In the past decade, psychological and behavioral studies have found that individual commitment to contracts persists beyond personal relationships and traditional promises. Even take-it-or-leave it consumer contracts get substantial deference from consumers — even when the terms are unenforceable, even when the assent is procedurally compromised, and even when the drafter is an impersonal commercial actor. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that people import the morality of promise into situations that might otherwise be described as predatory, exploitative, or coercive. The purpose of this Article is to propose a framework for understanding what seems to be widespread acceptance of regulation via unread terms. I refer to this phenomenon as "term deference" — the finding that people defer to the term, even when the assent is perfunctory, and even when the term is unfair.

The framework I propose is a motivated reasoning explanation: when it feels better to believe that contracts are fair and that assent is reliable, people are more likely to hold those beliefs. In order to predict when contractual fairness will be especially psychologically urgent, I draw on an extensive body of psychological literature on the preference for believing in a just world, or for being satisfied with the status quo. When a phenomenon or a system appears implacable and unavoidable, it is psychologically less stressful to believe that the system is good. "System justification" is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that predicts when individuals will be motivated to hold beliefs that support the status quo, even when the status quo redounds to their own disadvantage. The two studies reported here manipulate the pressure to support the status quo — to believe that firms are reasonable and contract law is fair — by varying the term's enforceability, its consequences, and its history. The findings show the predicted patterns, that increased psychological pressure to support the status quo increases beliefs that the status quo is good and fair. These results also align with the prediction that pressure to justify the status quo is not only a psychological state, but also a trait. That trait, highly associated with political conservatism, is reflected in the results suggesting a stronger motivation to justify the status quo among subjects who report that they are more politically conservative. The results here have implications not only for contract law, but also for how we understand self-interest in legal decision-making, and for the legal understandings of consent and compliance.


We present the R package SimInf which provides an efficient and very flexible framework to conduct data-driven epidemiological modeling in realistic large scale disease spread simulations. The framework integrates infection dynamics in subpopulations as continuous-time Markov chains using the Gillespie stochastic simulation algorithm and incorporates available data such as births, deaths and movements as scheduled events at predefined time-points. Using C code for the numerical solvers and OpenMP to divide work over multiple processors ensures high performance when simulating a sample outcome. One of our design goal was to make SimInf extendable and enable usage of the numerical solvers from other R extension packages in order to facilitate complex epidemiological research. In this paper, we provide a technical description of the framework and demonstrate its use on some basic examples. We also discuss how to specify and extend the framework with user-defined models.


In December 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had reviewed all the available evidence and was poised to approve meat and milk from cloned animals and their progeny. Such products, said the FDA, are virtually identical to meat or milk from a non-clone. Further, the FDA announced it would almost certainly not require food from clones to be labeled as such. Part I of this article identifies three functions that labels perform, outlines the types of information usually required, and introduces the rule that voluntary label information cannot be misleading. Part II focuses on process information and its implications. The article argues that there is no truly voluntary labeling when consumers care about a feature; if some products are labeled, then unlabeled products bear a de facto label by implication. Partly because of the de facto mandatory labeling principle, process labeling has the potential to mislead consumers. In Part III the article examines some relevant characteristics of consumers and argues that not all consumers can be misled by label information. Consumers who have no preferenc3es or who are very knowledgeable about the labeled feature are not misled by process labeling. Finally, using labeling of genetically modified (GM) ingredients as an example, the article suggests that mandatory labeling of some process information could enhance consumer sovereignty and welfare.


A modern form of energy, in particular electricity for household use, is an important vehicle in alleviating poverty in developing countries. However, access and costs of connecting to this service for most poor in these countries is inconceivable. Policies promoting electricity connection in rural areas are known to be beneficial in improving the socio-economic and health well-being for households. This paper examines willingness to pay (WTP) for rural electrification connection in Kisumu district, Kenya, using the contingent valuation method (CVM). A nonparametric and a parametric model are employed to estimate WTP values for two electricity products: grid electricity (GE) and photovoltaic (PV) electricity. The results indicate that respondents are willing to pay more for GE services than PV and households favoured monthly connection payments over a lump sum amount. Some of the policies suggested in this paper include: subsidizing the connection costs for both sources of electricity, adjusting the payment periods, and restructuring the market ownership of providing rural electricity services.


Nowadays, computing is migrating from traditional high performance and distributed computing to pervasive and utility computing based on heterogeneous networks and clients. The current trend suggests that future IT services will rely on distributed resources and on fast communication of heterogeneous contents.
The success of this new range of services is directly linked to the effectiveness of the infrastructure in delivering them. The communication infrastructure will be the aggregation of different technologies even though the current trend suggests the emergence of single IP based transport service.
Optical networking is a key technology to answer the increasing requests for dynamic bandwidth allocation and configure multiple topologies over the same physical layer infrastructure, optical networks today are still "far" from accessible from directly configure and offer network services and need to be enriched with more "user oriented" functionalities. However, current Control Plane architectures only facilitate efficient end-to-end connectivity provisioning and certainly cannot meet future network service requirements, e.g. the coordinated control of resources.
The overall objective of this work is to provide the network with the improved usability and accessibility of the services provided by the Optical Network. More precisely, the definition of a service-oriented architecture is the enable technology to allow user applications to gain benefit of advanced services over an underlying dynamic optical layer. The definition of a service oriented networking architecture based on advanced optical network technologies facilitates users and applications access to abstracted levels of information regarding offered advanced network services.
This thesis faces the problem to define a Service Oriented Architecture and its relevant building blocks, protocols and languages. In particular, this work has been focused on the use of the SIP protocol as a inter-layers signalling protocol which defines the Session Plane in conjunction with the Network Resource Description language.
On the other hand, an advantage optical network must accommodate high data bandwidth with different granularities. Currently, two main technologies are emerging promoting the development of the future optical transport network, Optical Burst and Packet Switching. Both technologies respectively promise to provide all optical burst or packet switching instead of the current circuit switching. However, the electronic domain is still present in the scheduler forwarding and routing decision.
Because of the high optics transmission frequency the burst or packet scheduler faces a difficult challenge, consequentially, high performance and time focused design of both memory and forwarding logic is need.
This open issue has been faced in this thesis proposing an high efficiently implementation of burst and packet scheduler. The main novelty of the proposed implementation is that the scheduling problem has turned into simple calculation of a min/max function and the function complexity is almost independent of on the traffic conditions.


This new first edition from best-selling author Kelly Rainer, and highly respected coauthor, Hugh Watson, supports your teaching goals by allowing for maximum flexibility of coverage, and by engaging students with a tested pedagogical structure. Utilizing flexible Learning Units comprised of tightly coupled concepts and Student Activities, Rainer transports the student from passively learning about IS to doing IS in a realistic context. Plug IT In learning extensions enable instructors to introduce material of interest at their discretion. Plug IT In's cover such topics as project management, business processes, and information asset protection.


Objectives To conduct a content analysis of pre-Games local media coverage of the potential impact on health and the determinants of health in Newham, the site of the Olympic Park. Design Local newspaper content analysis. Setting Olympic park host site of the London Borough of Newham. Outcome measures Media coverage of employment, physical activity and well-being. Results Three hundred and 51 articles meeting the inclusion criteria were included in the analysis. The overwhelming majority of the articles took a positive perspective on the Olympic Games being hosted in Newham with less than 10% (32/351) addressing potential adverse effects. The frequency of articles reporting on both employment and well-being increased significantly over time (p=0.002 and p=0.006, respectively). A non-significant increasing trend was observed for physical activity (p=0.146). New employment opportunities and the promotion of physical activity in young people were the pathways most frequently reported in the local media. However, much less attention is devoted to understanding the uncertainties about how much of these new opportunities will directly improve the determinants of health in the Newham population. Conclusions Pre-Games reporting on the impact on health and the determinants of health increased over time in the London Borough of Newham, and is overwhelmingly positive. However, specific uncertainties around the true nature of its impact on local employment and physical activity were articulated. Further evaluation of the tangible impacts on population health, and the determinants of health and health inequalities from the London 2012 Olympics, is required.


The concept of class, along with its correlates -m class interest, class conflict, class consciousness - ramain indispensable tools of historical explanation. Yet research over the last twenty-five years, especially on the histories of England, France, and Germany, has revealed an increasingly poor fit between these concepts and the reality they purport to explain. Some historians have reacted by rejecting class; others have proposed bold revisions in our understanding of it that enable it to encompass new research findings. This study does neither. Instead, building on interpretive method Professor Reddy proposes to replace class with an alternative concept that seeks to capture from a new angle the fundamental relations of exchange and authority that have shaped social life in modern Europe.


As a living environment or biotope of the human species, urban structures must meet not only the economic, social and political rights of the people, but also their biological and neurophysiologic requirements. A new scientific approach to urban planning is biourbanism or organic urbanism, which considers the urban environment as being a hyper-complex living thing. From the scientific point of view, this approach opens the way to new scenarios for urban planning research. The aim of the study is to promote this modern concept of urban planning for Bucharest City in the context of its climate vulnerability. The objectives of our investigation are the following: analyzing the dynamic of climate conditions of the city, highlighting the weather risks for the population and devising scenarios for implementing the concept in Bucharest. The research methodology focused on the following: the discussion of conceptual framework based on specialty literature, the calculation of bioclimatic indices in order to assess the city's vulnerability to climate conditions and the presentation of "biourban" improvement models applicable to urban fabric samples. The study reveals the vulnerability of Bucharest City in relation to the specific risks associated to the weather phenomena of the summer season (high temperatures and moisture deficit), as argument in favour of preparing implementation scenarios for biourbanism ideas.


