactly and efficiently. We introduce a new method to enforce the no-slip boundary condition. With this boundary enforcement, the interaction forces between fluid and wall are computed accurately. We employ the boundary force to predict the motion of rigid spherical silt particles inside the fluid. To validate the model, we simulate the 2-D sedimentation of a single particle in viscous fluid tank and compare results with benchmark data. The particle resolution is verified by convergence study. We also simulate the sedimentation of two particles exhibiting drafting, kissing and tumbling phenomena in 2-D and 3-D. We compare the results with other numerical solutions.


Abstracting the signification from an amorphous conglomerate of data requires appropriate techniques for making patent some latent cognitive structures. This paper is devoted to the challenging case when fuzzy-termed data occur in a survey. The fuzzy paradigm is inherently assumed, but the representation formalism related to it induces a higher complexity in the semantic structure of the universe of discourse we have to deal with. In order to disclose the cognitive structures underlying fuzzy information systems, we are led to explore suitable metric concepts equipping the space of fuzzy-valued variables and the space of fuzzy-described individuals, respectively. This is crucial for laying the foundations of multivariate fuzzy-termed data analysis. Some natural algorithmic consequences following from the conceptual and formal generalizations mentioned above are explored in turn, namely the principal component analysis, the automatic classification and the methods of inducing graphical models, which are all extended to allow the processing of fuzzy-termed data.


The basis for the lesions in the Sp25 and H7 ribulose-l,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) mutants of tobacco was studied in detail because these plants may be suitable hosts for transformation with the genes for Rubisco enzymes of various origins that have different substrate specificities. We show that the Sp25 mutant lacks active holoenzyme, but contains the large and small subunit polypeptides, Rubisco activase and the chloroplast chaperonin, Cpn 60. The large subunit polypeptides were not distributed uniformly in the stroma in the Sp25 mutant as they were in the wild-type plants, but had an anomalous distribution being present only in aggregated clusters notably in chloroplasts with large starch grains. Furthermore, these clusters were not uniformly distributed throughout the photosynthetic cells but were localized largely in the mesophyll cells surrounding the vascular tissue. In contrast to the Sp25 mutant, the H7 mutant contained the Rubisco holoenzyme, but in this case the enzyme was inactive. It is clear that in both these mutants the Rubisco holoenzyme fails to assemble correctly. In the Sp25 mutant assembly is lost completely while in the H7 mutant the holoenzyme is formed, but the assembly process fails to produce an active enzyme. We suggest that the flaw in assembly in the Sp25 mutant results from a defect in chloroplast encoded proteins.


This paper explores alternative spaces for learning amongst postgraduate research (PGR) students in the form of research-related groups such as reading and discussion groups, writing groups, seminar series or social groups. Our research with PGR students and academics explores the pedagogy and role of such groups in student learning and identity formation. In this paper, we discuss our findings related to PGR student needs and the factors prompting the formation of research-related groups. A survey of 36 PGR students revealed that students were reasonably satisfied with the formal components of their research degrees such as supervision and mandatory units of study. Yet general dissatisfaction with other opportunities for intellectual engagement, and feelings of isolation, were also prevalent. We hypothesise that though a majority of students might feel supported to complete their higher research degree, they are not necessarily feeling supported in the transition to becoming scholars or in developing broader scholarly interests and networks. As other academic literature has opined, research-related student groups can fulfil a dual function, assisting students towards completion of their research degree but also socialising students into academia. This paper discusses the role that higher education institutions and faculties might play in supporting research-related groups. In particular, there is a balance to be achieved between facilitating groups and enabling sustainability while ensuring that PGR students maintain autonomy and a reciprocal degree of responsibility in governance of such groups, which are key to developing an academic identity.


In Compressed Sensing and high dimensional estimation, signal recovery often relies on sparsity assumptions and estimation is performed via l1-penalized least-squares optimization, a.k.a. LASSO. The l1 penalisation is usually controlled by a weight, also called "relaxation parameter", denoted by λ. It is commonly thought that the practical efficiency of the LASSO for prediction crucially relies on accurate selection of λ. In this short note, we propose to consider the hyper-parameter selection problem from a new perspective which combines the Hedge online learning method by Freund and Shapire, with the stochastic Frank-Wolfe method for the LASSO. Using the Hedge algorithm, we show that a our simple selection rule can achieve prediction results comparable to Cross Validation at a potentially much lower computational cost.


This research article examines factors that influence the long-term survival and viability of a random sample of 500 micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) located in five geographical regions of Ethiopia based on a 6-year long follow-up study. The objective of the study is to identify key predictors of long term survival and viability in small businesses and enterprises in Ethiopia, and to find out if small businesses and enterprises operated by male entrepreneurs perform better than those operated by female entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. Data was gathered on key determinants of survival such as access to finance, managerial skills, level of education, level of technical skills, ability to convert profit back into investment, etc between 1996 and 2001. Econometric methods such as Kaplan-Meier survival probability curves and the Cox proportional hazards model were used for data analysis. 221 of the 500 businesses in the study (44%) were operated or owned by women. 110 of the 500 businesses in the study (22%) had failed at the end of the study period. The majority of businesses that failed were operated by women (78%). Female-headed firms that ceased operation had an average lifetime of 3.2 years, while male-headed firms that ceased operation had an average lifetime of 3.9 years. Businesses that failed were characterized by inability in obtaining loans from formal money lending institutions such as commercial banks (61%), inability to convert part of profit back into investment (46%), poor managerial skills (54%), shortage of technical skills (49%), and low level of education (55%). Based on hazard ratios estimated from Cox regression, businesses operated by women were 2.52 times more likely to fail in comparison with businesses operated by men.


A new divide-and-conquer technique for disparity estimation is proposed in this paper. This technique performs feature matching following the high confidence first principle, starting with the strongest feature point in the stereo pair of scanlines. Once the first matching pair is established, the ordering constraint in disparity estimation allows the original intra-scanline matching problem to be divided into two smaller subproblems. Each subproblem can then be solved recursively until there is no reliable feature point within the subintervals. This technique is very efficient for dense disparity map estimation for stereo images with rich features. For general scenes, this technique can be paired up with the disparity-space image (DSI) technique to compute dense disparity maps with integrated occlusion detection. In this approach, the divide-and-conquer part of the algorithm handles the matching of stronger features and the DSI-based technique handles the matching of pixels in between feature points and the detection of occlusions. An extension to the standard disparity-space technique is also presented to compliment the divide-and-conquer algorithm. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed divide-and-conquer DSI algorithm.


Invasive species are a major threat to global biodiversity but can also serve as valuable model systems to examine important evolutionary processes. While the ecological aspects of invasions have been well documented, the genetic basis of adaptive change during the invasion process has been hampered by a lack of genomic resources for the majority of invasive species. Here we report the first larval transcriptomic resource for the Northern Pacific Seastar, Asterias amurensis, an invasive marine predator in Australia. Approximately 117.5 million 100 base-pair (bp) paired-end reads were sequenced from a single RNA-Seq library from a pooled set of full-sibling A. amurensis bipinnaria larvae. We evaluated the efficacy of a pre-assembly error correction pipeline on subsequent de novo assembly. Error correction resulted in small but important improvements to the final assembly in terms of mapping statistics and core eukaryotic genes representation. The error-corrected de novo assembly resulted in 115,654 contigs after redundancy clustering. 41,667 assembled contigs were homologous to sequences from NCBI's non-redundant protein and UniProt databases. We assigned Gene Ontology, KEGG Orthology, Pfam protein domain terms and predicted protein-coding sequences to > 36,000 contigs. The final transcriptome dataset generated here provides functional information for 18,319 unique proteins, comprising at least 11,355 expressed genes. Furthermore, we identified 9,739 orthologs to P. miniata proteins, evaluated our annotation pipeline and generated a list of 150 candidate genes for responses to several environmental stressors that may be important for adaptation of A. amurensis in the invasive range. Our study has produced a large set of A. amurensis RNA contigs with functional annotations that can serve as a resource for future comparisons to other echinoderm transcriptomes and gene expression studies. Our data can be used to study the genetic basis of adaptive change and other important evolutionary processes during a successful invasion.


