This paper tackles the problem of spatio-temporal action localization in a video, without assuming the availability of multiple videos or any prior annotations. Action is localized by employing images downloaded from internet using action name. Given web images, we first dampen image noise using random walk and evade distracting backgrounds within images using image action proposals. Then, given a video, we generate multiple spatio-temporal action proposals. We suppress camera and background generated proposals by exploiting optical flow gradients within proposals. To obtain the most action representative proposals, we propose to reconstruct action proposals in the video by leveraging the action proposals in images. Moreover, we preserve the temporal smoothness of the video and reconstruct all proposal bounding boxes jointly using the constraints that push the coefficients for each bounding box toward a common consensus, thus enforcing the coefficient similarity across multiple frames. We solve this optimization problem using variant of two-metric projection algorithm. Finally, the video proposal that has the lowest reconstruction cost and is motion salient is used to localize the action. Our method is not only applicable to the trimmed videos, but it can also be used for action localization in untrimmed videos, which is a very challenging problem. We present extensive experiments on trimmed as well as untrimmed datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


Induced mutation by gamma irradiation has been found to be a very useful technique for crop improvement. Apart from this, the proper use of induced mutation in plant breeding has become a profitable approach. This investigation was carried out to determine the LD50 and effect of gamma rays on germination, plant height, survival percentage, root length, root dry weight and shoot dry weight of seedlings derived from irradiated seeds of chili (Capsicum annuum). Seeds of chili were treated with 300, 400, 500, 600 and 800 Gy gamma rays at Malaysian Institute of Nuclear Technology (MINT). The treated seeds including control were sown in sand beds in size 4.6 x 0.7 m2 in a greenhouse at Horticulture Unit, UPMKB. Water was applied manually to maintain the soil moisture at field capacity as well as weed was manually controlled. The experiment was designed as 5 x 6 factorial in completely randomized design (CRD) with three replications. Lethal dose 50 % of population (LD50) was assayed. Observation showed that germination percentage, plant height, survival percentage, root length, root weight and shoot dry weight decreased with increasing dose of gamma rays. The 800 Gy gamma ray dose had a profound effect on these variables perhaps due to injury the higher doses may have caused to the seeds of chili. This resulted in poor growth and development of chili seedlings. The LD50 for chili (survival percentage) was estimated at 445 Gy. Loan contracts performance determines the profitability and stability of the financial institutions and screening the loan applications is a key process in minimizing credit risk. Before making any credit In general, higher gamma ray doses particularly 600 and 800 Gy had negative effect on the morphological characteristics of chili seedlings derived from irradiated seeds.


Currently, titanium dioxide is a most researched semiconductor in photocatalysis field; however, practical applications of TiO2 are limited due to high band gap (3.2 eV). In last decades, researchers implemented several strategies to improve photoactivity of TiO2 in visible electromagnetic spectrum. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) sensitization for absorption of naturals and/or synthetics organic dyes is an important research subject in the field, and it is an efficient method to develop practical application in waste treatment. In this chapter, we review main theoretical aspects of sensitization process of TiO2 by phthalocyanines and its effect in photocatalytic properties. In the last section, we review reports of photocatalytic systems.


On September 15, 2003, VeriSign, Inc., the company that operates the databases that allow Internet users to reach any Internet resource ending in .com or .net, introduced a new service it called Site Finder. Less than three weeks later, after widespread protest from the technical community, at least three lawsuits, and a stern demand from ICANN (the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, which has undertaken responsibility for managing the Internet domain name space), VeriSign agreed to shut Site Finder down. In between those dates, the Internet community saw a passionate debate over the roles of ICANN, VeriSign, and the Internet's technical aristocracy in managing the domain name space. In this paper, I unpack the Site Finder story. Site Finder was highly undesirable from a technical standpoint; it contravened key elements of Internet architecture. ICANN had power to force VeriSign to withdraw it, though, only if VeriSign was violating the terms of its registry contracts. The arguments that Site Finder violated VeriSign's contractual obligations are plausible, but they don't derive their force from Site Finder's architectural or stability consequences. The registry contracts gave ICANN no hook to invoke those concerns; if VeriSign was in breach, it was by happenstance. Part of the lesson of Site Finder is that there needs to be an effective institutional mechanism for protecting the domain name space infrastructure from unilateral, profit-driven change that bypasses the protections and consensus mechanisms of the traditional Internet standards process. Notwithstanding ICANN's flaws, it may be better suited than any other existing institution to protect against that threat. Yet ICANN regulation is itself highly problematic, and so any plan to expand its authority must be approached with care.


Carnosine, an endogenous peptide, has been demonstrated to play an antitumorigenic role in certain types of cancer, suppressing glycolysis in cultured tumour cells1,2. Recent evidence suggests that l-carnosine can interfere with oxidative phosphorylation as well3. However, its underlying mechanism is unclear. The capsule of Karnozin EXTRA® (Carnomed) is a unique patented formula of l-carnosine, in combination with vitamin E, coenzyme Q10, l-carnitine, northern blueberries extract and grape seed extract.
This food supplement was tested on two continuous cell lines with different energy pathways, MRC-5 (human embryo lung fibroblasts) and MCF-7 (human breast cancer cells), to evaluate its effects on mitochondrial respiration and certain mitochondrial respiratory chain complexes of the cells. Cells were treated for 24 hours with different concentrations of aqueous solution of the capsule Karnozin EXTRA® (Carnomed) corresponding to concentrations of pure l-carnosine from the capsule of 2, 5, and 10 mM. Afterwards, we investigated basal respiration of intact cells and the activities of mitochondrial respiratory chain complexes I, II and IV. All measurements were performed using the Hansatech Oxygraph+ instrument (England).
The results showed that Karnozin EXTRA® (Carnomed) exerted a significant reduction in the oxygen consumption in both cell lines in a dose-dependent manner. Moreover, the activities of mitochondrial electron transport chain complexes I, II and IV in both cell lines were compromised. The strongest inhibitory action was shown on the activity of complex II of mitochondrial electron transport chain.
The present study highlights a novel role of this capsule as a regulator of tested cells energy metabolism both in the anaerobic and aerobic pathways, which may give renewed impetus for its development as antitumor agent.


Mechanisms linking maternal nutrient restriction (MNR) to intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR) and programming of adult disease remain to be established. The impact of controlled MNR on maternal and fetal amino acid metabolism has not been studied in non-human primates. We hypothesised that MNR in pregnant baboons decreases fetal amino acid availability by mid-gestation. We determined maternal and fetal circulating amino acid concentrations at 90 d gestation (90dG, term 184dG) in control baboons fed ad libitum (C, n 8) or 70 % of C (MNR, n 6). Before pregnancy, C and MNR body weights and circulating amino acids were similar. At 90dG, MNR mothers had lower body weight than C mothers (P< 0·05). Fetal and placental weights were similar between the groups. MNR reduced maternal blood urea N (BUN), fetal BUN and fetal BUN:creatinine. Except for histidine and lysine in the C and MNR groups and glutamine in the MNR group, circulating concentrations of all amino acids were lower at 90dG compared with pre-pregnancy. Maternal circulating amino acids at 90dG were similar in the MNR and C groups. In contrast, MNR fetal β-alanine, glycine and taurine all increased. In conclusion, maternal circulating amino acids were maintained at normal levels and fetal amino acid availability was not impaired in response to 30 % global MNR in pregnant baboons. However, MNR weight gain was reduced, suggesting adaptation in maternal–fetal resource allocation in an attempt to maintain normal fetal growth. We speculate that these adaptive mechanisms may fail later in gestation when fetal nutrient demands increase rapidly, resulting in IUGR.


OBJECTIVE
To better understand testing patterns in children, we measured temporal trends in paediatric testing from 2005 to 2019 in Oxfordshire, UK.

DESIGN
Descriptive study of population-based secondary data.

SETTING
Oxfordshire University Hospitals National Health Service Trust laboratories.

PARTICIPANTS
Children aged 0-15 years in Oxfordshire who received at least one blood test.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
We estimated average annual percentage changes (AAPCs) in test use using joinpoint regression models. Temporal changes in age-adjusted rates in test use were calculated overall and stratified by healthcare setting, sex, and age.

RESULTS
Between 2005 and 2019, 1 749 425 tests were performed among 113 607 children. Overall test use declined until 2012, when test rates appeared to increase (AAPC 1.5%, 95% CI -0.8% to 3.9%). Most tests were performed in inpatient settings, where testing rates stayed steady (AAPC -0.6%, 95% CI -2.1% to 0.9%). Increases were highest in females, those aged 6-15 years and in the outpatient setting. The greatest increase in testing was for vitamin D (AAPC 26.5%), followed by parathyroid hormone (9.8%), iron studies (9.3%), folate (8.4%), vitamin B12 (8.4%), HbA1c (8.0%), IgA (7.9%) and coeliac (7.7%).

CONCLUSIONS
After an initial decline, laboratory test use by children in Oxfordshire demonstrated an apparent increase since 2012. Test use increased in outpatient and general practice settings, however remained steady in inpatient settings. Further research should examine the root causes and implications for test increases, and whether these increases are warranted. We encourage clinicians to consider the individual and systemic implications of performing blood tests in children.