We conducted a double-blind, randomized multicenter trial to determine whether the addition of mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) improves the efficacy of initial systemic treatment of chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). The primary endpoint was resolution of chronic GVHD and withdrawal of all systemic treatment within 2 years, without secondary treatment. Enrollment of 230 patients was planned, providing 90% power to observe a 20% difference in success rates between the 2 arms. The study was closed after 4 years because the interim estimated cumulative incidence of success for the primary endpoint was 23% among 74 patients in the MMF arm and 18% among 77 patients in the control arm, indicating a low probability of positive results for the primary endpoint after completing the study as originally planned. Analysis of secondary endpoints showed no evidence of benefit from adding MMF to the systemic regimen first used for treatment of chronic GVHD. The estimated hazard ratio of death was 1.99 (95% confidence interval, 0.9-4.3) among patients in the MMF arm compared with the control arm. MMF should not be added to the initial systemic treatment regimen for chronic GVHD. This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov as #NCT00089141 on August 4, 2004.


This paper estimates the direct effect of low-cost countries on Portuguese manufacturing import prices, using detailed data both by product and by geographical market for the period 1997-2006. The results point to a negative but modest direct effect when compared with studies available for other countries. This is understandable given the lower share of low-cost countries in Portuguese imports. However, besides this direct effect, import prices were influenced by several other factors, some also related to the increasing presence of low-cost countries in international markets. Overall, this lower direct effect was not reflected in a differentiated evolution of manufacturing import prices in Portugal as its evolution was very close to the average of the euro area countries


The objective of this study was to investigate rangeland condition in a semi-arid area with doubling erosion rates. Work was conducted using aerial photographic analysis and field investigations were conducted using 10 paired 20 x 20 m plots and 2 1 x 1 m quadrats randomly located with each plot. Degraded sites showed significant differences in soil compaction but not in soil water infiltration time. Degraded sites were characterized by absence of woody plant cover. Grass cover and litter cover were lower on degraded plots than on undegraded plots. Bare soil cover was more extensive on degraded plots than on undegraded plots. The sheet eroded plots had very low woody cover, grass cover and litter cover, low organic matter, low porosity and high soil density. Soil density on degraded sites was significantly different from undegraded sites (t test; t =3.482; df =18; p<0.05). Assessing rangeland characteristics and erosion risk in the study is part of a global management of agricultural soils that should aim at increasing productivity.

 Key words: Umfolozi catchment, soil erosion, semi-arid landscapes, range-condition.


ABSTRACT The Southampton Rebellion of 1831, Nat Turner's Rebellion, stands as the most famous slave rebellion in American History. Historians have studied the rebellion extensively often focusing on Turner's biography, the incident's violent sequence of events, and the wide social, cultural, and political impact of the rebellion. The most recent scholarship on the Southampton Rebellion focuses on the wider community that produced the violent event that resulted in the death of nearly 60 whites and an uncountable number of people of color. African-American children made up a significant demographic in antebellum Southampton. They were present everywhere, just as children were present in most antebellum communities. Yet their appearances in the trial records associated with the Southampton Rebellion are all but unstudied. The Southampton Rebellion was not the result of Nat Turner's singular genius focused on immediate results. It was a rebellion constituted in the community with future liberation in mind. Children, the literal embodiment of slavery's future, then were necessarily included and involved. This article engages the extensive court documents associated with the Southampton Rebellion's aftermath to investigate the possible role of children in the rebellion and their significance to the resistance of enslaved communities.


Purpose: Transitional care is time-limited, with the goal of ensuring safety and health continuity for at-risk patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as they move from one setting to the next. An acute care episode of COPD ranges from relatively healthy adults to adults with multiple chronic conditions or those in the end-of-life phase. The primary quality concern of an urgent need to improve health care is in response to the gaps of sufficient experience to manage patients with COPD, leading to hospital readmissions. Implementation of standards of care for the improvement of health-related quality of life (HRQL) of COPD patients is intended to reduce the rate of adverse events and hospital readmissions. Method: The project was implemented in collaboration with the transitional health care team at a local medical hospital. For the challenge of high levels of readmissions, coaching models for patient advocacy required continued tracking to decrease readmissions within 30 days to avoid penalties. The goal was to reduce the all-cause readmission rate by 20%. A detailed plan of action customized for the purpose of designing strategic interventions addressed health care reform. Practical education aimed at staff, patients, and family members are the standard for the delivery of health care for patients with COPD. Decision supports for a change of behavior and adaptations had a significant role in client care. Case managers, nurse practitioners, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and dieticians formulated solutions in patient safety during the acute phase. As a result, cost-effective care reduced medical costs, decreased recurrent hospital stays, and improved patient satisfaction. Findings: Cultures, socioeconomics, and gender had an effect on the transitional approach. Coach status had positive effects on the population's shared decision-making requirements. Religion and health disparities considered, patients had universal needs across the REDUCING RECURRENT COPD ADMISSIONS 8 population. The biggest impact made was with pharmacy involvement and elderly polypharmacy involving potential adverse drug events. The pharmacist counseled patients on medication with accuracy. Case studies and preliminary results identified gaps. Results identified multiple errors per patient. Intervention scores had a greater improvement over a ninemonth period. Conclusions: Citizen ties to a community-based organization (CBO) are critical for the improvement of the quality of life in low-income areas. Services and resources with strategies expand the legitimacy of low-income communities with a devoted effort for goal accomplishment (Walker & McCarthy, 2010). Implementing cost containment and competitive strategies for an alternate health care delivery system generates savings and improves the management of chronic disease. Determining costs associated with exacerbations of COPD and an acute exacerbation of chronic bronchitis (AECB) is specific to controlling costs derived from treatment failure and hospitalization. The leading preventable risk factor associated with chronic lung disease for further study is smoking. Determining the underlying addiction and further education may also be an area for further research to consider. Treatment failure causes further medical visits, emergency room visits, and potentially extended hospital stays (Miravitlles et al., 2002). Access to clinical excellence for the successful transition from the hospital, across settings, prevented readmissions. The impact of reducing recurrent admissions for patients discharged with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease improved patient care outcomes. REDUCING RECURRENT COPD ADMISSIONS 9


There is a clear need for a public domain data set of road networks with high special accuracy and global coverage for a range of applications. The Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS), version 1, is a first step in that direction. gROADS relies on data from a wide range of sources and was developed using a range of methods. Traditionally, map development was highly centralized and controlled by government agencies due to the high cost or required expertise and technology. In the past decade, however, high resolution satellite imagery and global positioning system (GPS) technologies have come into wide use, and there has been significant innovation in web services, such that a number of new methods to develop geospatial information have emerged, including automated and semi-automated road extraction from satellite/aerial imagery and crowdsourcing. In this paper we review the data sources, methods, and pros and cons of a range of road data development methods: heads-up digitizing, automated/semi-automated extraction from remote sensing imagery, GPS technology, crowdsourcing, and compiling existing data sets. We also consider the implications for each method in the production of open data.


3D imaging systems provide valuable information for autonomous robot navigation based on landmark detection in pipelines. This paper presents a method for using a time-of-flight (TOF) camera for detection and tracking of pipeline features such as junctions, bends and obstacles. Feature extraction is done by fitting a cylinder to images of the pipeline. Data in captured images appear to take a conic rather than cylindrical shape, and we adjust the geometric primitive accordingly. Pixels deviating from the estimated cylinder/cone fit are grouped into blobs. Blobs fulfilling constraints on shape and stability over time are then tracked. The usefulness of TOF imagery as a source for landmark detection and tracking in pipelines is evaluated by comparison to auxiliary measurements. Experiments using a model pipeline and a prototype robot show encouraging results.


This study tests for labor market hysteresis in low income countries while accounting for structural break in the unemployment rates. This is to verify if unemployment in low income countries will return back to natural rate of unemployment in the long run using data from Nigeria and South Africa. It follows the procedure for single structural break unit root test by Zivot and Andrews (1992). The empirical result indicates that accounting for structural break makes the unemployment rate series stationary for Nigeria; hence, shocks to the unemployment rates will have temporary effects. Contrarily, evidence of hysteresis was found in South Africa's unemployment rates series because it was not stationary. Nigeria's macroeconomic policy can aim at lowering inflation through a contractionary policy, it will temporarily increase unemployment but it will return back to its natural state, but structural reforms that will prompt shock on South African unemployment will increase the persistence of hysteresis.


Mobility is central to urbanity, and urbanity is central to our common future as the world's population crowds into urban areas. This is creating a global urban mobility crisis due to the unsustainability of our 20th century transportation systems for an urban world. Fortunately, the science and planning of urban mobility is transforming away from infrastructure as the solution towards a sustainable mobility paradigm that manages rather than encourages travel, diminishes mobility and accessibility inequities, and reduces the harms of mobility to people and environments. In this essay, I discuss the contributions over the past decade of movement analytics to sustainable mobility science and planning. I also highlight two major challenges to sustainable mobility that should be addressed over the next decade.