The characterisation of rainwater in metropolitan Sydney and in rural New South Wales was undertaken. The results showed that factors such as the lack of vehicular traffic, air pollution and urban contamination meant that rural rainwater water quality was better. The rain water collected in both metropolitan and rural areas generally complied with the 2004 Australian Drinking Water Guidelines except for parameters such as the pH in both the metropolitan and rural rainwater tanks and the turbidity, and lead levels from the metropolitan tanks. This paper also reports the results of a laboratory and a pilot scale study with a deep bed filter (granular activated carbon, GAC) and microfiltration (MF) hollow fibre membrane filter system used to treat raw rainwater collected from a metropolitan rainwater tank. The results of the laboratory experiment and pilot scale systems focus on the non-compliant parameters of the sampling program, i.e. turbidity, lead and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). It was found that rainwater treated by the GAC filter removed the majority of the turbidity and organic substances. The treatment system reduced the concentration of turbidity, lead and DOC to below the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines limits. The pilot plant experiment demonstrated that a GAC filter system and gravity driven membrane could result in low cost and low maintenance operation.


The increasing of public knowledge about raw and height of rights and obligations awarnes every cityzen makes health personel must take care when doing health service to public.health personel must take care applied,that later doesn\'t get demand from patient in the event of undesirable situation. medical conceived of a profession taht is a activity that gives service and containing two element namely:firstly,applies a knowledge set that sistematically structured to certain problems.second,problems has big
relevance in the relationship with public fundamental values.
kaa kunci:tanggung jawab,etika,profesi,dokter,hukum


In this paper, we propose a generative multi-column network for image inpainting. This network synthesizes different image components in a parallel manner within one stage. To better characterize global structures, we design a confidence-driven reconstruction loss while an implicit diversified MRF regularization is adopted to enhance local details. The multi-column network combined with the reconstruction and MRF loss propagates local and global information derived from context to the target inpainting regions. Extensive experiments on challenging street view, face, natural objects and scenes manifest that our method produces visual compelling results even without previously common post-processing.


The meaning and nature of athlete representation in sport governance is broad and goes beyond formalistic delegate models and voting rights accounts. This article explores the meaning and nature of representation in the context of intercollegiate sport governance. Interviews were conducted with intercollegiate athlete representatives and athlete representative administrative advisors to gain an understanding of how and why athlete representatives carried out their roles. Findings revealed that the meaning and motivations of athlete representation were based on the institutionalized deliberative democratic governance system. Representation meant standing and acting for the power of the athlete voice and having the capacity to generate the athlete voice into legislation and decision making. The performative role of representatives involved self-accountability, where they accepted responsibility to engage in a deliberative process of collective decision making. Implications for practice and future research on athlete representation in a deliberative democratic sport governance system are presented.


Gastroparesis is characterized by a constellation of upper gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in association with delayed gastric emptying (GE) in the absence of mechanical outlet obstruction from the stomach. Cardinal symptoms are nausea, vomiting, early satiety or postprandial fullness, bloating, and abdominal or epigastric pain (1). Gastric retention may be asymptomatic in some, possibly due to afferent dysfunction in the setting of vagal denervation (2,3), and delayed GE may be associated with recurrent hypoglycemia in patients without upper GI symptoms (4,5). In these individuals, the term "delayed GE" is preferred to gastroparesis (1), although others have used terms such as "gastric hypoglycemia" (6). Thus, clinical manifestations of impaired GE may include anorexia, weight loss, malnutrition, phytobezoar formation, poorer quality-of-life, or impaired glycemic control due to erratic delivery of nutrients to the small bowel for absorption, and these may occur independent of factors such as age, gender, alcohol consumption, tobacco use, and diabetes type (7–9).

Upper GI symptoms in diabetic patients may result from accelerated GE, often in association with vagal neuropathy and impaired proximal gastric accommodation (10). In addition, upper GI symptoms in diabetic patients were not significantly different in those with delayed compared with rapid GE, except possibly for postprandial distress ( P = 0.076 on univariate analysis) (11). Hence, it is essential to measure GE in patients with upper GI symptoms if the right treatment is to be selected, such as choice of a prokinetic agent in those with delayed GE. Similarly, one cannot assume that patients with known vagal neuropathy and upper GI symptoms have gastroparesis, because the measured GE may be normal, fast, or slow in such patients. The magnitude of GE delay may also influence diagnosis; there is overlap in the clinical diagnosis of functional dyspepsia and gastroparesis in patients …


We apply linear algebra techniques to precise interprocedural dataflow analysis. Specifically, we describe analyses that determine for each program point identities that are valid among the program variables whenever control reaches that program point. Our analyses fully interpret assignment statements with affine expressions on the right hand side while considering other assignments as non-deterministic and ignoring conditions at branches. Under this abstraction, the analysis computes the set of all affine relations and, more generally, all polynomial relations of bounded degree precisely. The running time of our algorithms is linear in the program size and polynomial in the number of occurring variables. We also show how to deal with affine preconditions and local variables and indicate how to handle parameters and return values of procedures.


Runtime verification is checking whether a system execution satisfies or violates a given correctness property. A procedure that automatically, and typically on the fly, verifies conformance of the system's behavior to the specified property is called a monitor. Nowadays, a variety of formalisms are used to express properties on observed behavior of computer systems, and a lot of methods have been proposed to construct monitors. However, it is a frequent situation when advanced formalisms and methods are not needed, because an executable model of the system is available. The original purpose and structure of the model are out of importance; rather what is required is that the system and its model have similar sets of interfaces. In this case, monitoring is carried out as follows. Two "black boxes", the system and its reference model, are executed in parallel and stimulated with the same input sequences; the monitor dynamically captures their output traces and tries to match them. The main problem is that a model is usually more abstract than the real system, both in terms of functionality and timing. Therefore, trace-to-trace matching is not straightforward and allows the system to produce events in different order or even miss some of them. The paper studies on-the-fly conformance relations for timed systems (i.e., systems whose inputs and outputs are distributed along the time axis). It also suggests a practice-oriented methodology for creating and configuring monitors for timed systems based on executable models. The methodology has been successfully applied to a number of industrial projects of simulation-based hardware verification.


Objective To evaluate the association between community well-being, a positively framed, multidimensional assessment of the health and quality of life of a geographic community, and hospitalisation rates. Design Cross-sectional study Setting Zip codes within six US states (Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania and Utah) Main outcome measures Our primary outcome was age-adjusted, all-cause hospitalisation rates in 2010; secondary outcomes included potentially preventable disease-specific hospitalisation rates, including cardiovascular-related, respiratory-related and cancer-related admissions. Our main independent variable was the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index (WBI) and its domains (life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviours and basic access). Results Zip codes with the highest quintile of well-being had 223 fewer hospitalisations per 100 000 (100k) residents than zip codes with the lowest well-being. In our final model, adjusted for WBI respondent age, sex, race/ethnicity and income, and zip code number of hospital beds, primary care physician density, hospital density and admission rates for two low-variation conditions, a 1 SD increase in WBI was associated with 5 fewer admissions/100k (95% CI 4.0 to 5.8; p<0.001). Results were similar for cardiovascular-related and respiratory-related admissions, but no association remained for cancer-related hospitalisation after adjustment. Patterns were similar for each of the WBI domains and all-cause hospitalisations. Conclusion and relevance Community well-being is inversely associated with local hospitalisation rates. In addition to health and quality-of-life benefits, higher community well-being may also result in fewer unnecessary hospitalisations.