Transglutaminase 2 (TG2) expression is required for epidermal squamous cell carcinoma cancer stem cell survival. However, the molecular signaling mechanisms triggered by TG2 that mediate this survival action are not well understood. Here we show that TG2 is constitutively expressed in ECS cells, where it interacts with α6/β4 integrin to stimulate FAK and Src signaling, leading to PI3K activation of phosphoinositide-dependent kinase 1 (PDK1). PDK1 inhibits Hippo signaling, leading to enhanced nuclear accumulation of YAP1, which interacted with and stabilized ΔNp63α to enhance epidermal squamous cell carcinoma spheroid formation, invasion, and migration. Overall, these findings suggest that constitutive TG2 expression results in stabilization of ΔNp63α, leading to maintenance of cancer stem cell properties and enhanced tumor formation. Cancer Res; 76(24); 7265-76. ©2016 AACR.


Mapping scholarly debates is an important genre of what can be called Knowledge Domain Analytics (KDA) technology --i.e. technology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysing specialist knowledge domains. However, current KDA technology research has emerged from diverse traditions and thus lacks a common conceptual foundation. This paper reports on the design of a KDA ontology that aims to provide this foundation. The paper then describes the argumentation extensions to the ontology for supporting scholarly debate mapping as a special form of KDA and demonstrates its expressive capabilities using a case study debate.


W ith education among the electorate's top priorities, the phrase "higher standards" has become ubiquitous in political campaigns across the country. Ever since the publication of the Reagan Administration's A Nation at Risk in 1983, the standards-based school reform movement has galvanized a broad coalition from right to left. Conservatives and business leaders are drawn to its pledge to improve the accountability of a public school system they see as an entrenched bureaucracy, as well as to its goal of preparing a more globally competitive work force. At the same time, the movement's underlying premise, that all children can learn at high levels, has won over many liberals and civil rights advocates, who are rightly concerned about teachers and schools lowering their expectations for poor and minority students. Unfortunately, this movement has all too frequently been reduced to a single policy: high-stakes testing. This policy links the score on one set of standardized tests to grade promotion, high school graduation and, in some cases, teacher and principal salaries and tenure decisions. To date, about twenty-five states have adopted some version of this policy, and the number of legislatures considering similar measures is growing. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush vigorously promote the use of standardized tests. President Clinton recommended in his State of the Union address that test-preparation manuals be made available to all children. Yet despite the political popularity of the testing "solution," many educators and civil rights advocates are suggesting that it has actually exacerbated the problems it sought to alleviate. They claim that these policies discriminate against minority students, undermine teachers, reduce opportunities for students to engage in creative and complex learning assignments, and deny high school diplomas because of students' failure to pass subjects they were never taught. They argue that using tests to raise academic standards makes as much sense as relying upon thermometers to reduce fevers. Most compellingly, they maintain that these tests are directing sanctions against the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of educational inequities. The implications of these arguments were serious enough to lead The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University to commission a series of studies on the educational and social impact of high-stakes testing policies from some of the nation's top scholars in this field. Some of their most significant findings include: § High-stakes tests attached to grade promotion and high school graduation lead to increased dropout rates, particularly for minority students. George Madaus and Marguerite Clarke of Boston College discovered a strong association between highstakes testing and increased dropout rates. They cite studies showing that in 1986 half of the ten states with the lowest dropout figures used no high-stakes tests. The other half employed testing programs that could be characterized as low stakes. Nine of the ten states with the highest dropout rates used standardized tests in decisions about high school graduation. The effects for minority students can be discerned from a study by Aaron Pallas of Michigan State University and Gary Natriello of Columbia University, who examined the racial and ethnic disparities in performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) between 1996 and 1998. By the spring of their senior year, almost twice as many black and Hispanic students as white students had not passed the TAAS exit-level tests required to obtain a Texas high school diploma. The authors concluded that "these tests are, and will remain for some time, an impediment to the graduation prospects of African American and Hispanic youth." In another study, Columbia's Jay Heubert points out that students of color are almost always overrepresented among those who are denied diplomas on the basis of test scores. § Using tests to retain students in the same grade produces no lasting educational benefits. Robert Hauser of the University of Wisconsin has found that retaining students in the same grade creates huge management problems in the classroom, is extremely expensive for the school system and dramatically increases the likelihood that the retained student will eventually drop out. GARY ORFIELD AND JOHANNA WALD


Requirements Engineering (RE) covers not only the capture and structuring of various properties the system should achieve but also the identification of high-level choices on how to achieve such goals or to avoid related obstacles. Generic RE frameworks support simple formalisation of alternatives using AND/OR refinements while more specialised fields such as safety and security engineering have richer analysis capabilities respectively through fault and attack trees. In this paper, we review the various constructs proposed in those domains and state their semantics at RE level to support safety and security co-engineering. As a supplementary step, we propose a mapping on the semantics provided by Constraint Programming in order to search for optimal configurations in the design space of a RE model. We consider multiple objectives stated as non-functional requirements and formalised using quantified attributes over goal models. Our work is validated on the complex design of an oil pipe system mixing safety and security critical properties.


Notes on Contributors Foreword John Tirman Acknowledgements Introduction 1. International Law and International Politics: Old Divides, New Developments Veronica Raffo, Chandra Lekha Sriram, Peter Spiro, and Thomas Biersteker Small Arms and Light Weapons 2. Moving Forward? Assessing Normative and Legal Progress in Dealing with Small Arms Robert Muggah 3. Small Arms, Violence, and the Course of Conflicts William Reno 4. Commentary: A World Drowning in Guns Harold Hongju Koh Terrorism 5. International Terrorism, Nonstate Actors, and the Logic of Transnational Mobilization: A Perspective from International Relations Fiona Adamson 6. Crying War Mary Ellen O'Connell 7. Preemption and Exception: International Law and the Revolutionary Power Gerry Simpson and Nicholas J. Wheeler 8. Commentary: Convergence of International Law and International Relations in Combating International Terrorism: The Role of the United Nations Commentary Curtis A. Ward Internally Displaced People 9. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the Development of International Norms Francis M. Deng 10. Privately Generated Soft Law in International Governance: Comment on Francis M. Deng Kenneth W. Abbott International Criminal Accountability 11. The International Criminal Court and Universal International Jurisdiction: A Return to First Principles Leila Nadya Sadat 12. International Humanitarian Law: State Collusion and the Conundrum of Jurisdiction Madeleine Morris 13. Whose Justice? Reconciling Universal Jurisdiction with Democratic Principles Diane F. Orentlicher 14. Bringing Security Back In: International Relations Theory and Moving Beyond the "Justice vs. Peace" Dilemma in Transitional Societies Chandra Lekha Sriram and Youssef Mahmoud 15. International Criminal Accountability at the Intersection of Law and Politics: A Commentary Ellen L. Lutz Conclusions 16. Disaggregating US interests in International Law: Sketching a Theory of Liberal Transnationalism Peter J. Spiro 17. New Directions, New Collaborations for International Law and International Relations Martha Finnemore 18. International Relations and International Law: From Competition to Complementarity Clarence J. Dias Selected Bibliography Index


ABSTRACT Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system.


A promising class of generative models maps points from a simple distribution to a complex distribution through an invertible neural network. Likelihood-based training of these models requires restricting their architectures to allow cheap computation of Jacobian determinants. Alternatively, the Jacobian trace can be used if the transformation is specified by an ordinary differential equation. In this paper, we use Hutchinson's trace estimator to give a scalable unbiased estimate of the log-density. The result is a continuous-time invertible generative model with unbiased density estimation and one-pass sampling, while allowing unrestricted neural network architectures. We demonstrate our approach on high-dimensional density estimation, image generation, and variational inference, achieving the state-of-the-art among exact likelihood methods with efficient sampling.


This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children's education.
Seven stories in my corpus are similar, although told by different performers in different villages. These stories stage an identical topic, central participant and pair of agents. However, the plot is different. The analyses give insight in the degree of improvisation. The corpus consists of dramatic and comic stories. The basic topic of the stories is the diviner's consultation of the 'guardian spirit' through Fa.
The statistical analyses of the narrative discourse show a constant speech rate, with the exception of rhetorical highlights and songs. The graphics show that the performers use a pattern of pauses that functions as content marker. The performers use a single particle as the clause-final topic as well as a definite marker of a noun.
The framework of the story is rudimentary, although several grammatical functions, lexical markers and rhetorical phenomena obligatorily convey parts of the plot. On the other hand, the performer uses the storyboard technique to structure the performance.

