Classification of nonlinearly separable data by nonlinear support vector machines is often a difficult task especially due to the necessity of a choosing a convenient kernel type. In this study, we propose a new classification method called support vector selection and adaptation (SVSA) that is applicable to both linearly and nonlinearly separable data in terms of some reference vectors generated by processing of support vectors obtained from the linear SVM. The method consists of two steps called selection and adaptation. In these two steps, once the support vectors are obtained by a linear SVM, some of them are rejected and others are selected and adapted to become the reference vectors. Classification is next carried out by using the K Nearest Neighbor Method (KNN) with the reference vectors. In the first step, all support vectors are classified by KNN with respect to the training data excluding the support vectors. The misclassified support vectors are rejected, and the remaining support vectors are chosen as the reference vectors. In the second step, the reference vectors are adapted by moving them towards to or away from the decision boundaries by the Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) method. At the end of the adaptation process, the reference vectors are finalized. During classification, the class of each input vector is detected with the minimum distance rule in which the distances are calculated from the input vector to all the reference vectors. The SVSA method was experimented with some synthetic and real data, and the experimental results showed that the SVSA is competitive with the traditional SVM.


Oxidative stress and resulting oxidative damage at the cellular level is thought to be a major factor in the aging process. Associated cellular dysfunction or loss of elasticity as a result of oxidative stress may increase the risk for age related diseases like cancer and atherosclerosis. Psychological stress may be influential in this process through altered behaviors and/or changes in biological systems that then affect oxidative stress. One source of oxidative stress is inflammation and inflammatory cells such as the neutrophil, which produce reactive oxygen species (ROS). Recent research suggests that stress may increase inflammation. These increases in inflammation during stress may lead to elevations in oxidative stress, which may be a pathway through which psychological stress increases risk for disease and possibly accelerates aging. To date, no study has examined the potential relationship between inflammation and oxidative stress during times of psychological stress. The present study investigates the interrelationships among stress, neutrophil activity, and oxidative damage, controlling for health behaviors, in a group of 18 healthy professional students taking exams. This study found increases in neutrophil activity during exams when compared to a month after the exam. However, oxidative damage did not increase during exams, and changes in alcohol consumption may partially account for this finding. Interestingly, oxidative damage was found to be highly correlated with neutrophil activity during exams after controlling for demographic and health behaviors. The implication and limitations of these findings are discussed.


I. The 12th IASL Conference on Legal Aspects of Professional Sport was held from 23 to 25 November 2006 in Ljubljana. The conference was attended by most members of the Board of Directors and many members of the IASL. Over the two days of the conference proceedings (Friday 24 and Saturday 25 November) 22 speakers addressed the conference, providing an in-depth presentation of developments in the academic discipline of sports law and the wider area of law which touches upon sporting and competitive activities from both an international viewpoint and the national perspective of the legal order the speakers represented. II. The conference proceedings opened with an address entitled 'Lex Sportiva and its application to the national framework of Sports Law' by Asst. Professor of Sports Law and Secretary General of IASL, Dimitrios Panagiotopoulos. Key points of his presentation were an explanation of the nature of Lex Sportiva as the law of international sporting and competitive activity which develops within the context of the private autonomy of sporting bodies, coupled with an exploration of the interface between, and parallel implementation of, that law and traditional legal orders: namely those of international law, European law and individual national legal orders. Following that on the first day of the conference Janwillem Soek talked about the results of a comparative survey of the sports legislation and the meaning given to the term 'sport' in various national legal orders while Cathryn Claussen examined issues of equality in US school sports. Luc Silance explored the issue of rights and obligations of athletes from various legal orders and then Prof. James Nafziger, IASL President, set forth the differences between the US model on the one hand and the European model of professional sport on the other, while Prof. Gerard Auneau, President of the IASL Scientific Committee, explored the influence of the special features of sport and in particular professional sport- on shaping national and Community law. Prof. Andras Nemes presented a recent case brought before the Hungarian National Olympic Committee related to a claim for autonomy of the sports associations while the first day proceeded with papers covering issues such as taxation of the sale by an athlete of the right to commercially exploit his image (Jernej Podlipnik), the security of sports events and individual rights of spectators (Cathryn Clausen), compliance with contractual obligations to participate in events where there are security shortcomings (Urvasi Naidoo) and the EU policy on preventing violence in sport seen from the perspective of the British experience (Jack Anderson). Prof. Klaus Vieweg, Vice President of IASL, opened the second day of proceedings by analysing the issue of protecting and utilising the right to commercially exploit athletes' names and images under German and US law. Jean-Christian Drolet talked about the new FIFA transfer rules in the post-Bosman era and about the developments in NHL and modern professional hockey. Prof. Brian Brooks explored the commercialisation of sport in the Republic of South Africa. The scandal in Italian football was analysed and presented in comparison to similar disciplinary provisions in other countries by Lucio Colantuoni, while Simon Gardiner talked about issues of corruption in British football, Tone Jagodic explored sponsorship agreements in modern sport, Vesna Bergant Rako_evi_talked about the commercial exploitation of sporting venue names and_pelca Me_nar examined the trademarks of international sports events. Towards the end of the second day of proceedings and the thematic unit entitled 'Jurisdiction systems in professional sport' two recent cases from the French and Greek sporting legal orders were examined: one case which was brought before CAS concerning a dispute between a footballer and his team presented by Giangiacomo Bausone, and an extremely interesting case about the temporary expulsion of the Hellenic Football Federation from FIFA due to failure failure to comply with the provisions of the latter's statutes on the independence of national federations presented by Dimitrios Panagiotopoulos and Ioannis Mourniannakis). …


Abstract. Halogen chemistry in the polar regions occurs through the release of halogen elements from different sources. Bromine is primarily emitted from sea salt aerosols and other saline condensed phases associated with sea ice surfaces, while iodine is affected by the release of organic compounds from algae colonies living within the sea ice environment. Measurements of halogen species in polar snow samples are limited to a few sites although there is some evidence that they are related to sea ice extent. We examine here total bromine, iodine and sodium concentrations in a series of 2 m cores collected during a traverse from Talos Dome (72°48' S, 159°06' E) to GV7 (70°41' S, 158°51' E) analyzed by inductively coupled plasma-sector field mass spectrometry (ICP-SFMS) at a resolution of 5 cm. We find a distinct seasonality of the bromine enrichment signal in most of the cores, with maxima during the austral spring. Iodine shows average concentrations of 0.04 ppb with little variability. No distinct seasonality is found for iodine and sodium. The transect reveals homogeneous air-to-snow fluxes for the three chemical species along the transect due to competing effects of air masses originating from the Ross Sea and the Southern Ocean.


The article offers a conjunctural analysis of three 'moments' in the post-war black visual arts in the UK. The main contrast identified is between the 'problem space' of the artists–the last 'colonials'–who came to London after World War Two to join the modern avant-garde and who were anti-colonial, cosmopolitan and modernist in outlook, and that of the second generation–the first 'post-colonials'–who were born in Britain, pioneered the Black Art Movement and the creative explosion of the 1980s, and who were anti-racist, culturally relativist and identity-driven. In the work of the former, abstraction predominated; the work of the latter was politically polemical and collage-based, subsequently embracing the figural and the more subjective strategy of 'putting the self in the frame'. This generational shift is mapped here in relation to wider socio-political and cultural developments, including the growth of indigenous racism, the new social movements, especially anti-racist, feminist and identity politics, and the theoretical 'revolutions' associated with them. The contemporary moment–less politicized, and artistically neo-conceptual, multi-media and installation-based–is discussed more briefly.


Many collective classification (CC) algorithms have been shown to increase accuracy when instances are interrelated. However, CC algorithms must be carefully applied because their use of estimated labels can in some cases decrease accuracy. In this article, we show that managing this label uncertainty through cautious algorithmic behavior is essential to achieving maximal, robust performance. First, we describe cautious inference and explain how four well-known families of CC algorithms can be parameterized to use varying degrees of such caution. Second, we introduce cautious learning and show how it can be used to improve the performance of almost any CC algorithm, with or without cautious inference. We then evaluate cautious inference and learning for the four collective inference families, with three local classifiers and a range of both synthetic and real-world data. We find that cautious learning and cautious inference typically outperform less cautious approaches. In addition, we identify the data characteristics that predict more substantial performance differences. Our results reveal that the degree of caution used usually has a larger impact on performance than the choice of the underlying inference algorithm. Together, these results identify the most appropriate CC algorithms to use for particular task characteristics and explain multiple conflicting findings from prior CC research.


This paper studies the island effects induced by negation in exclamative sentences. In order to explain this phenomenon, I focus on the interaction between exclamative wh-phrases and negation, showing that negation can appear in exclamative sentences when the wh-phrase is not within the scope of negation; when the negative operator has wide scope, the sentence is ungrammatical. Assuming Szabolcsi and Zwarts's (1997) account of negative islands, I argue that the wh-phrase can have wide scope only when its domain is an unordered set, and not when it ranges over ordered sets. I argue that the inverse scope relation, where the wh-phrase is within the scope of negation, is always rejected, since wh-phrases are positive polarity items. I show that they are sensitive to downward-entailing contexts and propose that this is due to the fact that they widen a domain of quantification without strengthening the statement, in line with Kadmon and Landman's (1993) and Chierchia's (2004) analyses of negative polarity.