Reinforcement learning is concerned with identifying reward-maximizing behaviour policies in environments that are initially unknown. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches, such as deep Q-networks, are model-free and learn to act effectively across a wide range of environments such as Atari games, but require huge amounts of data. Model-based techniques are more data-efficient, but need to acquire explicit knowledge about the environment.
In this paper, we take a step towards using model-based techniques in environments with a high-dimensional visual state space by demonstrating that it is possible to learn system dynamics and the reward structure jointly. Our contribution is to extend a recently developed deep neural network for video frame prediction in Atari games to enable reward prediction as well. To this end, we phrase a joint optimization problem for minimizing both video frame and reward reconstruction loss, and adapt network parameters accordingly. Empirical evaluations on five Atari games demonstrate accurate cumulative reward prediction of up to 200 frames. We consider these results as opening up important directions for model-based reinforcement learning in complex, initially unknown environments.


The real estate sector has made a significant contribution to dealing with the impacts of climate change by introducing low-energy and efficiency-plus homes on the market. Nevertheless, current investigations show that we will need a second planet by 2050 in order to meet our needs for natural resources. The world's increasing scarcity of raw materials and the rise in prices for the world's natural resources represents a rapidly growing risk for the industry. In future, optimizing the building envelope and building services engineering systems to ensure low heat transmission and high energy efficiency will simply not be sufficient. In fact, subsequent conversions or even the dismantling of the built fabric needs to be incorporated into the planning process today.Primary approaches on dealing with this scarcity involve, on the one hand, ensuring a long duration of use or re-use of the building and on the other hand establishing the simplest possible methods for recycling materials already in use in order to stimulate the recycling loop. Building materials with high levels of substances that cause problems during dismantling or recycling ultimately lead to costs: these materials not only increase complications for the building ecologically but, so too, economically.For a number of years now, not only have the "eco-effective" Cradle-to-Cradle principles ranked among key counter-strategies but, so too, designing for recycling: a principle which emphasizes practical effectiveness. In addition, green building certification programs such as DGNB or LEED are increasingly picking up on the topic of dismantling and recycling. All in all, sustainable buildings represent a significantly lower risk for our resources.The presentation will identify opportunities and risks and will present key strategies in dealing with building materials and building structures. The discussion on opportunities includes looking at the portion of valuable raw materials in buildings and the discussion on risks, the concentration of hazardous substances in building materials. This presentation takes examples from current projects and developments to illustrate how we can boost the potential for recycling and how we can plan effectively to ensure reduced costs for dismantling and disposal.


One goal of government health insurance programs is to improve health, yet little is known empirically about how important such government interventions can be in explaining health transitions. We analyze the child mortality effects of a major health insurance expansion in Costa Rica. In contrast to previous work in this area that has used aggregated ecological designs, we exploit census data to estimate individual-level models. Theoretical and empirical econometric results indicate that aggregation can introduce substantial upward biases in the insurance effects. Overall we find a statistically significant but quite small effect of health insurance on child mortality in Costa Rica.


Sparsifying deep neural networks is of paramount interest in many areas, especially when those networks have to be implemented on lowmemory devices. In this article, we propose a new formulation of the problem of generating sparse weights for a pre-trained neural network. By leveraging the properties of standard nonlinear activation functions, we show that the problem is equivalent to an approximate subdifferential inclusion problem. The accuracy of the approximation controls the sparsity. We show that the proposed approach is valid for a broad class of activation functions (ReLU, sigmoid, softmax). We propose an iterative optimization algorithm to induce sparsity whose convergence is guaranteed. Because of the algorithm flexibility, the sparsity can be ensured from partial training data in a minibatch manner. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we perform experiments on various networks in different applicative contexts: image classification, speech recognition, natural language processing, and time-series forecasting. Project page: https://sagarverma.github.io/compression


In this study we investigated body satisfaction and sex differences in exercise motivations. We used a questionnaire that assessed the exercise motivations: stress/anxiety, health/fitness level, mood/enjoyment, and appearance/body shape. We had 198 undergraduate participants, 114 females and 84 males between the ages of 18-23 from the University of New Hampshire, Durham campus. Self-objectification is relevant in this topic because males and females feel pressures from society to obtain the "ideal body type". We found that health/fitness goals are the primary motivators for both males and females. There were statistically significant differences between male and female exercisers desire to lose, gain weight, and be stronger. The majority of both males and females, regardless of exercise behavior, desire to have thinner bodies. The majority of exercising males report no discrepancy in their ideal and actual body types and the majority of exercising females report an ideal body type thinner than their own body.


In spite of the increasing globalisation of the work domain and the mobilization of the workforce (Wong et al. 2007) only very little attention has been paid to the interplay between culture and professional identities in workplace contexts. This paper addresses this gap by exploring some of the ways through which professionals are required to construct and negotiate their various identities in increasingly multicultural contexts where notions of culture may become particularly salient.
We focus on multicultural workplaces where, we believe, the intricate and complex relationship between culture and identity is particularly well reflected: In these contexts members are on a daily basis exposed to culture-specific perceptions, assumptions, expectations, and practices which may ultimately be reflected in workplace communication, and which impact on how professional identities are constructed.
Drawing on a corpus of more than 80 hours of authentic workplace discourse and follow-up interviews conducted with professionals we explore how expatriates who work in Hong Kong with a team of local Chinese construct, negotiate and combine aspects of their professional and cultural identities in their workplace discourse. Our particular focus is on two issues that have been identified in participants' interviews: Sharing decision making responsibilities and negotiating a work-life balance. Our analysis of these two aspects illustrates the complex processes of identity construction from two different but complementary perspectives: i) the ways in which participants portray themselves as adapting to, negotiating or rejecting the new culture in which they work and live; and ii) the ways in which these perceived identity construction processes are actually reflected in participants' workplace discourse.


In the multicultural world of today, as boundaries continue to merge and evolve, issues of accessibility and translation are brought to the forefront of political and social debate. Whilst considerable progress has already been achieved in this domain, the international social and legal recognition of the human right of accessibility to the media and arts demands further advancement in the development of facilities to provide universal access to various art forms including theatre, cinema, and opera. With rapidly developing technology, digitisation and an increasingly socially-aware society, the notion of media accessibility is evolving in response to shifting audience expectations. Performing arts and media, such as opera, are called upon to advance further to embrace all audiences and related audiovisual translation methods are progressing. These include audio description and touch tours for the blind and partially-sighted, as well as sign language interpreting and surtitles for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing. These relatively new translation modalities which are consumer-oriented by nature require an original research design for investigation of the translation processes involved.
This research design follows two fundamental principles: (1) audience reception studies should be an integral part of the investigation into the translation process; and (2) the translation process is regarded as a network. This present work explores the unique translation processes of audio description, touch tours, surtitles and sign language interpreting within the context of live opera, focusing on the UK and from the perspective of actor-network theory. A twofold methodology is employed which brings together a study of the translator's role and an audience reception survey. The translator's task is examined through observational methods and dialogue with professional practitioners of the various aforementioned translation modalities. The audience's perspective is investigated through analysis of data collected in a pioneering audience reception project conducted in May 2011, in collaboration with Opera North at performances of Bizet's Carmen. The focus is on findings assessing the mutual impact of
the translator's choices and audience reception on the distinctive process of translating opera for the blind and partially-sighted as well as the deaf and the hard-of-hearing.


Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects one-third of the global population and claims two million lives every year. Because memory CD8 T cells exhibit a high heterogeneity in terms of phenotype and functional characteristic, we investigated the frequency, phenotype, and functional properties of Ag85A epitope-specific HLA-A*0201 CD8 T cells in children affected by tuberculosis (TB) before and 4 mo after chemotherapy and healthy contact children. Using Ag85A peptide/HLA-A*0201 pentamer, we found a low frequency of blood peptide-specific CD8 T cells in tuberculous children before therapy, which consistently increased after therapy to levels detected in healthy contacts. Ex vivo analysis of the expression of CD45RA and CCR7 surface markers indicated a skewed representation of Ag85A epitope-specific CD8 T cells during active TB, with a predominance of T central memory cells and a decrease of terminally differentiated T cells, which was reversed after therapy. Accordingly, pentamer-specific CD8 T cells from tuberculous patients produced low levels of IFN-γ and had low expression of perforin, which recovered after therapy. The finding of an elevated frequency of pentamer-specific CD8 T cells with T effector memory and terminally differentiated phenotypes in the cerebrospinal fluid of a child with tuberculous meningitis strongly indicates compartmentalization of such CD8 effectors at the site of disease. Our study represents the first characterization of Ag-specific memory and effector CD8 T cells during TB and may help to understand the type of immune response that vaccine candidates should stimulate to achieve protection.