"Verbal art of the Fon (Benin)" is published by
Ruediger Koeppe Verlag
P.O. Box 45 06 43
50881 Cologne
Germany


One of the important issues that have significant role in study of hydrology of basin is determination of lag time. Lag time has significant role in hydrological studies. Quantity of rainfall related lag time depends on several factors, such as permeability, vegetation cover, catchments slope, rainfall intensity, storm duration and type of rain. Determination of lag time is important parameter in many projects such as dam design and also water resource studies. Lag time of basin could be calculated using various methods. One of these methods is time series analysis of spectral density. The analysis is based on fouries series. The time series is approximated with Sinuous and Cosines functions. In this method harmonically significant quantities with individual frequencies are presented. Spectral density under multiple time series could be used to obtain basin lag time for annual runoff and short-term rainfall fluctuation. A long lag time could be due to snowmelt as well as melting ice due to rainfalls in freezing days. In this research the lag time of Jahanbin basin has been determined using spectral density method. The catchments is subjected to both rainfall and snowfall. For short term rainfall fluctuation with a return period 2, 3, 4 months, the lag times were found 0.18, 0.5 and 0.083 month, respectively. * `_ 6& D 6& 4 < F } `_ < < 6 ** AU & 8 " 6 78 < 6 *** " 6 78 & _ AU & 8


Sewage sludge is of increasing concern in China, due to extended sewerage control and advanced wastewater treatments resulting from urbanization and economic growth. Based on the evolution of municipal sewage generation and treatment technologies in the last decade, as well as the long-term national and local plans in China, the paper elucidates production, distribution and characteristics (organics, nutrients, heat value, heavy metals, trace pollutants, pathogens) of sludge in some typical districts of China. The status and challenges of sludge management are discussed.


We present a ray-tracing-based method for simulation of interference fringe patterns (IFPs) for measuring gear tooth flanks with a two-path interferometer. This simulation method involves two steps. In the first step, the profile of an IFP is achieved by means of ray tracing within the object path of the interferometer. In the second step, the profile of an IFP is filled with interference fringes, according to a set of functions from an optical path length to a fringe gray level. To examine the correctness of this simulation method, simulations are performed for two spur involute gears, and the simulated IFPs are verified by experiments using the actual two-path interferometer built on an optical platform.


We use techniques from applied matrix analysis to study small world cutoff in a Markov chain. Our model consists of a periodic random walk plus uniform jumps. This has a direct interpretation as a teleporting random walk, of the type used by search engines to locate web pages, on a simple ring network. More loosely, the model may be regarded as an analogue of the original small world network of Watts and Strogatz [Nature, 393 (1998), pp. 440-442]. We measure the small world property by expressing the mean hitting time, averaged over all states, in terms of the expected number of shortcuts per random walk. This average mean hitting time is equivalent to the expected number of steps between a pair of states chosen uniformly at random. The analysis involves nonstandard matrix perturbation theory and the results come with rigorous and sharp asymptotic error estimates. Although developed in a different context, the resulting cutoff diagram agrees closely with that arising from the mean-field network theory of Newman, Moore, and Watts [Phys. Rev. Lett., 84 (2000), pp. 3201-3204].


Field confinement in a microchip laser with transversely varying gain and plane–plane cavity mirrors is theoretically discussed with a semiclassical treatment. We show that the common notion of a transverse cavity mode becomes closely linked to that of a longitudinal cavity mode owing to the key role that detuning of the longitudinal cavity frequency from the atomic resonance plays in the formation of the transverse field profile. In particular, we show that as the pump size decreases the laser emission is pulled toward the atomic resonance frequency on the negative detuning side. Strong mode pulling is interpreted as being due to the index-antiguiding effect induced by the pump and manifests itself as a ring pattern in the far-field spatial intensity.


We analyze a class of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum on a high-dimensional random least squares problem. Our framework, inspired by random matrix theory, provides an exact (deterministic) characterization for the sequence of loss values produced by these algorithms which is expressed only in terms of the eigenvalues of the Hessian. This leads to simple expressions for nearly-optimal hyperparameters, a description of the limiting neighborhood, and average-case complexity. As a consequence, we show that (small-batch) stochastic heavy-ball momentum with a fixed momentum parameter provides no actual performance improvement over SGD when step sizes are adjusted correctly. For contrast, in the non-strongly convex setting, it is possible to get a large improvement over SGD using momentum. By introducing hyperparameters that depend on the number of samples, we propose a new algorithm sDANA (stochastic dimension adjusted Nesterov acceleration) which obtains an asymptotically optimal average-case complexity while remaining linearly convergent in the strongly convex setting without adjusting parameters.


This paper reviews field measurements of evapotranspiration from rice (ET rice) in the Murrumbidgee Valley of southern New South Wales. The results are compared with US Class A open pan evaporation (E pan) at CSIRO Griffith, and with reference evapotranspiration (ETo) calculated using a locally calibrated Penman equation. Both methods (+ETrice = +Epan or +ETrice = +ETo) give good estimates of total evapotranspiration from flooded rice over the ponded season of about 5 months, from October to February. Variation between seasons in total ETo, rainfall, and ETo minus rainfall is large. Over 32 years, total seasonal ETo varied by a factor of 1.5, while rainfall varied >10-fold. The irrigation water requirement for rice +(ETo - rainfall) varied from 685 mm in 1992-93 to 1350 mm in 1990-91. This large variation highlights the need to adjust the rice water use limit (16 ML/ha or 1600 mm) on a seasonal basis, to detect and eliminate high water use paddocks where percolation to the groundwater or surface runoff is excessive (>2 ML/ha). On average, an irrigation requirement of 10.5 ML/ha is needed to replace net evaporative loss +(ETo - rainfall) for rice flooded for 5 months, October-February. Monthly totals of ETo are compared for several locations within the rice-growing areas of southern New South Wales, and differences between locations are found to be small and not significant. This reflects the strong dependence of evaporation on radiant energy, which is unlikely to vary spatially to a significant extent across the region. ETo calculated from meteorological data collected at CSIRO Griffith therefore provides a definitive basis for estimating evapotranspiration from rice in southern New South Wales. Furthermore, CSIRO Griffith has a computerised meteorological data base going back to the 1930s. Current meteorological data and historical records are readily available by contacting the Metdata Manager. Therefore, the case is made for using CSIRO Griffith ETo as the reference for estimating evapotranspiration from rice in southern New South Wales. This study provides farmers, Land and Water Management Plan groups, and policy makers with a tool that can be used, on a yearly basis, to evaluate rice paddock water use efficiency. It should be adopted to confine rice growing to the least permeable soils.


DITIS was originally developed to address the difficulties of communication and continuity of care between the home health care multidisciplinary team (PASYKAF) and between the team and the oncologist often over 100km away. DITIS has through its data base and possibility of access via mobile or wire line (computers) offered much more than improved communication. Its flexibility of communication and access to the patient's history and daily record at all times, home, outpatients or in the event of an emergency admission has offered the team an overall assessment and history of each symptom. DITIS has thus offered improved quality of life to the patient, for example by offering the nurse's immediate authorisation to change prescription via mobile devices and the oncologist the possibility of assessment and symptom control without having to see the patient. It has offered the home care service the opportunity to plan future services and lobby for funding by offering audit, statistics, and performance evaluation and with these in place, the possibility for research. DITIS the programme will be presented and demonstrated including the mobile device and a discussion around the evaluation of its use. The difficulties will also be examined with trust being the key to implementation of the system. Trust between the different professionals in the home care team, trust between the oncologist and the team and most importantly trust in the technology, including confidentiality. DITIS supports the creation, management and coordination of virtual healthcare professional teams, for the continuous hometreatment of cancer patients.


The majority of cases of frontotemporal lobar degeneration and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are pathologically defined by the cleavage, cytoplasmic redistribution and aggregation of TAR DNA binding protein of 43 kDa (TDP-43). To examine the contribution of these potentially toxic mechanisms in vivo, we generated transgenic mice expressing human TDP-43 containing the familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-linked M337V mutation and identified two lines that developed neurological phenotypes of differing severity and progression. The first developed a rapid cortical neurodegenerative phenotype in the early postnatal period, characterized by fragmentation of TDP-43 and loss of endogenous murine Tdp-43, but entirely lacking aggregates of ubiquitin or TDP-43. A second, low expressing line was aged to 25 months without a severe neurodegenerative phenotype, despite a 30% loss of mouse Tdp-43 and accumulation of lower molecular weight TDP-43 species. Furthermore, TDP-43 fragments generated during neurodegeneration were not C-terminal, but rather were derived from a central portion of human TDP-43. Thus we find that aggregation is not required for cell loss, loss of murine Tdp-43 is not necessarily sufficient in order to develop a severe neurodegenerative phenotype and lower molecular weight TDP-43 positive species in mouse models should not be inherently assumed to be representative of human disease. Our findings are significant for the interpretation of other transgenic studies of TDP-43 proteinopathy.


Despite differences in the constructs measured, the Memory Assessment Scales (MAS) remain an alternative to the Wechsler Memory Scales (WMS) as a broad-band instrument for assessing multiple aspects of attention and memory. Although a number of studies have examined indices of the WMS as indicators of malingering, few studies have similarly investigated the MAS. In this study, we examined the degree to which the MAS was effective in detecting incomplete effort in a clinical sample of patients referred for neuropsychological evaluation after mild head injury. Included in the sample were 21 financially compensable (FC) participants with alleged mild head injury and 21 participants who were not involved in litigation and suffered more serious head injuries. Examination of the four MAS domain indices indicated that Short-Term Memory was most useful at identifying incomplete effort. We also examined subscales of the MAS. Consistent with previous findings, brief tests such as Verbal and Visual Span had high rates of diagnostic sensitivity and specificity. Although tests based on a forced-choice recognition paradigm (e.g., Immediate and Delayed Visual Recognition) predicted group membership above chance levels, they failed to significantly add to prediction above Verbal and Visual Span subtests.