This research is based on discovery og blogger Indonesia survey conducted by a corporate communications consultant in Indonesia Indopacific Edelman, that22% of students claimed to activity use their Blogs as a means of seeking and giving information. Blog stands for Web-Log is writing applications like writing (which appeared as a post) that is on a public web page. In the result of survey found that the intensity of the writing of Bloggers who begun to decline after two years due to the saturation level of the writer or the lack of topic that will be written. The statement of the problem in this research include the influence of exposure to the intensity of writing Blogs on the Blog on Students and how much the influence of exposure to the intensity of writing Blogs on the Blog Students.
Uses and Gratifications theory that emphasizes the use and satisfaction of a person, which means the respondent or public have special authority to determine what media they use to satisfy their needs so they will feel satisfied for these choices. In this case the respondents who have chosen Blogs as a medium for writing and eventually put them to feel satisfied that the more intense in writing on the Blog. Type used in this research is explanation the research to examine the relationship between the hypothesized variables with a quantitative approach,
the emphasis on data analysis and figures. The population in this research is students concentration in journalism and media studies of UMM in 2006 and the sample of 5 (five)
students who already know and have a Blog. The sampling technique used is total sampling, because respondents who comprise less then 100 data. Collection techniques used are
questionnaires and also supported by the secondary data used data from respondents who owned Blog and then put the items in question had made. Data Analysis used Coefficient
Correlations Rho Spearman, caused amount respondents it less then 1 people.
The result of this research showed that value correlations spearman is 0,975 it's mean that have influences between exposure to the Intensity firmly and than taking a decision there is showed probability value > 0,05 it means that H0 is rejected with other words. Have significant influences between variable X is Exposure Blog depend variable Y is Write Intensity in Blog for University Students.


While statistical mechanics describe the equilibrium state of systems with many degrees of freedom, and dynamical systems explain the irregular evolution of systems with few degrees of freedom, new tools are needed to study the evolution of systems with many degrees of freedom. This book presents the basic aspects of chaotic systems, with emphasis on systems composed by huge numbers of particles. Firstly, the basic concepts of chaotic dynamics are introduced, moving on to explore the role of ergodicity and chaos for the validity of statistical laws, and ending with problems characterized by the presence of more than one significant scale. Also discussed is the relevance of many degrees of freedom, coarse graining procedure, and instability mechanisms in justifying a statistical description of macroscopic bodies. Introducing the tools to characterize the non asymptotic behaviors of chaotic systems, this text will interest researchers and graduate students in statistical mechanics and chaos.


We study a number of large international military conflicts since World War II where we establish a news analysis as a proxy for the estimated likelihood that the conflict will result in a war. We find that in cases when there is a pre-war phase, an increase in the war likelihood tends to decrease stock prices, but the ultimate outbreak of a war increases them. In cases when a war starts as a surprise, the outbreak of a war decreases stock prices. We show that this paradox cannot be explained by uncertainty about investment decisions, nor by the expectation about a quick end of the war or ambiguity aversion. A connection of this puzzling phenomenon to mean-variance preferences of investors is suggested. JEL classification: G11,G14,G19.


We investigate the potential of different pre-fetching and/or caching strategies for different user behaviour with respect to surfing or browsing in a catch-up-TV network. To this end we identify accounts and channels associated with strong or weak surfing or browsing respectively and study the distributions of hold times for the different types of behaviour. Finally we present results from a request prediction model and a caching simulation for the different types of behaviour and find that the results are relatively similar.


Geometric modeling is concerned with the description and manipulation of geometric shapes. Recursive subdivision is a particularly simple and efficient way of representing shapes as the limit of a sequence of recursive refinement operations, applied to a simple initial shape. The properties of this limit shape depend on the subdivision rules that are used to build the next finer shape at any step in the recursion.
In this thesis, I present a methodology for constructing subdivision rules. Starting from a variational energy functional, this method constructs subdivision rules in a systematic manner. The shapes modeled by these schemes are guaranteed to minimize the given energy functional.
Applications of this method are as simple as the modeling of a bending piece of metal, and as far reaching as the efficient animation of a realistic fluid flow.
This thesis consists of four major parts. Part one, the introduction, contains just one chapter. There, I presents subdivision as an efficient way for describing functions.
The second part, focussing on exact subdivision schemes for physical problems, consists of chapters two, three and four. In chapter two, I will establish a natural link between the modeling of physical problems and subdivision by working through a concrete example. The result is a dethodology for building a subdivision scheme that captures the physical modeling problem. In chapter three, this methodology is generalized to a large class of curves and surfaces defined over regular grids. Chapter four finally links more traditional definitions of subdivision schemes, based on convolution, with this approach.
Part three, consisting of chapters five and six, extends subdivision for physical problems to the case where approximation is necessary to obtain locally supported schemes. Chapter five presents the various approaches that can be taken to find local approximations of globally supported subdivision schemes. In chapter six, these methods are used to capture several interesting physical modeling problems for curve networks and for various classes of surfaces on irregular domains.
Part four, consisting of chapter seven, develops analytic basis functions for the subdivision schemes derived using the methodology of this thesis.
To summarize, this thesis provides a link between multi-resolution modeling and the modeling of physical problems. A methodology for building subdivision schemes that model given physical principles is derived, analyzed, applied to various interesting modeling problems.


Recent years have seen global food prices rise and become more volatile. Price surges in 2008 and 2011 held devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of people and negatively impacted many more. Today one billion people are hungry. The issue is a high priority for many international agencies and national governments. At the Cannes Summit in November 2011, the G20 leaders agreed to implement five objectives aiming to mitigate food price volatility and protect vulnerable persons. To succeed, the global community must now translate these high level policy objectives into practical actions. In this paper, we describe challenges and unresolved dilemmas before the global community in implementing these five objectives. The paper describes recent food price volatility trends and an evaluation of possible causes. Special attention is given to climate change and water scarcity, which have the potential to impact food prices to a much greater extent in coming decades. We conclude the world needs an improved knowledge base and new analytical capabilities, developed in parallel with the implementation of practical policy actions, to manage food price volatility and reduce hunger and malnutrition. This requires major innovations and paradigm shifts by the global community.


Abstract Despite extensive paleoecological analyses of spatial and temporal turnover in species composition, the fidelity with which time-averaged death assemblages capture variation in species composition and diversity partitioning of living communities remains unexplored. Do death assemblages vary in composition between sites to a lesser degree than do living assemblages, as would be predicted from time-averaging? And is the higher number of species observed in death relative to living assemblages reduced with increasing spatial scale? We quantify the preservation of spatial and temporal variation in species composition using 11 regional data sets based on samples of living molluscan communities and their co-occurring time-averaged death assemblages. (1) Compositional dissimilarities among living assemblages (LA) within data sets are significantly positively rank-correlated to dissimilarities among counterpart pairs of death assemblages (DA), demonstrating that pairwise dissimilarity within a study area has a good preservation potential in the fossil record. Dissimilarity indices that downplay the abundance of dominant species return the highest live-dead agreement of variation in species composition. (2) The average variation in species composition (average dissimilarity) is consistently smaller in DAs than in LAs (9 of 11 data sets). This damping of variation might arise from DAs generally having a larger sample size, but the reduction by ∼10–20% mostly persists even in size-standardized analyses (4 to 7 of 11 data sets, depending on metric). Beta diversity expressed by the number of compositionally distinct communities is also significantly reduced in death assemblages in size-standardized analyses (by ∼25%). This damping of variation and reduction in beta diversity is in accord with the loss of temporal resolution expected from time-averaging, without invoking taphonomic bias (from differential preservation or postmortem transportation) or sample-size effects. The loss of temporal resolution should directly reduce temporal variation, and assuming time-for-space substitution owing to random walk within one habitat and/or temporal habitat shifting, it also decreases spatial variation in species composition. (3) DAs are more diverse than LAs at the alpha scale, but the difference is reduced at gamma scales because partitioning of alpha and beta components differs significantly between LAs and DAs. This indicates that the effects of time-averaging are reduced with increasing spatial scale. Thus, overall, time-averaged molluscan DAs do capture variation among samples of the living assemblage, but they tend to damp the magnitude of variation, making them a conservative means of inferring change over time or variation among regions in species composition and diversity. Rates of temporal and spatial species turnover documented in the fossil record are thus expected to be depressed relative to the turnover rates that are predicted by models of community dynamics, which assume higher temporal resolution. Finally, the capture by DAs of underlying variation in the LA implies little variation in the net preservation potential of death assemblages across environments, despite the different taphonomic pathways suggested by taphofacies studies.


