ABSTRACT Measles virus (MV) immunosuppression is due to infection of SLAM-positive immune cells, whereas respiratory shedding and virus transmission are due to infection of nectin4-positive airway epithelial cells. The vaccine lineage MV strain Edmonston (MV-Edm) acquired an additional tropism for CD46 which is the basis of its oncolytic specificity. VSVFH is a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) encoding the MV-Edm F and H entry proteins in place of G. The virus spreads faster than MV-Edm and is highly fusogenic and a potent oncolytic. To determine whether ablating nectin4 tropism from VSVFH might prevent shedding, increasing its safety profile as an oncolytic, or might have any effect on CD46 binding, we generated VSVFH viruses with H mutations that disrupt attachment to SLAM and/or nectin4. Disruption of nectin4 binding reduced release of VSVFH from the basolateral side of differentiated airway epithelia composed of Calu-3 cells. However, because nectin4 and CD46 have substantially overlapping receptor binding surfaces on H, disruption of nectin4 binding compromised CD46 binding and greatly diminished the oncolytic potency of these viruses on human cancer cells. Thus, our results support continued preclinical development of VSVFH without ablation of nectin4 binding.


If mass extinctions were caused by reduced primary productivity, then extinctions should be concentrated among animals with starvation-susceptible feeding modes, active lifestyles, and high-energy budgets. The stratigraphic ranges (by stage) of 424 genera of bivalves and 309 genera of articulate brachiopods suggest that there was an unusual reduction of primary productivity at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary extinction. For bivalves at the K/T, there were (1) selective extinction of suspension feeders and other susceptible trophic categories relative to deposit feeders and other resistant categories, and (2) among suspension feed-ers, selective extinction of bivalves with active locomotion. During the Permian-Triassic (P/Tr) extinction and Jurassic background time, extinction rates among suspension feeders were greater for articulate brachiopods than for bivalves. But during the K/T event, extinction rates of articulates and suspension-feeding bivalves equalized, possibly because the low-energy budgets of articulates gave them an advantage when food was scarce.


The properties of semiconducting polymers are strongly influenced by their aggregation behavior, that is, their aggregate fraction and backbone planarity. However, tuning these properties, particularly the backbone planarity, is challenging. This work introduces a novel solution treatment to precisely control the aggregation of semiconducting polymers, namely current-induced doping (CID). It utilizes spark discharges between two electrodes immersed in a polymer solution to create strong electrical currents resulting in temporary doping of the polymer. Rapid doping-induced aggregation occurs upon every treatment step for the semiconducting model-polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene). Therefore, the aggregate fraction in solution can be precisely tuned up to a maximum value determined by the solubility of the doped state. A qualitative model for the dependences of the achievable aggregate fraction on the CID treatment strength and various solution parameters is presented. Moreover, the CID treatment can yield an extraordinarily high quality of backbone order and planarization, expressed in UV-vis absorption spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry measurements. Depending on the selected parameters, an arbitrarily lower backbone order can be chosen using the CID treatment, allowing for maximum control of aggregation. This method may become an elegant pathway to finely tune aggregation and solid-state morphology for thin-films of semiconducting polymers.


Citizen science refers to scientific research that is carried out by volunteers, often in collaboration with professional scientists.
The spread of the internet has allowed volunteers to contribute to citizen science projects in dramatically new ways while creating scientific value and gaining pedagogical and social benefits. Given the sheer size of available projects, finding the right project, which best suits the user preferences and capabilities, has become a major challenge and is essential for keeping volunteers motivated and active contributors. We address this challenge by developing a system for personalizing project recommendations which was fully deployed in the wild. We adapted several recommendation algorithms to the citizen science domain from the literature based on memory-based and model-based collaborative filtering approaches. The algorithms were trained on historical data of users' interactions in the SciStarter platform - a leading citizen science site -as well as their contributions to different projects.
The trained algorithms were evaluated in SciStarter and involved hundreds of users who were provided with personalized recommendations for new projects they had not contributed to before. The results show that using the new recommendation system led people to increased participation in new SciStarter projects when compared to groups that were recommended projects using non-personalized
 recommendation approaches, and compared to behavior before recommendations. In particular, the group of volunteers receiving recommendations created by an SVD algorithm (matrix factorization) exhibited the highest levels of contributions to new projects, when compared to the other cohorts. A follow-up survey conducted with the SciStarter community confirmed that users felt that the recommendations matched their personal interests and goals. Based on these results, our recommendation system is now fully integrated into the SciStarter portal, positively affecting hundreds of users each week, and leading to social and educational benefits.


Agrarian landscapes are among the least understood features of first millennium B.C. societies in the western Mediterranean. Studies of such landscapes in the context of the Iberian Iron Age have been based essentially on the archeological record in places used for purposes other than farming, particularly settlements and areas reserved for burials and rituals, or on the identification of the possible use of fertilizers. Here we present a multiproxy analysis of an agrarian landscape based on geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental studies in a mountainous region in southeastern Iberia. The findings confirmed the existence of farmland cultivated as early as the first millennium B.C. in the high Jutia Valley in the Spanish province of Albacete. These results suggest that coordinated analyses can be highly useful for identifying enduring agricultural practices, while contributing to a fuller understanding of western Mediterranean agrarian landscapes and their millenarian resilience, attributable to the coevolution of human communities and the environment.


In an attempt to determine the mechanism whereby thalassemia in its milder forms may protect against malaria, we have examined the expression of neoantigen at the surface of Plasmodium falciparum- parasitized thalassemic red cells. Neoantigen expression was estimated by measurement of antibody bound after incubation in serum from adults living in a malaria-endemic area, using a quantitative radiometric antiglobulin assay. We found that P. falciparum-parasitized alpha- and beta-thalassemic red cells bind greater levels of antibody from endemic serum than controls: mean binding ratios (+/- SE), respectively, for alpha- and beta-thalassemia compared with controls were 1.69 +/- 0.12 and 1.23 +/- 0.06 on a cell for cell basis, and 1.97 +/- 0.11 and 1.47 +/- 0.08 after a correction for surface area differences. Binding of antibody increased exponentially during parasite maturation. In addition, we found a small but significant degree of binding of naturally occurring antibody to parasitized red cells, the extent of which was also greater in thalassemia. The apparent protective effect of thalassemia against malaria may be related to enhanced immune recognition and hence clearance of parasitized erythrocytes.


We recently described a new neurodevelopmental syndrome (TAF1/MRXS33 intellectual disability [ID] syndrome) (MIM# 300966) caused by pathogenic variants involving the X‐linked gene TATA‐box binding protein associated factor 1 (TAF1), which participates in RNA polymerase II transcription. The initial study reported 11 families, and the syndrome was defined as presenting early in life with hypotonia, facial dysmorphia, and developmental delay that evolved into ID and/or autism spectrum disorder. We have now identified an additional 27 families through a genotype‐first approach. Familial segregation analysis, clinical phenotyping, and bioinformatics were capitalized on to assess potential variant pathogenicity, and molecular modeling was performed for those variants falling within structurally characterized domains of TAF1. A novel phenotypic clustering approach was also applied, in which the phenotypes of affected individuals were classified using 51 standardized Human Phenotype Ontology terms. Phenotypes associated with TAF1 variants show considerable pleiotropy and clinical variability, but prominent among previously unreported effects were brain morphological abnormalities, seizures, hearing loss, and heart malformations. Our allelic series broadens the phenotypic spectrum of the TAF1/MRXS33 ID syndrome and the range of TAF1 molecular defects in humans. It also illustrates the challenges for determining the pathogenicity of inherited missense variants, particularly for a gene mapping to chromosome X.


This paper attempts to perform a comparative analysis of brain signals dataset using various machine learning classifiers such as random forest, gradient boosting, support vector machine, extra trees classifier. The comparative analysis is accomplished based on the performance parameters such as accuracy, area under the ROC curve (AUC), specificity, recall, and precision. The key focus of this paper is to exercise the machine learning practices over an Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals dataset provided by Rochester Institute of Technology and to provide meaningful results using the same. EEG signals are usually captivated to diagnose the problems related to the electrical activities of the brain as it tracks and records brain wave patterns to produce a definitive report on seizure activities of the brain. While exercising machine learning practices, various data preprocessing techniques were implemented to attain cleansed and organized data to predict better results and higher accuracy. Section II gives a comprehensive presurvey of existing work performed so far on the same; furthermore, section III sheds light on the dataset used for this research.


In this paper I will discuss the effects of online communication on social connectivity and the development of community, as specifically related to teacher communities. I will begin by discussing differing constructions and aspects of the concept of community and the important role of connectivity in the development of community. I will then discuss modern technologies in the realm of CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication), the foundations of these technologies as actual tools for collaboration and community, and the role these technologies play in developing connectedness in communities. I will then draw out characteristics and value in virtual community interaction and its relationship to "real" or offline community as it exists. Identity, cultural and language issues will be discussed as they relate to online communities. I will then focus on the implications that flow from this for the development of a teacher community through online communication. Finally I will analyze two threads to illustrate some of the themes discussed above.


This thesis sets out to investigate and resolve a number of technical issues relating to the residual shear strength of clay soils. For this research the principal objectives concerned strain rate effects using the Bromhead Ring Shear and associated other factors their effects on residual shear strength, replication of the stress path and the homogeneity of clay. The principal areas of investigation are concerned with effects of varying rates of strain on residual shear strength, influence of "stress path" in determining residual shear strength and innate variability of residual strength in natural strata. Finally the principal conclusions were that the Ring Shear was excellent for British Landslides but at high strain rates there were problems with pore water movement and extrusion which are artefacts of the design. Stepless application of normal stress reduces these effects as it removes extreme stress changes. Clay strata are non homogeneous hence the requirement for continuous characterization tests.