Poly-
and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are ubiquitous contaminants across the
globe, can bioaccumulate in aquatic taxa, and potentially biomagnify in food
webs. Consequently, research examining the influence of PFAS on wildlife is warranted.
Amphibians are sensitive to contaminants such as PFAS because of their porous
skin and associations with aquatic habitats where contaminants accumulate. Because
PFAS tend to bioaccumulate and can adversely affect the endocrine system, there
is a need to examine uptake rates to inform ecotoxicology studies, as well as a
need to examine sublethal effects. To address these knowledge gaps I conducted
two experiments. First, I exposed larval northern leopard frogs (Rana
pipiens), American toads (Anaxyrus
americanus), and eastern tiger
salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) to PFAS chemicals
perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) or perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) at
concentrations of 10 or 1000 ppb for 10 days and sampled them every 48 hours during
the exposure period. In the next experiment, I examined the effects of PFAS exposure via
contaminated substrate on the survival and growth of post metamorphic amphibians of the same species. I
found that, for all species, body burdens often reached steady state within 48
to 96 h of exposure. Steady-state body burdens of PFOA ranged from 3,819–16,481
ng/g dry weight among treatments and species (corresponding BCFs of 0.5 to 2.5),
while PFOS body burdens ranged from 6,955–489,958 ng/g dry weight
(corresponding BCFs of 47–259) among treatments and species. These data suggest
that steady state is rapidly reached in larval amphibians exposed to PFAS,
particularly regarding PFOS. This reflects a high potential for trophic
transfer of PFAS within food webs because amphibians are often low in trophic
position and are important prey for many aquatic and terrestrial species. In post-metamorphic
amphibians, there
was no influence of PFAS on survival or mass. However, significant effects on snout-vent
length were observed in all species, and body condition differences were
observed for two of my species. I found that all leopard frogs increased in
scaled mass index (SMI) when exposed to a PFAS treatment, indicating an
increased body condition. Toads exhibited a more variable SMI pattern across
treatments, with no outstanding trends, and tiger salamanders did not differ
significantly across treatments. These data suggest that sublethal effects vary
greatly depending on the species, possibly due to life history traits. Future research examining biomagnification
potential is warranted to determine the influence of PFAS on food webs. Additionally,
there is a need to determine the physiological mechanisms underlying the
observed effects of PFAS exposure.


One of the classic problems in embryology is the segmentation of the body plan. In vertebrates, this process is underpinned by a multicellular oscillatory genetic network. Riedel-Kruse et al. modeled this complex "segmentation clock" as a population of simple, coupled oscillators in the presence of noise and compared their modeling with experimentally induced segment defects after quantitative inhibition of Notch signaling in the zebrafish embryo. The model predicts the position of posterior defects, a synchronized transition, and the existence of resynchronization and allows the estimation of coupling strength, noise, and robustness to perturbation. I. H. Riedel-Kruse, C. Müller, A. C. Oates, Synchrony dynamics during initiation, failure, and rescue of the segmentation clock. Science 317, 1911-1915 (2007). [Abstract] [Full Text]


This paper intends to examine the environmental foundation for establishing financial markets in Ethiopia, identify the potential challenges and opportunities. The environmental foundation is assessed using the PEST (political, economic, social and technological) perspectives. Emphasis is given to identify the roles that financial markets can play in expediting Ethiopian economy, the environmental factors that need to be analyzed the current situation of Ethiopia in terms of each factor. An exhaustive analysis of literature has been made on the secondary data obtained from different sources. The research method employed in the study has both qualitative and quantitative features. The findings of the study are presumed to be of paramount importance in providing input information for policy makers towards establishing financial markets in Ethiopia. As a way forward the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) need to take timely actions to further investigate the environmental situation to establish financial markets, appreciate the potential opportunities and make preparations towards addressing the direct challenges. Keywords : Financial Market, Securities Market, Environment, Governance


Involvement in therapeutic recreation (TR) after experiencing a stroke is an important component of the rehabilitation process. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of community-based recreation in stroke recovery for 14 stroke survivors who had engaged in TR within a community-based stroke rehabilitation program in Canada. These individuals were co-researchers in a participatory action research project using a Photovoice methodology. Based on photographs and individual interviews that were analyzed using the constant comparative method, this study demonstrated that recreation facilitated experiences of hope, collective social support, and community engagement for these stroke survivors as they re-integrated into their communities.


Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy-makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people's lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion, and it is feared that they will become a 'lost generation'. This paper draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging that these issues have a much wider purchase. The notion of NEETs rests alongside longstanding concerns of the English state and middle classes, addressing unruly male working-class youth as well as the moral turpitude of working class girls. Waged labour and domesticity are seen as a means to integrate such groups into society thereby generating social cohesion. The paper places the debate within it socio-economic context and draws on theorisations of cognitive capitalism, Italian workerism, as well as emerging theories of antiwork to analyse these. It concludes by arguing that 'radical' approaches to NEETs that point towards inequities embedded in the social structure and call for social democratic solutions veer towards a form of comfort radicalism. Such approaches leave in place the dominance of capitalist relations as well as productivist orientations that celebrate waged labour.


The authors start with the observation that hedge funds are not obliged to disclose sources of earnings and trade strategies. For this reason little is known on how returns are achieved. One approach to shed some light on this matter is based on Sharpe [1992], which introduced a model for the explanation of returns of traditional mixed funds (e.g., composed of equities and bonds). Mixed funds usually pursue a strategy of "long only" whereas hedge funds also use short selling and leveraging, and act in a much more flexible way. These trade strategies of hedge funds lead to option-like structures, which are not covered by the basic Sharpe model. They discuss and describe the possibilities to include such structures into a regression model. Offering data on the various such strategies, they present the empirical results of an analysis of the risk factors of the Standard & Poor's hedge fund indices. They conclude with the view that their study confirms the findings documented in the literature and that further research could be directed toward capturing further risk factors in order to increase the explanatory power of regression models.


Background and aims DSM-5 includes Internet gaming disorder (IGD) as a condition for further study. While online and offline gaming may produce undesired negative effects on players, we know little about the nosology of IGD and its prevalence, especially in countries with emerging economies. Methods A self-administered survey has been employed to estimate prevalence of DSM-5 IGD and study the structure and performance of an instrument in Spanish to measure DSM-5 IGD among 7,022 first-year students in 5 Mexican universities that participated in the University Project for Healthy Students (PUERTAS), part of the World Health Organization's World Mental Health International College Student Initiative. Results The scale for IGD showed unidimensionality with factor loadings between 0.694 and 0.838 and a Cronbach's α = .816. Items derived from gaming and from substance disorders symptoms mixed together. We found a 12-month prevalence of IGD of 5.2% in the total sample; prevalence was different for males (10.2%) and females (1.2%), but similar for ages 18–19 years (5.0%) and age 20+ (5.8%) years. Among gamers, the prevalence was 8.6%. Students with IGD were more likely to report lifetime psychological or medical treatment [OR = 1.8 (1.4–2.4)] and any severe role impairment [OR = 2.4 (1.7–3.3)]. Adding any severe role impairment to the diagnostic criteria decreased the 12-month prevalence of IGD to 0.7%. Discussion and conclusions Prevalence of DSM-5 IGD and the performance of diagnostic criteria in this Mexican sample were within the bounds of what is reported elsewhere. Importantly, about one in every seven students with IGD showed levels of impairment that would qualify them for treatment under DSM-5.


A new method is described for measuring the wavelength of peak intensity of x-ray tubes. This method employs known absorption data and gives an independent check on crystal spectrometer measurements. For a tungsten target tube, the measured values were: 50.0 kv spectrum peak at 0.337 A, 45.5 kv at 0.367 A, 39.8, kv at 0.416 A, and 33.5 kv at 0.478 A.An important companion result is the variation of intensity with tube potential, at constant wavelengths shorter than the peak wavelengths, for spectra corresponding to tube potentials between 30 and 70 kv.


This paper reports on early soil related outcomes from conservation agriculture (CA) benchmark sites located within the marginal rainfed environment of agro-ecological zone 4 (annual rainfall: 200–250 mm) in pre-conflict central Syria. The outcomes reported are specifically those that relate to beneficial soil quality and water retention attributes relative to conventional tillage-based soil management practices applied to the fodder barley–livestock system, the dominant system in the zone. On-farm operational research was established to examine the impact of a barley (Hordeum vulgare) and vetch (Vicia sativa) rotation intercropped with atriplex (Atriplex halimus) and salsola (Salsola collina), under CA and conventional tillage agriculture, on the soil quality parameters and crop productivity. Preliminary results showed that CA had a positive effect on the soil quality parameters and crop performance. The soil moisture and hydraulic conductivity were higher under CA (p < 0.05), combined with improved productivity (grain and above-ground biomass) under specific crop mixes. The results suggest that despite the marginal nature of the zone, the use of CA is a viable option for the future of farmers' livelihoods within similar localities and agro-climates, given the benefits for soil moisture and grain and straw productivity. In addition, it is likely to positively impact those in marginal environments where both pastoralism and agro-pastoralism production systems co-exist and compete for crop biomass as a main source of livestock feed. The increase in grain and straw yields vis-a-vis improvements in biophysical parameters in the CA system relative to tillage agriculture does suggest, however, that the competition with livestock for biomass is likely to reduce over time, and farmers would be able to return increased levels of straw (as stubble and residue) as mulch, given improved biomass yields.