Electrical motors are the most important source of mechanical energy in the industrial world. Their modeling traditionally relies on a physics-based approach, which aims at taking their complex internal dynamics into account. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of modeling the dynamics of an electrical motor by following a data-driven approach, which uses only its inputs and outputs and does not make any assumption on its internal behaviour. We propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture which benefits from recurrent skip connections. We also propose a novel loss function that takes into account the complexity of electrical motor quantities and helps in avoiding model bias. We show that the proposed architecture can achieve a good learning performance on our high-frequency high-variance datasets. Two datasets are considered: the first one is generated using a simulator based on the physics of an induction motor and the second one is recorded from an industrial electrical motor. We benchmark our solution using variants of traditional neural networks like feedforward, convolutional, and recurrent networks. We evaluate various design choices of our architecture and compare it to the baselines. We show the domain adaptation capability of our model to learn dynamics just from simulated data by testing it on the raw sensor data. We finally show the effect of signal complexity on the proposed method ability to model temporal dynamics.


Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS) is a rare multisystemic disorder characterized by defects in renal function, obesity, mental retardation, retinal degeneration and polydactyly. The disease is transmitted primarily in an autosomal recessive fashion but can also exhibit oligogenic inheritance. Twelve BBS genes have been identified to date. Based on localization and functional studies of their protein products, the underlying cause of the disease phenotype is defects in ciliary function which accounts for the pleiotropic nature of the disease. Though it is still unclear exactly how these genes function in cellular signalling pathways, evidence suggests that they are important in a number of fundamental pathways, including the Wnt signalling pathway.

Keywords:

Bardet-Biedl syndrome;
cilium;
basal body;
oligogenic;
Wnt


Local health agencies are often leaders in public health regulation. Despite the significance of this phenomenon, scant scholarship has assessed the interesting doctrinal and normative questions that local agency rulemaking raises. This paper uses local health agency rulemaking, and the New York City portion-cap rule for sugar-sweetened beverages ("the Bloomberg soda rule"), in particular, as a prism through which to analyze local agency rulemaking. The article first explains why it is important -- both doctrinally and practically -- to determine whence local agency power flows. If agencies are created directly by state law, then their powers should be circumscribed by state law. If, on the other hand, agencies are local creatures, then local law should play a significant role in delineating their powers.This article then argues that the willingness of local health agencies to regulate the food, soda, and tobacco industries more stringently than the state or national governments, at least in many prominent instances, calls for a departure from the gloomy public-choice narrative of agency action. Clearly, local agency officials in cities like New York and Boston are not cowed by the well-funded industry groups that they may regulate, as public choice often predicts. For an alternative explanation of local agency activism, the article looks to the early work of political scientist Woodrow Wilson, who envisioned agencies as apolitical entities staffed by technocratic elites who would regulate for the common good. This article then asks whether the Bloomberg soda rule, championed by many health professionals -- but scorned by the media, the food and soda industries, and much of the public at large -- measures up to the Wilsonian ideal. Although the rule is a good example of elites regulating in a way that likely will promote the public health, elements of New York City's institutional design make it more difficult for the rule to lay claim to the Wilsonian mantle of legitimacy.


Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) techniques has aroused considerable interests from the field of artificial intelligence in recent years because of its good interpretability and computational efficiency. However, in many real world applications, the data features usually evolve over time smoothly. In this case, it would be very expensive in both computation and storage to rerun the whole NMF procedure after each time when the data feature changing. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (eNMF), which aims to incrementally update the factorized matrices in a computation and space efficient manner with the variation of the data matrix. We devise such evolutionary procedure for both asymmetric and symmetric NMF. Finally we conduct experiments on several real world data sets to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of eNMF.


Despite advances in deep learning and knowledge graphs (KGs), using language models for natural language understanding and question answering remains a challenging task. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown to be able to leverage contextual information, to complete cloze prompts, next sentence completion and question answering tasks in various domains. Unlike structured data querying in e.g. KGs, mapping an input question to data that may or may not be stored by the language model is not a simple task. Recent studies have highlighted the improvements that can be made to the quality of information retrieved from PLMs by adding auxiliary data to otherwise naive prompts. In this paper, we explore the effects of enriching prompts with additional contextual information leveraged from the Wikidata KG on language model performance. Specifically, we compare the performance of naive vs. KG-engineered cloze prompts for entity genre classification in the movie domain. Selecting a broad range of commonly available Wikidata properties, we show that enrichment of cloze-style prompts with Wikidata information can result in a significantly higher recall for the investigated BERT and RoBERTa large PLMs. However, it is also apparent that the optimum level of data enrichment differs between models.


We discuss the magnetization $M_m$ in the $m$-th column of the zig-zag layered 2D Ising model on a half-plane using Kadanoff-Ceva fermions and orthogonal polynomials techniques. Our main result gives an explicit representation of $M_m$ via $m\times m$ Hankel determinants constructed from the spectral measure of a certain Jacobi matrix which encodes the interaction parameters between the columns. We also illustrate our approach by giving short proofs of the classical Kaufman-Onsager-Yang and McCoy-Wu theorems in the homogeneous setup and expressing $M_m$ as a Toeplitz+Hankel determinant for the homogeneous sub-critical model in presence of a boundary magnetic field.


[Abstract: This paper examines new Para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as "awareness systems" that provide journalists with more complex ways of understanding and reporting on the public communication. Traditional journalism defines fact as information and quotes from official sources, which have been identified as forming the vast majority of news and information content. This model of news is in flux, however, as new social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, online dissemination of short fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources. This paper draws from literature on new communications technologies in computer science to suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems this paper describes as ambient journalism. The emergence of ambient journalism brought about by the use of these new digital delivery systems and evolving communications protocols raises significant research questions for journalism scholars and professionals. This research offers an initial exploration of the impact of awareness systems on journalism norms and practices. It suggests that one of the future directions for journalism may be to develop approaches and systems that help the public negotiate and regulate the flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection and transmission of news.]


The structural distortions resulting from the size mismatch between the Eu2+ luminescent centre and the host Ba2+ cation as well as the electronic structure of BaAl2O4:Eu2+(,Dy3+) were studied using density functional theory (DFT) calculations and synchrotron radiation (SR) luminescence spectroscopy. The modified interionic distances as well as differences in the total energies indicate that Eu2+ prefers the smaller of the two possible Ba sites in the BaAl2O4 host. The calculated Eu2+ 4f7 and 4f65d1 ground level energies confirm that the excited electrons can reach easily the conduction band for subsequent trapping. In addition to the green luminescence, a weak blue emission band was observed in BaAl2O4:Eu2+,Dy3+ probably due to the creation of a new Ba2+ site due to the effect of water exposure on the host.