One of Indonesian traditional food, expecially in Minangkabau called galamai was baked with inefficient and complicated manner. At least 4 or 5 person were needed to mix 30 kg galamai batter for 6 hours during baking process. This research solved those problems. The aim  of this work was to displace a human labor with an automatic machine to make it more efficient.  The basic idea of this reseach is to desain an automatic mixer by using camera sensor for controling the speed of DC machine. This mixer was worked base on the fact galamai batter characteristics that its color and viscosity will change during cooking process. Discoloration in galamai batter will be captured by camera sensor as a data input. Images data of the color of galamai batter will be converted in grayscale images. The intensity of gray scale image became an input for  FIS (Fuzzy Inference System) which controled the speed of  machine. The speed of motor will increase when the grayscale color of galamai batter is low. The system could controlled turning speed of motor automatically with acuration of speed value is more than 96.4% and synchronized in variation of galamai batter volume.


The human ability to track musical downbeats is robust to changes in tempo, and it extends to tempi never previously encountered. We propose a deterministic time-warping operation that enables this skill in a convolutional neural network (CNN) by allowing the network to learn rhythmic patterns independently of tempo. Unlike conventional deep learning approaches, which learn rhythmic patterns at the tempi present in the training dataset, the patterns learned in our model are tempo-invariant, leading to better tempo generalisation and more efficient usage of the network capacity. We test the generalisation property on a synthetic dataset created by rendering the Groove MIDI Dataset using FluidSynth, split into a training set containing the original performances and a test set containing tempo-scaled versions rendered with different SoundFonts (test-time augmentation). The proposed model generalises nearly perfectly to unseen tempi (F-measure of 0.89 on both training and test sets), whereas a comparable conventional CNN achieves similar accuracy only for the training set (0.89) and drops to 0.54 on the test set. The generalisation advantage of the proposed model extends to real music, as shown by results on the GTZAN and Ballroom datasets.


We demonstrate that two-wave mixing of partially coherent light beams inside a medium with an inertial nonlinear response allows one to increase the coherence substantially. An increase of the coherence function from 0.24 to 0.94 is demonstrated experimentally in SBN:Ce crystal.


The three-dimensional structure of the basic pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI) contains four internal water molecules, which form a total of nine intermolecular hydrogen bonds with the BPTI polypeptide chain. To investigate the effect of such internal hydration on protein structure and stability, we displaced one of the internal water molecules in a recombinant BPTI analogue, BPTI(G36S), in which Gly 36 is replaced by serine. The replacement of a water molecule by the seryl side chain was established by the absence of the protein-water nuclear Overhauser effects (NOE) that had been attributed to the water molecule near Gly 36 in wild-type BPTI and by the presence of new, intramolecular NOEs to the hydroxyl proton of Ser 36. BPTI(G36S) has slightly reduced thermal stability compared to BPTI, corresponding to a destabilization by delta (delta G) approximately 0.7 kcal/M in 6 M guanidinium hydrochloride solution. Additionally, the stabilities of the complexes formed between BPTI(G36S) and trypsin, plasmin, or kallikrein are significantly reduced when compared to the corresponding complexes with wild-type BPTI.


End-to-end communication in highly-dynamic airborne networks is challenging due to the presence of highly mobile nodes and the inherent nature of wireless communication channels. Domain-specific protocols are required that can address these challenges and enable reliable transmission of data in this environment. We develop the ANTP (airborne network and transport protocols) suite that operates in this highly-dynamic environment while utilising cross-layer optimisations between the physical, MAC, network, and transport layers. We show how each component in the ANTP suite outperforms the traditional TCP/IP and MANET protocols through simulation using ns-3. Having verified these protocols through simulation and analysis, the next step towards deployment of the ANTP suite is developing a cross-platform implementation of the protocols. Towards this end we present an architecture for the protocol stack to be implemented in the Python programming language.


Methodological individualism underpins economic analysis. In his paper in this volume, however, Douglas Glen Whitman demonstrates that group selection can be reconciled with methodological individualism. This essay extends Whitman's analysis in two ways. First, it summarizes and restates the necessary conditions for group selection to play a role in the evolution of human preferences and societies. Second, it discusses the role of group selection in Hayek's thought, with a particular focus on the role of group selection in the evolution of legal rules and the rule of law. The viability of group selection is demonstrated to be an empirical question.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~tzywick2/Advances in Austrian Economics.pdf


In marine ecosystems the interactions among protists and prokaryotes (eubacteria and cyanobacteria) and effects on zooplankton play a dominant role in food web ecology and trophodynamics. Among protists and cyanobacteria, species considered to be harmful algae can cause harm by forming aggregations of cells known as harmful algal blooms (HABs). Certain harmful algae can cause negative ecological effects even at relatively low cell concentrations by production of potent phycotoxins, thereby killing or incapacitating micro-grazers and diverse organisms such as fish, sea-birds and marine mammals by vectorial transfer through marine food webs. Although the ecological role of phycotoxins is poorly understood, the obvious ability of toxic protists to survive, thrive and occasionally to dominate the plankton via the formation of blooms, supports the hypothesis that these bioactive secondary metabolites have a distinct function in the ecological success and evolution of the species.A key component for defining the factors responsible for bloom development is the biochemical and molecular regulation of the toxic and other allelochemical interactions among grazers, prey, and competitors. Knowledge of the genes and enzymes involved in phycotoxin production and their metabolic regulation within the cell, and molecular regulation of other secondary metabolites that may function as allelochemicals, is very limited. Functional genomic and proteomic studies on regulation of phycotoxins/allelochemicals are crucial for our understanding of the molecular ecology of toxigenic microalgae. Studies on genetic regulation and intrinsic control mechanisms of growth and cell proliferation are also required. During the last few years, rapid advances in molecular technologies are allowing us to begin to address this lack of knowledge. Whole genome sequencing and limited genomic approaches, such as expressed sequence tags (ESTs), complemented with the development of DNA-microarrays, are powerful tools to address questions in functional genomics. Application of a spectrum of molecular methods has begun to yield valuable insights into the genetic regulation of processes such as growth and toxin synthesis in marine protists.


Maximizing submodular functions under cardinality constraints lies at the core of numerous data mining and machine learning applications, including data diversification, data summarization, and coverage problems. In this work, we study this question in the context of data streams, where elements arrive one at a time, and we want to design low-memory and fast update-time algorithms that maintain a good solution. Specifically, we focus on the sliding window model, where we are asked to maintain a solution that considers only the last W items. In this context, we provide the first non-trivial algorithm that maintains a provable approximation of the optimum using space sublinear in the size of the window. In particular we give a 1/3 - ε approximation algorithm that uses space polylogarithmic in the spread of the values of the elements, δ, and linear in the solution size k for any constant ε > 0. At the same time, processing each element only requires a polylogarithmic number of evaluations of the function itself. When a better approximation is desired, we show a different algorithm that, at the cost of using more memory, provides a 1/2 - ε approximation, and allows a tunable trade-off between average update time and space. This algorithm matches the best known approximation guarantees for submodular optimization in insertion-only streams, a less general formulation of the problem. We demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithms on a number of real world datasets, showing that their practical performance far exceeds the theoretical bounds. The algorithms preserve high quality solutions in streams with millions of items, while storing a negligible fraction of them.


When legal scholars specializing in financial regulation have examined the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), their lens has usually focused on matters outside of the core public law expertise they are best positioned to contribute. This curious state of affairs is the consequence of the historical mutual disinterest between administrative law scholars and financial regulatory scholars. This Article helps bridge this divide, conducting a comprehensive administrative law analysis of the FSOC's Section 113 designation program, and using it as a case study of an emerging trend in U.S. public law: increased contestation concerning the legal legitimacy of financial supervisory programs that provide for extensive, open-ended discretion on the part of regulators.

Today, the FSOC's designation program and other supervisory programs like it require financial supervisors to draw from an ever-deeper reservoir of administrative discretion to make hypothetical and conjectural assessments of future events. These programs have come to resemble so-called "risk regulatory" regimes — programs that require the exercise of significant regulatory discretion to counteract future harms subject to non-trivial uncertainty. In response, affected regulatory subjects have seized upon this discretionary power, calling into question the legality of its exercise. This Article analyzes the legal sufficiency of the procedural and substantive constraints on the FSOC's discretion embedded in the FSOC's designation statute and its own rulemakings.

It uncovers several structural problems with the FSOC framework. Whereas some of these problems are susceptible to amendatory fixes, others are not. These more trenchant problems are ubiquitous in risk regulatory regimes, but financial supervisory regimes have yet to develop the institutional and doctrinal forms needed to reconcile such open-ended discretion with the rule of administrative law. In presenting this analysis, the Article fires a warning shot in the direction of financial regulators, policymakers, and scholars, cautioning them that other programs are likely to be contested in the near future.


This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they encounter when interpreting these symbols. Video data were collected with 30 children between four and five years of age. From the children's verbal and non-verbal interactions, four different categories of sense-making were constructed: by material, by object type, by appearance and by function. Three stumbling blocks were identified. The first had to do with giving the symbols a different logical meaning to the intended one; the second related to what materials the different refuse items were made of; the third was being able to stick to one correct way of interpreting each symbol.