Foraging workers of Formica planipilis and Pogonomyrmex salinus were collected at various distances from their colony by pitfall traps in the former species and by catching workers recruited to food at known locations in the latter. In F. planipilis the number of larger workers increased in proportional representation to distance from the nest. Larger workers also weighed relatively less with distance from the nest, indicating that energy or water allocated for maintaining all foragers is patterned such that resource loss with forager mortality is minimized. However, the smallest size class involved in foraging shows the opposite pattern, with heavier individuals being found farther from the nest. Thus, it is possible that smaller size classes function as mobile reserves of energy or water to maintain foraging activity of larger classes at a distance from the colony. In P. salinus all sizes of workers were equally likely to be found at any distance. Foragers weighed significantly less than mound workers of the same head size, again suggesting resource conservation in provisioning foraging workers. Differences in patterns of energy allocation to foragers are discussed relative to the species' ecologies.


Water flow from soil to roots is controlled by the hydraulic behavior of the soil near the roots, the rhizosphere. Recent experiments showed that during drying, the rhizosphere held more water than the bulk soil. After irrigation, the rhizosphere remained temporarily dry, and it slowly rewetted after a few days. The hypothesis is that the observed hydraulic behavior was caused by mucilage exuded by roots. Mucilage is a polymeric material that is capable of holding a large amount of water but that contains also lipids that makes it hydrophobic when it dries. A model of root water uptake coupled with swelling and shrinking of mucilage id proposed. Water flow is modeled solving the Richards equation in a domain composed of two concentric regions, bulk soil and rhizosphere, with the root in the center as a boundary condition. It is assumed that during drying, mucilage is in equilibrium with the bulk water. After irrigation, mucilage does not rehydrate immediately, and water content and water potential in the rhizosphere are decoupled. The rhizosphere rewetting rate is assumed to be proportional to the difference between the water potential in the rhizosphere and the potential that the rhizosphere would have if it was in equilibrium at the actual water content. The proportional coefficient depends on mucilage properties and pore characteristics. The model reproduced well the observed water dynamics in the rhizosphere. According to this model, the rhizosphere conductivity is not a unique function of soil water potential, but it is variable and depends on the drying and wetting history. The study illustrates the dynamic and interacting nature of water flow to roots.


Mad Studies is an emerging new critical project. As such, its purpose and future direction is open to debate. In any new project, questions emerge regarding its boundaries; who is inside and outside, included or excluded? This paper explores questions of who (and what) is (or should be) included in the Mad Studies project. For example, we explore the place of those who are not 'Mad positive' or anti-psychiatry; the extent you need to be Mad identified to do Mad Studies; and the potential inclusion of a number of related conditions, experiences and perspectives (such as neurological diversity; chronic fatigues syndrome / myalgic encephalomyelitis ME/CFS; and psychedelic drug use). Whilst we do not argue that Mad Studies is exclusionary, nor that it should be all-inclusive, we do think it could be more attuned to potential exclusions, especially because these are often based on unhelpful binary oppositions (physical/mental; social/medical; psychiatry/anti psychiatry etc). Therefore, we make the case that Mad Studies could more explicitly interrogate underlying assumptions, not only of psychiatry and the 'psy' professionals, but also of pre-existing 'critical' approaches to madness. If so, it could be a truly ground breaking project.


Problem statement:The word participation was introduced for the first time in European political affairs for the participation of men in voting and decision-making, about two hundred years ago. Subsequently, the use of this word gradually became widespread in other social and environmental dimensions of Europe. From around 1991 until now in Iran, we see an increasing use of this word in various dimensions. Thus, phrases such as political participation, social participation, civil participation, participatory management and landscape participation become popular over the last few decades. Despite the frequent use of participation in landscape in technical texts, the exact meaning of this term is not specified anywhere, and several texts have considered different meanings for it. Purpose: Given this conceptual multiplicity of participation in landscape, as well as the use of multiple and similar phrases for these concepts, the purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of participation in landscape design. Research Methodology: The research method is qualitative and content analysis. At first, the concept of the word "participation" and similar words have been examined in the Iranian texts. Then, in terms of the word "landscape", the experts view has been considered. Finally, the concepts that can be comprehended from the word "participation in landscape" are explained from the perspective of domestic writers. Also, the concept of participation in landscape design in English has also been reviewed. Conclusion: Finally, a concept was found for "participation in landscape design" through the studies that in addition to considering the objective and subjective aspects of landscape, the concept of participation in landscape design was proposed instead of other similar terms to express this concept.


Abstract. Documentation on archaeological fieldworks needs to be accurate and time-effective. Many features unveiled during excavations can be recorded just once, since the archaeological workflow physically removes most of the stratigraphic elements. Some of them have peculiar characteristics which make them hardly recognizable as objects and prevent a full 3D documentation. The paper presents a suitable feature-based method to carry on archaeological documentation with a three-dimensional approach, tested on the archaeological site of S. Calocero in Albenga (Italy). The method is based on one hand on the use of structure from motion techniques for on-site recording and 3D Modelling to represent the three-dimensional complexity of stratigraphy. The entire documentation workflow is carried out through digital tools, assuring better accuracy and interoperability. Outputs can be used in GIS to perform spatial analysis; moreover, a more effective dissemination of fieldworks results can be assured with the spreading of datasets and other information through web-services.


The observed pronunciations or spellings of words are often explained as arising from the "underlying forms" of their morphemes. These forms are latent strings that linguists try to reconstruct by hand. We propose to reconstruct them automatically at scale, enabling generalization to new words. Given some surface word types of a concatenative language along with the abstract morpheme sequences that they express, we show how to recover consistent underlying forms for these morphemes, together with the (stochastic) phonology that maps each concatenation of underlying forms to a surface form. Our technique involves loopy belief propagation in a natural directed graphical model whose variables are unknown strings and whose conditional distributions are encoded as finite-state machines with trainable weights. We define training and evaluation paradigms for the task of surface word prediction, and report results on subsets of 7 languages.


Between March 2008 and August 2011, the Transport Accident Commission (TAC), through the TAC Community Road Safety Grants program, funded twenty five projects in local councils or community groups to develop municipal or community based road safety strategies. The TAC established the Community Road Safety Grants (CRSG) program to provide community groups with opportunities to address local road safety issues within the context of the Victorian road safety strategy. Since March 2008, the TAC has conducted 10 rounds of funding, resulting in more than 200 approved projects totalling around $A3.7 million in grants. In 2012, the TAC commissioned a study to develop an understanding of the development and implementation of community/municipal road safety strategies. Particularly, the TAC aims to understand processes, support, consultation, barriers to implementation and evaluation of strategies and associated action plans. The results of the study will assist the TAC and its road safety partners to review guidelines and policy on the implementation of community based and/or municipal road safety strategies.


This thesis is about interactive music—a musical experience that involves participation from the listener but is itself a composed piece of music—and the Interactive Music Systems (IMSs) that create these experiences, such as a sound installation that responds to the movements of its audience. Some IMSs are brief marvels commanding only a few seconds of attention. Others engage those who participate for considerably longer. Our goal here is to understand why this difference arises and how we may then apply this understanding to create better interactive music experiences. I present a refined perspective of interactive music as an exploration into the relationship between action and sound. Reasoning about IMSs in terms of how they are subjectively perceived by a participant, I argue that fundamental to creating a captivating interactive music is the evolving cognitive process of making sense of a system through interaction. I present two new theoretical tools that provide complementary contributions to our understanding of this process. The first, the Emerging Structures model, analyses how a participant's evolving understanding of a system's behaviour engages and motivates continued involvement. The second, a framework of Perceived Agency, refines the notion of 'creative control' to provide a better understanding of how the norms of music establish expectations of how skill will be demonstrated. I develop and test these tools through three practical projects: a wearable musical instrument for dancers created in collaboration with an artist, a controlled user study investigating the effects of constraining the functionality of a screen-based IMS, and an interactive sound installation that may only be explored through coordinated movement with another participant. This final work is evaluated formally through discourse analysis. Finally, I show how these tools may inform our understanding of an oft-cited goal within the field: conversational interaction with an interactive music system.


We present a new chronology to constrain ice‐margin retreat in the northern Irish Sea Basin. Estimates on the timing of ice thinning derived from surface exposure ages for boulders from the summits of the Isle of Man and south‐west Cumbria suggest that ice thinning was commensurate with the rapid retreat that followed the short‐lived advance of the Irish Sea Ice Stream (ISIS) to maximum limits in the Celtic Sea. This ice retreat in the northern Irish Sea Basin was fastest at 20 ka in response to a wider calving margin, but slowed as ice stabilized and oscillated against the Isle of Man. We provide the first age constraints for the Scottish Readvance (19.2–18.2 ka) and demonstrate that it was a potentially regional event across the Isle of Man and Cumbrian lowlands not linked with Heinrich Event 1. After the Scottish Readvance, the ice front retreated northwards towards the Southern Uplands of Scotland at the same time as climate north of ∼45°N warmed in response to summer insolation. This sequence demonstrates the importance of internal dynamics in controlling ice retreat rates in the Irish Sea, but also that deglaciation of the northern Irish Sea Basin was a response to climate warming.