Active learning is considered by many academics as an important and effective
learning strategy. Students can improve the quality of their work by developing
their higher cognitive skills through reflection on their own ideas, and through
practice of analytic and evaluative skills. Assessment is a tool for learning, but
traditional assessment methods often encourage surface learning, rather than
deep learning which is an approach to developing higher cognitive skills. Peer
assessment is one of the successful approaches, which can be used to enhance
deep learning. It is a method of motivating students, involving students
discussing, marking and providing feedback on other students' work. Although it
is often used in the context of essays, it has seldom been applied to computer
programming courses. The skill of writing good software includes understanding
different approaches to the task, and stylistic and related considerations - these
can be developed by evaluation of other programmers' solutions.
As part of a study investigating the extent that peer assessment can promote deep
learning to develop the higher cognitive skills in a programming course, a novel
web-based peer assessment tool has been developed.
- The process used is novel, since students are engaged not only in marking
each other's work, but also in evaluating the quality of marking of their
peers.
- This system is designed to provide anonymity for the whole process, in
order to ensure that the process is fair, and to encourage students to
discuss without embarrassment by using an anonymous communication
device (ACD) in a variety of roles (script authors, marker, and feedback
marker).
In this thesis, we describe and compare the learning theory and tools, which are
relevant in learning computer programming. Deep learning, which can be
described using the six categories of learning in Bloom's taxonomy, is discussed.
Other peer assessment software tools are compared and discussed. The design
and implementation of a novel web-based peer assessment system (with
anonymous communication device) are described, and set in the context of the
learning theories. The results of evaluating the tools through several experiments
involving large programming classes and an essay writing module are reported.
In this thesis, we also propose a new variation of Bloom's taxonomy, which is
appropriate to describe the skills required for tasks such as programming.
The results indicate that this approach to web-based peer assessment has
successfully helped students to develop their higher cognitive skills in learning
computer programming, and peer assessment is an accurate assessment method
in a programming course.


Recent studies have established that atmospheric water vapor fields exhibit spatial spectra that take the form of power laws and hence can be compactly characterized by scaling exponents. The power law scaling exponents have been shown to exhibit substantial vertical variability. In this work, Taylor's frozen turbulence hypothesis is used to infer the first‐order spatial structure function and generalized detrended fluctuation function scaling exponents for scales between 1 km and 100 km. Both methods are used to estimate the Hurst exponent (H) using 10 Hz time series of water vapor measured at 396 m altitude from an Ameriflux tower in Wisconsin. Due to the diurnal cycle in the boundary layer height at the 396 m observational level, H may be estimated for both the daytime convective mixed layer and the nocturnal residual layer. Values of H≈13 are obtained for the convective mixed layer, while values of H>12 apply in the nocturnal residual layer. The results are shown to be remarkably consistent with a similar analysis from satellite‐based observations as reported in Pressel and Collins (2012).


Retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells transdifferentiate in culture, a transition which is accompanied by a shift in biological activity. The present study investigates whether transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta has the same effects on morphologically transformed RPE cells that it has on primary RPE cells. It also evaluates the autocrine and paracrine activities of TGF-beta s synthesized by RPE cells as well as the anti-TGF-beta effect of mannose-6-phosphate (M-6-P). RPE cells were subcultured at the sixth passage to induce morphological change. The effect of second passaged RPE-conditioned medium (CM) on DNA synthesis was evaluated by the incorporation of 3H-thymidine in rabbit subconjunctival fibroblasts (SCFs) and primary RPE cells. The presence of TGF-beta in RPE-CM was determined using immunoblotting analysis. And the inhibitory effect of M-6-P on cell proliferation mediated by RPE-CM was also analyzed using 3H-thymidine incorporation into DNA. TGF-beta 1, TGF-beta 2, and TGF-beta 3 inhibited the proliferation of the primary cultures of RPE cells in a dose-dependent manner, but the spindle-shaped sixth passaged RPE cells were not inhibited by these growth factors. The medium conditioned by RPE cells stimulated the proliferation of SCFs and inhibited the proliferation of primary RPE cells, in a manner similar to TGF-beta. When this medium was precipitated with either anti-TGF-beta 1, anti-TGF-beta 2, or anti-TGF-beta 3 antibodies, all three TGF-beta s, with an apparent molecular size of 25 kDa, were detected. Mannose-6-phosphate significantly blocked the effect of RPE-CM on cell proliferation. These findings indicate that RPE cells produce biologically functional TGF-beta s and that M-6-P can block the inhibitory effect of RPE-CM on cell proliferation.


In the framework of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission, a two-year (1987-1988) global simulation of brightness temperatures (TB) at L-band was performed using a simple model [L-band microwave emission of the biosphere, (L-MEB)] based on radiative transfer equations. However, the lack of alternative L-band spaceborne measurements corresponding to real-world data prevented from assessing the realism of the simulated global-scale TB fields. In this study, using a similar modeling approach, TB simulations were performed at C-band and X-band. These simulations required the development of C-MEB and X-MEB models, corresponding to the equivalent of L-MEB at C-band and X-band, respectively. These simulations were compared with Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) measurements during the period January to August 1987 (corresponding to the end of life of the SMMR mission). A sensitivity study was also carried out to assess, at a global scale, the relative contributions of the main MEB parameters (particularly the roughness and vegetation model parameters). Regional differences between simulated and measured TBs were analyzed, discriminating possible issues either linked to the radiative transfer model (C-MEB and X-MEB) or due to land surface simulations. A global agreement between observations and simulations was discussed and allowed to evaluate regions where soil moisture retrievals would give best results. This comparison step made at C-band and X-band allowed to better assess how realistic and/or accurate the L-band simulations could be


Official self-study test preparation guide for the Cisco SNRS exam 642-502 Attack threats Router management and administration Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) and Cisco Secure Access Control Server RADIUS and TACACS+ Cisco IOS® Firewall feature set Securing networks with Cisco routers Mitigating Layer 2 attacks IPsec and Easy Virtual Private Network (VPN) Security Device Manager (SDM)CCSP SNRS Exam Certification Guide is a best-of-breed Cisco® exam study guide that focuses specifically on the objectives for the SNRS exam. Network security engineers Greg Bastien, Sara Nasseh, and Christian Degu share preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve your knowledge of router and switch security. Material is presented in a concise manner, focusing on increasing your understanding and retention of exam topics.CCSP SNRS Exam Certification Guide presents you with an organized test preparation routine through the use of proven series elements and techniques. "Do I Know This Already" quizzes open each chapter and allow you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Foundation summary information gives you a quick refresher whenever you need it. Challenging chapter-ending review questions help you assess your knowledge and reinforce key concepts.The companion CD-ROM contains a powerful test engine that allows you to focus on individual topic areas or take complete, timed exams. The assessment engine also tracks your performance and provides feedback module-by-module basis, presenting question-by-question remediation to the text.Well-regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, and challenging review questions and exercises, this book helps you master the concepts and techniques that will enable you to succeed on the exam the first time.CCSP SNRS Exam Certification Guide is part of a recommended learning path from Cisco Systems® that includes simulation and hands-on training from authorized Cisco Learning Partners and self-study products from Cisco Press®. To find out more about instructor-led training, e-learning, and hands-on instruction offered by authorized Cisco Learning Partners worldwide, please visit www.cisco.com/go/authorizedtraining.i¾ i¾ Companion CD-ROMThe CD-ROM contains an electronic copy of the book and over 200 practice questions for the SNRS exam, all available in study mode, test mode, and flash card format.Includes a FREE 45-Day Online EditionThis volume is part of the Exam Certification Guide Series from Cisco Press. Books in this series provide officially developed exam preparation materials that offer assessment, review, and practice to help Cisco Career Certification candidates identify weaknesses, concentrate their study efforts, and enhance their confidence as exam day nears.


Training geologists for a career in the mining industry has changed over the years. It has become at the same time more specialized and with a broader approach. The modern resource geologist needs to understand new styles of ore deposits, the impact of energy transition on the types of deposits and to implement mining processes, the increasing number of mining regulations, and the shift toward educating populations in countries that are new to mining. Based on observation and imagination, rooted in fundamental science, the education of a resource geologist has been transformed by the digital revolution and the integration of the principles of sustainable development. Training future resource geologists means changing the role of teachers to better develop the imaginations of their students and to increasing what students know about the social impact of mining.


This thesis describes a study of a number of aspects of the Nephrops creel fishery. Various aspects have been studied. In particular, work has focused on how the biology of Nephrops affects its catchability in creels, as well as assessing the environmental impacts of the Nephrops creel fishery. A smaller study relating to the physiological effects of the capture and transport of live creel-caught Nephrops, has also been undertaken.