This study documents for the first time the ages and structural field relationships of banded orthogneisses, and associated high-grade paragneisses, from the Mkhondo River in the Ancient Gneiss Complex of Swaziland, whose age and regional context has been disputed. LA-ICP-MS U-Pb zircon dating shows that the orthogneiss unit mapped as Mahamba gneiss is composed of a 3215 ± 12 Ma granodiorite phase that was intruded by a 3162 ± 11 Ma felsic granitic phase. A hornblende-bearing tonalite dated at 2889 ± 13 Ma, which occurs structurally beneath the Mkhondo Valley Metamorphic Suite (MVMS) metasediments, experienced a metamorphic overprint at 2735 ± 11 Ma that coincided with granulite facies metamorphism and partial melting in the MVMS (Taylor et al., 2010). Both the MVMS and the Mahamba gneisses are characterised by north-northwest aligned, syn-peak-metamorphic deformation structures, indicating a period of west-southwest to east-northeast directed crustal shortening. Neither the Mahamba gneisses, nor the hornblende tonalite are intrusive into the structurally overlying MVMS sediments. This suggests that: (1) the Mahamba gneisses form part of the exposed basement in the area; and (2) the MVMS is a relatively young, late Archaean sedimentary succession that is unrelated to ≥ 3.23 Ga high-grade paragneiss units documented to the east and northeast of the MVMS (Taylor et al., 2012).


The demand for oil products in Asia, particularly in China and India, is now growing strongly. The demand is estimated to rise to 29.9 million b/d by 2015, demonstrating growth of 15% (approximately 3.9 million b/d) compared to 26 million b/d in 2009. As for supply, until 2008, Asian countries had strived to upgrade their refining capacities only proportionate to demand. Contrary to this, large-scale projects to upgrade facilities undertaken by China and India in 2009 pushed up the refining capacity to 28 million b/d, outpacing demand by 2 million b/d. China and India have plans to upgrade their refining capacities by 3.3 million b/d and 1.2 million b/d by 2015, respectively, which means that supply will surpass demand (29.9 million b/d) by 3 million b/d by 2015. These facts reveal the issue of overcapacity of refining facilities. It is important for the Japanese oil refining sector to curtail such overcapacity so as to achieve an optimal supply-demand balance, to promote trading of products with an emphasis on Japan's advantages, and thereby to reinforce its international competitiveness. Major Asian countries can be divided into two categories in accordance with their oil pricing mechanisms : i.e. countries where oil price is determined based on the free market mechanism, such as Japan, South Korea, etc; and countries where the oil pricing mechanism is regulated by the government, such as China, Taiwan, India, etc. It is important to keep a close watch on the countries with a regulated pricing mechanism, as the recent trend shows that these countries will take steps for deregulation in the future. Oil pricing is closely connected to demand. The climate of demand is the key factor for determining a profitable price. The Japanese oil sectors will need to strive to eliminate the factors which would be obstacles to fair pricing, by means of addressing the overcapacity so as to achieve an optimal supply-demand balance and coming up with effective frameworks to ensure a sound market. In addition, in order for the Japanese oil sectors to sustain their supply chains while maintaining an optimal supply-demand balance, they would need to move ahead to take restructuring steps including a new pricing mechanism so as to attain both "adequate refining margin" and "shortening time lags."


Beta cell function is an important factor in the development of both Type 1 (T1D) and Type 2 (T2D) diabetes mellitus. T1D is characterized by a primary defect in insulin secretion due to the immune-mediated beta cell destruction, however, the more common T2D beside insulin resistance also include impaired beta cell function as a consequence to abnormal glucose homeostasis. Genetic susceptibility is involved in both types of diabetes. We have studied several genetic and immunological factors affecting beta cell function. First, we tested whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the human Free Fatty Acid Receptor 1 (FFAR1) are associated with T2D and insulin secretion. Another genetic study focused on FOXP3 association with T1D and the disease-related clinical parameters. The role of microRNAs (miRNAs) on beta cell function was studied in the third project using a novel genetically engineered mouse model. Subsequently, the effect of Alpha 1-Antitrypsin (AAT) on cytokine-induced apoptosis and on insulin secretion was studied in beta cells in vitro. In Study I, we concluded that SNPs rs1978013 and rs1978014 in the upstream region of FFAR1 gene might contribute to impaired beta cell function in T2D. Study II showed that the minor A allele in the FOXP3 rs2232365 SNP might represent a protective factor in T1D pathogenesis and suggest a possible role of FOXP3 in the regulation of autoimmunity against pancreatic beta cells. We have demonstrated for the first time in Study III that targeted disruption of the Dicer1 gene specifically in beta cells leads to progressive impairment of insulin secretion and diabetes development. Our findings of Study IV show that AAT stimulates insulin secretion and protects beta cells against cytokine-induced apoptosis, and these effects of AAT seems to be mediated through the cAMP pathway. (Less)


Until recently, artificial intelligence researchers who use games as their experimental testbed have concentrated on games of perfect information. Many of these games have been amenable to brute-force search techniques. In contrast, games of imperfect information, such as bridge and poker, contain hidden information making similar search techniques impractical. This paper describes recent progress in developing a high-performance pokerplaying program. The advances come in two forms. First, we introduce a new betting strategy that returns a probabilistic betting decision, a probability triple, that gives the likelihood of a fold, call or raise occurring in a given situation. This component unifies all the expert knowledge used in the program, does a better job of representing the type of decision making needed to play strong poker, and improves the way information is propagated throughout the program. Second, real-time simulations are used to compute the expected values of betting decisions. The program generates an instance of the missing data, subject to any constraints that have been learned, and then simulates the rest of the game to determine a numerical result. By repeating this a sufficient number of times, a statistically meaningful sample is used in the program's decision-making process. Experimental results show that these enhancements each represent major advances in the strength of computer poker programs.


The current study investigates acoustic correlates associated with friendly formal and friendly informal speaking styles. A small corpus of speech was recorded by a native speaker of American English. The results revealed that that the most distinctive feature differentiating the two styles is the fundamental frequency. There was also a small difference found in the articulation rate and RMS energy between the two styles.


Going west from the quintessentially English Cotswolds you will find an Island of cultural and ethnic diversity that is the City of Gloucester. As the xenophobic and nationalistic rhetoric ramped up after the announcement of the referendum on leaving the EU, a collaboration between Gloucester Artist Russell Haines and Filmmaker Mike Parker began. Russell was a builder who began painting as part of the healing process when recovering from depression and a stroke. Mike Parker is a filmmaker with a body of work that focuses on cultural identity.

"Faith" is the first part of a trilogy of exhibitions exploring our differences. "Faith", "Hope" and "Charity" examine the fundamental issues that divide religious belief, cultural practices, and economic disparities and tries to find out what we have in common. "Faith" is major site-specific exhibition with work by artist Russell Haines and filmmakers Mike Parker and Rob Daglish who created four films that were integrated within the exhibition, "Why", Happiness", "Repression" and "Afterlife"
It was important that the films did not follow a traditional narrative structure but could be experienced in the context of the space and as part of the exhibition of 38 large scale portraits in Gloucester Cathedral.
Though the audio tracks to the films were based on answers from the people that were interviewed, the decision was taken to never see anyone speaking in vision. Instead, they used a split screen approach, the interviewees unconscious that the camera was focusing on them, mixed with images of places of religion and street scenes in Gloucester that became a character itself in the films.

The development included filmed debates, interfaith activities and the exhibition opened with an Islamic call to prayer, music, food and dance that resulted in an increased understanding, and coming together of the different communities. Despite international outcry from right wing Christian fundamentalists, the project has brought the diverse communities closer and fostered a number of interfaith activities, debate and outreach programmes with the exhibition since touring venues around the UK.

Mike Parker's earlier work that included "Gododdin" HTV 1999, "Silent Village?" BBC Wales 1992, "Satellite City" BBC Wales 1994-98 and the Royal Court co-production "Gas Station Angel" 1998 explored cultural identity in Wales using more conventional mediums. Working to create the films for "Faith" exhibition with Russell and Rob allowed Mike to explore new uses of film within communities to explore similar themes.


\(Nesidiocoris\) \(tenuis\) Reuter (Hemiptera: Miridae) and \(Lysiphlebus\) \(testaceipes\) (Cresson) (Hymenoptera: Braconidae, Aphidiinae) are candidate biological control agents known to play an important role in the management of agricultural and horticultural pests in southern Europe. Through a series of laboratory and field assessments, this study investigates the establishment potential of these two species in cool temperate climates typical of northern Europe. Laboratory results demonstrated a low level of cold tolerance in \(N.\) \(tenuis\) with a developmental threshold of 12.9°C and no indication of ability to diapause. Field trials supported these findings with 100% mortality occurring after less than 4 weeks of winter field exposure. Collectively, these data suggest that \(N.\) \(tenuis\) is unlikely to establish outdoors in northern Europe and would therefore have little or no non-target effects on native species in such regions, thereby constituting a 'safe' candidate for release. Additionally, investigations into temperature-related thresholds indicated that \(N.\)\(tenuis\) would be an effective control agent against species with a similar activity profile to the two-spotted spider mite \(Tetranychus\) \(urticae\) Koch (Acari: Tetranychidae). \(Lysiphlebus\) \(testaceipes\)demonstrated a greater ability to tolerate cold than \(N.\) \(tenuis\) but there was no indication of ability to diapause. With a developmental threshold of 5.8°C, parasitoid larvae and pupae continued to develop during the 70 d of winter field trials yielding reproductively viable adults. With this level of cold tolerance and a host range in excess of 100 aphid species, including some known to overwinter in the UK and other temperate regions, it seems reasonable to predict that \(L.\) \(testaceipes\) would be able to establish in northern Europe. Thermal activity threshold investigations also indicated that \(L.\) \(testaceipes\) would constitute an effective control agent for pest species with similar activity profiles to \(Aphis\) \(fabae\) Scop. (Hemiptera: Aphididae) under a range of climatic conditions. These data are discussed in relation to current debate on the environmental risk assessment and regulatory system in Europe for the release of non-native biological control agents.