This paper presented during the Technology and Innovation (Techon) 2015 National Conference 2015 from 9 to 11 June 2015 at Hilton Hotel, Kuching. The conference was organized by Politeknik Malaysia Mukah


Abstract. In this paper, we present a combined geospatial and two dimensional (2D) flood modeling approach to assess the impacts of flooding due to extreme rainfall events. We developed and implemented this approach to the Tago River Basin in the province of Surigao del Sur in Mindanao, Philippines, an area which suffered great damage due to flooding caused by Tropical Storms Lingling and Jangmi in the year 2014. The geospatial component of the approach involves extraction of several layers of information such as detailed topography/terrain, man-made features (buildings, roads, bridges) from 1-m spatial resolution LiDAR Digital Surface and Terrain Models (DTM/DSMs), and recent land-cover from Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI images. We then used these layers as inputs in developing a Hydrologic Engineering Center Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC HMS)-based hydrologic model, and a hydraulic model based on the 2D module of the latest version of HEC River Analysis System (RAS) to dynamically simulate and map the depth and extent of flooding due to extreme rainfall events. The extreme rainfall events used in the simulation represent 6 hypothetical rainfall events with return periods of 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 years. For each event, maximum flood depth maps were generated from the simulations, and these maps were further transformed into hazard maps by categorizing the flood depth into low, medium and high hazard levels. Using both the flood hazard maps and the layers of information extracted from remotely-sensed datasets in spatial overlay analysis, we were then able to estimate and assess the impacts of these flooding events to buildings, roads, bridges and landcover. Results of the assessments revealed increase in number of buildings, roads and bridges; and increase in areas of land-cover exposed to various flood hazards as rainfall events become more extreme. The wealth of information generated from the flood impact assessment using the approach can be very useful to the local government units and the concerned communities within Tago River Basin as an aid in determining in an advance manner all those infrastructures (buildings, roads and bridges) and land-cover that can be affected by different extreme rainfall event flood scenarios.


Recent research on creativity in the context of English further education (FE) suggests that teaching and learning is severely constrained by a remit that prioritises instrumentalism, care and containment. Following New Labour's 'discovery' of FE and the resulting unprecedented levels of state intervention in the sector (Finlay et al., 2007), Government policy has increasingly directed FE to embrace agendas of economic competitiveness and social inclusion, emphasising skills development and engagement with non-traditional learners. Although there have been significant increases in funding for FE under New Labour, the growth of performativity and central control in the sector suggests that any meaningful conception of creativity may be lost as teachers' energy and morale is sapped by 'policy overload' (Edward et. al., 2007). Simmons & Thompson (2008) discuss the rise of performativity in FE and the impact that this has on opportunities for creativity for both teachers and learners. Drawing on the work of Brown & Lauder (1992), they argue that, in this context, practitioners' autonomy is diminished within a system of work relations characterised by low trust and high levels of surveillance more in keeping with Fordist modes of production, rather than a post-Fordist response to the development of a 'knowledge economy'.

Furthermore, although official discourse increasingly aligns notions of creativity with the economic competitiveness agenda, Simmons & Thompson argue that opportunities for creative teaching and learning are limited by centrally prescribed curricula, performance indicators and mechanisms of quality control. They highlight evidence from the work of Hall & Thomson (2007) showing that officially-sponsored creativity remains largely at the level of 'a treat and a pick-me-up' for teachers and learners, and that the aim is less to change the curriculum than to ensure that learners fit more comfortably into it. Within this context, creativity may be compromised by policy imperatives and the demands of performativity.

This paper contests such an outcome by offering a (re-) conceptualization that distances itself from official accounts of creativity in education. It argues that teacher and learner identities are crucial in developing forms of 'creativity' appropriate to 21st century curricula in further education, and that these identities are framed in part by the specific and socially constructed nature of vocational curricula in English FE. At present, teachers and learners in FE are often acutely aware that their courses occupy a position within the educational hierarchy characterised by lower status. Learners may often 'follow a particular route, not so much because they know what they want to do, but because they know what they cannot do' (Bathmaker, 2005). These learners are unlikely to reflect New Labour's positioning of FE within its rhetoric of 'learning society' and 'knowledge economy'. Indeed, their learning identities may be seen as a response to their positioning in an education and training hierarchy rather than reflecting their inherent capacities.

Drawing on a conceptual framework derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1980) and Basil Bernstein (2000), the paper discusses creativity as a particular 'cultural arbitrary' located within the broader structure of an education sector. According to Bourdieu, cultural arbitraries such as curricula are the product of social relationships operating so as to reproduce dominant versions of culture and to maintain the position of powerful social groups. Bernstein (2000) elaborates on these ideas by drawing attention to the operation of this process in structuring the field of education, so that the school 'disguises and masks the way power relations, external to the school, produce the hierarchies of knowledge, possibility and value within the school' and thereby legitimizes educational inequality. The paper argues that in order to reclaim creativity for teachers and learners in FE a reappraisal of their role and status is required


Objectives:To assess whether prolotherapy, an injection-based therapy, improves elbow pain, grip strength, and extension strength in patients with lateral epicondylosis. Setting:Outpatient Sport Medicine clinic. Study Design:Double-blind randomized controlled trial. Participants:Twenty-four adults with at least 6 months of refractory lateral epicondylosis. Intervention:Prolotherapy participants received injections of a solution made from 1 part 5% sodium morrhuate, 1.5 parts 50% dextrose, 0.5 parts 4% lidocaine, 0.5 parts 0.5% sensorcaine and 3.5 parts normal saline. Controls received injections of 0.9% saline. Three 0.5-mL injections were made at the supracondylar ridge, lateral epicondyle, and annular ligament at baseline and at 4 and 8 weeks. Outcome Measures:The primary outcome was resting elbow pain (0 to 10 Likert scale). Secondary outcomes were extension and grip strength. Each was performed at baseline and at 8 and 16 weeks. One-year follow-up included pain assessment and effect of pain on activities of daily living. Results:The groups were similar at baseline. Compared to Controls, Prolotherapy subjects reported improved pain scores (4.5 ± 1.7, 3.6 ± 1.2, and 3.5 ± 1.5 versus 5.1 ± 0.8, 3.3 ± 0.9, and 0.5 ± 0.4 at baseline and at 8 and 16 weeks, respectively). At 16 weeks, these differences were significant compared to baseline scores within and among groups (P < 0.001). Prolotherapy subjects also reported improved extension strength compared to Controls (P < 0.01) and improved grip strength compared to baseline (P < 0.05). Clinical improvement in Prolotherapy group subjects was maintained at 52 weeks. There were no adverse events. Conclusions:Prolotherapy with dextrose and sodium morrhuate was well tolerated, effectively decreased elbow pain, and improved strength testing in subjects with refractory lateral epicondylosis compared to Control group injections.


Jews and Gentiles in Early America: 1654-1800, by William Pencak. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 321 pp. $29.95. Jews and Gentiles in Early America fills an important gap in the scholarship on American Jewish history and the history of early America. It offers a community-by-community analysis of how Jews, a numerically insignificant but still visible element in the population, fit into the political and cultural world of America, from the years of the first settlement in the middle of the seventeenth century through the early national period, with the book ending in 1800. Pencak has organized his material, chapter by chapter, geographically, devoting his book to the five cities in which Jews lived in substantial enough numbers to have led them to create Jewish communal institutions. These five communities, whose Jews, their congregations, and their complex interactions with the vastly larger non-Jewish majority constitute the heart of Jews and Gentiles in Early America, New York, Newport, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia and Philadelphia, all seaport cities, housed America's first Jewish communities. For each community Pencak asks a series of questions. He wants to know how the local, non-Jewish population received the Jews who settled in their midst. Did they greet the Jews warmly or did they express antipathy towards the non-Christian newcomers? Where did anti-Jewish feelings come from, both in terms of historical origins and the social and economic strata of the local population? Why did the residents of some colonies provide a more hospitable environment than others and how did differing levels of welcome-or the lack thereof-leave its mark on the Jews? Pencak turns his attention, as such, not just to the words and deeds of the Christian majority, expressed in print and in the actions of courts and legislatures, but to the Jews themselves. He seeks to explore how Jews navigated life in the colonies and in the new nation. To what degree did they play a role in the Revolution, and how did they inject themselves into the political life of the states which emerged from the former colonies? Pencak's questions go further, and in posing them he provides a useful service to historians. How did Jews respond to attacks on their character and their religion when negative images became part of the public discourse? What did Jews do to defend themselves, and what did their arguments reveal about their understanding of themselves and their place in America, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the onset of the nineteenth? Each colony, then state, had its own history, and each history took its shape from the particular political, religious, and cultural characteristics that dominated the local scene. …


The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology.Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and ?organic memory? that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from ?railway spine? to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.