Fishery-directed sampling of Nephrops displayed strong seasonal trends in catch composition and catch rate, reflecting patterns in the Nephrops moult and reproductive cycles. Most females were caught in the early spring, following moulting and mating, with catch rates becoming low after spawning in autumn. Catches of males were greatest around February following moulting. Of those animals caught, males were larger than females. These seasonal patterns reflect the exploitation of different components of the stock throughout the year.

Fishery sampling also showed there to be considerable stock heterogeneity both among and within creel fisheries. Global positioning system (GPS)-linked data loggers fitted to selected fishing boats provided a more detailed assessment of spatial variability in catch rate. Results showed both effort and landings per unit effort (LPUE) to be patchily distributed in the area studied, further illustrating considerable stock heterogeneity throughout the area. Both approaches illustrated that catch rate varied with sediment type, with high catch rates of small animals on sandy to firm mud and high catch rates of large animals on softer mud. Additionally, population modelling indicated that, in the areas studied, Nephrops are not currently being growth overfished.

Behavioural observations in both the field and laboratory indicated a low probability of entry to creels by approaching Nephrops, particularly if other crustacean species were inside the creel. Larger Nephrops appeared to have a greater threshold for disturbances such as and the presence of conspecifics or other species as well as reduced gear avoidance, suggesting that Nephrops creels select larger animals in the population.

Using sea pens as an indicator of physical disturbance of the sea bed showed that impacts from creeling were low. The sea pens Virgularia mirabilis and Pennatula phosphorea were caught in moderate quantities in the creel fishery, but were still observed in high densities on creel grounds. Comparison with trawled areas showed some differences in density, the most notable being that the tall sea pen Funiculina quadrangularis was less abundant on trawled grounds, indicating an adverse effect of bottom-towed gear.

Bycatch was assessed in two distinct fisheries and varied both between and within areas; however, levels of bycatch (both target and non-target species) in all areas were much lower than previous estimates from the trawl fishery. Additionally, in contrast to the trawl fishery, commercially exploited fish made up a small proportion of the bycatch in the Nephrops creel fisheries studied. The survival of Nephrops discards is considered to be high, although preliminary results suggest that predation by seabirds may cause significant mortality.

The effects of 'ghost fishing' were investigated experimentally at two sites and it seemed that lost creels do not constitute a serious issue in this fishery. Creels were found to be very selective for their target species, with both target and non-target species being able to escape. Only a few crabs and a small proportion of the captured Nephrops died in the creels, indicating no evidence of a 're baiting' effect from dead animals.

Stress associated with the capture, storage and live transport of creel-caught Nephrops was found to be greatest during the transport process, during which Nephrops are kept out of water for long periods of time. Temperature was particularly important, suggesting cooling prior to and during transport was essential in order to ensure their survival. Reduced salinity was found to be a major source of stress.

An assessment of the management measures implemented in the Torridon creel fishery show that escape gaps placed in creels are effective in enabling smaller Nephrops and other bycatch species to escape. Limiting effort of individual fishermen has been successful, but this has been followed by an increase in the number of boats fishing within the area, leading to an overall increase in effort. Management measures (both statutory and voluntary) currently applied in the Torridon area are discussed and considered in relation to other areas. It is concluded that creel fishing areas need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, accounting for biological characteristics of individual stocks, as well as management issues at a local scale.

The findings of the present study are discussed in the context of providing a detailed description of the characteristics of the Nephrops creel fishery on the west coast of Scotland. Findings are also discussed in relation to other crustacean creel fisheries, enabling issues directly relevant to the specific fishery to be considered in a much broader context. The present study has been particularly valuable in a wider context, as Nephrops are found in a habitat which is very different from the majority of other commercially exploited crustaceans, and their life history characteristics are also different. This study provides an ideal platform to assess what general principles from other creel fisheries apply to the Nephrops creel fishery, as well as what characteristics are unique to this fishery.


SUMMARY Probiotics are defined as live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host. There is now mounting evidence that selected probiotic strains can provide health benefits to their human hosts. Numerous clinical trials show that certain strains can improve the outcome of intestinal infections by reducing the duration of diarrhea. Further investigations have shown benefits in reducing the recurrence of urogenital infections in women, while promising studies in cancer and allergies require research into the mechanisms of activity for particular strains and better-designed trials. At present, only a small percentage of physicians either know of probiotics or understand their potential applicability to patient care. Thus, probiotics are not yet part of the clinical arsenal for prevention and treatment of disease or maintenance of health. The establishment of accepted standards and guidelines, proposed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, represents a key step in ensuring that reliable products with suitable, informative health claims become available. Based upon the evidence to date, future advances with single- and multiple-strain therapies are on the horizon for the management of a number of debilitating and even fatal conditions.


Purpose We conducted this study to evaluate the outcomes of external-beam radiotherapy tumor boost (EBRT-B) in cervical cancer patients who could not receive intracavitary brachytherapy. Methods A total of 11 hospitals provided the data of patients who received EBRT-B during the period from January 2005 through October 2012. Results A total of 75 patients were included. The median radiotherapy dose was 46 Gy (range, 40–54 Gy) for whole pelvis and 24 Gy (range, 9–35 Gy) for EBRT-B. Initial tumor responses assessed at 2 to 6 months after radiotherapy were as follows: 46 with complete response, 22 with partial response, 2 with stable disease, and 3 with progressive disease. After a median follow-up time of 33 months, 30 patients (40.0%) showed disease progression including 21 (28.0%) with local progression. The 5-year local failure-free survival rate was 70.0%. Achieving complete response at the first follow-up visit and an overall treatment time of 53 days or less were significantly related to favorable local failure-free survival. The rate of grade 3 or higher toxicity was 2.6%. Conclusions Approximately 70% of patients had local tumor control after curative radiotherapy using EBRT-B. Early tumor response and overall treatment time of 53 days or less were closely associated with favorable local control.


Management education and development are recognised as
highly problematic in advanced industrial societies
that have a relatively long tradition of management
theory and practice. Problems of developing managerial
competence become all the more acute in non-Western
societies that require the transfer of managerial
know-how from external, mainly Western sources.
The focus of this thesis is Continuing Management
Education as a vehicle for Management Development with
special reference to Bahrain as a transitional
society. The investigation serves as a context for
evaluating the transferability of selected Western
Management theories to non-Western *environments.
Special emphasis is placed on the concepts of
leadership, motivation and managerial professionalism,
following a detailed empirical investigation of the
Bahrain management culture at the macro, intermediate
and micro levels. A strategy for Continuing Management
Education is designed within the broader context of
scanning four major management development options
available to Bahrain, namely Westernisation,
Bahrainisation, Japanisation and Pragmatisation. The
latter option is recommended in the light of evidence
generated through a collaborative approach involving an
extensive survey of the management community. The
strategy is applied to Bahrain through evaluating Gulf
Polytechnic's Continuing Management Education Programme
(COMEP) against it and identifying areas where specific
correctives are needed. An explicit attempt is made to
develop some guidelines pertinent to cross-cultural
management theory transfer with special reference to
such variables as specificity of a particular theory,
its level of analysis and its methodological
structure. At a parallel level, an effort is made to
derive pertinent lessons of experience; both in policy
terms and on theoretical grounds, out of the Bahrain
case by way of a series of tentative generalizations
whose applicability extends beyond Bahrain to the Gulf
region, the Middle East and possibly other transitional
societies.
The research is based on a processual-developmental
qualitative methodology and amounts to a managerial
evaluation of a particular body of management theory
and practice. This choice was partly influenced by the
author's duality of roles as researcher and director of
a major institution of higher learning. A future
research agenda is also charted out.