Within the current context of digital architectural construction and immersive representation exists a problem of 'ocularcentrism' as defined by Pallasmaa. Recent immersive developments such as Google Earth VR, or Realities.io, focus primarily in working within the tangible experience, purely emphasising on geometric forms and physical artefacts. They largely ignore the more experiential and intangible qualities of space, which are crucial elements in a real embodied physical experience of architecture. Phenomenologists such as Pallasmaa, Holl, and Zumthor expand on this, identifying that architecture clearly exists as something beyond just the tangible. Architecture fundamentally is an experiential and spatial art, incorporating not just the geometric sense of space but also aspects of the intangible such as sound, movement, lighting and interaction. As a result of this tangible-bias, virtual-reality's current use within architecture as an immersive medium is largely limited. Most developments can be described as 'an immersive virtual photograph' of architecture rather than an experience of one.  This research is a response to studies that directly address the problem of 'ocularcentrism' while also exploring the methods and techniques that can translate intangible qualities into virtual architecture. Utilising a Real-Time Virtual Environment (RTVE) and Virtual Reality (VR) tool set, this paper virtually reconstructs the case study of the Kowloon Walled City. It proposes a novel working methodology for immersive architectural visualisation with VR and adds to the on-going research in the field of phenomenology within architecture.


Design and demonstration of a versatile liquid crystal-based scanner is shown for steering a laser beam in three dimensions. The scanner consists of a unique combination of digital and analog control polarization-based beamforming optics resulting in both continuous and random fashion beam steering. The scanner features a novel device biasing method, large aperture beamforming optics, low electrical power consumption, and ultra-fine as well as wide angle coarse beam steering. Demonstrations include one, two and three dimensional beam steering with a maximum of 40.92° continuous scan, all at 1550 nm. The minimum scanner aperture is 1 cm diameter and uses a combination of ferroelectric and nematic liquid crystals in addition to Rutile crystal birefringent prisms.


The Cambro-Ordovician Seventy Mile Range Group occurs within the Mount Windsor Subprovince in northern Queensland, Australia. It extends approximately 165 km east-west, consists of compositionally and texturally diverse submarine volcanic and sedimentary fades and hosts massive sulfide deposits. The Seventy Mile Range Group has undergone greenschistgrade regional metamorphism and three phases of deformation. It comprises four formations, the middle two of which are dominantly volcanic (Mount Windsor and Trooper Creek Formations).
Detailed volcanic fades mapping has been undertaken along spaced traverses throughout the
Seventy Mile Range Group. The main areas studied include Warawee, Brittania,
Highway /Reward, Mt. Farrenden, Mt. Windsor, Lion town and Thalanga. This research has
prompted a review of the existing stratigraphic framework. The Mount Windsor and Trooper
Creek Formations are amalgamated into one lithostratigraphic unit, informally termed the
Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit. The Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit overlies nonvolcanic
sandstone and mudstone of the Puddler Creek Formation. The contact with the
Puddler Creek Formation is either narrow (<100 m) or broad (up to 1000 m) and interfingering
or intrusive. The Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit is conformably overlain by non-volcanic
sandstone and mudstone of the Rollston Range Formation.
Twenty-three principal lithofacies have been identified in the Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek
unit and are organised into five groups: 1) coherent rhyolite, dacite and basaltic andesite; 2)
monomictic volcanic breccia and conglomerate; 3) polymictic volcanic breccia and
conglomerate; 4) volcanic sandstone and mudstone; and 5) non-volcanic sandstone and
mudstone. The volcanic succession is interpreted to comprise lavas and intrusions, syn-eruptive
pyroclastic sediment gravity flow deposits, bomb-rich fire-fountain deposits, syn-eruptive
resedimented pyroclastic and autoclastic deposits and post-eruptive and reworked volcaniclastic
deposits. Transport and deposition of monomictic and polymictic volcanic breccia and
conglomerate involved water-supported sediment gravity flows. Coherent and associated
autoclastic rhyolite fades are interpreted to be dominantly intrusions.
Regionally, the environment of deposition was submarine and below-storm-wave-base. The
products of both intrabasinal submarine and extrabasinal shallow-marine or subaerial volcanic
eruptions are preserved in the Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit. The volcanic fades
associations represent three and possibly four main intrabasinal volcano types: 1) rhyolite lava
and intrusion volcanic complexes, 2) basaltic andesite fire-fountain and lava volcanoes, 3) dacite dome volcanoes, and 4) possibly rhyolite lava-intrusion "tuff'' volcanoes. Rhyolite lava and
intrusion volcanic complexes are the most voluminous and common type of volcano identified.
The basaltic andesite fire -fountain eruptions generated a distinctive monomictic breccia
composed of fluidal and blocky basaltic andesite clasts. The fluidal clasts resemble subaerial
volcanic bombs and are interpreted to be the products of submarine fire fountaining of
relatively low-viscosity lava.
The stratigraphic thickness of the Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit varies across the belt
from ~1100 mat Thalanga to >7 km in the Mt. Farrenden and Mt. Windsor east areas.
Thickness variations of the volcanic stratigraphy are a product of accumulation of mass-flow
volcaniclastic fades in local depocentres and emplacement of voluminous felsic lavas and
intrusions at intrabasinal volcanic centres.
Lavas, intrusions and monomictic volcaniclastic fades can be divided into three geochemically
distinct suites. Suite I ranges in composition from rhyolite to basaltic andesite and is interpreted
to comprise a cogenetic suite related by variable degrees of crystal fractionation and crustal
assimilation. Suite II consists principally of rhyolites which are geochemically distinct from
Suite I rhyolites. Suite III consists of trachyandesites. Suite I occurs at all stratigraphic levels
within the Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek, Suite II is restricted to the lower Mount WindsorTrooper
Creek unit, and Suite III is largely restricted to the Puddler Creek Formation. All suites
occur across the length of the Seventy Mile Range Group. New U-Pb zircon ages for felsic
volcanic rocks from the Mount Windsor-Trooper Creek unit are 467.9 ± 4.1 Ma, 466.7 ± 2.6
Ma, and 465.4 ± 1.4 Ma.
Volcanic-hosted massive sulfide deposits occur in the middle to upper part of the Mount
Windsor-Trooper Creek unit. They have previously been interpreted to be spatially and
temporally associated with emplacement of rhyolite lavas and shallow-level intrusions (e.g.,
Thalanga and Highway /Reward) or hosted by volcaniclastic facies (e.g., Lion town). The
volcanic fades architecture of the Seventy Mile Range Group is similar to that of the Early
Proterozoic Skellefte District in Sweden, where numerous polymetallic massive sulfide deposits
are hosted within rhyolite volcanic centres and volcaniclastic deposits.


American constitutional jurisprudence has long accepted the notion that the exercise of certain rights can only be restricted by the government if the restriction satisfies strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court has identified such rights as fundamental often by relying on an expansive interpretation of the word "liberty" in the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. In this Article, Professor Colb argues that the Supreme Court has failed to recognize the right to physical liberty itself as a fundamental right She demonstrates that at present conduct that is not itself constitutionally protected may serve as the basis for imprisonment even if the government lacks a compelling interest in preventing the conduct. Professor Colb argues that a governmental decision to restrict a person's fundamental freedom from incarceration, like the decision to restrict any other fundamental right, should be subjected to strict scrutiny. She demonstrates the inadequacy of possible justifications for the Supreme Court's present failure to protect the freedom from incarceration. Finally, Professor Colb begins the process of scrutinizing decisions to incarcerate by positing possible applications of her theory.


Hydrological series lengths are decreasing due to decreasing investments and increasing human activities. For short sequences, a copula-based composite likelihood approach (CBCLA) has been employed to enhance the quality of hydrological design values. However, the Pearson type III (P-III) distribution for short annual precipitation records has not yet been thoroughly investigated using the CBCLA. This study used the CBCLA to incorporate the concurrent and non-concurrent periods contained in data of various lengths into an integrated framework to estimate the parameters of precipitation frequency distributions. The marginal distributions were fitted using the P-III distribution, and the joint probability was constructed using a copula which offers flexibility in choosing arbitrary marginals and dependence structure. Furthermore, the uncertainties in the estimated precipitation design values for the short series obtained from this approach were compared with those obtained from univariate analysis. Then, Monte-Carlo simulations were performed to examine the feasibility of this approach. The annual precipitation series at four stations in Weihe River basin, China, were used as a case study. Results showed that CBCLA with P-III marginals reduced the uncertainty in the precipitation design values for the short series and the reduction in the uncertainty became more significant with longer adjacent series.


This report reviews the characteristics of the immigrant workforce and analyzes the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of immigrant workers. According to the most recent available data, immigrant workers are now over 15 percent of the workforce and almost 13 percent of unionized workers. Even after controlling for systematic differences between union and non-union workers, union representation substantially improves the pay and benefits received by immigrants.