The ecosystem of the baltic sea has undergone dramatic changes, perhaps a regime-shift, during the last four decades. The Baltic Sea Herring SSB has declined to a third and weight-at-age has halved due to plankton prey deficits. The management objective of the herring is currently in the transition to a cautionary maximum sustainable yield (MSY). We modelled the main basin Baltic Sea herring under the currernt regime, and analysed the effect of a ercovery of the cod stock and the food availability as they were in the early 1980s. We recommend a target F MSY of 0.16, but with a recovery of the cod, recommended target F MSY is is 0.10. A simultaneous increase in both cod and food availability is estimated to increase the yield with 40% at the target F MSY is 0.20. We present functions to calculate F MSY and estimate the expected yield depending on the abundance of cod and food-availability. A retrospective application of our functions indicates over-fishing in the 1990s and early 2000s, and a net loss in yields with a landing value of about E440 Millions.


The associated production of a W boson with a jet originating from either a light parton or heavy-flavor quark is studied in the forward region using proton-proton collisions. The analysis uses data corresponding to integrated luminosities of 1.0 and 2.0 fb(-1) collected with the LHCb detector at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, respectively. The W bosons are reconstructed using the W -> mu nu decay and muons with a transverse momentum, p(T), larger than 20 GeV in the pseudorapidity range 2.0 20 GeV and 2.2 20 GeV. The fraction of W + jet events that originate from beauty and charm quarks is measured, along with the charge asymmetries of the W+b and W+c production cross sections. The ratio of the W + jet to Z + jet production cross sections is also measured using the Z -> mu mu decay. All results are in agreement with Standard Model predictions.


The present study was undertaken to evaluate the use of fecal progesterone (FP4) concentration for early pregnancy diagnosis, estrus detection, and predicting the litter size and parturition date in dairy goats. Fecal samples were collected from 17 hand-mated goats 3 times a week for 22-23 weeks, beginning on the day of mating. The levels of FP4 were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Significant positive correlations were found between the levels of serum P4 and FP4 (r = 0.8787, n = 13). Pregnancy diagnosis was performed at 2 months postmating with transabdominal ultrasonography and confirmed upon birth of the offspring. The results indicated a significant difference in the mean FP4 concentration obtained during days 19 and 20 postmating between the pregnant and nonpregnant does (2492.4 ± 239.1 vs. 577.0 ± 112.9 ng/g, P < 0.05). A significant drop in the FP4 concentration was noted 3 days prior to the detected day of estrus (P < 0.05). The mean weekly FP4 profile obtained in this study showed a progressive increase from week 7 to 14 until a plateau was reached between weeks 15 and 21, and then a rapid decline began 5 to 6 days prepartum, with a significant drop 1-2 days prepartum (from 3884.3 ± 576.0 to 1205.0 ± 339.0 ng/g, P < 0.05). No significant correlation was observed between the FP4 concentration and the number of kids born. In conclusion, the measurement of FP4 concentration could potentially be an alternative method for early pregnancy diagnosis, prediction of estrus, and parturition in dairy goats.


This paper studies the strategic interaction between a bank whose deposits are randomly withdrawn and a lender of last resort (LLR) that bases its decision on supervisory information on the quality of the bank's assets. The bank is subject to a capital requirement and chooses the liquidity buffer that it wants to hold and the risk of its loan portfolio. The equilibrium choice of risk is shown to be decreasing in the capital requirement and increasing in the interest rate charged by the LLR. Moreover, when the LLR does not charge penalty rates, the bank chooses the same level of risk and a smaller liquidity buffer than in the absence of an LLR. Thus, in contrast with the general view, the existence of an LLR does not increase the incentives to take risk, while penalty rates do.


Different diets wear teeth in different ways and generate distinguishable wear and microwear patterns that have long been the basis of palaeodiet reconstructions. Little experimental research has been performed to study them together. Here, we show that an artificial mechanical masticator, a chewing machine, occluding real horse teeth in continuous simulated chewing (of 100 000 chewing cycles) is capable of replicating microscopic wear features and gross wear on teeth that resemble wear in specimens collected from nature. Simulating pure attrition (chewing without food) and four plant material diets of different abrasives content (at n = 5 tooth pairs per group), we detected differences in microscopic wear features by stereomicroscopy of the chewing surface in the number and quality of pits and scratches that were not always as expected. Using computed tomography scanning in one tooth per diet, absolute wear was quantified as the mean height change after the simulated chewing. Absolute wear increased with diet abrasiveness, originating from phytoliths and grit. In combination, our findings highlight that differences in actual dental tissue loss can occur at similar microwear patterns, cautioning against a direct transformation of microwear results into predictions about diet or tooth wear rate.


This paper describes the implementation of INFIBRA, a machine vision system used in the quality control of acrylic fibre production. The system was developed by INETI under a contract with a leading industrial manufacturer of acrylic fibres. It monitors several parameters of the acrylic production process. This paper presents, after a brief overview of the system, a detailed description of the machine vision algorithms developed to perform the inspection tasks unique to this system. Some of the results of online operation are also presented.


One repetition maximum (1RM) strength tests have been the criterion assessment of force producing capabilities of athletes. The bench press exercise is regularly employed to test and train upper body strength. The Myotest® is a small, portable tri-axis accelerometer, which has been validated (in-house) for measurement of barbell velocity and calculation of power output for a given movement. The aim of this study was to assess how accurately Myotest®
predicted bench press, 1RM, (based on speed of movement with a series of sub-maximal weights) in comparison to criterion value and thus the validity of the device for prescribing training loads for athletes. With institutional ethical approval, 14 male university students (age mean 23.9, s 4.2 years; height mean 180.9, s 7.0 cm; weight mean 83.5, s 9.2 kg) all with at least 1 year experience of resistance training were selected as participants. After familiarisation, participants were asked to perform up to eight explosive, sub-maximal bench press trials typically progressing to 80% of criterion 1RM using the Myotest®. This followed manufacturer's guidelines, which included a 90-s rest interval. On completion of this test and after a 3-min rest period participants had between three to five attempts to establish a 1RM as described in Earle and Baechle (2006: Essentials of personal training symposium workbook. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics). Predicted versus actual 1RM was compared using linear regression (Hopkins et al., 2001: Sports Medicine, 31, 211–234). Means were compared using a paired samples t-test. No significant differences (P = 0.163) were found between the mean 1RM predicted by the Myotest (mean 86.0, s 20.1 kg) and the actual 1RM established (mean 88.9, s 19.9 kg). However, the Pearson correlation coefficient of the relationship between the tests was 0.89 and the typical error = CV 9.8%, the size of this error is characterised as low validity between physical performance tests (Hopkins et al., 2001; Sports Medicine, 31, 211–234). The results showed that the Myotest is a useful tool to provide the strength and conditioning coach/ athlete with a convenient way to assess force and power during the bench press. However, because of the poor validity recorded we would recommend this be used in conjunction with traditional 1RM test and not in isolation.


Among the raft of information systems (IS) applications developed for use by local governments are those that attempt to introduce more open community engagement (CE) and facilitate e-democracy. In this paper, we report on a longitudinal study that reveals how the open nature of e-democracy challenges the practices of government bureaucracies. In 2012, we partnered with the Community Engagement Team of a Local Government Council in Australia, to study their planning for, and use of, IS for CE. Our study involved an action research intervention to gain a rich understanding of the contradictory demands of the bureaucratic imperative of the Council and the informal activities of the community. This was the first step of a longitudinal qualitative study of the Council's e- democracy efforts over the ensuing seven years. Our analysis has been conducted through a dialectic lens, informed by the Cynefin sense-making framework. Our theoretical contribution is an e-Democracy Framework that incorporates the dialectic between the ordered environment of government and the community view that is ill-defined and unordered. As a practical contribution, government organisations can use the Framework to assess the current status of their CE and design a CE strategy to make interactions with civil society more meaningful.


Background

Research has shown that healthcare organisations can cause harm to patients, much of which is avoidable, and there is reliable evidence to suggest that this harm is a widespread and recurring phenomena (Institute of Medicine 1999; Department of Health 2000; Leape et al 2002; de Vries et al 2008; Longtin et al 2009; Jha et al 2010). Encouraging patients to take an active role in their own healthcare was identified in the landmark patient safety publication 'To Err is Human' (Institute of Medicine 2000) as a vital factor in the quest to improve patient safety. It has since been contended that if patients were involved in their healthcare they could help to further reduce opportunities for accidents and errors during the course of their care (Vincent and Coulter 2002; Koutantji et al 2005; Weingart et al 2005; Unruh and Pratt 2006; Davis et al 2007). More recently, there has been growing interest in the development and use of interventions to promote and support patients' roles in securing their own safety in healthcare contexts (Hall et al 2010; Longtin et al 2010; Peat et al 2010; Doherty and Stavropoulou 2012; Vaismoradi et al 2014).