This article analyzes the background and current status of portfolio margining, how it has evolved over the past several years, and how the recent Dodd-Frank Act will impact its utilization and effectiveness. Portfolio margining allows a broker-dealer to analyze a client's total overall portfolio from a risk-based analytical model, establishing the proper minimum initial margin requirements for the entire portfolio applying certain parameters. To be a more effective tool, changes to the U.S. Bankrupcty Code were needed. The Dodd-Frank Act made those legislative changes. It's now up to the regulators to make portfolio margining an even more effective and utilized tool.


New Zealand's fauna of the family Tenebrionidae (Coleoptera) is recorded in a synonymic catalogue, presented alphabetically, which includes data on the primary type specimens. The composition of the fauna is summarised in a checklist of taxa, and keys are given to all valid taxa. Seven new genera and 35 new species are proposed, with brief diagnoses, and 23 new synonymies and 13 new combinations are recorded. The fauna here recognised comprises 36 valid genera in 16 tribes, and 149 valid species (10 of them introduced). There are 168 published specific names, excluding misspellings and misidentifications. Fortyfive species are illustrated in photographs or scanning electron micrographs.


This paper summarizes the processes of exchange/fluxes for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a small well‐studied rural lake, Esthwaite Water in northwest England. Measurements of PCB and PAH concentrations have been made in rain, air, water, dated sediment cores, and sediment trap samples over a 2‐yr study period and used to determine fluxes to and from the lake. A steady state mass balance model was used to construct an input‐output budget for the chemicals and to investigate the relative importance of transport into and out of the lake. The hydraulic transport from the lake was the most important loss mechanism for both PCBs and PAHs. Volatilization, not sedimentation, is currently the dominant loss process for PCBs in the water column, whereas, sedimentation exceeds volatilization for PAHs. The data further suggest that the current sediment‐water flux is upward for PCBs and downwards for PAHs, indicating that the sediments might be acting as a secondary source for PCBs but continue to act as a sink for PAHs. Riverine, catchment runoff, or both are believed to be the most important input for PCBs and PAHs to the lake although direct aerial deposition to the lake is also important for PCBs. Differences in the mixtures of compounds in the various compartments suggests significant fractionation of PCBs and PAHs in the air‐water‐sediment system in the lake.


The goal of the current paper is to verify how an entrepreneur's structural, relational and cognitive social capital levels are perceived by young people in Poland. The research involved a group of 374 undergraduate business students from a Polish university as participants. Participants completed a survey on entrepreneurial cognitions. It was found that participants assess the level of an entrepreneur's social capital as relatively low. Due to the fact that social capital, and its different dimensions, serve different purposes in the process of venture creation, the result obtained can be considered alarming. Its practical implications are related to the necessity to review and design activities facilitating the development of an entrepreneurial culture in Poland. The value and the originality of the paper lie in the approach that allowed us to investigate which dimensions of an entrepreneur's social capital are seen as particularly weak by people for whom launching a new business is a viable option in the near future.


Abstract MicroRNAs are a class of small non-coding RNAs that serve as important regulators of gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. They are stable in body fluids and pose great potential to serve as biomarkers. Here, we present a highly specific, sensitive and cost-effective system to quantify miRNA expression based on two-step RT-qPCR with SYBR-green detection chemistry called Two-tailed RT-qPCR. It takes advantage of novel, target-specific primers for reverse transcription composed of two hemiprobes complementary to two different parts of the targeted miRNA, connected by a hairpin structure. The introduction of a second probe ensures high sensitivity and enables discrimination of highly homologous miRNAs irrespectively of the position of the mismatched nucleotide. Two-tailed RT-qPCR has a dynamic range of seven logs and a sensitivity sufficient to detect down to ten target miRNA molecules. It is capable to capture the full isomiR repertoire, leading to accurate representation of the complete miRNA content in a sample. The reverse transcription step can be multiplexed and the miRNA profiles measured with Two-tailed RT-qPCR show excellent correlation with the industry standard TaqMan miRNA assays (r2 = 0.985). Moreover, Two-tailed RT-qPCR allows for rapid testing with a total analysis time of less than 2.5 hours.


The golden-headed or Cat Ba Langur ( Trachypithecus poliocephalus poliocephalus) is an endemic species of Cat Ba Island in northern Vietnam. It is listed as a critically endangered species in the IUCN red list because of its small, isolated sub-populations and low population numbers. This study was undertaken to understand the trend of population development and the risk of extinction of the species in the future. This will help conservationists to minimize the risk of extinction, and develop better conservation strategies for this species. A number of methods were carried out to examine the conservation status and life history of the langurs. This included conducting in-depth interviews with 21 members of forest protection groups and 20 staff of the Cat Ba National Park, gathering secondary data from reports and other publications dating from 1997 onwards, and conducting field surveys. These information and data were then used to construct a simulation model for the dynamics and viability of the langur population. The study found that 12 groups of the langurs consisting of a total of 50 – 60 individuals with an average group size of 4.67 individuals survived on Cat Ba Island. Disturbed social structure is one of the most significant reasons causing the stable population in the past twelve years, and it is predicted to continue to stabilize in the next 10 years, reaching 86 individuals by 2050. The validation tests have confirmed that the model is sufficient to be used as a tool for policy analysis and decision making for conservationists on the island. The effects of reproducing population on birth rate, and birth rate are two factors which have the most influence on the number of langurs. This clearly implies that an increase in the reproducing population numbers and birth rate would have a significant effect on the growth of langur population in the long-term. Relocation of non-reproductive groups to reproductive units, strict protection and management are important strategies to save this critically endangered species from extinction.


In a previous study, the photocatalytic activity of titania (TiO2) for the degradation of methyl orange was found to be significantly enhanced by the incorporation of carbon black (CB). This work aims to improve the catalyst activity further by changing the method of heat treatment and determining the optimal annealing temperature for the preparation of catalyst. The effect of annealing temperature on structure and activity of the prepared catalysts is also investigated. Experimental results reveal that the photocatalytic activities of both composite catalyst (TiO2/CB) and bare TiO2 annealed under N2 flowing are higher than those of those calcined under atmospheric air. An optimal annealing temperature of 600°C maximizes the photocatalytic activity. Above this temperature, the activities of both catalysts decrease owing to a phase change and the growth of TiO2 crystallites. The composite catalyst that was annealed at 600°C had a higher activity than Degussa P‐25. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 2011


The world's most successful Organizational Behavior textbook provides the research you want, in the language your students understand. This text makes current, relevant research come alive for readers. The 18th Edition reflects the most recent research and business events within the field of organizational behavior, while maintaining its hallmark features -- a clear writing style, cutting-edge content, and intuitive pedagogy. There's a reason why Robbins's textbooks have educated millions of students and have been translated into 20 languages -- and it's because of a commitment to provide engaging, cutting-edge material that helps students understand and connect with organizational behavior.


This book provides a comprehensive introduction to housing policy and finance in Britain. It describes changes in the condition and tenure of housing in the post-war period, and contrasts the massive investment in house building and improvement with allegations that housing conditions are deteriorating. It describes the rise of the public housing sector and the slight decline in the face of the Thatcher government's policy on council house sales, which followed. The book thus provides a background for the development of housing policy over the next decade.


Patients with chronic diseases such as cancer and AIDS often develop cachexia, a life-threatening disorder characterized by extensive weight loss and degeneration of skeletal muscle (see the Perspective by Tracey). The molecular pathogenesis of cachexia is poorly understood. Zimmers et al. show that mice develop a wasting syndrome resembling human cachexia when myostatin, a member of the transforming growth factor β family, is systemically administered at high levels. Prior administration of proteins that inhibit myostatin activity, such as follistatin, slowed weight loss in the mice. These results suggest that myostatin may be a useful drug target for prevention or treatment of cachexia, which is estimated to be the ultimate cause of death in about 25% of all cancer patients. K. Tracey, Lethal weight loss: The focus shifts to signal transduction. Science's STKE (2002), http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/OC_sigtrans;2002/130/pe21 [Abstract] [Full Text] T. A. Zimmers, M. V. Davies, L. G. Koniaris, P. Haynes, A. F. Esquela, K. N. Tomkinson, A. C. McPherron, N. M. Wolfman, S.-J. Lee, Induction of cachexia in mice by systemically administered myostatin. Science 296, 1486-1488 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Purpose: To explore the patients and healthcare providers' attitudes and perceptions of drug-related problems in Saudi Arabia. Methods: It is a 4-months cross-sectional survey of drug-related problem information in Saudi Arabia. The study consisted of two-part a demographic data, and second part contained the questions about the knowledge of drug-related problems, the frequent occurrence, the type of medication-induced those problems, and the resources information used about the drug-related problem. American Society of Health- System Pharmacist definitions of drug-related problems used. The 5-point Likert response scale system used. The survey distributed through social media. The questionnaire made of an electronic format, and it analyzed through survey monkey system. Results: The total responders were two hundred and one; the Saudi nationality was 188 (93.5%), and non-Saudi was 13 (6.5%) patient. The gender distribution was female 180 (89.6%), and the male was 21 (10.4%). The majority of them in age (18-44) 88% and located in Riyadh region 84 (41.8%) and Asir region 59 (29.4%). Of those 44 (22.1 %) were healthcare providers. The majority of responders showed good knowledge about medication non-compliance 150 (75.76%), and medication without indication 147 (73.1%), while an adequate revealed information of adverse drug reaction 128 (64%), and an indication without medication 124 (62%). The imperfect information found about drug interaction 75 (37.5%) and drug poisoning 89 (44.5%). The most frequent drug-related problems occurred with the patient last year at least once; it was drug noncompliance 142 (71.4%), indications without medication 100 (50%), and adverse medication events 80 (40%). The most resources information on drug-related problems used were the internet, medicine leaflet, and healthcare practitioners. Conclusion: Drug-related problems occurred at a high rate in Saudi patients. The knowledge of drug-related problems is not adequate. It is very demanding and comprehensive public education about medication and urgent implementation of the patient medications counseling program in Saudi Arabia. Key words: Patients, Healthcare providers, Attitudes, Perceptions, Drug-related problems, Saudi Arabia.