This paper reports the first experimental observation and theoretical description of zero time lag, complete-chaos synchronization using three laser diodes coupled in a unidirectional cascade configuration. The master laser is rendered chaotic by optical feedback from an external mirror. The output intensity of the master laser is injected into an intermediate laser, and the output intensity of this intermediate laser is in turn injected into a slave laser. The distances between the lasers are carefully adjusted such that the times of flight between the lasers are equal to the delay time in the external-cavity of the master laser. When the three lasers are subject to the same optical injection strength it is observed that their output intensities synchronize with zero time lag. The chaos synchronization has been confirmed by time traces and synchronization diagrams of the three laser outputs, and the null lag time has been measured from cross-correlation diagrams. Numerical simulations based on single-mode rate equations are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental observations.


There has been an ongoing research on coal and gas outburst for the past two decades at the School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering, University of Wollongong. Research study began with a humble beginning, initially conducting basic laboratory studies on the coal and gas properties, progressing into the determination of gas content of coal by sorption technique and the effect of gas pressures on coal strength. The present laboratory facilities and research interests are extended to include the study of coal permeability and shrinkage properties and their effect of gas drainage characteristics with respect to gas type, and pressures. All the changes are examined with respect to changing in-site geological conditions of the coal deposit investigated. The aim is to provide a long-term support to industry in establishing a data bank for Australian coal deposit characteristics and properties.


Because doping is becoming more and more of a problem in elite sports, anti-doping and prevention programs are receiving more attention. However, current doping prevention programs that primarily involve pedagogical education in youths have not been shown to be very effective. In sports philosophy there is a discourse about ethics and morality in sports in connection with doping. So far, however, the aspect of ethics has been neglected in anti-doping prevention programs. This article discusses a new approach to doping prevention for young athletes and a way to improve conventional doping prevention by focusing on the process of decision-making. The article argues that ethical decision-making programs based on ethical training programs developed in business offer a large potential for prevention programs in sport. The article concludes with a presentation of training possibilities for ethical decision-making in connection with doping.


In 1953 Aarne Koskinen's book, The Missionary Influence as a Political Factor in the Pacific Islands, appeared on the shelves of the academic world, adding further fuel to the longstanding debate in anthropological and historical studies regarding the role and effects of missionary activity in colonial settings. Koskinen's finding supported the general view amongst anthropologists and historians that missionary activity had a negative impact on non-Western populations, wiping away their cultural templates and disrupting their socio-economic and political systems. This attitude towards mission activity assumes that the contemporary non-Western world is the product of the 'West', and that what the 'Rest' believes and how it lives, its social, economic and political systems, as well as its values and beliefs, have derived from or have been implanted by the 'West'. This postulate has led to the denial of the agency of non-Western or colonial people, deeming them as 'history-less' and 'nation-less': as an entity devoid of identity. But is this postulate true? Have the non-Western populations really been passive recipients of Western commodities, ideas and values? This dissertation examines the role that Christianity, the ideology of the West, the religion whose values underlies the semantics and structures of modernisation, has played in the genesis and rise of West Papuan nationalism. The modernist and primordialist approaches to the study of the relation between nationalism and religion assume either structural-functionalist or intellectualist definitions of religion. This thesis rejects that view in postulating that religion plays a foundational role in the rise of both historical consciousness and nationalism. Positioning itself in antithesis to traditional primitivist approaches to the study of West Papua, which have tended to study the Papuan people as a set of distinct tribes, each endowed with particular identity dynamics, this thesis attempts to provide a comprehensive study of West Papuan nationalism as a single ethnic and geographical entity. Breaking away from modular forms of nationalism, which consider such a phenomenon as a res 'capable of being transplanted', it attempts to recover the 'eventful reconfigurations' which have allowed for the rise of West Papuan national consciousness and identity. Sahlins' structure of the conjuncture will be used as the basis for the articulation of a methodology to enable the recovery of the lost history of pre-literate peoples and the discarding of the interrelated myths of 'history-less-ness' and 'nationless-ness'. This thesis argues that West Papua was a distinct ethnic identity long before the Europeans entered the region. This identity was shaped and defined by processes of adaptation to a particular ecosystem and by the longstanding relations that the Papuans had engaged in with the neighbouring Malay populations in, what can be regarded as, the 'Maluku-Papuan-Ceramese' zone. Consequently Papuan pre-colonial ethnic identity, authenticated by a series of myths and stories, acted as the prime mover in determining the relational dynamics and dialectics with the Europeans and Christianity. It will be shown that Christianity did not create the Papuan nation and West Papuan nationalism, although, once Christianity was 'inculturated' into the Papuan culturalreligious template, Christian institutions acted as the structure and semantics by which the Papuans were able to communicate and articulate communal sentiments of belonging, coalescing into a unified entity. Papuan hermeneutics, known as cargoism, played an important role in mediating and systemising Christian beliefs and values into Papuan cultural-religious templates, so that the locus of Papuan national identity came to reside in the intersection of Papuan stories and myths with Christian narratives. In the aftermath of World War II, the Dutch nation-building program inculcated into the emerging Papuan intelligentsia an idea of nation and nationalism, which could serve their neo-colonial interests and resist Indonesian incorporation of the territory. This program came to clash with the autochthonous Papuan nationalism, which had manifested itself in the great Koreri movement of 1938-1942.


We present novel designs for virtual and augmented reality near-eye displays based on phase-only holographic projection. Our approach is built on the principles of Fresnel holography and double phase amplitude encoding with additional hardware, phase correction factors, and spatial light modulator encodings to achieve full color, high contrast and low noise holograms with high resolution and true per-pixel focal control. We provide a GPU-accelerated implementation of all holographic computation that integrates with the standard graphics pipeline and enables real-time (≥90 Hz) calculation directly or through eye tracked approximations. A unified focus, aberration correction, and vision correction model, along with a user calibration process, accounts for any optical defects between the light source and retina. We use this optical correction ability not only to fix minor aberrations but to enable truly compact, eyeglasses-like displays with wide fields of view (80°) that would be inaccessible through conventional means. All functionality is evaluated across a series of hardware prototypes; we discuss remaining challenges to incorporate all features into a single device.


Web search is a challenging task. Previous research mainly exploits texts on the Web pages or link information between the pages, while multimedia information is largely ignored. This paper proposes a new framework for Web search, which exploits image contents to help improve the search performance. In this framework, candidate images are retrieved at first by considering their associated text information. Then, images related to the query are identified by analyzing the density of the visual feature space. After that, an image-based rank of the Web pages is generated, which is combined with the traditional keyword-based search result to produce the final search result. Experiments demonstrate the promise of the proposed framework.


Sijunjung is a city in Sijunjung regency. Sijunjung is located in Sijunjung regency about 99 km from Padang City.  Sijunjung is a regency of West Sumatera. In society life, language is very important because language is used to communicate. Especially in address form. They always vary their forms in different situation and different addresses even though the person being addressed remains the same. The importance of address forms cannot be overestimated in the use of language in any human society. They serve as an indicator of the social relationship between a speaker and a listener in terms of status and social distance. Sijunjung forms of address literature still limited except for their uses in literary genres. Otherwise, an exploration of various forms of address in Sijunjung may help in understanding the culture of the people and also in knowing the reason why the people behave the way they do in an encounter with others in different situations. The address terms examined in this paper are limited to names only. Pronouns and other forms were not included. The population of this research that the writer takes from questionnaire to native speakers of Sijunjung society. For example, the writer takes 20 informants who can give information about the term of address form of Sijunjung. The writer used observation method and questionnaire technique, then the writer takes the answer sheets of Sijunjung people. There are two methods in representating the result of data analysis, formal and informal method. The informal method is written in the form of verbal statements, meanwhile the formal method is written by symbol and sign. While, informal method by using words based on the finding. In this analysis the writer uses both of method.


As information technology becomes the main force behind human activities, getting information should be done with less effort. Massive programming is a task users attempt to avoid. For novice users, a few steps of simple instructions are sufficient to get information they want. The same desire is required from database users. In databases, retrieving information is the dominant activity.
In this work, a visual query interface has been developed as an effort to facilitate query formulation. Java language was used as an implementation tool. The interface consists of two main parts, database creation and query formulation. A key feature of the interface is to support users formulating queries in simple way. With this interface, a user can express his or her query by using visual supports such as tick a table for selecting the table involved in the query. The interface not only allows visual queries but also can produce result of the queries in a visual form. The database schema, referred by users, is also shown on the screen. Although the visual supports are provided, the way a query is formulated still follows the SQL style, namely it follows SELECT-FROM-WHERE clause.