Aims

The broad aim of this study is to explore the extent to which patients are involved in attempts to improve their own healthcare safety through enrolment in an enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) programme. Recognising that patient safety is just one aspect of the ERAS programme theory, this research evaluates those elements of the programme that see patients taking a role in their own healthcare safety. This is achieved by considering in realist terms the mechanisms of effect by which patients might contribute to their healthcare safety and investigating the conditions and circumstances (contexts) that are required to enable this involvement. The overall aim of this research is to seek out regularities in the patterns of these contexts and mechanisms which result in patient involvement in patient safety. The emerging theory will explain implementation variations, and the experiences of the programme participants in the different cases will provide an opportunity to make comparisons with initial programme theories, the objective being to better understand when and why patient involvement in patient safety works in an ERAS programme.

Methods

The underpinning methodological framework for this research is realist evaluation (Pawson and Tilley 1997), which is a technique concerned with exploring the interaction among context, mechanism and outcome, based on the realist principle of generative causation.
This study uses an in-depth multiple case study approach, with each of the three surgical units under study purposively selected to represent involvement in the ERAS programme. To capture the complex and dynamic nature of the programme under investigation, the study draws on a wide range of empirical data sources, methods and materials, including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Taking 'early mobilisation' as a tracer outcome, the study examines the mechanisms and contexts involved in programme outcomes in relation to patient involvement in patient safety.

The first stage of the enquiry involves eliciting and formalising the programme theories relating to patient involvement in patient safety in an ERAS programme which are then articulated in conjectured context-mechanism-outcome configurations (CMO) terms. The next stage involves collecting data that will allow interrogation of these hypotheses, comparing the programme's intentions with case study data of actual practice that occurred and the views and experiences of key stakeholders, including patients and nursing staff. This is followed by cross case comparisons which attempt to determine how the same mechanisms played out in different contexts.

Key findings

Overall, the findings show that there are many contextual factors relating to the successful outcomes of the programme theories postulated. The key findings of this study demonstrate that successful patient involvement in patient safety related elements of an ERAS programme requires that: ward staffs are aligned with the programme objectives; that patients' expectations for their post-operative recovery are managed prior to surgery and the underlying rationale for their care is understood and; in the post-operative period patients' enrolment in the programme is sustained and reinforced by ward based staff.
The study also demonstrates how differences in the implementation of ERAS across the study sites, support for early mobilisation and individual patient differences (for example emotional status and operation type) were consequential for the outcomes of the programme theory.

Conclusion

This thesis sits at the interface of a number of health policy and quality improvement trends including patient involvement, patient safety, standardisation, patient centred care, co-production and the growing interest in healthcare with the implementation and embedding of interventions. The aspirations of policy and programme documentation to 'empower' patients to take a more active role in their care also proved more complex in reality. The study highlights the tensions between achieving a quality standard and patient centred care and how the approach to postoperative care in the three different case study sites shaped nurses' willingness to adapt the programme and support patient involvement. The main areas for consideration from this study include the importance of the role of healthcare staff in attempts to involve patients in patient safety, along with the tensions between standardisation of care versus the aspirations of providing person-centred, individual care for patients. This is considered in relation to the ongoing standardisation of healthcare through an increasing reliance on protocols and pathways, such as the ERAS programme.


In this paper, we analyse the industrial and trade policies in Turkey in relation to their impact on the automotive industry. Established during the import substituting industrialisation era of the 1960s and 1970s, the Turkish automotive industry had seized the opportunities opened up with the customs union agreement between Turkey and the EU that went into effect in 1996. As such, it provides a good example of how an industry with an initially protected home market can be transformed into a competitive and increasingly export-oriented industry through foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. In one of the important conclusions of our study, we emphasise the lack of a welldesigned, long-term industrial development perspective in place, leading to the current state of the Turkish automotive industry. Rather, the automotive firms that performed well in recent decades did so thanks to their organisational capabilities and experience in international competition. Our analysis of export patterns shows that Turkey's place in the international division of labour has been determined by the decisions of multinational firms. Motor vehicle manufacturers in Turkey were able to readjust their positions vis-a-vis European value chains by skillfully managing the benefits of geography (proximity to European markets) and the country's metalworking capability. However, existing tax policies that rely heavily on indirect taxes have created significant obstacles for automotive firms, which in principle can move their production and R&D activities in Turkey towards high quality/high valueadded segments of the industry.


Very little has been written on the growing number of urban disaster risk hotspots, or the integration of disaster risk reduction and human settlement planning in Africa aside from publications by the World Bank, United Nations and a few other international organisations. This book aspires to fill these gaps, and I recommend it as essential reading for any urban development or disaster management practitioner or academic concerned with risk reduction in African cities. I also recommended the book for courses on sustainable human settlements, development planning and disaster risk reduction.


In Scandinavia, the provision of health care services has been, almost entirely, the responsibility of the public health care system. However, in the last five to seven years there has been remarkable growth in the private health care market. These health care services are obtained normally through insurance contracts. In this paper, I seek explanations for this phenomenon, using data from Norway. First, using available market data, I document that the market for private treatment insurance—often labelled as "jump the treatment queue insurance"—is growing rapidly. Thereafter, I present a theoretical model that identifies primary drivers for individual demand for treatment insurance. The third step is to analyse a unique survey data set that is combined with aggregate county data on treatment queues. The overall results indicate that public waiting lists affect the demand for privately bought insurance, while employer-provided insurance does not seem to be affected. I find strong preference for this type of insurance among smokers and the self-employed. Moreover, income is an important determinant of insurance demand.


People with alcohol use disorders often have co-occurring psychiatric disorders, but they frequently do not receive specialized substance abuse treatment that addresses both conditions. Although pharmacological and psychosocial treatments for alcohol use disorders and psychiatric disorders can be integrated to help these patients, relatively few clinical studies have tested these types of treatments. As mental health and substance abuse facilities expand their services for patients with dual disorders, further research is needed to guide the treatment of this patient population. KEY WORDS: AODD (alcohol and other drug dependence); comorbidity; mentally ill; prevalence; health care utilization; drug therapy; antidepressants; serotonin uptake inhibitors; psychosocial treatment method; antipsychotic tranquilizers; 12-step program Alcohol abuse and dependence frequently occur with other psychiatric conditions; this dual diagnosis is called comorbidity. Professionals working with comorbid patients face unique and challenging dilemmas about how to provide the best treatment to address both conditions. Despite growing interest in these problems, relatively few clinical studies have tested treatments for this patient population. This review examines the prevalence of alcohol abuse and dependence with other psychiatric disorders and the patterns of treatment among comorbid patients. It also describes how treatment approaches can be integrated for patients with these comorbid disorders and offers suggestions for future directions in treatment research. RATES OF PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS IN PATIENTS WITH ALCOHOL USE DISORDERS The two main U.S. studies that have addressed the epidemiology of comorbidity are the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) (Kessler et al. 1996) and the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study (Regier et al. 1990). The NCS was a nationally representative household survey of people ages 15-54 conducted in 1990-1991. Diagnoses were based on the results of diagnostic interviews. The ECA study reflected data from the U.S. general population as well as an institutionalized population, using data from the National Institute of Mental Health Epidemiologic Catch ment Area Program. A total of 20,291 people ages 18 and older were interviewed between 1980 and 1984. Alcohol abuse is an alcohol use disorder characterized by continued drinking despite negative consequences and the inability to fulfill responsibilities. Alcohol dependence, also known as alcoholism, is characterized by a craving for alcohol, possible physical dependence on alcohol, an inability to control one's drinking on any given occasion, and an increasing tolerance to alcohol's effects (American Psychiatric Association [APA] 1994). The table shows the prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders among the respondents to the NCS and the ECA study who were diagnosed with alcohol abuse or dependence and a comorbid psychiatric disorder. Alcohol Abuse In the NCS, 2.5 percent of the respondents were classified as having abused alcohol but not as having been alcohol dependent during the 12-month period before the survey. In the ECA study, 3.5 percent of respondents were diagnosed as having alcohol abuse at some point in their lifetime. Among respondents to the NCS who had abused alcohol, 12.3 percent also met the criteria for a mood disorder (including major depression and bipolar disorder, characterized by shifts in mood between depression and manic episodes) during the previous year. Of those with comorbid mood disorders, 11.3 percent had major depressive disorder and 0.3 percent had bipolar disorder. (For each category of comorbid disorders, the prevalences of only a few specific disorders are reported. Therefore, the prevalence rates of the specific disorders [e.g., major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder] do not total the rate for the general type [e.g., mood disorders]). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was the most frequently occurring anxiety disorder (i. …


Abstract. The Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL) is the second largest boreal wetland ecosystem in the world and an important natural source of global atmospheric methane. We quantify the HBL methane emissions by using the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to simulate aircraft measurements over the HBL from the ARCTAS and pre-HIPPO campaigns in May–July 2008, together with continuous 2004–2008 surface observations at Fraserdale (southern edge of HBL) and Alert (Arctic background). The difference in methane concentrations between Fraserdale and Alert is shown to be a good indicator of HBL emissions, and implies a sharp seasonal onset of emissions in late May (consistent with the aircraft data), a peak in July–August, and a seasonal shut-off in September. The model, in which seasonal variation of emission is mainly driven by surface temperature, reproduces well the observations in summer but its seasonal shoulders are too broad. We suggest that this reflects the suppression of emissions by snow cover and greatly improve the model simulation by accounting for this effect. Our resulting best estimate for HBL methane emissions is 2.3 Tg a−1, several-fold higher than previous estimates (Roulet et al., 1994; Worthy et al., 2000).