A more controllable method to synthesize particular zeolites from geopolymers is needed in order to effectively use these materials in industrial applications. In the present study, a well-crystallized zeolite P1 was synthesized from a metakaolin-based geopolymer (SiO2/Al2O3=3.2) using a hydrothermal method. The products obtained by hydrothermal treatment were identified using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and specific surface areas. The XRD patterns and SEM micrographs indicated that the structure and morphology of zeolite P1 could be controlled by the NaOH solution concentration, hydrothermal temperature, and the hydrothermal treatment time. The crystalline structure of the prepared zeolite P1 was refined using the Rietveld method and the crystal structure parameters were as follows: a = 10.01 Å, b = 10.01 Å and c = 10.03 Å. The optimal hydrothermal conditions to form zeolite P1 were 24 h at a hydrothermal temperature of 100°C and 2.0 M NaOH solution. Moreover, the synthesized zeolite P1 had a specific surface area of 36.56 m2/g.


In this riveting book, Michael Burleigh sets Nazi Germany in a European context, showing how the Third Reich's abandonment of liberal democracy, decency and tolerance was widespread in the Europe of the period. He shows how a radical, pseudo-religious movement, led by an oddity with dazzling demagogic talents, seemed to offer salvation to a German exhausted by war, depression and galloping inflation. 'This is a monumental book.' Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph 'If I had to recommend one book on the Third Reich, this would be it.' Daniel Johnson, Daily Telegraph 'It is a breathtaking achievement, at once broader and deeper than any other single volume ever published on the subject. Indeed I would go further: it is the product of authentic historical genius.' Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times 'Happily, Michael Burleigh now fills that bibliographical gap, with a readable and highly knowledgeable account of that ghastly period. You will never be bored by this extraordinary book.' Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Guideline-recommended diagnostic criteria for hemodialysis (HD) catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs) are based on data from indwelling central catheters in patients not on HD and non-HD situations, and upon which peripheral vein cultures are the gold standard. We aimed to examine the validity of these criteria in patients on HD.

DESIGN, SETTINGS, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS
Adult patients on in-center HD using catheters were prospectively followed from 2011 to 2014 at a large academic-based HD facility (Toronto, Canada). When a CRBSI was suspected, blood culture sets were obtained from four sites (peripheral vein, both catheter hubs, and HD circuit) to determine the guideline-recommended differential time to positivity (DTTP). DTTP criteria were met when catheter hub cultures turned positive ≥120 minutes before peripheral vein cultures. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were first calculated using peripheral vein cultures as the gold standard and then these same calculations were repeated with additional information, including exit site/catheter tip and HD circuit cultures, as the true gold standard. The feasibility of obtaining peripheral vein cultures was determined.

RESULTS
Of 178 suspected CRBSIs, 100 had peripheral vein blood cultures. Using the true gold standard, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of blood culture results were highest in samples from the HD circuit (93.5%, 100%, and 95%, respectively). The guideline recommended combination of peripheral vein and arterial hub blood cultures was the least sensitive, specific, and accurate (91.7%, 93.1%, and 92.7%, respectively). The diagnostic criteria using measured DTTP were met in less than one third of events.

CONCLUSIONS
In patients on HD, blood culture results are the most sensitive, specific, and accurate for diagnosing CRBSIs when taken from the HD circuit and the venous catheter hub, and blood culture results are the least sensitive, specific, and accurate in any combination with peripheral vein cultures. The DTTP does not increase diagnostic accuracy, reducing the necessity for venipuncture and its potential vein damage. Future guidelines should consider the applicability of criterion on specific patient populations and tailor them accordingly.


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PURPOSE
To present the results of the irradiations performed on Radiological Physics Center's anthropomorphic lung phantom using a respiratory simulating motion table.

METHODS
The RPC's lung phantom is used to credential institutions to participate in NCI sponsored lung clinical trials. When institutions use breath hold, gating, ITV or tracking techniques to account for patient motion, a motion table was included with the phantom. The institutions designed and delivered 3D or IMRT plans that covered an ovoid shaped target located in the left lung. All irradiations in this analysis included heterogeneity dose calculation algorithms approved by the RTOG. The TLD criteria were ±5% about RPC/Inst=0.97 (about 1.00 for Monte Carlo algorithms). Before March 2012 the film criteria required a DTA <=5 mm in the fall off regions of orthogonal profiles taken through the center of the target. After March 2012 the film criteria changed to require >=80% of the pixels in the ROI in each plane to pass a 5%/5mm gamma calculation. The average of the 3 planes must be >=85%.

RESULTS
The lung phantom was irradiated 427 times by 304 institutions. 124 institutions irradiated it 157 times using the motion platform. 79% of the irradiations utilizing the motion platform and 87% of the static irradiations passed the criteria. The overall pass rate for the phantom is 84%. Thirty percent of the moving phantom failures and 67% of the static phantom failures were due to failing solely the film criteria. 4 of 4 (100%) breath hold irradiations, 54 of 68 (79%) gating irradiations, 43 of 61 (70%) ITV irradiations and 23 of the 24 (96%) tracking irradiations passed the criteria.

CONCLUSION
The moving phantom has a pass rate that is statistically significantly different than that for a static phantom. Supported by PHS grant CA10953 and CA081647 from the NCI, DHHS.


We report on the facile production of single-layered tin sulfide nanosheets by a direct solid-state reaction, followed by quantitative liquid exfoliation in water. The new solid solution of SnS2 and Li2S with composition Li4xSn1−xS2 serves as a versatile solid-state precursor with tunable relative lithium and tin content. The end member Li2SnS3, corresponding to the solid solution composition Li3x[LixSn1−xS2], crystallizes in the well-known A2BO3 structure type with mixed Li/Sn layers alternating with pure Li layers in the cationic substructure, which is interleaved with sulfur layers. The bonding in the Li layers can be regarded as ionic, while the Sn–S bonds have substantial covalent character. The resulting inherent anisotropy allows for the facile production of unilamellar chalcogenide nanosheets with thicknesses below 1 nm and lateral sizes of tens of microns, simply by shaking the crystalline precursor in water. The quantitative exfoliation into single-layered nanosheets was confirmed using optical microscopy, AFM, TEM, as well as X-ray diffraction of freestanding films produced from the colloidal suspension by centrifugation. Upon annealing, the as-obtained nanosheets are converted into SnS2 without sacrificing their favorable dispersion properties in water. The presented method allows for the cheap and scalable production of unilamellar chalogenide nanosheets for various potential applications, such as in electronic devices, solar cells, sensors, or battery technology. We expect this method to be generic and transferable to the synthesis of other metal chalcogenides. The use of solid solutions as solid-state precursors, featuring a large compositional range and potential for doping with other metals, may ultimately allow for the controlled introduction of defect levels and rational band-gap engineering in nanosheet materials.


How to estimate parameters from observations subject to errors and uncertainty? Very often, the measurement errors are random quantities that can be adequately described by the probability theory. When we know that the measurement errors are normally distributed with zero mean, then the (asymptotically optimal) Maximum Likelihood Method leads to the popular least squares estimates. In many situations, however, we do not know the shape of the error distribution, we only know that the measurement errors are located on a certain interval. Then the maximum entropy approach leads to a uniform distribution on this interval, and the Maximum Likelihood Method results in the so-called minimax estimates. We analyse specificity and drawbacks of the minimax estimation under essential interval uncertainty in data and discuss possible ways to solve the difficulties. Finally, we show that, for the linear functional dependency, the minimax estimates motivated by the Maximum Likelehood Method coincide with those produced by the Maximum Consistency Method that originate from interval analysis. Mathematics Subject Classification: 62J02, 62J05, 65G40


The Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region compared to other developing regions has been the most vulnerable as regards foreign capital inflow. The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) is expected to result into advanced managerial and technological capacities and acceleration of industrial development. The study examined how the flow of FDI to the SSA region has impacted the industrial development of the region, using the proxy of industry value added growth. The study made use of pooled data from thirty three SSA countries within the period 1993 and 2012. The method of analysis utilized for the study was the fixed effect least-square dummy variable model, employed to estimate the impact of FDI on industrial development for the selected host countries. The study finds that FDI is statistically significant in relation to industrial development for host SSA countries; but it is disappointing that the expected desired features of industrial development, like increased manufacturing outputs, reduction in high level of import and manufactured goods; etc., have not been realized. It is therefore recommended that the governments of host countries should put policies in place to encourage development of industries domestically, to enhance sustained industrial development, such that dependence on external financial assistance and borrowing could be reduced, resulting in sustained increases in non-oil export earnings, domestic income, savings, investment, technology, and hence improved living standard


Pelvic infections commonly occur in pregnant and postoperative women. Most of these infections are readily diagnosed because of their typical clinical manifestations and prompt antimicrobial therapy that leads to the resolution of disease. However, uncommon cases may escape detection and the severity of the process may also go unrecognized without a careful assessment of clues available through physical examination and laboratory testing. In some cases a particularly virulent pathogen can lead to severe infection, septic shock and its consequences, even death, despite clinicians acting appropriately.