A tachykinin peptide was isolated from an extract of the intestine of the European green frog, Rana ridibunda, and its primary structure was established as: His-Lys-Leu-Asp-Ser-Phe-Ile-Gly-Leu-Met.CONH2. This sequence was confirmed by chemical synthesis and shows two amino acid substitutions (leucine for threonine at position 3 and isoleucine for valine at position 7) compared with neurokinin A. Binding parameters for synthetic [Leu3,Ile7]neurokinin A and mammalian tachykinins were compared using receptor-selective radioligands and crude membranes from tissues enriched in the NK1, NK2 and NK3 receptors. [Leu3,Ile7]Neurokinin A was approx. 3-fold less potent than substance P in inhibiting the binding of 125I-labelled [Sar9,Met(O2)11]substance P (labelled with Bolton-Hunter reagent) to rat submandibular gland (NK1 receptor), 8-fold less potent than neurokinin A in inhibiting the binding of [2-[125I]iodohistidine1]neurokinin A to rat stomach fundus (NK2 receptor) and 6-fold less potent than neurokinin B in inhibiting the binding of 125I-Bolton-Hunter-labelled scyliorhinin II to rat brain (NK3 receptor). Thus the frog neurokinin A-related peptide shows moderate affinity but lack of selectivity for all three tachykinin-binding sites in rat tissues. This non-selectivity is similar to that displayed by the molluscan tachykinin, eledoisin, which also contains an isoleucine residue in the corresponding position in the molecule.


Electrophysiology is entering the era of 'Big Data'. Multiple probes, each with hundreds to thousands of individual electrodes, are now capable of simultaneously recording from many brain regions. The major challenge confronting these new technologies is transforming the raw data into physiologically meaningful signals, i.e. single unit spikes. Sorting the spike events of individual neurons from a spatiotemporally dense sampling of the extracellular electric field is a problem that has attracted much attention [22, 23], but is still far from solved. Current methods still rely on human input and thus become unfeasible as the size of the data sets grow exponentially. Here we introduce the t-student stochastic neighbor embedding (t-sne) dimensionality reduction method [27] as a visualization tool in the spike sorting process. T-sne embeds the n-dimensional extracellular spikes (n = number of features by which each spike is decomposed) into a low (usually two) dimensional space. We show that such embeddings, even starting from different feature spaces, form obvious clusters of spikes that can be easily visualized and manually delineated with a high degree of precision. We propose that these clusters represent single units and test this assertion by applying our algorithm on labeled data sets both from hybrid [23] and paired juxtacellular/extracellular recordings [15]. We have released a graphical user interface (gui) written in python as a tool for the manual clustering of the t-sne embedded spikes and as a tool for an informed overview and fast manual curration of results from other clustering algorithms. Furthermore, the generated visualizations offer evidence in favor of the use of probes with higher density and smaller electrodes. They also graphically demonstrate the diverse nature of the sorting problem when spikes are recorded with different methods and arise from regions with different background spiking statistics.


In this study, we propose and test the moderator roles of career stages on the job characteristics–job satisfaction relationships among guest worker salespersons in Saudi Arabia. Due to the severe shortage of indigenous labor, Saudi Arabia brings in foreign workers as guest workers from various countries of the world. These foreign workers meet the human resource needs of both local and foreign companies. As expected, findings suggest that job autonomy, job identity, and job feedback have a stronger influence on guest workers' job satisfaction during the later stages of their career than during the early career stages. Of all the variables we tested, only the influence of job variety on job satisfaction does not vary across career stages. In general, the results indicate that managers are well advised to take into account guest worker salespersons' career stages when managing job characteristics.


ABSTRACT:This article uses a queer lens to examine two short stories by the Iraqi communist, teacher, and prose writer Dhu al-Nun Ayyub (1908–88), "The Eagles' Anthem" and "How I Found a Guy," published in his collection Sadiqi (1938). Scholars have avoided analysis of the homoerotic and heterotopic aspects of Ayyub's writings, even if they mention his depictions of physical attraction between men. Ratherthan read these fictional texts as sociological studies of sexual sensibilities, the article assumes that they tapped into and reflected psychological and social dynamics in interwar Baghdad. The Ayyub stories, which render homoerotic masculine sexualities as commonplace and a positive aspect of city spaces, are thus distinguished from most Iraqi writings during this period. The stories stage homoeroticism and love between men as democratic critique and affirmation of heterogeneity and vitality in a nationalist, militarist, and heteronormalizing setting that increasingly associated homosexuality with moral dissolution and backwardness.


Diversity has the potential to significantly benefit organizations by leading to positive work outcomes when diversity 'works'. Unfortunately, not only is our knowledge limited as to the necessary conditions and the mechanisms by which diversity affects individual, work performance and organizational outcomes, but we still know very little about which diversity management practices are most effective in promoting positive outcomes. We analyse the literature on diversity and its management, and describe how the seven papers included in this section advance our understanding of what organizations can do to get diversity at work to work. Our discussion points to the need for more research on how diversity at multiple levels affects work and organizational outcomes; the development of integrative theory which takes into account that diversity might not only engender separation and variety but also disparity; as well as to the need for more empirical attention to the climates or cultures that facilitate the positive effects of diversity on work and organizational outcomes. We suggest that future research should also identify those people management practices that are most powerful in the creation of a positive diversity climate, and the factors that moderate and underlie its effects on work and organizational outcomes. We conclude with proposals about how this might be achieved.


The static synchronous compensator is presented in order to improve an electrical network system performance. The present work aims to develop a Bayesian methodology for assessing the time-variant reliability of a complex electrical system taking into account reactive energy compensator (STATCOM). However, the complex aspect is not only related to the complexity of electrical system components architecture, nevertheless is allied to electrical network and STATCOM interactions. The Bayesian network is used for coping with this complexity constraint. The reliability-based assessment of reactive energy compensator effect is applied to a real case of a complex electrical system. The proposed Bayesian methodology application reveals that the STATCOM has a significant influence on electrical system reliability and the developed model can provide valuable information for decision makers to improve the system reliability performance. A Bayesian approach for the electrical system re• liability assessment is proposed.


Over the past century, flow regulation and vegetation encroachment have reduced active channel widths along the central Platte River, Nebraska. During the last two decades, an annual program of in‐channel vegetation management has been implemented to stabilize or expand active channel widths. Vegetation management practices are intended to enhance riverine habitats which include nocturnal roosting habitat for sandhill cranes. Evaluating the success of other management treatments such as streamflow modification requires an understanding of how flow shapes the sandbars in the river and how sandbar morphology interacts with flow to create crane habitat. These linkages were investigated along a 1‐km managed river reach by comparing the spatial pattern of riverine roosts and emergent sandbars identified with aerial infrared imagery to variables computed with a two‐dimensional hydraulic model. Nocturnal observations made multiple years showed that the area and patterns of riverine roosts and emergent sandbars and the densities of cranes within roosts changed with stage. Despite sandbar vegetation management, low flows were concentrated into incised channels rather than spread out over broad sandbars. The flow model was used to compute hydraulic variables for identical streamflows through two sandbar morphologies; one following a period of relatively high flow and the other following the low‐flow period. Compared with the simulation using the morphology from the antecedent high flow, the simulation using the morphology from the antecedent low flow produced a smaller quantity of available wetted area. These remote‐sensing observations and hydraulic simulations illustrate the importance of considering flow history when designing streamflows to manage in‐channel habitat for cranes. Published in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The dinoflagellate Gymnodjnium 'gracjlenturn' feeds on the cryptophyte Rhodomonas salina and retains the chloroplasts of the prey as functional kleptochloroplasts. Using kleptochloroplasts. G. 'gracilentum' becomes a mutotroph, acquiring a proportion of its organic carbon demand through photosynthesis, but the kleptochloroplasts and their photosynthetic activity are lost within a few days. Photosynthesis seems, primarily, to be an important means of nutrition for G. 'gracilenturn' during food depletion, thereby enhancing the survival of the species during food limitation and starvation. However, light has a positive effect on growth kinetics of G. 'gracilentum' in food replete cultures: growth and ingestion rates are higher at a high light intensity than at a low light intensity. This effect may be due to other factors than photosynthetic activity of kleptochloroplasts, since a control experiment with a supposed strictly heterotrophic dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium sp., also showed a dependence of growth kinetics on light intensity.