There are over 6,000 languages used around the world, and linguists estimate that by 2050 half of these will have become extinct. The use of language is what fundamentally distinguishes humans from other animals: only we have developed languages of such richness and flexibility that they can be used to elucidate abstract concepts, to expose our most intimate feelings and emotions, or even to create entire worlds of imagination to entertain, amuse or inspire others. This book offers a linguistic guided world tour, looking in detail at the eleven global languages, before exploring the major languages of each region in turn. Each language entry details numbers of speakers and geographical spread, together with a history of the growth and development of the language.


Promoting community participation in school management is a widely found intervention in the developing world. While this type of program is generally believed to be effective, the actual evidence is not sufficient to inform policy makers on how community participation works in improving educational outcomes. To shed more light on this question, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an education program in Burkina Faso. The program was designed to build trust among community members and teachers, and encourage them to work together in school management. The results show that the intervention increased student enrollment, decreased student repetition, and lowered teacher absence. The results also indicate that it had a strong impact on class repetition by 6th grade boys, presumably reflecting parental priorities. This suggests that community participation can improve educational outcomes through empowering the community and enhancing social capital, but whether idealized results can be gained depends on the perception and the knowledge of the community members.


The aim of this thesis is to lead to a further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying object feature binding in the human brain. The focus is on information processing and integration in the visual system and visual shortterm memory. From a review of the literature it is clear that there are three major
competing binding theories, however, none of these individually solves the binding problem satisfactorily. Thus the aim of this research is to conduct behavioural experimentation into object feature binding, paying particular attention to visual short-term memory.
The behavioural experiment was designed and conducted using a within-subjects delayed responset ask comprising a battery of sixty-four composite objects each with three features and four dimensions in each of three conditions (spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal).Findings from the experiment,which focus on spatial and temporal aspects of object feature binding and feature proximity on
binding errors, support the spatial theories on object feature binding, in addition we propose that temporal theories and convergence, through hierarchical feature
analysis, are also involved. Because spatial properties have a dedicated processing neural stream, and temporal properties rely on limited capacity memory systems, memories for sequential information would likely be more
difficult to accuratelyr ecall. Our study supports other studies which suggest that both spatial and temporal coherence to differing degrees,may be involved in
object feature binding. Traditionally, these theories have purported to provide individual solutions, but this thesis proposes a novel unified theory of object feature binding in which hierarchical feature analysis, spatial attention and temporal synchrony each plays a role. It is further proposed that binding takes place in visual short-term memory through concerted and integrated information
processing in distributed cortical areas. A cognitive model detailing this integrated proposal is given. Next, the cognitive model is used to inform the design and suggested implementation of a computational model which would be
able to test the theory put forward in this thesis. In order to verify the model, future work is needed to implement the computational model.Thus it is argued
that this doctoral thesis provides valuable experimental evidence concerning spatio-temporal aspects of the binding problem and as such is an additional building block in the quest for a solution to the object feature binding problem.


Dehydrins (DHNs) belong to a large family of proteins whose expression is associated with dehydration during seed maturation, pollen grain development and bud dormancy during winter, as well as plant adaptive response to various stressors. However, the exact roles played by different members of this protein family have not been fully defined. To gain a better understanding of DHN functions in olive plants, we used Western blot analyses to investigate their expression in the leaves of olive plants subjected to wounding, water-deprivation and salt-treatment. Two prominent bands having molecular masses of approximately 40 kD and 42 kD were constitutively expressed, however, their levels increased when the leaves were exposed to stress. Dehydration and salt stress also resulted in the accumulation of two additional proteins, which had molecular masses of approximately 16 kDa and 18 kD. These additional proteins were not detected following wounding. Our results suggest a physiological function for DHNs in olive plants during normal growth conditions and specialized functions during responses to certain types of stress.


This piece draws together two areas: screenwriting and film or video works (to be jointly referred to as 'films') that explicitly try to undertake a conceptual practice. Conceptual practice is to be understood here not within the exclusive framework of conceptual or abstract art, but of acts and interventions in theory of the kind that crossover between the academy and the broader culture. Interventions of this kind have (especially in the form of the essay film, and films by humanities academics) been a part of Australian screen culture since at least the 1980s. While these interventions may not appear to be central to much cultural studies work, I want to suggest that cultural studies is intertwined with them in at least three ways.


Intestinal absorption of glucose plays a key role in water economy as attested by the congenital and selective glucose and galactose malabsorption which is expressed as severe watery diarrhea just after birth, leading to life-threatening dehydration. This syndrome, transmitted on an autosomal recessive mode, is the consequence of a functional defect of the glucose-sodium cotransporter at the luminal membrane of the enterocyte of the small intestine. In one family, this defect was associated with a misense mutation at position 92 of the SGLT1 gene coding for the cotransporter. The mutant RNA reproduced the transport defect after injection in xenopus oocytes. These results confirm the genetic origin of the congenital defect; in addition they indicate that the study of the relationship between phenotype and genotype of congenital defects of intestinal transport may help in the understanding of basic intestinal functions in relation with human nutrition.


As time progresses, computer architects continue to create faster and more complex microprocessors using techniques such as out-of-order execution, branch prediction, dynamic scheduling, and predication. While these techniques enable greater performance, they also increase the complexity and silicon area of the design. This creates larger development and testing times. The shrinking feature sizes associated with newer technology increase wire resistance and signal propagation delays, further complicating large designs. One potential solution is the Single-Chip Message-Passing (SCMP) Parallel Computer, developed at Virginia Tech. SCMP makes use of an architecture where a number of simple processors are tiled across a single chip and connected by a fast interconnection network. The system is designed to take advantage of thread-level parallelism and to keep wire traces short in preparation for even smaller integrated circuit feature sizes. This thesis presents the implementation of the MPI (Message-Passing Interface) communications library on top of SCMP's hardware communication support. Emphasis is placed on the specific needs of this system with regards to MPI. For example, MPI is designed to operate between heterogeneous systems; however, in the SCMP environment such support is unnecessary and wastes resources. The SCMP network is also designed such that messages can be sent with very low latency, but with cooperative multitasking it is difficult to assure a timely response to messages. Finally, the low-level network primitives have no support for send operations that occur before the receiver is prepared and that functionality is necessary for MPI support.


Simulating multiple scattering correctly is important for accurate rendering of hair. However, a volume of hair is a difficult scene to simulate because scattering from an individual fiber is very structured and forward directed, and because the radiance distributions that arise from many such scattering events remain quite directional. For these reasons, previous methods cannot compute accurate images substantially faster than Monte Carlo path tracing.This paper proposes a new physically accurate method for rendering hair that is based on previous volumetric photon mapping methods. The first pass generates a photon map by tracing particles through the hair geometry, depositing them along paths rather than at scattering events. The second pass ray traces the hair, computing direct illumination and looking up indirect radiance in the photon map. Photons are stored and looked up in 5D position-direction space to allow for the very directional radiance distributions that occur in hair. Together with a new radiance caching method for fibers, our method simulates difficult scattering problems in hair efficiently and with low noise.The new algorithm is validated against path tracing and also compared with a photograph of light scattering in real hair.


Most analyses see electoral outcomes as a reflection of voters' evaluation of the incumbent leaders. Other literature, however, focuses our attention on the centrality of the institution of the party in attaining electoral victory. Parties do so through their efficient functioning as electoral machinery as well their ability to command a sizeable loyal following, galvanised by the values and the principles on which the party is founded and which it continues to espouse. That partisan following is just as critical in winning an election as getting new non-partisan voters. But loss of support among the partisan supporters, which is often forgiving of the party's mishaps, is even more perilous to the continuing popularity of a party.
This article examines the dynamics within the African National Congress (ANC) in relation to its performance in the recent local elections. It argues that the party's performance indicates a growing alienation of its traditional support-base. The article ascribes this phenomenon to local leaders' flouting of organisational principles in their determination to use the organisation as an instrument for material accumulation.