This paper highlights perspectives on action research in education, health and social care and was originally presented as a keynote at the International Practitioner Research Conference and Collaborative Action Research Conference in 2005. The paper links with the other conference keynote given by Stephen Kemmis, co‐author of Becoming Critical. It reflects on the importance of Being Caring in action research in the context of health and social care; particularly in relation to emotionally supporting practitioners to improve their practice in settings which do not always welcome more emancipatory or critical approaches often used in education. The paper begins by exploring the nature of practitioner research and action research in health and social care and its links with quality. It argues that health and social care professionals have often drawn their methodological understanding from the literature written by colleagues in education. This literature tends to support critical and emancipatory forms of action research, which health and social care professionals have tended to adopt in an uncritical manner. Reflecting on some of the contextual constraints in health and social care, it argues that many of these factors are beyond the control of individual practitioners and suggests a need to focus on the neglected area of emotions, in addition to, contextual issues. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach an example of psychodynamically informed action research is given. The paper concludes that in the quest to be critical, practitioner researchers/action researchers in education, health and social care may be ignoring the emotional contexts in which they work. It suggests that being caring may be the key to being critical.


With the increasing demand for access to content in foreign languages in recent years, we have also seen a steady improvement in the quality of tools that can help bridge this gap. One such tool is Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which learns automatically from real examples of human translations, without the need for manual intervention. Training such a system takes just a few days, sometimes even hours, but requires a lot of sentences aligned to their corresponding translations, a resource known as a bi-text. Such bi-texts contain translations of written texts as they are typically derived from newswire, administrative, technical and legislation documents, e.g., from the EU and UN. However, with the widespread use of mobile phones and online conversation programs such as Skype as well as personal assistants such as Siri, there is a growing need for spoken language recognition, understanding, and translation. Unfortunately, most bi-texts are not very useful for training a spoken language SMT system as the language they cover is written, which differs from speech in style, formality, vocabulary choice, length of utterances, etc. It turns out that there exists a growing community-generated source of spoken language translations, namely movie subtitles. These come in plain text in a common format in order to facilitate rendering the text segments accordingly. The dark side of subtitles is that they are usually created for pirated copies of copyright-protected movies. Yet, their use in research is an exploitation of a "positive side effect" of Internet movie piracy, which allows for easy creation of spoken bi-texts in a number of languages. This alignment typically relies on a key property of movie subtitles, namely the temporal indexing of subtitle segments, among with other features. Due to the nature of movies, subtitles differ from other resources in several aspects: they are mostly transcriptions of movie dialogues that are often spontaneous speech, which contains a lot of slang, idiomatic expressions, and also fragmented spoken utterances, with repetitions, errors and corrections, rather than grammatical sentences; thus, this material is commonly summarised in the subtitles, rather than being literally transcribed. Since subtitles are user-generated, the translations are free, incomplete and dense (due to summarization and compression) and, therefore, reveal cultural differences. Degrees of rephrasing and compression vary across languages and also depend on subtitling traditions. Moreover, subtitles are created to be displayed in parallel to a movie in order to be linked to the movie's actual sound signal. Subtitles also arbitrarily include some meta information such as the movie title, year of release, genre, subtitle author/translator details and trailers. They may also contain visual translation, e.g., into a sign language. Certain versions of subtitles are especially compiled for the hearing-impaired to include extra information about non-spoken sounds that are either primary, e.g., coughing, or secondary background noises, e.g., soundtrack music, street noise, etc. This brings yet another challenge to the alignment process: the complex mappings caused by many deletions and insertions. Furthermore, subtitles must be short enough to fit the screen in a readable manner and are only shown for a short time period, which presents a new constraint to the alignment of different languages with different visual and linguistic features. The languages a subtitle file is available for differ from one movie to another. Commonly, the Arabic language, even though spoken by more than 420 million people worldwide, and being the 5th most spoken language worldwide, has relatively scarce online presence. For example, according to Wikipedia's statistics of article counts, Arabic is ranked 23rd. Yet, Web traffic analytics shows that search queries for Arabic subtitles and traffic from the Arabic region are among the highest. This increase in demand for Arabic content is not surprising with the recent dramatic economic and socio-political shift in the Arab World. On another note, Arabic, as a Semitic language, has a complex morphology, which requires special handling when mapping it to another language and therefore poses a challenge for machine translation. In this work, we look at movie subtitles as a unique source of bi-texts in an attempt to align as many translations of movies as possible in order to improve English to Arabic SMT. Translating from English into Arabic is an underexplored translation direction and, due to the morphological richness of Arabic among with other factors, yields significantly lower results compared to translating in the opposite direction (Arabic to English). For our experiments, we collected pairs of English-Arabic subtitles for more than 29,000 movies/TV shows, which is a collection that is bigger than any preexisting subtitle data set. We designed a sequence of heuristics to eliminate the inherent noise that comes with the subtitles' source in order to yield good quality alignment. We used time overlap to align the subtitles by utilising the time information provided within the subtitle files and measuring the time overlap. This alignment approach is language-independent and outperforms other traditional approaches such as the length-based approach, which relies on segment boundaries to match translation segments, as segment boundaries differ from one language to another, e.g., because of the need to fit the text on the screen. Our goal was to maximise the number of aligned sentence pairs while minimising the alignment errors. We evaluated our models relatively and also extrinsically, i.e., by measuring the quality of an SMT system that used this bi-text for training. We automatically evaluated our SMT systems using BLEU, a standard measure for machine translation evaluation. We also implemented an in-house Web application tool in order to crowd-source human judgments comparing the SMT baseline's output and our best-performing system's output. Our experiments yielded bi-texts of varied size and relative quality, which we used to train an SMT system. Adding any of our bi-texts improved the baseline SMT system, which was trained on TED talks from the IWSLT 2013 competition. Ultimately, our best SMT system outperformed the baseline by about two BLEU points, which is a very significant improvement, clearly visible to humans; this was confirmed in manual evaluation. We hope that the resulting subtitles corpus, the largest collected so far (about 82 million words), will facilitate research in spoken language SMT.


Soccer causes the largest number of injuries each year (18% of all sports injuries) in the Netherlands. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the body of evidence on injury prevention for adult male soccer players. Chapter 1 is a general introduction and presents the "sequence of prevention" model proposed by Van Mechelen et al. (1992). From the review described in chapter 2 we concluded that there is conflicting evidence for the effectiveness of exercise-based programmes to prevent soccer injuries. These generic preventive training programmes involve different exercises focusing on multiple joints and/or muscle groups and aim to prevent of the most common soccer injuries. We believe that the general structure of such programmes can be useful for numerous adult male soccer teams, because they are cost-free and can often be easily incorporated in regular training sessions. Chapters 3 to 5 then describe the study design and results of our randomized controlled trial (RCT) investigating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of FIFA's "The11" programme for Dutch adult male amateur soccer players. After one season, we did not find significant differences in the overall injury incidence or injury severity between the intervention and control groups, although the intervention did result in a cost-saving effect. In conclusion, there are doubts that The11 is an effective programme to prevent soccer injuries in this particular population of adult male amateur soccer players. Based on the model by Van Mechelen et al., and having found no preventive effect of The11 on injury incidence among male amateur players, we used the data we had collected to establish the extent of the injury problem for this particular group and to gain more insight into injury characteristics. Chapter 6 presents the main findings of this study: almost 60% of Dutch amateur soccer players sustained at least one injury during one competitive soccer season, and approximately one third of these injuries resulted in absence from soccer play for at least one month. Chapter 7 provides information on injuries in Dutch professional soccer players. In chapter 8, the injury data from the professional and amateur cohorts are compared. The overall injury incidence was higher in the amateur cohort, as was the incidence during training. In contrast, the injury incidence during matches was higher among the professional players. Soccer injuries result from a complex interaction of multiple risk factors and events. Many risk factors are mentioned in the literature, but the findings are contradictory. We therefore conducted a literature review to study risk factors for hamstring injuries in male adult soccer players (chapter 9). We concluded that previous hamstring injury is the strongest predictive factor for hamstring injury. Conflicting evidence was found for age and hamstring length or flexibility as risk factors for hamstring injuries. Finally, chapter 10 offers a general discussion, reflecting on the main findings of our studies. The chapter ends with several recommendations for future research.