Seventy years after Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the scholarly consensus is that American labor law has become ossified. As I have argued elsewhere, however, while the NLRA is undoubtedly dysfunctional, the blockage of this traditional channel for collective action has led not to ossification, but to a hydraulic effect: unable to find an outlet through the NLRA, the continuing demand for collective action has forced open alternative legal channels. This article explores the first of these new channels, which I name employment law as labor law. The article presents detailed accounts of collective campaigns in which workers turn to employment law, in particular the Fair Labor Standards Act and Title VII, as the legal architecture that facilitates and protects their collective activity. This legal architecture, provided here by employment statutes, is one we conventionally call labor law. Drawing upon and moving beyond these descriptive accounts, the article offers a theoretical model that explains how employment law's individual rights regime can galvanize, insulate, and generate workers' collective action. By revealing employment law's capacity to foster collective action, moreover, the article provides a new way of understanding the relationship between labor law and employment law. The model developed here disputes the claim that labor and employment law constitute distinct - and inimical - regulatory regimes. Finally, the article contends that employment law's ability to foster collective action invites future inquiry into the possibility for a great trade in labor law reform: a new regime that provides strong safeguards for the early stages of collective action but retreats from the cradle-to-grave regulation that has defined, and ultimately undermined, the NLRA.


OF DISSERTATION CHANGING AMERICA: THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION ON WELFARE ATTITUDES AND WELFARE REFORM The purpose of my dissertation is to further our understanding of why some states restricted immigrant access to welfare in the 1990s while other states granted immigrants access to social programs. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), many states diverged from equal access to welfare programs, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), for immigrants arriving after 1996. Very little scholarly work examines the variance in immigrants' access to welfare programs. Current research studying welfare attitudes and policy has largely failed to investigate whether and how the influx of immigrants over the last three to four decades has decreased public support for welfare programs and resulted in policies that both decrease benefit levels and restrict access to programs based on citizenship. This is a serious shortcoming because immigration since the 1970s represents the largest population shift since the early 20 century, a change that has increased the size of the underclass and transformed the cultural and racial makeup of the United States. Accordingly, in my dissertation, I will examine how changes to the American political environment, immigration levels and the increasing number of immigration media stories, trigger authoritarian attitudes that in turn form a breeding ground supporting restrictive welfare programs. The results from the individual-level analysis provide strong evidence that authoritarians prefer less welfare spending, fewer immigrants, and a waiting period before immigrants can access welfare programs. In addition, authoritarians view immigrants as a threat due to their perceived failure to socially conform to American society. Building on these individual-level results, I find that states with large authoritarian populations are more likely to adopt restrictive welfare policies. Jason E. Kehrberg March 30, 2013


Peptide based and peptide hybrid materials represent two interesting and challenging classes of biomaterials. Both classes consist of and contain, respectively, one or more polypeptide blocks, endowing the resulting polymers with enhanced self-assembly properties, biocompatibility or novel characteristics. Peptide based materials, solely comprised of amino acids, benefit from their advanced self-assembly properties. In the case of peptide hybrid materials, being conjugates of peptides and synthetic polymers, either the polypeptide or the synthetic polymer block can drive the self-assembly process. Furthermore, the latter class benefits from combining the advantages of peptides and synthetic polymers, thus overcoming limitations related to the use of the individual components. The application of these materials is still challenging because it is not possible to predict their final self-assembly behavior based on their design. In order to facilitate a target-oriented design of novel materials for application such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, or self-healing materials, a detailed understanding of the complex interactions within and between these molecules is essential. The work presented in this thesis addresses these fundamental questions. Over the last decades, a plethora of peptide and peptide hybrid materials has been reported. Chapter 1 gives an overview of selected articles describing different synthesis routes for peptide as well as peptide hybrid materials, showing examples of molecules and their self-assembly into superstructures, and highlighting recent applications. Chapter 2 describes the synthesis and characterization of different peptide hybrid diblock oligomers composed of two classes of peptide sequences covalently attached to a poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) block. The first class of peptide sequences contains the intrinsic propensity to form coiled coils, whereas the second class is composed of "switch" peptides and is able to adopt both amphiphilic α-helical and β-strand conformations. Upon dissolution, the first class yielded superstructures comprised of dimeric and tetrameric coiled coil aggregates, whereas the second class formed fibrillar assemblies. In both cases, the self-assembly properties were driven by the peptide block, and the final superstructure consisted of a peptidic core wrapped by the synthetic polymer block. Chapter 3 presents a detailed study on the aqueous solution self-assembly of two poly(styrene)n-b-poly(L-lysine)m peptide hybrid oligomers. The aim was to clarify whether the observed rod-like micelles, obtained by direct dissolution of the diblock oligomers in aqueous solution, reflect intrinsic self-assembly properties of the hybrid diblock oligomers or whether they present structures that are energetically trapped due to the glassy nature of the polystyrene block. To address this question, the influence of a variety of sample preparation techniques, including the use of organic solvents, dialysis from an organic solvent and several thermal treatments, was investigated. All treatments resulted in solution aggregates that differed in size and shape from samples prepared by direct dissolution in aqueous solution. Thus, it seems likely that direct dissolution of polystyrene-b-poly(L-lysine) diblock oligomers in aqueous solution results in kinetically trapped, rod-like aggregates, which can be transformed into non-spherical micelles by the appropriate treatment. Chapter 4 contains a comprehensive study on peptide-based materials, investigating four different series of short elastin-like peptides (ELPs) based on the GVGVP motif. The objective was to test whether and how defined changes in the primary structure of short ELPs affect the secondary structure and the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) behavior. Therefore, the number of repeats was altered, and within one peptide of constant length, all valines were successively substituted by the more hydrophobic amino acids isoleucine, leucine and phenylalanine, respectively. In parallel, a theoretical approach based on the partition coefficient log P was used to predict the shift of the LCST as function of chain length and composition. For short ELPs, the LCST is strongly affected by changes in the primary structure. This has also been predicted by calculating log P. An increase in the hydrophobicity resulted in a shift of the LCST towards lower temperatures. Furthermore, it was shown for the first time that the sensitivity of short ELPs towards external factors, such as salt concentration, is determined by the intrinsic propensity of the incorporated amino acids to form either α-helices or β-strands. In summary, the obtained results on peptide based and peptide-hybrid materials provides deeper insights into their self-assembly characteristics and highlights the potential of these materials to be used for technical and medical applications.


The aim of the present study was to present and test a model assuming that career-related variables might function as antecedents of workaholism—the tendency to work compulsively and excessively. More specifically, based on conservation of resource theory and social identity theory, the study tested whether personal (i.e., career insecurity, extrinsic career goals, and career commitment) and contextual variables (i.e., career barriers and perceived organizational support) are related to workaholism. We tested our assumptions by means of stepwise hierarchical regression analyses within a large sample of N = 685 scientists working in different occupational fields (e.g., social science, arts and humanities, economics, and science, technology, engineering, mathematics) in German research institutes and universities. The results showed that career insecurity, career barriers, career commitment, and extrinsic career goals were positively associated, and perceived organizational support was negatively associated, with workaholism. Furthermore, the set of analyzed career variables showed incremental validity and explained a significant portion of variance in workaholism beyond control variables (i.e., gender, age, work hours, and occupational field) and personality (i.e., extroversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism).


School-based, park-focused obesity prevention programs can be a creative solution to the rise in childhood and adolescent obesity rates in the last three decades. Studies have identified numerous physical and mental health benefits connected to physical activity and the outdoors. Several parks prescription programs have been developed and implemented to encourage youth to become more physically active by using their local parks. The Pittsburgh Parks Prescription (Rx) is a school-based pilot program delivered in two gym class settings in Pittsburgh's Arsenal Elementary and Middle Schools. The program is significant to public health in its aims at increasing knowledge of local parks, desire to utilize park systems, and self-reported physical activity in parks. A review of successful school-based obesity prevention and parks prescription programs revealed a common ecological design. Interviews and small group discussions were held with key program informants to inform improvements for the Pittsburgh Parks Rx program. In response, proposed modifications were made to expand reach, increase flexibility, enhance sustainability, and integrate the Pittsburgh Parks Rx into existing programs.


Background—Selective immunoglobulin A (IgA) deficiency (SIgAD) is associated with coeliac disease (CD). Aim—To make a retrospective study of the association of SIgAD with CD in Italy. Methods—Hospital medical records of 2098 patients consecutively diagnosed as having CD were reviewed. Results—Of 2098 patients with CD, 54 (2.6%) had SIgAD, representing a 10–16-fold increase over that in the population in general. This increase was not influenced by age or geographical factors. Patients with SIgAD had a higher incidence of silent forms (7/54, 13%), recurrent infections (16/54, 29.6%), and atopic diseases (7/54, 13%) than those without. The association with autoimmune and malignant diseases and the outcome after eating a gluten free diet were similar in patients with or without SIgAD. In all patients with SIgAD, antibodies for IgA gliadin and endomysium were absent, but serum levels of IgG anti-gliadin antibodies were high in almost all of them (51/54). Conclusions—Serum IgA should be measured in order to be able to interpret negative results for IgA anti-gliadin antibodies and anti-endomysial antibodies in patients being screened for CD. Since some patients with CD and SIgAD may be negative for IgG anti-gliadin antibodies, an intestinal biopsy should be performed in all suspected cases.


Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics, struggles to incorporate ecological processes into predictive models, while structured population modelling, a tool widely used in ecology, rarely incorporates evolution explicitly. In this paper we develop a flexible, general framework that links quantitative genetics and structured population models. We use the quantitative genetic approach to write down the phenotype as an additive map. We then construct integral projection models for each component of the phenotype. The dynamics of the distribution of the phenotype are generated by combining distributions of each of its components. Population projection models can be formulated on per generation or on shorter time steps. We introduce the framework before developing example models with parameters chosen to exhibit specific dynamics. These models reveal (i) how evolution of a phenotype can cause populations to move from one dynamical regime to another (e.g. from stationarity to cycles), (ii) how additive genetic variances and covariances (the G matrix) are expected to evolve over multiple generations, (iii) how changing heritability with age can maintain additive genetic variation in the face of selection and (iii) life history, population dynamics, phenotypic characters and parameters in ecological models will change as adaptation occurs. Our approach unifies population ecology and evolutionary biology providing a framework allowing a very wide range of questions to be addressed. The next step is to apply the approach to a variety of laboratory and field systems. Once this is done we will have a much deeper understanding of eco-evolutionary dynamics and feedbacks.


We present and review several successful applications using graphic processing unit to accelerate the processing of biomedical optics data including image processing, Monte Carlo simulation, image reconstruction and statistics analysis. It is shown that using GPU can obtain significant performance enhancement comparing with that based on CPU calculation.


Threshold effect of advertising has received wide attention in the marketing literature, but little formal representation of this phenomenon has been developed. On the basis of monthly time-series and cross-sectional data, the author tests for the existence of a threshold effect in a consumer good market. Alternative models are developed and estimated. A switching regression model which assumes a concave function to a cutoff point seems consistent with the evidence. The cutoff point below which advertising has little effect is estimated and the shift of advertising elasticity is assessed. The results show that advertising elasticity increases above the cutoff level, price elasticity is larger for heavily advertised premium brands than for less advertised low-price brands, and a minimum threshold level on advertising share is consistent with the theory.


Integrating digital technologies in teaching and learning processes is a universal phenomenon which is often recommended by governments, universities, education faculties and schools in order to improve educational systems.  In spite of the capabilities of digital tools, their usage is new in classrooms and restricted to primary grades. Therefore, the present study with an exploratory sequential mixed method approach in two steps was conducted to extract influential factors that enhance the use of digital technologies. To do so, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 6 groups of from 3 to 5 primary and mathematics high school teachers, respectively. In addition, influencing factors were extracted, through the quantitative approach, survey method participating 457 people using path analysis, and the relationships amongst factors were examined and several recommendations were proposed. The main findings showed that school readiness contributed to teacher readiness and these two had statistical signification effect on student's use of digital technologies.


A profile of CONUCO database is presented with the purpose of showing its usefulness and meaning for Puerto Rican periodicals. This database mainly compiles articles published in Puerto Rican periodicals but includes materials from Puerto Rican authors and topics published in foreign periodicals. The profile is accompanied by a series of characteristics which describe the reason of being of the art of indexing. It is established that the aim of indexing is to facilitate information retrieval of documents and images included in a multidocumentary index as the one described. The development of this database had been impossible without the collaboration of periodicals editors within the index frame of commitment to provide information and knowledge to the people of Puerto Rico.


A proxy object is a surrogate or placeholder that controls access to another target object. Proxies can be used to support distributed programming, lazy or parallel evaluation, access control, and other simple forms of behavioral reflection. However, wrapper proxies (like futures or suspensions for yet-to-be-computed results) can require significant code changes to be used in statically-typed languages, while proxies more generally can inadvertently violate assumptions of transparency, resulting in subtle bugs. To solve these problems, we have designed and implemented a simple framework for proxy programming that employs a static analysis based on qualifier inference, but with additional novelties. Code for using wrapper proxies is automatically introduced via a classfile-to-classfile transformation, and potential violations of transparency are signaled to the programmer. We have formalized our analysis and proven it sound. Our framework has a variety of applications, including support for asynchronous method calls returning futures. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of our framework: programmers are relieved of managing and/or checking proxy usage, analysis times are reasonably fast, overheads introduced by added dynamic checks are negligible, and performance improvements can be significant. For example, changing two lines in a simple RMI-based peer-to-peer application and then using our framework resulted in a large performance gain.


Herman Melville's "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," included in his signature set of shorter narratives The Piazza Tales, remains relatively unvisited by readers and critics. So too was the archipelago generally known as the Galapagos, before becoming a chic destination for natural history excursions and eco-tourism. These ten "sketches" relate a narrator's experiences on the Pacific islands, adding a number of travelers' stories, some extrapolated (more or less accurately) from known records, some creatively transformed. One informative, comprehensive handbook suggests that Melville's description of this volcanic archipelago as Encantadas or "enchanted" in the sense of bewitched-uncanny, weird, their very positions and relations apparently forming a zone of indeterminacy-can serve as a metaphor for the critical writing attempting to chart them. That guide asks whether critics have been successful in their efforts to find something more than geographical unity here. Are these sketches just travel narratives connected merely by their subject's equatorial position six hundred miles west of Peru? Naturally, some are struck by the fact that the most celebrated visit to the islands was Darwin's, recorded in the Voyage of the Beagle, which Melville may have read shipboard (apparently ships' libraries were rich enough to justify Ishmael's description of his whaling life as his Yale and Harvard). There is a striking contrast between "The Encantadas'" impressions of utter inhumanity and desolation and Darwin's fascination with the rich variety of birds, reptiles, and amphibians that stimulated his eventual formulation of the grand theory of evolution. Melville too is interested in the beasts-both native and imported-not so much as a naturalist but in terms of how they shock humans, provide food, become part of, or present analogies to our social and political structures, and whose exploitation enables a global economy. Document Type Book Chapter ISBN 9781498536745 Publication Date 2017 Publisher Statement Copyright © 2017 Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.This chapter first appeared in Melville Among the Philosophers. Please note that downloads of the book chapter are for private/personal use only. Purchase online at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Recommended Citation Shapiro, Gary. "Beasts, Sovereigns, Pirates: Melville's 'Enchanted Isles' Beyond the Picturesque." In Melville Among the Philosophers, edited by Cory McCall and Tom Nurmi, 83103. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2017.  Download


Background & Aims of the Study : Disorder or disturbance in family functioning is a serious threatens for family member's mental health and community health. Current study intended to examine the reality therapy on the improvement of couple's family functioning. Materials and methods: The design of the study is as quasi-experiment research (pre-test and post-test with follow up and control group). Statistical population consists all couples referring to the psychological and counseling centers of Rasht city in 2012. Samples were selected at first by Convenience sampling  method and after completing family assessment  device, and obtaining score for enter to research, were placement using random sampling method in two experimental and control groups (N=8 couples per group). The experimental group participated in 12 sessions of group counseling based on reality therapy and control group received no intervention. The gathered data was analyzed using covariance analysis. Results: The results show that there are significant differences between the pre-test and post test scores of the experimental group. This difference is significant at the level of 0.05. Therefore it seems that reality therapy improved the family functioning of couples. Conclusion: The results indicated that reality therapy group counseling can improve the family functioning, thus, using this approach in order to improve and strengthen the family functioning of couples is recommended


INTRODUCTION Laurie Anne Freeman, a world-renowned expert on information technology and Japanese politics and a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received extremely positive reviews from her department until she had two daughters and took leaves to be with them. (1) The reviews she received after returning from her leaves were increasingly critical of her research and productivity. (2) Despite family-friendly university policies, including rules that prohibited consideration of leave time when evaluating productivity, the department repeatedly evaluated her earlier than scheduled and compared her unfavorably with professors who had not taken leaves. (3) When Freeman came up for tenure, she had an impressive list of accomplishments including two prestigious fellowships, one book published and one under contract, and invitations to present her work at leading institutions including Harvard and Stanford. (4) Overwhelmingly negative assessments from her department, however, culminated in a unanimous recommendation to deny tenure. (5) But that was not the end of the road for Freeman. (6) The Chancellor sent Freeman's case back to the Political Science Department for a new tenure review. (7) Again, the department at tacked her scholarly work. (8) This time, however, the Chancellor could not overlook the overwhelmingly positive assessment of experts in her field and her outstanding resume. (9) The Chancellor granted her tenure. (10) Freeman was not satisfied; she filed a charge of sex discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the "EEOC"), alleging that her decisions to have children and to use the university's family-friendly policy were the real reasons for her tenure denial. (11) On September 6, 2005, Freeman was granted a rare EEOC cause determination. (12) Charlotte Fishman, Freeman's lawyer, said that she thought the cause determination was important because it drew attention to the sex-plus discrimination that women face in academia. (13) Sex-plus discrimination, however, is not limited to academia. Freeman's story highlights the discrimination that women face in the workplace, even at so-called family-friendly institutions. Despite legislation designed to promote equality for women and mothers in the workplace, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ("Title VII"), the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the "PDA"), and the Family and Medical Leave Act (the "FMLA"), discrimination persists. Role-reinforcing stereotypes (14) and the male-centric job model (15) continue to constrain women. The existing statutes are in large part narrowly applied by the courts and, as written, are insufficient to curtail the problem. The passage of the PDA acknowledged that pregnancy discrimination is a problem and began to roll back the paternalistic treatment of pregnant women, (16) but the PDA has not significantly alleviated the problem of pregnancy discrimination. It has been construed narrowly so that in many jurisdictions it covers only discrimination arising from pregnancy itself, as distinct from its side effects. (17) And the PDA does not grapple with many fundamental issues necessary to secure equality for women in the workplace and at home, such as how to structure the provision of childcare and breast-feeding. Women can attempt to pursue these claims as sex-plus claims under Title VII, but that route has proven to be generally unsuccessful. (18) Thus, many women are left unprotected from discrimination in the workplace based on their status as mothers, childcare providers, and producers of breast milk. According to one possible indicator, the number of charges filed with the EEOC, pregnancy discrimination is on the rise. (19) With more than sixty-eight million women in the workforce, including 72.9 percent of women with children under age eighteen, (20) in recent years the EEOC has seen a thirty-five percent increase in the number of pregnancy discrimination charges filed when compared with the number of charges filed in 1992, (21) even though the United States has seen a nine percent reduction in its birth rate. …