The report provides an up-to-date account of the debates about how Norway can best handle its paradoxical position between oil dependence and climate leadership ambitions. Historically, political actors have sought to reconcile Norway's goals of climate leadership and petroleum production by separating climate and petroleum policymaking into separate domains. Over the last ten years, however, this separation has increasingly been challenged, leading to a marked increase in political controversy around the future of the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The report gives an overview of the historical background for Norwegian petroleum and climate policy, and details more recent changes in public attitudes, political fault lines, and more specific policy changes currently under discussion. By focusing on the case of Norway, the report aims to inform broader debates about the relationship between fossil fuel extraction and climate policy, as this relationship is attracting increasing attention from climate policy analysts and policymakers internationally. Language of report: English Cover photo: Tom Haga, Norwegian Oil and Gas Association (CC BY-SA)


This Article describes the doctrinal, functional, and moral flaws inherent in the Gulf Coast Recovery Act (GCRA), a United States Senate bill that would provide liability protection to government contractors engaged in disaster relief work in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, as well as in future disaster areas. First, the Article discusses the history of the government contractor defense and finds that the protection provided by the GCRA is quite unlike the traditional government contractor defense. This Article further argues that this doctrinal departure cannot be justified on grounds of efficiency or fairness, as the GCRA allocates risk away from government contractors and the government and towards the disaster area residents and relief workers who are potential victims. Finally, this Article notes that even if the sort of protection provided by the GCRA may be justified under some conditions of market failure, there is no empirical evidence that government contractors in the Gulf Coast have experienced such conditions, and there are superior alternatives to the GCRA that could provide such protection while preserving a path for victim compensation. This Article concludes that the GCRA is an untenable solution to a problem that has not been proven to exist, and one that violates the basic principles of good government.


Since 2008 I have had the pleasure of teaching Girl Culture at California College of the Arts (CCA), a private art/design college located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This article features student zines from Girl Culture at this college. Girl Culture is part of the school's general studies curriculum in the Humanities and Sciences at the upper division (junior and senior) level. The course title comes from Sherrie Inness's foundational anthology defining American Girlhood Studies in the twentieth century, Delinquents and Debutantes (1998), in which she notes,"Too often girls' culture is shunted aside by scholars as less significant or less important than the study of adult women's issues, but girls' culture is what helps to create not just an individual woman but all women in our society. (11, emphasis in original)"Girl Culture explores the myriad forces that have an impact on American girls' lives today and seeks to identify the places where artists and designers can best advocate for girl-centric liberation, autonomy, and joy.


Until recently, infants born at moderate preterm (32–33 weeks) and late preterm (34–36 weeks) gestations have gone largely unstudied. Since their outcomes were thought to be similar to those of infants born at 37 weeks and above, they have historically been managed in much the same way as infants born at term. However, accumulating data indicate that risks of morbidity and mortality are significantly greater in this group than previously believed. Since moderate and late preterm infants account for around 6% of all births, very large numbers of babies are potentially affected. Although their problems may be less obvious than those of extremely preterm infants, the population impact of long-term health and neurodevelopmental problems in this group will be substantial. This review summarises the current available literature, highlights gaps in knowledge and discusses the implications of late preterm birth for both clinical practice and research in the perinatal period and beyond.


Abstract. Japan has 111 active volcanoes accounting for about 7 percent of active volcanoes in the world and many volcanic disasters have been recorded so far. Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) proceeds to develop Volcanic Base Map, which depicts specific landforms of volcanoes precisely from 1979 to 2009 for the purpose of providing basic information for formulating various types of volcanic disaster prevention plans and volcano research. Although Volcanic Base Maps have been created by aerial photogrammetry for 31 active volcanoes throughout Japan as a paper map with a scale of 1:2,500 to 1:10,000, they have not been able to meet the needs of recent volcanic disaster prevention measures and have not been fully utilized in disaster emergency measures due to the following reasons: (1) There are undeveloped volcanoes because creation pace was limited for one volcano per year in the conventional creation method; (2) Considerable number of years has passed after its maintenance, so the latest terrain and infrastructure have not been updated; (3) It is impossible to cover the whole area of the volcano and the range of damage estimation because the development around the crater is mainly focused; (4) Basic information such as disaster prevention related facility information, which is necessary for the formulating volcanic disaster prevention plan and disaster emergency measures, has not been covered; (5) Since they were provided by a paper map for a fee, they were not suitable for advanced application using GIS.In order to solve the above issues and to promptly develop and provide maps of volcanoes, we have revised methods of making and acquisition criteria and have newly created Volcanic Base Map Data from 2017. Contour line data was created using digital stereoscopic machine in the conventional method of Volcanic Base Map, but it was changed to generate automatically by Digital Elevation Model of airborne laser survey. Also, we have changed to create features such as roads, buildings and disaster prevention-related facilities by using existing geospatial data maintained by GSI and materials collected from relevant organs. Therefore, the process of numerical mapping and associated photocontrol points surveying, pricking and aerial triangulation becomes omissible, and the number of creating maps can be increased. Although some of the designated evacuation shelters and heliports are not acquired in the conventional Volcanic Base Map, they are added as an acquisition item in Volcanic Base Map Data in order to make it easier to utilize to disaster prevention plan and emergency measures.Volcanic Base Map Data consists of three types of raster image data (base map, colour relief map and photomap, Figure 1), two types of vector data (Shapefile and Digital Mapping data) and GSI Tile data, is started to provide and publish on March 31, 2017 on the website of GSI and 14 volcanoes are provided as of October 2018. While Volcanic Base Map Data is possible to update in a very short time compared to conventional paper maps by maintaining and creating as numerical data, if there is a change in the contents of display such as disaster prevention related facilities and important infrastructures, it is necessary to consider a mechanism that can quickly update and publish maps. Furthermore, it is necessary to promote the products in each of the Volcano Disaster Management Councils and to continuously grasp the needs of users to be utilized more in the future.


MOTIVATION
The increasing availability of gene expression microarray technology has resulted in the publication of thousands of microarray gene expression datasets investigating various biological conditions. This vast repository is still underutilized due to the lack of methods for fast, accurate exploration of the entire compendium.

RESULTS
We have collected Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression microarray data containing roughly 2400 experimental conditions. We analyzed the functional coverage of this collection and we designed a context-sensitive search algorithm for rapid exploration of the compendium. A researcher using our system provides a small set of query genes to establish a biological search context; based on this query, we weight each dataset's relevance to the context, and within these weighted datasets we identify additional genes that are co-expressed with the query set. Our method exhibits an average increase in accuracy of 273% compared to previous mega-clustering approaches when recapitulating known biology. Further, we find that our search paradigm identifies novel biological predictions that can be verified through further experimentation. Our methodology provides the ability for biological researchers to explore the totality of existing microarray data in a manner useful for drawing conclusions and formulating hypotheses, which we believe is invaluable for the research community.

AVAILABILITY
Our query-driven search engine, called SPELL, is available at http://function.princeton.edu/SPELL.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Several additional data files, figures and discussions are available at http://function.princeton.edu/SPELL/supplement.


Objectives: Athlete's nutritional habits and knowledge can directly affect their performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the nutritional habits and knowledge of the Division I collegiate football player. Methods: The participants of this study are male Division I college football players at Utah State University. The athletes included 45 players ranging from 18-26 and include freshman through seniors. Results: Over eighty six percent of the athletes were unaware that a nutritionist was readily available to them. Sixty percent of the athletes were interested in meeting with the nutritionist. Forty percent of the athletes ate at a fast-food restaurant daily while 31.5% ate at these restaurants three to five days a week. Fifty one percent of the athletes answered "yes" to trying to "gain weight" while 40% answered "no". Over forty six percent of the athletes rely on "strength coaches" for guidance and 25.5% for teammates &/or friends & family. Conclusion: Continued research on dietary interventions would be helpful to determine the ideal way to improve nutrition knowledge on an individual and team basis. Given the proper guidance, the team would be able to see the benefits of proper nutrition and dietary habits both on and off the field.


This essay, delivered at a symposium at the University of South Carolina in October 2008 and forthcoming in South Carolina Law Review, sets out initial thoughts about to the legal and policy choices that decision makers must address in the aftermath of the subprime crisis that has since triggered a global financing crunch. After tracing a narrative of how subprime lending grew into a mortgage financing crisis and then a broader financial dislocation, the essay addresses two issues. First, while it is commonly stated that increased regulation will be required in secondary mortgage markets going forward, the essay explores competing policy considerations that legislators and regulators must balance in developing effective regulation and not overregulation. These policy issues include: the benefits of the secondary mortgage; the globalization of capital; prevention of fraud and predatory lending; personal responsibility vs. paternalism; market discipline vs. regulation; ending racial discrimination in lending; the role of intermediation in creating the crisis; the current state of the American dream of home ownership; and addressing risk shifting vehicles. The second part of the essay examines how the development of the secondary market has changed mortgage law in the various states. It discusses the benefits, and costs, of the nationalization of real estate documents and terms brought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and speculates on how conservatorship of these institutions may affect this trend. The essay also looks at modernization of state mortgage law in light of the secondary market, through vehicles such as MERS, and the lessons that the crisis teaches about the modernization trend. It argues that the beneficial aspects of modernization should be retained and suggests other changes that would better reflect commercial reality (e.g., changes in assignment rules for mortgages, documentation for foreclosure), but asserts that increased consumer protection and transparency are also necessary for fair and effective secondary market transactions.