Ferromagnetic spin order has been realized in the LaCrO3-LaFeO3 superlattices. Ferromagnetic coupling between Fe3+ and Cr3+ through oxygen has long been expected on the basis of Anderson, Goodenough, and Kanamori rules. Despite many studies of Fe-O-Cr-based compounds, random positioning of Fe3+ and Cr3+ ions has frustrated the observation of ferromagnetic properties. By creating artificial superlattices of Fe3+ and Cr3+ layer along the [111] direction, ferromagnetic ordering has been achieved.


The most commonly used expression for the wave structure and mutual coherence function for an optical wave propagating in a turbulent atmosphere, which is based on an unphysical extrapolation of the Kolmogorov spectrum, is shown in general to be incorrect. For a modified spectrum, we show that the correction to the wave structure and mutual coherence functions, the implied resolution, and the resulting signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio using heterodyne detection, are considerable. Approximate expressions for the coherence function, valid over three distinct propagation distance regions, are derived, and experimental evidence in support of our results is cited.


High mortality in Acute Lung Injury (ALI) results from sustained proinflammatory signaling by alveolar receptors, such as TNFα receptor type 1 (TNFR1). Factors that determine the sustained signaling are not known. Unexpectedly, optical imaging of live alveoli revealed a major TNFα-induced surge of alveolar TNFR1 due to a Ca2+-dependent mechanism that decreased the cortical actin fence. Mouse mortality due to inhaled LPS was associated with cofilin activation, actin loss and the TNFR1 surge. The constitutively active form of the GTPase, Rac1 (V12Rac1), given intranasally as a non-covalent construct with a cell-permeable peptide, enhanced alveolar F-actin and blocked the TNFR1 surge. V12Rac1 also protected against ALI-induced mortality resulting from intranasal (i.n.) instillation of LPS, or of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We propose a new therapeutic paradigm in which actin enhancement by exogenous Rac1 strengthens the alveolar actin fence, protecting against proinflammatory receptor hyperexpression, hence blocking ALI.


By studying trouble tickets from small enterprise networks, we conclude that their operators need detailed fault diagnosis. That is, the diagnostic system should be able to diagnose not only generic faults (e.g., performance-related) but also application specific faults (e.g., error codes). It should also identify culprits at a fine granularity such as a process or firewall configuration. We build a system, called NetMedic, that enables detailed diagnosis by harnessing the rich information exposed by modern operating systems and applications. It formulates detailed diagnosis as an inference problem that more faithfully captures the behaviors and interactions of fine-grained network components such as processes. The primary challenge in solving this problem is inferring when a component might be impacting another. Our solution is based on an intuitive technique that uses the joint behavior of two components in the past to estimate the likelihood of them impacting one another in the present. We find that our deployed prototype is effective at diagnosing faults that we inject in a live environment. The faulty component is correctly identified as the most likely culprit in 80% of the cases and is almost always in the list of top five culprits.


Cloud platforms that use logical partitions to allocate dedicated resources to VMs can benefit from small and therefore secure hypervisors. Many-core platforms, with their abundant resources, are an attractive basis to create and deploy logical partitions on a large scale. However, many-core platforms are designed for efficient cross-core data sharing rather than isolation, which is a key requirement for logical partitions. Typically, logical partitions leverage hardware virtualization extensions that require complex CPU core enhancements. These extensions are not optimal for many-core platforms, where it is preferable to keep the cores as simple as possible. In this paper, we show that a simple address-space isolation mechanism, that can be implemented in the Network-on-Chip of the many-core processor, is sufficient to enable logical partitions. We implement the proposed change for the Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC). We also design a cloud architecture that relies on a small and disengaged hypervisor for the security-enhanced Intel SCC. Our prototype hypervisor is 3.4K LOC which is comparable to the smallest hypervisors available today. Furthermore, virtual machines execute bare-metal avoiding runtime interaction with the hypervisor and virtualization overhead.


The government initiative Every Child Matters was introduced in 2003 in the wake of a number of high profile cases of the abuse and deaths of children. Every Child Matters was identified as an educational responsibility and its philosophy represented the convergence of a number of developments that are explored in the opening chapters of this study. The central concern here is the delivery of Every Child Matters and this is examined through the processes of legitimation, formulation, adaptation and mediation. Particular reference is made to the role played by teachers of religious studies, citizenship and personal, social, health and economic education.


This article explores the Lehman Sisters Hypothesis. It reviews empirical literature about gender differences in behavioral, experimental, and neuro-economics as well as in other fields of behavioral research. It discusses gender differences along three dimensions of financial behavior: risk aversion and response to uncertainty, ethics and moral attitude, and leadership. The article argues that gender stereotypes are influential in finance, constraining women to achieve top positions in banking and sustaining a strong masculine culture. At the same time, the analysis indicates that the few women who make it to the top tend to perform on average better than men, in particular under uncertainty. This is explained by a combination of gender beliefs, gender stereotypes, gender identity, and flexible biological processes. Although further research is necessary, the existing empirical literature would support a plea for having more rather than less women in financial trade, risk management, and at the top of the financial sector.


The combination band of ν2 + 2ν3 of CH4 at 1.33 μm (7512 cm−1) was observed at 0.3-cm−1 resolution by a simple experimental arrangement using a near-infrared high-radiant InGaAsP light emitting diode (LED) and a Ge detector. Forty-six line centers were measured with accuracies of 0.03 cm−1. The assignment of these manifolds was made by inspection of the P, Q, and R branches. The experimental result indicates that the ν2 + 2ν3 band can be used for fully optical remote monitoring of methane using InGaAsP optical sources in conjunction with an ultralow-loss optical fiber network.


Upper Miocene Quaternary acid magmatism in the Cerro Blanco-La Hoyada area, southern Puna. An acid volcanism was deve- loped during the Upper Miocene-Holocene at the Southern Puna, represented by two units at the eastern portion of Cordillera de San Buenaventura (26°25'-27°00'S and 67°25'-67°50' W): the Aguada Alumbrera Ignimbrite and the Cerro Blanco Volcanic Complex. Toward the north and northwest of this area several pyroclastic deposits outcrop called Rosada Ignimbrite, which are included in this article for comparison purposes. All these units overlie the Neoproterozoic-Eopaleozoic igneous-meta- morphic basement and volcanic rocks of ca. 9-7 Ma. The Aguada Alumbrera and Rosada Ignimbrites erupted at Upper Miocene times, whereas the Cerro Blanco Volcanic Complex is as young as the Holocene. In this article, we present new field data as well as electron microprobe and geochemical analyses from which we synthesize the stratigraphy of this region. The studied rocks are all calk-alkaline rocks with rhyolitic composition and have the same characteristics as the volcanic rocks from the Central Volcanic Zone, for example, related to subduction setting where the silicic magmas formed mainly from mantle sources with a crustal component. The youngest magmatism represented by the Cerro Blanco Volcanic Complex could be re- lated to crustal magmas, however this hypothesis must be corroborated with additional geochemical data.


The dissertation examines three military interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa which took place in the mid and late 1990s in Rwanda, the DRC and Lesotho. These interventions took place despite high expectations of international and regional peace on the part of most analysts after the collapse of cold war in 1989. However, interstate and intrastate conflicts re-emerged with more intensity than ever before, and sub-Saharan Africa proved to be no exception. The study sets out to analyse the motives and/or causes of military interventions in Rwanda in 1990, the DRC in 1996-7, and the DRC military rebellion and the Lesotho intervention in 1998. In analysing these interventions, the study borrows extensively from the work of dominant security theorists of international relations, predominantly realists who conceptualise international relations as a struggle for power and survival in the anarchic world. The purpose of this analysis is fourfold; firstly, to determine the reasons for military interventions and the extent to which these interventions were conducted on humanitarian grounds; secondly, to investigate the degree to which or not intervening countries were spurred by their national interests; thirdly, to assess the roles of international organisations like Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the United Nations, in facilitating these interventions; as well as to evaluate the role of parliaments of intervening countries in authorising or not these military interventions in terms of holding their Executives accountable. In this context, the analysis argues that the intervening countries; Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Namibia, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe appeared to have used intervention as a realist foreign policy tool in the absence of authorisation from the United Nations and its subordinate bodies such as the OAU and SADC. The study found that an integrated approach is necessary to address these conflicts.