Background and Purpose: Nowadays, happiness as one of the positive psychology factors is of fundamental importance. Therefore, identifying the factors affecting this concept would be considerably helpful in the enhancement of well-being. Regarding this, the aim of the current study was to investigate the relationship of psychological well-being and happiness with religious orientation in female students. Materials and Methods: This descriptive and correlational study was conducted on 200 students of Islamic Azad University, Arak Branch, who were selected through cluster sampling method in 2014-2015. Data collection was performed using three research instruments including Ryff's Psychological Well-being Scale, Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, and Allport's Religious Orientation Scale. Data analysis was performed through Pearson product-moment correlation and regression analysis. Results: According to the results, there was a significant direct correlation between psychological well-being, happiness, and internal religious orientation (r=0.325, P<0.05). However, psychological well-being, happiness, and external religious orientation were indirectly correlated (r=0.0137, P<0.05). In addition, a significant positive correlation was observed between happiness and psychological well-being (r=0.263, P<0.05). Conclusion: As the findings of the present study indicated, religious orientation and happiness are associated with psychological well-being. Consequently, religion and happiness should be more considered in planning the preventive programs (primary and secondary).


With the high penetration of distributed generators (DGs), it puts higher requirements on the operational flexibility of active distribution networks (ADNs). Operational flexibilities are from controllable resources (CRs) within the feeders. However, due to the secure operational constraints of distribution network, the flexibilities of CRs cannot be fully translated into feeder operational flexibilities. In this paper, to quantify the feeder operational flexibility for flexible, efficient and secure operation of ADNs, a quantification analysis method is proposed. The definition and mathematical expression of feeder operational flexibility are proposed firstly. By constructing a multi-dimensional state space, state equations of operational constraints are presented. Then an analytical framework for quantifying the feeder operational flexibility in ADNs is proposed. Finally, based on Monte Carlo simulation, case studies are performed on the modified IEEE 33-node system.


Simulations of asteroid airburst are being conducted to obtain best estimates of damage areas and assess sensitivity to variables for asteroid characterization and mitigation efforts. The simulations presented here employed the ALE3D hydrocode to examine the breakup and energy deposition of asteroids entering the Earth's atmosphere, using the Chelyabinsk meteor as a test case. This paper examines the effect of increasingly complex material models on the energy deposition profile. Modeling the meteor as a rock having a single strength can reproduce airburst altitude and energy deposition reasonably well but is not representative of real rock masses (large bodies of material). Accounting for a yield curve that includes different tensile, shear, and compressive strengths shows that shear strength determines the burst altitude. Including yield curves and compaction of porous spaces in the material changes the detailed mechanics of the breakup but only has a limited effect on the burst altitude and energy deposition. Strong asteroids fail and create peak energy deposition close to the altitude at which ram dynamic pressure equals the material strength. Weak asteroids, even though they structurally fail at high altitude, require the increased pressure at lower altitude to disrupt and disperse the rubble. As a result, a wide range of weaker asteroid strengths produce peak energy deposition at a similar altitude.


This dissertation explores Toni Morrison's most prevalent motifs: the ghost, the orphan, and the outlaw. Each figure advances a critique of dominant narratives, specifically those that comprise history, family, and the law. In Chapter One, I argue that Morrison's ghost stories contrast two methods of memory, one that is authoritative and another that is imaginative, in order to counter the official renderings of history. Her ghosts signal forgotten aspects of American history and provide access to another storyline – one that lies in the shadows of the novel's principal narrative. This chapter compares the ghosts of Love and Home in order to show how Morrison uses ghosts as conduits of a subversive individual and communal memory. In my second chapter, I assert a reading of Morrison's orphans as blues figures. They attest to the destructive effects of race, class, and gender oppression, which render her characters biologically and culturally orphaned. I conclude this chapter by comparing Paradise and A Mercy to show how Morrison's orphaned characters posit an alternative model of kinship that is built from the shared project of liberation. In Chapter Three, I examine Morrison's treatment of the law and its foil – the outlaw. I argue that Morrison foregrounds criminality in the absence of the law and its apparatuses (courts, police) in order to subvert the social institutions that give rise to the ghost and the orphan. I compare the crimes at the heart of Tar Baby and Jazz in order to posit another notion of justice operating in Morrison's fiction. When looked at together, Morrison's triptych threatens the coherence of governing ideologies and offers a meditation on the transformative possibilities of narrative.


The kinetics and mechanism of the hydrothermal alteration from pentlandite (Ni, Fe)9S8 to violarite (Ni, Fe)3S4 has been studied by a series of experiments. High purity natural pentlandite, synthetic pure pentlandite or synthetic pentlandite/pyrrhotite assemblages were utilized as the starting minerals. The minerals were reacted with a 0.2 M acetic acid /sodium acetate buffer (pH 3-5) at temperatures ranging from 80°C to 145°C. The reaction progresses were monitored by Rietveld quantitative phase analysis based on X-ray diffraction data. At 80°C , the reaction took 792 h to transform 20(4) % pentlandite to violarite. This rate was improved by adding small amount of hydrogen sulfide gas into the buffer, as 40 (4) % pentlandite was altered after an identical time. At 125°C, the reaction took 168 h to reach completion for pure pentlandite. This process was catalyzed by pyrrhotite as the reaction time was reduced to 68 h for pentlandite in pentlandite/pyrrhotite assemblage, with marcasite produced after further soaking. The catalytic role of pyrrhotite is probably due to its dissolution, which provides large surface area as well as cracks for easier mass transfer. The classic Arrhenius rule does not apply to the kinetics as the reaction rate slowed down when increase the temperature from 125°C to 145Γ. The rate constants derived from Avrami equation range from 5.8 × 10-8/s to 3.0 × 10-7/s for reactions at 80°C, 2.8 × 10-6/s to 2.08 × 10-5/s for 125 °C, and 1 × 10-6/s to 5.1 × 10-6/s for 145°C. These rate constants are far excess those for solid - state diffusion controlled reactions, and indicate a rapid reaction on the geological time scale. Textual evolutions during the reaction were monitored by observing backscattered images of cross-sections of minerals prior to and after reactions. Fine-grained violarite crystals with micro-crack feature have been observed, indicating a coupled dissolution-reprecipitation mechanism rather than a solid state diffusion controlled mechanism. This mechanism is probably driven by the reaction front which controls the saturation state of the fluid.


Resource limitation in zero time may cause to some profitable projects not to be selected in project selection problem, thus simultaneous project portfolio selection and scheduling problem has received significant attention. In this study, budget, investment costs and earnings are considered to be stochastic. The objectives are maximizing net present values of selected projects and minimizing variance of them. Benefiting an efficient multi-objective approach to satisfy every conflicting objective, an integer non-linear goal programming model is developed. Another contribution of this paper is to consider cost dependency between the projects, in project portfolio selection and scheduling problem. Due to the complexity of this problem, especially in large sizes, imperialist competitive algorithm and genetic algorithm are presented. The effectiveness of the model and proposed algorithms are demonstrated via a case study in a knowledge based company at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The result shows high performance of the both proposed algorithms.


The competitiveness of a supply chain is driven by the ability of supply chain governance structures to adapt to the chains' continuously changing technical and organizational characteristics. The present study addresses the adoption of sustainability improvement options in the area of organization and management in the agri-food sector; within this framework the study proposes a tool for assessing the impact of sustainability oriented processes on the supply chain governance structures, in turn influencing the competitiveness of the supply chain. Two different approaches, proposed by (Gereffi et al., 2005) and (Hobbs and Young, 2000) have been linked to provide a theoretical framework for the tool development. The proposed new conceptual framework links the dimensions defining five different governance structures complexity of transaction, ability to codify and capabilities in the supply-base (Gereffi et al.,) to the product characteristics, regulatory and technology aspects defined by Hobbs and Young as drivers influencing the vertical coordination of supply chains. The method suggested for measuring the relations between improvement options and the chain governance structure is the adoption of experts' evaluations. This method improves the tool capacity to provide a context-related supply chain governance structure assessment and management.