Recently, learning discriminative features to improve the recognition performances gradually becomes the primary goal of deep learning, and numerous remarkable works have emerged. In this paper, we propose a novel yet extremely simple method Virtual Softmax to enhance the discriminative property of learned features by injecting a dynamic virtual negative class into the original softmax. Injecting virtual class aims to enlarge inter-class margin and compress intra-class distribution by strengthening the decision boundary constraint. Although it seems weird to optimize with this additional virtual class, we show that our method derives from an intuitive and clear motivation, and it indeed encourages the features to be more compact and separable. This paper empirically and experimentally demonstrates the superiority of Virtual Softmax, improving the performances on a variety of object classification and face verification tasks.


Banks' role as intermediaries between short term investors and long term borrow-
ers has dominated the literature. Whilst this is an important feature, there are many
other characteristics of banks. Each chapter in this PhD explores a different aspect
of banking, from other forms of lending to banks' role in payment services. The first,
and principal, chapter considers credit lines: `commitments' to lend if required. These
remain off the bank's balance sheet until drawn upon. As off-balance sheet items,
unused commitments face low capital charges under existing capital regulation. I ex-
plore how this regulatory feature incentivises banks to build up exposure to these lines.
This may lead to a suboptimal allocation of credit, ex post, following a market shock,
as high drawdowns cause the balance sheet to balloon and the capital requirement
to bind. In the second chapter, I consider banks as agents in large-value payment
systems. In choosing the optimal time to settle a payment, banks trade off delay costs
against the risk of having insuffcient liquidity to make future payments. With banks
participating in multiple systems, I show how default in one system may spill over into
another, through the strategic behaviour of multi-system participants. I explore how
this risk varies with the degree of information asymmetry between agents in different
systems. The third chapter focuses on retail banking. In joint work, we examine how
the provision of consumer credit, either through current account overdrafts, or through
credit card credit lines, affects the way in which debit and credit card networks com-
pete. We find that, even when debit and credit cards compete, there are elements
of complementarity between them. Banks providing debit cards and current accounts
benefit when the consumer delays withdrawal of funds from her current account by
using a credit card. This leads to surprisingly high debit merchant fees.


Smart city projects address many of the current problems afflicting high populated areas and cities and, as such, are a target for government, institutions and private organizations that plan to explore its foreseen advantages. In technical terms, smart city projects present a complex set of requirements including a large number users with highly different and heterogeneous requirements. In this scenario, this paper proposes and analyses the impact and perspectives on adopting software-defined networking and artificial intelligence as innovative approaches for smart city project development and deployment. Big data is also considered as an inherent element of most smart city project that must be tackled. A framework layered view is proposed with a discussion about software-defined networking and machine learning impacts on innovation followed by a use case that demonstrates the potential benefits of cognitive learning for smart cities. It is argued that the complexity of smart city projects do require new innovative approaches that potentially result in more efficient and intelligent systems.


Application virtualization is to isolate applications from the host system and from other applications in an operating system. This paper focuses on virtualization strategies and optimized strategies in our optimized approach to virtualize an execution environment for windows applications. Since the resources, such as registry, file and system object, play different roles during the runtime, different virtualization strategies are adopted. Every resource is divided into different groups which have different priorities according to the attributes and functions of the groups during the runtime. Registry virtualization is to rewrite the system calls, and file visit virtualization and system objects virtualization are to rewrite the parameters of the system calls. Moreover, because of the complicated scenarios during the runtime, our approach adopts three main optimized strategies, which are synchronization methods, parameter buffer and optimized methods of private registry. Synchronization methods are used to improve the performance of multi-threads and multi-processes created by applications. Parameter buffer is used to reduce the allocation operation when parameters are required to rewritten in the high frequent system calls made by applications, usually tens of thousands of times per run. Optimized methods of private registry are used to speed up the rewritten system calls for the virtual registry. Through the optimized strategies, the average overhead is reduced to 30% and the absolute value of time-consuming is acceptable.


A lower bathyal to abyssal agglutinated foraminiferal fauna (over 78 taxa belonging to 31 genera) is documented from Palaeocene–Eocene deep-water sediments of the Numidian Flysch (Talaa Lakrah Unit) in Northern Morocco. The sample locality is adjacent to the Strait of Gibraltar, which comprised an oceanic 'gateway' between the Tethys Ocean and the North Atlantic during the Palaeogene. The chronostratigraphy of the section is based upon long-distance comparisons with the stratigraphic ranges of identified species in the North Atlantic region and the Polish Carpathians. Although no major evolutionary turnover among deep-water agglutinated foraminifera (DWAF) is observed across the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary, a change from Palaeocene Aschemocella- and Trochamminoides-dominated assemblages to an early Eocene Glomospira assemblage is recognized. This Glomospira biofacies occurs throughout the North Atlantic and western Tethys and may indicate lowered productivity and widespread oxygenated deep-water conditions during the early Eocene greenhouse conditions. A change to an overlying Reticulophragmium amplectens biofacies in green claystones reflects renewed higher productivity. Taxonomic affinities and the succession of benthic foraminiferal assemblages from the Gibraltar gateway display greater affinities to Tethyan assemblages than North Atlantic assemblages. This is interpreted as faunal evidence for a late Palaeocene to early Eocene equivalent of 'Mediterranean outflow water', flowing from the western Tethys into the Atlantic.


This small scale, qualitative study explores the reality of the academic and social experiences of pupils with physical impairments. It focuses on one secondary school in the North West of England that has admitted disabled pupils for over twenty years. Whilst acknowledging that integration does take place, it analyses the extent to which this can be equated with inclusion. Semi-structured interviews with both disabled pupils and learning support assistants reveal that the school has experienced some success, but the degree to which the establishment encourages full participation as well as celebrating difference is seen to be affected by a variety of factors. The role of the learning support assistant together with accessibility to the physical environment, prove key features in the inclusion process. In addition, lack of proximity, restricted sporting and extra-curricular opportunity, together with the absence of a facility to discuss disability issues, prove to be discriminatory factors. An historical framework sets the institutional issues against a backdrop of successive governmental policies. Whilst the latter have published a commitment to integration - integration as opposed to inclusion -a series of qualifying clauses have led to inaction and indecision, resulting in restricted involvement for disabled pupils. Conclusions reached stress the need for future development. The importance of this school and indeed all educational establishments, working towards inclusive practice, is seen as paramount.


We address the problem of generating physical realistic optical transport network topologies. This type of network has characteristics that differ from scale-free networks, such as the Internet. Based on the analysis of a set of real transport topologies, we identify and assess relevant characteristics. A method to generate realistic topologies is proposed. The proposed method is validated by comparing the characteristics of computer-generated and real-world optical transport networks.


The dispersal of anatomically modern human populations out of Africa and across much of the rest of the world around 55 to 50 thousand years before present (ka) is recorded genetically by the multiple hominin groups they met and interbred with along the way, including the Neandertals and Denisovans. The signatures of these introgression events remain preserved in the genomes of modern-day populations, and provide a powerful record of the sequence and timing of these early migrations, with Asia proving a particularly complex area. At least 3 different hominin groups appear to have been involved in Asia, of which only the Denisovans are currently known. Several interbreeding events are inferred to have taken place east of Wallace's Line, consistent with archaeological evidence of widespread and early hominin presence in the area. However, archaeological and fossil evidence indicates archaic hominins had not spread as far as the Sahul continent (New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania), where recent genetic evidence remains enigmatic.


The function of software used to be calculation; mechanising what was previously done by hand. Now it runs our communication networks, mass transportation and medical support. Yet we still build large software systems as if they were small, easily comprehensible tools. The right to manage our safety and security should not be handed over lightly. When a program has the ability to compromise our security or injure us, we should demand evidence of its correctness. Formal software verification has demonstrated how to reliably and repeatedly build safe and secure high-assurance systems, to a standard not achievable using other techniques. Yet it remains underused due to perceptions that it is expensive and time intensive to apply. In this thesis we demonstrate how to scale formal software verification beyond its current limits using component-based software engineering. By leveraging the strong isolation boundaries made possible by the CAmkES component platform operating on the seL4 microkernel, we decompose system verification along lines that correspond to the system architecture. The parallels between proof obligations and system architecture aid the designer's intuition and allow easing verification challenges through architectural refactoring. To uphold the engineering abstraction that a component platform provides, we demonstrate a fully automated process for verifying functional correctness of platformgenerated code and the correct initialisation of a CAmkES system. The system designer no longer needs to trust that the platform's mechanisms do what they claim, as is the case with other existing component platforms. We also fully automate the production of an access control policy for a component-based system, allowing the designer to move seamlessly from architecture layout to security analysis, with knowledge that our verification guarantees a faithful translation. The techniques in this thesis represent novel contributions to the fields of componentbased software and formal verification. To our knowledge, they provide the most trustworthy development environment for high-assurance, componentised software systems in existence today. By extending the power and scope of formal verification, we lower the cost of its application and enable the development of safer and more secure software.