Hormonal control of root growth has been explored as one means to alleviate the crowding of plant root systems experienced in prototype hydroponic biomass production chambers being developed by the CELSS Breadboard Project. Four plant hormones, or their chemical analogs, which have been reported to selectively inhibit root growth, were tested by adding them to the nutrient solutions on day i0 of a 25 day growth test using spring wheat in hydroponic cultures. Growth and morphological changes in both shoot and root systems were evaluated. In no case was it possible to inhibit root growth without a comparable inhibition of shoot growth. It was concluded that this approach is unlikely to prove useful for wheat.


Brody's fight training, under the tutelage of samurai ghost Kagemura, has toughened his body and honed his senses so finely that Brody can not only communicate with ghosts, but envision how and when someone dies. However, his new skills aren't quite powerful enough to uncover the whereabouts of the mysterious Penny Murderer. With the help of the ghost Talia, herself hoping to bring the killer to justice, Brody must resort to desperate measures to find the killer before he strikes again - and Brody's received a psychic vision of his ex-girlfriend Nicole in the worst trouble imaginable...


By the second half of the eighteenth century, women ministers had become the principal upholders of the spiritual life of Quakerism in Yorkshire. Drawing on a range of sources including the institu tional records of Quaker Meetings, personal correspondence and spiritual journals and autobiogra phies, this paper aims to shed light on the precise nature of female leadership in the Religious Society of Friends and to contribute to greater understanding of the conditions under which it became dominant. It suggests that the growing tendency for women to outnumber men as ministers was closely linked to wider social and economic trends within contemporary Quake1ism, and highlights the importance of family ties and support networks of kinship and friendship in underpinning women's exercise of ministering responsibilities.


Despite its authoritarian political structure, Egypt's government has held competitive, multiparty parliamentary elections for more than thirty years. This book argues that, rather than undermining the durability of the Mubarak regime, competitive parliamentary elections ease important forms of distributional conflict, particularly conflict over access to spoils. In a comprehensive examination of the distributive consequences of authoritarian elections in Egypt, Lisa Blaydes examines the triadic relationship between Egypt's ruling regime, the rent-seeking elite that supports the regime, and the ordinary citizens who participate in these elections. She describes why parliamentary candidates finance campaigns to win seats in a legislature that lacks policy-making power, as well as why citizens engage in the costly act of voting in such a context.


Abstract:This article examines how local governments calculate and allocate compensation to displaced peasants in demolition-relocation projects, known as chaiqian 拆迁 (demolition and relocation projects), at the urban edge of eastern Nanjing. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows that, contrary to popular imaginings, chaiqian in Nanjing do not exclude peasants from urban development but seek to exploit the uneven urban and rural property regimes and bring rural spaces, including people, real estate, and crops, into the urban system. The government-developer growth coalition, motivated by real estate – driven urban expansion, engineers this process with the aid of calculative technologies and protocols of commensuration. Moreover, technocrats such as chaiqian cadres and urban planners can never fully translate rural real estate into monetary value. They have to constantly update and negotiate protocols of calculation with property-owning villagers to solve emerging issues of commensuration. The villagers, on the other hand, engage with these technologies of valuation to raise claims to a larger share of wealth in chaiqian compensation. Demolition and relocation projects thus are not merely the execution of a developmental ideal but assemble urban accumulation as an ongoing process of value translation and transformation. They also show how urban accumulation at the edge of eastern Nanjing is a contested hegemonic process.


Background: Rehabilitation has emerged as a comprehensive approach to addressing intellectually-disabled peoples' skill deficits, improving competencies and facilitating optimal functioning in order to provide the greatest possible measure of social and economic participation, self-reliance and independence. Objective: To synthesise critically and summarise the best available evidence of the effects of rehabilitation on intellectually-disabled people. Method: Literature searches of different electronic databases and manual searches were conducted using selected keywords. Studies on the effects of rehabilitation on intellectually-disabled people were selected systematically, appraised critically for methodological quality and summarised. Results: Rehabilitation interventions indicated good outcomes with regard to intellectually-disabled people. Findings showed that people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities improved in terms of activities of daily living (ADL) after rehabilitation. Improvement was noted in ADL, self-care skills, communication skills and cognitive achievements. Conclusion: Findings demonstrated positive rehabilitation effects on intellectually-disabled people. This study contributes to the comprehensive nursing care of intellectually-disabled people by endorsement of the effectiveness of rehabilitation in terms of ADL, self-care skills, communication skills and cognitive achievements. The collected evidence of this study may contribute to the education of more effective nurse practitioners involved in the daily care and rehabilitation of intellectually-disabled people.


Deep learning models for graphs have achieved strong performance for the task of node classification. Despite their proliferation, currently there is no study of their robustness to adversarial attacks. Yet, in domains where they are likely to be used, e.g. the web, adversaries are common. Can deep learning models for graphs be easily fooled? In this work, we introduce the first study of adversarial attacks on attributed graphs, specifically focusing on models exploiting ideas of graph convolutions. In addition to attacks at test time, we tackle the more challenging class of poisoning/causative attacks, which focus on the training phase of a machine learning model.We generate adversarial perturbations targeting the node's features and the graph structure, thus, taking the dependencies between instances in account. Moreover, we ensure that the perturbations remain unnoticeable by preserving important data characteristics. To cope with the underlying discrete domain we propose an efficient algorithm Nettack exploiting incremental computations. Our experimental study shows that accuracy of node classification significantly drops even when performing only few perturbations. Even more, our attacks are transferable: the learned attacks generalize to other state-of-the-art node classification models and unsupervised approaches, and likewise are successful even when only limited knowledge about the graph is given.


The 'translationally controlled tumour protein' TCTP was originally discovered 30 years ago by researchers in- terested in proteins regulated at the translational level. Cloning and sequencing confirmed the conservation of this protein among all eukaryotic kingdoms, but did not reveal any functional clue, and TCTP was listed in the databases as a 'family' of its own. The functional characterisation of this protein extended over more than a decade, leading to a plethora of indi- vidual functions and interactions that have been ascribed to this protein. A major addition to the functional characterisa- tion of TCTP was the identification in 1995 of its histamine releasing factor (HRF) activity in allergic conditions, which for the first time described an extracellular activity for TCTP in human disease. This triggered a host of additional publi- cations aimed at characterising this HRF activity, which are discussed in other articles of this issue. Another milestone in the elucidation of TCTP's function was the demonstration of its anti-apoptotic activity in 2001. Evidence is also accumu- lating for a role of TCTP in the cell cycle and in early development. This article provides an overview of the main cellular activities of TCTP. The second part will summarise our current knowledge on the mechanisms involved in regulating in- tracellular TCTP levels.


IZA DP No. 14004 DECEMBER 2020 We Don't Need No Education: The Effect of Natural Resource Income Shocks on Human Capital We explore the effects of persistent income shocks on human capital using oil price fluctuations in a large sample of relevant African countries and employing micro data from multiple waves of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Theoretically, such shocks enable human capital investment via the standard income effect; but also crowd it out because of substitutability between natural resource and human capital income sources so the net outcome can go either way. Our model also suggests that the relative strength of the two effects depends on the age at which the shock is experienced and the affected gender. Consistent with these insights, we find that income shocks in early life enhance educational attainment and other derived outcomes; but reduce them if experienced in adolescence, especially for females. These results survive multiple robustness checks, and their broader implications are discussed. JEL Classification: O12, I2


Genomic DNA sequences sharing homology with NBS region of resistance gene analogs were isolated and characterized from Pongamia glabra, Adenanthera pavonina, Clitoria ternatea and Solanum trilobatum using PCR based approach with primers designed from conserved regions of NBS domain. The presence of consensus motifs viz., kinase 1a, kinase 2, kinase 3a and hydrophobic domain provided evidence that the cloned sequences may belong to the NBS-LRR gene family. Conservation of tryptophan as the last residue of kinase-2 motif further confirms their position in non-TIR NBS-LRR family of resistance genes. The Resistance Gene Analogs (RGAs) cloned from P. glabra, A. pavonina, C. ternatea and S. trilobatum clustered together with well- characterized non-TIR-NBS-LRR genes leaving the TIR-NBS-LRR genes as a separate cluster in the average distance tree constructed based on BLOSUM62. All the four RGAs had high level of identity with NBS-LRR family of RGAs deposited in the GenBank. The extent of identity between the sequences at NBS region varied from 29% ( P. glabra and S. trilobatum ) to 78% ( A. pavonina and C. ternatea ), which indicates the diversity among the RGAs.


This paper is concerned with inference about a function g that is identified by a conditional moment restriction involving instrumental variables. The function is nonparametric. It satisfies mild regularity conditions but is otherwise unknown. The paper presents test of the hypothesis that g is the mean of a random variable Y conditional on a covariate X . The need to test this hypothesis arises frequently in economics. The test does not require nonparametric instrumental-variables (IV) estimation of g and is not subject to the ill-posed inverse problem that nonparametric IV estimation entails. The test is consistent whenever g differs from the conditional mean function of Y on a set of non-zero probability. Moreover, the power of the test is arbitrarily close to 1 uniformly over a set of functions g whose distance from the conditional mean function is O(n-1/2), where is the sample size.


European hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) is of worldwide agricultural significance, with breeding efforts focused on combining high nut yield and nut quality with resistance to diseases such as eastern filbert blight (EFB), a cause of severe crop loss in much of the United States. Oregon State University recently released a resistant cultivar, 'Jefferson' (OSU 703.007), that was chosen for transcriptome sequencing to establish further genomic resources for C. avellana L. We used Illumina ribonucleic acid sequencing (RNA-seq) to characterize complementary DNA (cDNA) libraries from four hazelnut tissues, including leaves, catkins, bark, and whole seedlings. The 6.8 Gb of hazelnut transcriptome data was assembled de novo into 28,255 contigs with an average length of 532 bp and an N50 (the minimum contig length necessary such that all contigs of equal or greater length will equal half of the bases of the assembly) of 961 bp. Sequence comparisons using BLASTX and gene ontology (GO) classifications were used to generate automated descriptive function annotations. High similarity of the predicted proteins to sequences in related plants demonstrates the validity of the transcript contigs, with 80.8% having similarity to grape (Vitis vinifera L.), poplar (Populus trichocarpa Torr. & A. Gray), and castor bean (Ricinus communis L.) sequences in the public domain. A survey of GO terms enriched among tissue-specific transcripts further validates the assembly. A basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) portal and web resources (http:// hazelnut.cgrb.oregonstate.edu [accessed 8 Jan. 2010]) are available and will be of importance to breeders for marker-assisted breeding efforts.


A tiny fragment of a clay sealing impressed by an Egyptian scarab was unearthed in 2014 during excavations by the Tel Aviv University at the City of David. The legible hieroglyphs form part of an inscription that provided the name and title of the seal owner, most likely a dignitary from the time of the 13th Dynasty. Close inspection of the sealing revealed that it was used to seal a box, and a provenance analysis of the clay proved it to be of local composition. In light of these findings, other Egyptian objects from MBIIA contexts, such as Egyptian seals, sealings and pottery are reevaluated in order to assess the extent of the relations between Egypt and the Levant in general, and Jerusalem in particular.


Often WT systems employ the discrete wavelet transform, implemented on a digital signal processor. However, in ultra low-power applications such as biomedical implantable devices, it is not suitable to implement the WT by means of digital circuitry due to the relatively high power consumption associated with the required A/D converter. Low-power analog realization of the wavelet transform enables its application in vivo, e.g. in pacemakers, where the wavelet transform provides a means to extremely reliable cardiac signal detection. In Ultra Low-Power Biomedical Signal Processing we present a novel method for implementing signal processing based on WT in an analog way. The methodology presented focuses on the development of ultra low-power analog integrated circuits that implement the required signal processing, taking into account the limitations imposed by an implantable device.


This paper investigates consumers' use of store-issued credit cards with particular attention to their function as an alternative payment and financing medium. Using 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances data, the researchers found that credit availability through bankcards is negatively correlated with consumers' use of store cards as a financing medium, suggesting the role of store cards as a supplementary credit line. A negative relationship is also found to exist between consumers' bankcard usage and their use of store cards for a transaction purpose, indicating that store cards function as a substitute payment medium. Consumers' usage of store cards varies according to function and is related to a number of variables, including the use of bank cards, credit history, attitude toward credit, income, education, and ethnicity. ********** The importance of credit cards, both as a payment and short-term financing medium to today's consumers, is no longer debatable (Chakravorti and Emmons 2001; Hayhoe et al. 2000). The market share of credit cards in the total dollar volume of consumer payments in the United States increased from 14.5% to 21.4% between 1990 and 1998 (Nilson Report 1999). And, between 1991 and 2000, consumers' outstanding revolving credit (a category that includes installment loans as well as credit card debt) grew from $247 billion to $610.7 billion (Federal Reserve Board 2000). Credit cards include bank-issued cards (Visa and MasterCard), general purpose cards (Discover and American Express Blue), store cards issued by specific retailers (Sears, J.C. Penney, etc.), travel-and-entertainment cards (American Express, Diners Club), and secured cards (credit cards that require a security deposit). While bankcards are today's dominant form of credit card, the first credit cards were store cards introduced in the early 1900s (Mandell 1990). There are 170 million active store card accounts in the United States (Spurgin 1998). According to the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances, 68% of American families have bankcards, and half of families have store cards (Durkin 2000). In addition, 19% of U.S. households carry a balance on store cards, while 37% carry a balance on bankcards. Like bankcards, store cards serve two distinct purposes for consumers: a payment instrument and a financing source (Ausubel 1991; Chakravorti 1997, 2000; Chakravorti and Emmons 2001; Lee and Hogarth 1999; Slocum and Matthews 1970; Stavins 2000). Consumers use store cards as a substitute for cash, checks, and bankcards when making purchases and as a source of revolving credit (Courtless 1993; Heck 1987; Hirschman 1981; Yeo 1990). However, there exist some differences between store cards and bankcards. First, store cards can be used only at locations affiliated with the issuer of the cards (Humphrey 2001). Second, store cards often provide credit for consumers with little creditworthiness and additional credit to consumers with only limited credit availability, allowing consumers to extend their credit perhaps beyond their ability to repay (Starvins 2000). The additional credit line created by store cards can harm consumers. Retailers use store card programs to increase sales, and retail sales typically increase after a retailer adopts its own credit cards (Chakravorti 2000). The availability of credit through store cards, combined with retailers' marketing efforts to facilitate their card use, encourages consumer spending, which can create excessive consumer debt. In general, store cards have higher interest rates than do bankcards (Higgins 1993; Rosen 1994; Staten and Johnson 1995; Simmonds 2000). These circumstances contribute to a store card delinquency rate that is even higher than that of bankcards (Clark 2000; Ring 1997; Zandi 1997). Retailers have also been known to pressure bankrupt consumers to repay store card debt for which they are not legally liable (A Painful Guilty Plea by Sears 1999; Adler 1998; Judge Kenner in Her Own Words 1997). …


Consider these two scenarios: 1. A student is in a rush to get lunch so that she can finish her homework before her next class, so she cuts the line in her high school cafeteria. Immediately the students around her begin to protest. 2. A student destroys school property; a classmate of hers is unjustly accused and taken into the principal's office. Those who know that this is an unfair accusation write an anonymous letter to the principal voicing their concerns. Although adolescent students often do not have the knowledge of specific laws, they usually have a keen sense of justice and fairness. We have found the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to be a powerful tool to channel students' sense of fairness into visible actions. Adopted in December 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the UDHR is an instrument that can help students anchor the universality of human rights both in their daily lives and in their study of history. It can be accessed on the Internet at www.un.org/Overview/rights.html By using the content of the UDHR as a blueprint to examine historical issues, students are given the opportunity to discover the universal values that are at the core of this internationally recognized "declaration." Students can also explore, through the eyes of others, how people from different cultures articulate universal rights within their own contexts, and when and why nations (the United States included) drift from universal rights in their policymaking or in practice. From the study of the UDHR at a more global level, students also learn different transformative strategies that they can use to become active agents of change in their communities. In 1997, Human Rights USA, a partnership for human rights education, conducted a survey about the knowledge and the attitudes of people in the USA on human rights. This study revealed the need to expose students to the UDHR. Through their survey, the researchers found "that only 8 percent of adults and 4 percent of young people are aware of and can name the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." (1) In the post-September 11 world, the need for students to know and use the UDHR and other international documents is even greater than it was in 1997. As the Human Rights Resource Center (HRRC) points out in their online handbook, teaching students through the perspective of human rights yields satisfying results. In their research, the HRRC advocates found that "Human rights education ... sets standards [and] ... produces change." (2) This change, according to the HRRC, is visible in students' attitudes and behaviors, and in their attunement to higher levels of "solidarity across issues, communities, and nations." (3) Students want, need, and can use the UDHR as a guidepost from which they can grapple with and make judgments about world events, developments, and issues throughout history. Teachers may begin the year by introducing the UDHR and posing key questions based on this pivotal document. The UDHR then becomes the anchor with which students can judge historical events throughout the year. As the students are exploring historical events in any given lesson, the teacher may pose the following questions: "To which article does this event refer?" "Within the context of this moment in history, in what ways are human rights advanced or violated? Give evidence for your reasoning." The strategies and activities that we describe below have been successfully implemented in university preservice and inservice social studies education classes or in high school world history and U.S. history classes. We hope that you consider using the UDHR as a focus point of your own classes, and adopt some of these activities as well. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Activities for Introducing, Interacting with, and Contextualizing the UDHR Introducing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1. …


This two-volume catalogue is the first comprehensive scholarly description of the Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, one of the finest collections in America. The rich holdings comprise more than 420 manuscripts in the Robert Garrett, Grenville Kane, Robert Taylor, Cotsen Library, and Princeton collections; manuscripts bound with incunables in the Rare Books Division; hundreds of single leaves and cuttings; and about 5,000 original documents in six other collections. The catalogue offers full textual, paleographic, codicological, art-historical, and iconographical descriptions; detailed provenance notes; and full bibliographies. About a third are illuminated manuscripts, which are selectively illustrated in the catalogue's 128 color plates, which contain nearly 400 images. Princeton's manuscripts range in date from the Carolingian era to the Italian Renaissance, with particular strength in late medieval holdings. They come chiefly from England, France, Italy, Germany and the deutscher Sprachraum, the Low Countries, and the Iberian Peninsula. There are more than thirty manuscripts in Middle English, and a nearly equal number in French (including Anglo-Norman), with smaller numbers in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch or Flemish, Hebrew, and Icelandic. Among the highlights of the collection are Hrabanus Maurus's Commentary on Matthew (Fulda, ca. 840-60); William of Waddington's Manuel des peches (1280s); a Chretien de Troyes miscellany (France, ca. 1295); the Tollemache Chaucer (ca. 1420-60); an illustrated copy of Kyrillos's Fables in German (1425-30); a Suetonius with sumptuous full-page miniatures (Milan, 1433); a richly illustrated copy of Giovanni Marcanova's Antiquitates (Bologna, ca. 1473); the Hours of Marguerite de Rohan, countess of Angouleme (ca. 1480); and the Sanvito Virgil (Padua, ca. 1507). Some twenty years in the making, this catalogue identifies virtually all the manuscripts' texts on an encyclopedic range of subjects. Classical Latin authors, medieval scholastic texts, scripture, liturgy, and devotional books are most prominent, but history, law, music, medicine, astronomy, magic, and especially vernacular literature are also represented. Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library has a fully integrated approach that gives equal emphasis to text and image and their historical context, offering insights into countless aspects of intellectual and artistic life.