DNA-based self-assembly of nanoelectronic devices is an emerging technology that has the potential to enable tera-to peta-scale device integration. However, self-assembly currently is limited to manufacturing small computing blocks (nodes) which must then be interconnected to build a larger computing system. In this paper, the authors study node networks created by varying control over three aspects of the self-assembly process (node placement, node orientation, and inter-node link creation). In particular, the authors examine the tradeoff between node complexity and control required during self-assembly to maximize the number of connected nodes in the network. As the level of control decreases, the authors find that node communication hardware needs to be augmented to allow link sharing between several transceivers. This also results in better network connectivity in the presence of defective nodes and links. Finally, the authors show that for a data parallel architecture with enough available nodes, the specific network topology has a negligible effect on performance


Cells containing histamine were identified in a third instar brain of a normal Drosophila melanogaster larva using a whole-mount staining technique that detects histamine. The histamine antibody staining was performed on intact tissue to easily identify cells that likely use histamine as a neurotransmitter in the brain. Results indicate that mutants in the Hdc gene do not have detectable levels of histamine in the central brain of larvae. The methodology used and these results should allow an examination of mutants that may be defective in spatial regulation of the transmitter, histamine.


MOST psychiatrists think that what goes on between them and their patients is entirely confidential. They believe the relationship is afforded a form of legal protection known as privilege. Some doctors think privilege is a favor or protection given them by the law because of their special training and as a public recognition of their need to treat patients in a setting of utmost privacy, free from the potential intrusion of uninvited third parties. This is simply not so. The law extends privilege to the patient, not the doctor. It protects the patient from unwelcome disclosure and serves to keep private the intimate details of a professional relationship. Under certain circumstances the protection may be incomplete. It is a general rule of law making that for every concession granted by statute, there are defined exceptions which serve to limit application of the statute and


Ageing influences the functioning of most living organisms in myriad ways and has profound consequences for their reproductive fitness and survival. Age-related changes in the functioning of an organism are thought to result from the weakened selection against deleterious mutations acting after the peak reproductive age, and selection optimizing resource allocation to reproduction versus self-maintenance. Consequently, life history theory predicts that the rate of senescence should be reduced and the age of onset of senescence delayed with increasing lifespan. A high risk of mortality from extrinsic causes should lead to earlier or faster senescence. Extensions of this theory lead to the prediction that the shorter-lived sex (e.g. males in most mammals) should show earlier senescence. Furthermore, the sex-specific selective pressures for lifespan and reproductive rate might be expected to lead to a preferential maintenance of traits that optimize immune function and self-maintenance in females, whereas male fitness may be better enhanced by a prolonged investment in competitive ability. Senescent declines might thus be expected to show trait- and sex-specific patterns. However, beyond comparative studies of age-related mortality rates, these predictions remain largely untested under natural conditions.
The aim of this thesis was to test these elemental predictions by studying sex-specific functional senescence (within-individual deterioration in physiological or physical functioning) in a sexually monomorphic, small-bodied primate species (gray mouse lemur, Microcebus murinus) that experiences a high risk of extrinsic mortality in its natural environment. To gain an understanding of the prevalence of senescence across traits, and how this is influenced by selective mortality of individuals in poor condition, I examined sex-specific age trajectories in four different components of health that together broadly indicate the overall functioning of the individual and its ability to cope with environmental demands: body mass, physical strength, gastrointestinal parasite burden and allostatic load (baseline glucocorticoid level). To estimate the significance of selective disappearance and for quantifying body mass senescence, I used long-term data (10-18 generations) from a captive breeding colony in Brunoy, France, and two wild populations in Kirindy, western Madagascar. I collected grip strength measurements and fecal samples over two dry and two rainy seasons from a long-term monitored, individually marked wild gray mouse lemur population. To compare the patterns of senescence between wild and captive animals, I additionally measured grip strength of captive animals.
In the first study, selective disappearance of individuals with declining body mass was found in both, the captive and wild setting, whereas a senescent decline in the ability to regain lost body mass was found only in captivity. Some evidence was found that mortality in the wild was more condition-dependent in females than in males, and an intriguing reversal of the sex-bias in lifespan was detailed between the settings: females live longer than males in nature but males outlive females in captivity. This study also confirmed an overall female advantage in body mass, despite sex-specific, seasonal body mass fluctuation in the wild. In the second study, no sex differences were found in the age trajectories of hand grip strength, an indicator of physical functioning, in either the captive or wild setting. Contrary to other species that invariably report stronger males than females, females were equally strong or stronger than males in the gray mouse lemur. To test the prediction that immune function might decline at old age, with more pronounced declines expected in males, in the third study I estimated the age trajectories of gastrointestinal parasite burdens (parasite prevalence and morphospecies richness quantified via fecal egg counts) as a proxy of overall health in the wild population. Contrary to these predictions, parasite burden declined with age similarly in both sexes, possibly due to acquired immunity and selective mortality of individuals with impaired resistance to parasites. However, males initially experienced a higher parasite burden. The fourth study was motivated by the finding that in other species, a high allostatic load follows from senescent deterioration in the negative feedback regulation of glucocorticoids, and has detrimental consequences for health and fitness. After validating an assay to quantify glucocorticoid levels from gray mouse lemur feces, I tested the prediction that aged animals would experience a high allostatic load. The prediction was met only in aged females in the dry season, perhaps indicating a reduced ability of the aged animals to cope with the energetic demands that coincide with the ecological dry season.
In summary, I evidenced highly variable sex-, season-, and setting-specific patterns of senescence in the gray mouse lemur, with substantial differences in aging between the components of health measured. While senescent declines were observed in some parameters, an absence of senescence and even negative senescence were found in others. Body mass and parasite resistance were best preserved until old age, likely reflecting the importance of these indicators for survival and the associated strong, positive selective pressures for their maintenance. Contrary to the predictions of life history theory, wild males experienced generally a similar magnitude or less pronounced functional senescence relative to females. This implies that despite their early mortality, males do not experience earlier or faster senescence in the included components of health, perhaps due to strong selective pressures for a "robust" male phenotype required for improved male fitness. However, age-related changes in further components of functioning, including reproductive success, should be examined in both sexes to confirm these patterns. In conclusion, the results of this thesis do not support the fundamental predictions of an earlier onset or higher rate of senescence in the wild population that experiences high extrinsic mortality risk, or of an earlier senescence in the shorter-lived sex. The rapid, selective mortality of individuals in a declining condition and the associated positive selection for better self-maintenance may counteract the selective pressures that act to reduce self-maintenance beyond the prime reproductive age. The fitness-enhancing traits and the significance of selective mortality may differ across species and between the sexes. Further investigation into sex-specific, multi-trait senescence across taxa can shed further light on mechanisms of lifespan determination and the patterns of senescence observed across the animal kingdom, including humans.


The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) and its partner agencies developed a research program to design new and retrofit culverts. The goal of this program is to identify culvert bed configurations, designs, and associated hydraulic conditions that allow successful movement of juvenile salmonids upstream, while safely passing water, sediment, and debris downstream. WSDOT in cooperation with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) constructed a culvert test bed at the WDFW's Skookumchuck Hatchery in western Washington State. Battelle conducted experiments to establish protocols for future research on bed conditions, culvert shape, etc. This technical report describes various protocols, such as time of day, duration of test, and density of test fish, and provides hydraulic and biological characterizations of a baseline culvert.


The American Journal of Tropical Medicine is now completing its first year in a condition which is fairly satisfactory to the editor and to the publishers. It has apparently also been acceptable to its readers. As is well known, American workers in tropical medicine have wanted and needed a journal for some time. Our population, our resources, our history and our prospects have all seemed to warrant it. A journal somewhat on the same lines was conducted in New Orleans for a short time a few years ago. It was discontinued, but only for personal reasons and not because there was no place for it.
The existence of a journal reduces itself to a question of manuscript and money. The present journal was established after an offer of a strong publishing house to undertake the financial risk. The editor considered this offer an opportunity that should not be missed.


Removing the nucleus in sieve elements Although a cell's nucleus performs critical command and control functions, some cell types, such as enucleated red blood cells, seem to do without. Sieve element cells in plants similarly carry out their function of transporting nutrients and signals from one end of the plant to the other without the guidance of a nucleus. Furuta et al. watched how the nucleus self-destructs during the development of sieve element cells (see the Perspective by Geldner). The process is regulated under the control of transcription factors, even as the entire nuclear edifice crumbles into nothingness. Science, this issue p. 933; see also p. 875 Cellular remodeling to develop phloem cells orchestrates degradation of the cell's nucleus. [Also see Perspective by Geldner] Photoassimilates such as sugars are transported through phloem sieve element cells in plants. Adapted for effective transport, sieve elements develop as enucleated living cells. We used electron microscope imaging and three-dimensional reconstruction to follow sieve element morphogenesis in Arabidopsis. We show that sieve element differentiation involves enucleation, in which the nuclear contents are released and degraded in the cytoplasm at the same time as other organelles are rearranged and the cytosol is degraded. These cellular reorganizations are orchestrated by the genetically redundant NAC domain–containing transcription factors, NAC45 and NAC86 (NAC45/86). Among the NAC45/86 targets, we identified a family of genes required for enucleation that encode proteins with nuclease domains. Thus, sieve elements differentiate through a specialized autolysis mechanism.