Polish Russian relations in the Putin era have become severely strained as Polish ties to Europe have expanded. In the past several years tension between the two countries have developed even as Polish leaders, in particular recently elected Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, insisted that Warsaw remains committed to good working ties with the Kremlin. One recent source of this tension was the Polish effort to influence the outcome of the November 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections. This Polish behavior risked provoking Russia. But, the outcome of the Ukrainian presidential contest was important for Poland for several reasons, not least security on its eastern border. So, despite the risk Poland became deeply involved in Ukrainian domestic politics during the election, openly supporting one candidate and opposing another. This Polish behavior and the consequences for Polish-Russian relations reverberate to this day. POLAND'S STAKE IN THE 2004 UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Poland had a large stake in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election that primarily concerned Polish security and regional strategy in the east. But, there were other reasons for Poland's interest in the outcome of the election that included Russian influence-building ambitions in Ukraine under President Vladimir Putin, the future development of Ukraine's fragile democracy, the well being of a Polish speaking minority living in Ukraine near its border with Poland; and a concern about, perhaps even an alarm over likely domestic and foreign policies of the leading presidential candidate during the campaign, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich who had the support of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and Russian President Putin. Security and Strategy Of utmost importance to Poland is the Polish-Ukrainian "Strategic Partnership" built by Poland's post-communist leaders from the early 1990's onward. It is a policy both sides had worked hard to cultivate. (1) In fact, the Ukrainian government in the 1990's, embraced the partnership at the risk straining relations with Russia. The partnership is based on three principles: first, reconciliation of past differences between the two countries; second cooperation to safeguard the newly won post-Soviet era independence of both partners; and third, avoidance of conflict of any kind between the two states that would increase their strategic vulnerability to an outside threat, say from Russia. (2) The Polish-Ukrainian partnership is important for maintaining Polish security in the east vis-a-vis Russia in the post-communist era. It is part of a comprehensive Polish strategy in the post-communist era of linking countries along Russia's western flank particularly the Baltic Republics and Belarus to the West, which form a sort of European front line with Russia. Poland and the Baltic Republics are in NATO and the European Union (EU) They can present a strong counterweight to Russia's influence on Ukraine. (3) The Polish Ukrainian partnership annoyed the Kremlin because it encouraged Ukraine's recent leaders, Presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, despite their close ties to Russia, to strengthen ties with the West. The Polish Partnership with Ukraine bothered the Kremlin because it rivaled and threatened to undercut Russian influence in Kiev which has a long history of closeness to Russia. Indeed, the Kremlin has tried to push the leadership in Ukraine from time to time to limit ties to the West and expand cooperation with Russia, especially in the military area. The Polish-Ukrainian partnership stood to be weakened or strengthened depending on who won the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections. It stood to be weakened, but by no means abandoned, by the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovic. It stood to be continued and strengthened by the pro-West Viktor Yushchenko who was serving as Prime Minister in 2004. Were Yanukovich to win the election, the Kremlin would expect Ukraine to strengthen ties with Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). …


This article uses the case of paying for a college education to study broad issues of equity, both between families and between generations. As a normative matter, I argue that we should subsidize the education of those who are disadvantaged, but that is because a college education generally 'pays off,' society as a whole should not subsidize most students. Rather, the government can serve the valuable function of simply ensuring that students have access to sufficient loans to finance their education. Congress recently enacted President Clinton's proposal to convert the federal role from a guarantor of student loans to a direct lender (for a phased-in portion of student loans). Direct lending will allow a novel repayment option: the graduate can elect to repay the government out of a modest percentage of her future income. Much of the article explores the difficulties of trying to determine an individual's financial resources, so that the government can best target its subsidies. When do we view the child separately from his family? When is it proper to look to a student's lifetime rather than current resources? Using the public finance literature, I examine the limitations of our governmental redistributive tools. Happily, most of the conceptual difficulties melt away in the face of an income-contingent repayment mechanism, which basically matches payments of principal and interest to the profits from an education. For most graduates, a percentage-of-income cap is the only real insurance they need against doing poorly in the job market. However, because President Clinton's proposal perpetuated existing federal subsidies in the guaranteed student loan program, Congress missed the opportunity to make the program fairer by applying analyses based on intergenerational equity and lifetime income.


This paper discusses the development of a virtual reality (VR) interface for the visualization of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) data. The application, VR-CFD, provides an immersive and interactive graphical environment in which users can examine the analysis results from a CFD analysis of a flow field in three-dimensional space. It has been tested and implemented with virtual reality devices such as the C2, head mounted display (HMD) and desktop VR. The application is designed to read PLOT3D structured grid data and to display the flow field parameters using features such as streamlines, cutting planes, iso-surfaces, rakes, vector fields and scalar fields. Visualization Toolkit (VTK), a data visualization library, is used along with OpenGL and the C2 VR interface libraries, to develop the application. Analysts and designers have used VRCFD to visualize and understand complex three-dimensional fluid flow phenomena. The combination of three-dimensional interaction capability and the C2 virtual reality environment has been shown to facilitate collaborative discussions between analysts and engineers concerning the appropriateness of the CFD model and the characteristics of the fluid flow.


The purpose of this study is to contribute to the existing research in the field of packaging and marketing and shed more light on the psychology of colors and their effect on packaging and marketing. Nowadays, packaging is proved to be one of the significant factors in the success of promoting product sale. However, there is a perceived gap with respect to the different aspects of packaging, in particular the graphics, design, and color of packaging. The current study provides a comprehensive overview of packaging. It elaborates on different aspects of packaging and summarizes the findings of the most recent research conducted to date probing into packaging from different perspectives. It also discusses the role of color, i.e., the psychology of colors, and graphics in packaging and product sale. It is argued that graphics and color play key roles in promoting product sale and designers and marketers should attach a great deal of importance to color in packaging. The implications for producers, marketers, practitioners, and researchers are discussed in detail and suggestions for future research are provided.


Regulatory schemes have remained an open question about the implementation of an urban bus system. Because of the introduction of a higher private initiative within these systems, the expectation of increased patronage has not been met. Hence, studying the effect of regulation on innovation becomes the first objective of this research because innovative solutions may help to attract users. To fulfill that objective, an analysis of innovative capabilities was carried out. The aim was to understand the gap between potential and practical innovation on the authorities and operators. The second objective was to use theoretical modeling to find the effect of payment schemes on frequency and bus size. Both analyses used as a case study the experience of Transantiago in Santiago, Chile. Innovation proved to be dependent on the regulatory scheme in which an operation was framed. Both authorities and operators showed the existence of innovative capabilities dependent on the perceived incentives. Trusting cooperation was an aspect that might have encouraged some types of innovation, such as route design. Analytical solutions showed that as in the experience of Transantiago, supply-based payments provided higher frequency and smaller bus size than fixed payments. Finally, an optimal tariff gave incentives to the operators to provide socially optimal levels of frequency and bus size for a certain demand level.


Collaboration among Security Service Functions (SSF) is expected to become as essential to SECaaS (SECurity as a Service) systems as elasticity is to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The virtualization opens new era in network security as new security appliances can be created on demand in appropriate places in the network. At the same time, the increasing size and diversity of attacks make it necessary to come up with new approaches for more efficient and more resilient security mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new framework leveraging SDN (Software Defined Networking) and SFC (Service Function Chaining) to enhance the collaboration among different SSFs to mitigate large scale attacks. We describe a framework that allows SSFs from different domains to negotiate and dynamically control the amount of resources allocated for collaboration, in what we call a "best-effort" collaboration mode. This SSF collaboration framework creates a distributed mitigation system for handling large scale attacks in a dynamic and scalable manner. The efficiency and feasibility of this framework is experimentally assessed, showing that our approach incurs low overhead, increases the amount of traffic treated by SSFs and reduces the dropped traffic due to the lack of resources from the security mechanisms.


Transfer Learning is concerned with the application of knowledge gained from solving a problem to a different but related problem domain. In this paper, we propose a method and efficient algorithm for ranking and selecting representations from a Restricted Boltzmann Machine trained on a source domain to be transferred onto a target domain. Experiments carried out using the MNIST, ICDAR and TiCC image datasets show that the proposed adaptive feature ranking and transfer learning method offers statistically significant improvements on the training of RBMs. Our method is general in that the knowledge chosen by the ranking function does not depend on its relation to any specific target domain, and it works with unsupervised learning and knowledge-based transfer.


Because clindamycin therapy has been associated with severe colitis which may end fatally, it should be reserved for serious infections where less toxic antimicrobial agents are inappropriate, as described in the INDICATIONS AND USAGE section. It should not be used in patients with nonbacterial infections such as most upper respiratory tract infections. C.difficile produces toxins A and B which contribute to the development of CDAD. Hypertoxin producing strains of C.difficile cause increased morbidity and mortality, as these infections can be refractory to antimicrobial therapy and may require colectomy. CDAD must be considered in all patients who present with diarrhea following antibiotic use. Careful medical history is necessary since CDAD has been reported to occur over two months after the administration of antibacterial agents. If CDAD is suspected or confirmed, ongoing antibiotic use not directed against C.difficile may need to be discontinued. Appropriate fluid and electrolyte management, protein supplementation, antibiotic treatment of C.difficile, and surgical evaluation should be instituted as clinically indicated.


To help users quickly understand the major opinions from massive online reviews, it is important to automatically reveal the latent structure of the aspects, sentiment polarities, and the association between them. However, there is little work available to do this effectively. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical aspect sentiment model (HASM) to discover a hierarchical structure of aspect-based sentiments from unlabeled online reviews. In HASM, the whole structure is a tree. Each node itself is a two-level tree, whose root represents an aspect and the children represent the sentiment polarities associated with it. Each aspect or sentiment polarity is modeled as a distribution of words. To automatically extract both the structure and parameters of the tree, we use a Bayesian nonparametric model, recursive Chinese Restaurant Process (rCRP), as the prior and jointly infer the aspect-sentiment tree from the review texts. Experiments on two real datasets show that our model is comparable to two other hierarchical topic models in terms of quantitative measures of topic trees. It is also shown that our model achieves better sentence-level classification accuracy than previously proposed aspect-sentiment joint models.