There is an important information deficit on political and financial risks in Africa. This paper fills this gap by compiling a unique database of financial (sovereign, banking, currency, expropriation) and political crises (regime changes, ethnic and revolutionary wars, genocides, armed conflicts) covering 53 African countries between 1965 and 2008. We employ a new methodological framework to disentangle cross-crisis from temporal contagion effects. This allows us to extend to Africa a number of insights from the literature on financial crises (e.g., the mutual contagion effects between banking and currency meltdowns). Importantly, and critically for a study devoted to Africa, political upheavals are of modest relevance to predict financial crises. These results may be reconciled with previous literature given our original focus on Africa and our event-based approach of financial and political risks.


The aggregate using of a flexible automation system in the industry area is gaining increasing attention from researchers in the last two decades. The most important factors influencing the automation system are the interaction techniques and the communication facilities used at the production line. There are different interaction techniques that have developed rapidly over the recent years within different manufacturing area for the sake of improving performance and quality of product.Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has been used as a flexible goods transportation tool at fac-tories. This work is aiming to test and introduce an adaptive communication technique be-tween an AGV and a production line's components using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system, which can be used in the manufacturing area.In this report, related works and titles to understand and achieve the goal has been discussed. As a background, AGV, RFID and communication techniques have also been discussed.This project provides a solution on how AGV communicates with the robot in a production line by using RFID systems and sensors. The proposed solution has been imple-mented and tested in order to get applicable results. The implementation phase is done us-ing an AGV, robot, RFID system (RFID reader and tags) and raspberry pi (RPI). In addition, the software used to make this components work includes AGV program (to control the AGV), RAPID program (to program the robot) and C program (is used in the RPI to receive the data from the RFID reader and resend it to the robot).The first test is conducted to determine AGV's accuracy, i.e. positioning accuracy or stop position in front of the robot. The importance of accuracy test helps in avoiding damage of goods and other unexpected consequences that can be caused by the lack of accuracy of the robot. Other tests aim to determine the suitability of the system and that the RFID, as a communication technique, is functioning properly.Some major benefits of the provided solutions include testing and proving that RFID can be used as a communication tool in the production line especially in the transportation of goods between different worksites and the capability of using RPI as a coordinating tool instead of ordinary computers. This fact can contribute in increasing the flexibility of production lines.


The use of adhesives for joining metallic and non-metallic substrates is widely accepted in various structural engineering applications, such as aerospace, automobiles. In order to meet the industry requirements, the ability to achieve good mechanical properties under a wide variety of conditions should be considered. A major advantage of adhesive bonding over conventional mechanical fastening such as bolts and rivets is that it enables dissimilar materials to be joined. However, these materials (i.e. cured epoxy resins) are brittle and have poor resistance to cracks which indicate low capability to absorb the external energy therefore limiting their application in fields requiring high adhesive and impact strength. The incorporation of secondary components or modifiers into the epoxy system can overcome these issues. Sol-gel technology is finding increasing applications, for example, as hydrophobic selfcleaning and decorative colour coatings, formation of low-temperature cure high purity optical components and biomedical applications. The basic advantage of the sol-gel process is its ability to form inorganic structures and hybrid organic and inorganic network structures at relatively low temperatures using conventional coating techniques such as dip coat, spin coat or spraying. The present work is based upon the use of sol-gel technology to produce an adhesive which can be used to bond aluminum 2024-T3 and mild steel substrates. A novel adhesive material is produced from the combination of a hybrid silica sol-gel system, nano-inorganic particles and an epoxy polymer. The adhesive strength was investigated using a universal tensile test machine. The percentage of the bond strength of the material formed through the hybrid silica-base sol-gel is found to be related to the condensation reaction of sol-gel or via a formation of Si-O-Si networks in the adhesive. The effects of adding different concentrations of organic and inorganic materials on sol-gel adhesive strength were studied. For example, by doping a DGEBA epoxy resin, TiO[2], gamma-Al[2]O[3] MWCNT and mixture of PANI and gamma-Al[2]O[3] into the sol-gel, an increase in bond strength via the enhancement of the cross-linking among a hybrid sol-gel system was observed. The effects of cure process were investigated and it was observed that an increase in cure temperature/time led to an increase of the adhesive strength. In addition, the adhesive strength was increased as the specimen surface roughness increased due to a mechanical keying effect. Lap shear strength was also increased as bond geometry of the joint increased. The strength of the sol-gel adhesive joint has found to decrease on increasing the test temperature, being related to a softening of the sol-gel adhesive. Furthermore the adhesive strength decreased as the immersion time in 3.5%NaCI increased as a result of water absorption and the formation of corrosion products along the interfacial bond line. A study of sol-gel adhesive performance subjected to cyclic loading showed fatigue behaviour, as reported in the literature, notably increasing fatigue life with decreasing fatigue load. No significant effects in the fatigue behaviour of the lap joints were noted for different loading frequencies. FTIR, Raman and XPS analysis confirmed that improvements in the strength of the hybrid epoxy/sol-gel materials were related to the formation of different covalent bonds in the adhesive matrix, i.e. Si-O-Si, Si-O-Al and Si-O-C.


Abstract Orius albidipennis (Reuter) (Hemiptera: Anthocoridae) is a generalist predator used for biological control of insects attacking ornamental plants. Molecular identification of this species using internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) of ribosomal DNA was conducted for the first time. The complete sequence of ITS1 and fragments of its flanking 18S and 5.8S rDNA genes are reported herein. The estimated length of ITS1 of O. albidipennis was 305 bp. This spacer was nearly identical to its counterpart of Orius sp-Taif strain in spite of the difference in their length. The phylogentic relationships were determined using the maximum-likelihood method supported with strong bootstrap probabilities clustering of both taxa together. Further molecular markers could be useful to identify the Taif strain and support its sister relationship to the Egyptian O. albidipennis.


Stranded in the frozen Antarctic sea for nearly two years, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team of 27 polar explorers endured extreme temperatures, hazardous ice, dwindling food, and complete isolation. Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the group remained cohesive, congenial, and mercifully alive—a fact that speaks not just to luck but to an unparalleled feat of leadership. Drawing on this amazing story, Leading at The Edge demonstrates the importance of a strong leader in times of adversity, uncertainty, and change. The book reveals 10 timeless leadership lessons that show readers how to: • Instill optimism while staying grounded in reality

 • Have the courage to step up to risks worth taking

 • Consistently reinforce the team message

 • Set a personal example

 • Find something to celebrate and something to laugh about

 • Never give up. Part adventure tale, part leadership guide, the second edition features additional lessons, new case studies of the strategies in action, tools to uncover and resolve conflicts, and expanded resources. An updated epilogue compares the leadership styles of the famous polar explorers Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott. Today's leaders have much to learn from this gripping account of survival against all odds. Leading at The Edge will help them bring order to chaos—and achieve success in the face of adversity.


Rapid deployment of wind and solar energy generation is going to result in a series of new problems with regards to the reliability of our electrical grid in terms of outages, cost, and life-time, forcing us to promptly deal with the challenging restructuring of our energy systems. Increased penetration of fluctuating renewable energy resources is a challenge for the electrical grid. Proposing solutions to deal with this problem also impacts the functionality of large generators. The power electronic generator interactions, multi-domain modelling, and reliable monitoring systems are examples of new challenges in this field. This book presents some new modelling methods and technologies for renewable energy generators including wind, ocean, and hydropower systems.


The potential effects of law are far-reaching and research is ongoing regarding the intersection of law and technology. Given the widespread availability of online legal documents today, the laws of various jurisdictions can be reviewed and researched in their full text form. However, in the not-so-distant past, this task was overwhelmingly more difficult. Many jurisdictions, unable to keep pace with the increased volume of statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions, compiled indexes of legal information rather than catalogs of full documents. These indexes made comparisons between jurisdictions difficult and left researchers unsure of whether they had captured all relevant information. However, in the middle of the 20th century, researchers began to tap into the potential of computers in relation to information retrieval. Much of the early pioneering work in the legal field was conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, who developed the "Pittsburgh System" that was a precursor to the computerized legal research tools that are ubiquitous today.


Most Jewish law scholarship, especially that which is published in English, focuses on only one of Jewish law's criminal law enforcement systems, namely, the operation of the rabbinic court system pursuant to the rules set forth in the Pentateuch, as interpreted in the Babylonian Talmud. In fact, this literature usually fails even to acknowledge the existence of the two other law enforcement systems: (1) enforcement by rabbinic courts functioning under their "extraordinary powers"; and (2) and enforcement by a Jewish king. These two systems vary enormously as to the procedural protections they provide and as to their practical consequences. Failing to examine them causes one to very seriously misunderstand how Jewish law functioned throughout history and paints a rather "Pollyanna-like" portrait of Jewish law.This submission constitutes Chapter 8 of my book, "Understanding Jewish Law," published by LexisNexis in June 2012. It explains the dramatic differences among these three criminal law enforcement systems and documents the pragmatic steps taken by rabbinic authorities responsible for providing a safe and stable social environment.