The aim of this study is identifying the effective taxonomies of operations strategy of mobile phone service providers across countries. All Arab countries in the Middle East region were surveyed except Syria, and 27 out of 31 service providers were surveyed. Data were collected from corporations' annual reports, websites and other professional institutions published sources. K-means clustering analysis was used to develop clusters and ANOVA test was used to identify the significant differences across clusters in term of relative market share. The adopted taxonomies were; agile, lean oriented, product oriented and cost oriented. Agile, lean oriented and products oriented taxonomies are very close in relative market share and differ significantly from cost oriented. The widely adopted taxonomy across countries is


"Something needs to be done about grammar." Katz and Blyth have written this book with the hope of changing the way French instructors teach and conceive of grammar. Intended to help teachers and teacher trainers develop an understanding of French discourse that is grounded in recent theoretical and sociolinguistic research, this book is devoted to informing teachers-in-training, as well as experienced teachers, about cutting-edge methods for teaching grammar. It also describes the grammatical features of the French language in its social context. At the same time, it provides suggestions for applying such abstract knowledge in practical pedagogical ways, for example, how to structure grammatical explanations, devise classroom activities, and take advantage of resources that give students greater exposure to French as it is truly used in various discourse environments.


We present the GT-IIR language recognition system submitted to the 2005 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation. Different from conventional frame-based feature extraction, our system adopts a collection of broad output scores from different language recognition systems to form utterance-level score distribution feature vectors over all competing languages, and build vector-based spoken language recognizers by fusing two distinct verifiers, one based on a simple linear discriminant function (LDF) and the other on a complex artificial neural network (ANN), to make final language recognition decisions. The diverse error patterns exhibited in individual LDF and ANN systems facilitate smaller overall verification errors in the combined system than those obtained in separate systems


Study Design. Prospective, sequential enrollment. Objective. We report the development and testing of the Spinal Appearance Questionnaire (SAQ) for reliability, validity, and responsiveness in patients with idiopathic scoliosis. Summary of Background Data. The SAQ was designed to measure patients' and their parents' perception of their spinal deformity's appearance using standardized drawings and questions. This study was designed to test the instrument's psychometric properties. Methods. The SAQ was administered as a test-retest to idiopathic scoliosis patients and parents for reliability and initial validity assessment (Group I). It was then administered to patients before surgery and 1 year after surgery (Group II) for responsiveness and further validity testing. Finally, both the SAQ and SRS instruments were administered to adolescent idiopathic patients before surgery and 1 year after surgery (Group III) for comparison of the 2 instruments. Results. Group I: The individual scale items had good to excellent reliability (Spearman's rho, 0.57–0.99) and high internal scale consistency (Cronbach's alpha >0.7). The mean scale scores differentiated between curves greater than 30° and lesser curves (P < 0.01). Surgery improved scores compared with those with "surgery recommended." Group II: The domains correlated with clinical and radiographic aspects of the deformity before surgery. All of the domains showed significant difference after surgery (P < 0.0001) and large effect size for all domains except for the patient chest domain. Group III: Both the SAQ and the SRS instruments had significant improvement in all of their domains except for the SRS Activity scale. The relative efficiency of the SAQ domains to the SRS appearance domain (the most responsive SRS domain) was greater for 5 SAQ domains. Conclusion. The SAQ is reliable, responsive to curve improvement, and shows strong evidence of validity. It provides more detail than the SRS in the appearance domain, and provides explanation of spinal deformity's concerns and improvements.


The UN Resolution 181 of 27 November 1947, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state in parts of Palestine, was one of the only votes backed by both the USSR and the USA. Both superpowers saw the future state as a potential ally. Though being long affiliated with the American agenda, the young state of Israel did possess several Soviet-like characteristics during the early rule of the socialist Mapai party. One of the young state's key projects was the construction of new industrial towns and residential neighbourhoods. These environments corresponded with ruling socialist ideology as they consisted of affordable, repetitive, and customised public housing estates. The growing alliance with the USA in the 1960s significantly influenced the Israeli culture and economy, as both underwent a process of 'Americanisation'. This included the promotion of liberal values, such as privatisation, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. 'Americanisation' largely affected the local built environment. Through an intense process of privatisation, the former monotonous publicly built housing estates began giving way to new privately constructed projects. Ultimately, what began as a tool of self-expression was taken over by large-scale private corporations. The early public housing estates first turned into private houses, and later into a commodity. This article aims to reveal how the Israeli allegiance with the USA affected its local culture and economy. Leading to a transformation in the system of housing production, it replaced the former socialist housing approach with a market-driven one. The article focuses on five adjacent settlements located beside the Green Line and the West Bank: Kibbutz-Eyal (1950), Tzur-Nathan (1966), Sal'it (1977), Kochav-Yair (1986), and Tzur-Yitzhak (2005). Analysing their development, the article shows how the growing privatisation process altered the development of the built environment while adapting to changes in local politics, culture, and economy.


Poster art has served to the societies in order to get a certain event or situation off to its target audience since its emergence. The efficacy of the implementations of posters have gained a high acceleration and run up its importance in each period. In this sense; artwork, which has gone through the phase of design, has appeared in relation to technology. The works of art that have been appeared in that vein have proceeded on its way in consideration of various techniques according to the environment of the period. It's an indisputable truth that how visual education is significant on societies either in the past or today. Especially, the implementations of illustration efficacy have been top level because of its feature of drawing attention and being permanent. In this study, contextually the illustration and (as an element of graphic design) the implementations of posters have been handled together. By informing about the historical process, it has been limited with the cultural poster art, which is included in poster art. Many implementations of posters have been made by means of computer assisted programs which are among the products of improving technology. The effects of these kinds of implementations on target audience have been examined and reinforced by interpreting. Accordingly, the research of the efficacy of the illustration art on cultural poster implementations has been aimed at.


Abstract— Four asteroidal bodies (the Martian satellites Phobos and Deimos and the main‐belt asteroids 243 Ida and 253 Mathilde) have now been the subjects of sufficiently close encounters by spacecraft that the masses and sizes and, hence, the densities of these bodies can be estimated to ∼10%. All of these asteroids are significantly less dense than most members of the classes of meteorites identified as being compositionally most nearly similar to them on the basis of spectral characteristics. We show that two processes can act, independently or in concert, during the evolutionary histories of asteroids to produce a low bulk density. One of these processes is the result of one or more impact events and can affect any asteroid type, whereas the other can occur only for certain types of small asteroids that have undergone aqueous alteration.


Many moral philosophers assume that a person is entitled to respect; this suggests that there is a right to respect. I argue, however, that there is no such right. There can be no right to respect because of what respect is, in conjunction with what a right demands and certain limitations of human agency. In this article, I first examine the nature and ontological basis of rights. I next consider the notion of respect in general; I adduce several varieties of respect, then present a primary distinction needed to discern the notion of respect relevant to the putative right. Then I propound the argument that there can be no right to respect and consider some means of challenging its conclusion. In closing, I trace some of the consequences of this argument and suggest how it might motivate a different approach to understanding our most basic obligations to one another.


This review paper revisits European spatial planning in terms of its EUropeanisation, meaning that planning becomes part of the EU policy-making state, and its Europeanisation which stands for mutual learning. The paper argues that by the mid twentieth century this Europeanisation had reached a point where it was natural for planners to want to be part of the agenda-building for European integration. However, their success in penetrating the decision agenda of the EU continues to be limited. While the EUropeanisation of planning has thus stalled, thanks amongst others to EU programmes, mutual learning and thus its Europeanisation has accelerated. Based on this, the paper constructs "business as usual" and "deep change" scenarios under which, by rethinking categories basic to their trade like space and territory, planners can get involved in reconfiguring European integration.