Increasing penetrations of distributed generation at low power levels within electricity networks leads to the requirement for cheap, integrated, protection and control systems. To minimise unit cost, algorithms for the measurement of AC voltage and current waveforms should be implemented on a single microcontroller, which also carries out all other protection and control tasks, including communication and data logging. This limits the frame rate of the major algorithms, although ADCs can be over-sampled using peripheral control processors on suitable microcontrollers. Measurement algorithms also have to be tolerant of poor power quality which may arise, even transiently, within a microgrid, battlefield, or disaster-relief scenario. This thesis analyses the potential magnitude of these interfering signals, and presents suitably tolerant architectures and algorithms for measurements of AC waveforms (amplitude, phase and frequency). These algorithms are shown to be robust and accurate, with harmonic content up to the level of 53% THD, and with the major algorithms executing at only 500 samples per second. This is achieved by the careful optimisation and cascaded use of exact-time averaging techniques, which prove to be useful at all stages of the measurements: from DC bias removal to low-sample-rate Fourier analysis to sub-harmonic ripple removal. Algorithms for three-phase nodal power flow analysis are benchmarked on the Infineon TC1796 microcontroller and require less than 8% of the 2000μs frame time, leaving the remainder free for other algorithms. Furthermore, to optimise security of supply in a microgrid scenario, loss-of-mains must be detected quickly even when there is an accidental or deliberate balance between local active power generation and demand. The measurement techniques are extended to the detection of loss-of-mains using a new Phase Offset relay, in combination with a novel reactive power control technique to avoid the non-detection-zone. These techniques are tested using simulation, captured network transient events, and a real hardware microgrid including a synchronous generator and inverter.


The NCAA Basketball Tournament selection committee annually selects the Division I men's teams that should receive at-large bids to the national championship tournament. Although its deliberations are shrouded in secrecy, the committee is supposed to consider a litany of team-performance statistics, many of which outsiders can reasonably estimate. Using a probit analysis on objective team data from 1994 through 1999, we developed an equation that accurately classified nearly 90 percent of 249 "bubble" teams during that time frame and over 85 percent for the 2000 tournament. Given the NCAA Tournament's nickname of the big dance, the equation is effectively the "dance card" that determined whether a team got an invitation from past committees and is also a tool that could aid decision making for future committees. The accuracy of the dance card, and the factors and weights included in it, suggest that the committee is fairly predictable in its decisions, despite barbs from fans, teams, and the media.


We aim at developing ultralight autonomous microflyers capable of navigating within houses or small built environments. Our latest prototype is a fixed-wing aircraft weighing a mere 10 g, flying around 1.5 m/s and carrying the necessary electronics for airspeed regulation and collision avoidance. This microflyer is equipped with two tiny camera modules, two rate gyroscopes, an anemometer, a small microcontroller, and a Bluetooth radio module. In-flight tests are carried out in a new experimentation room specifically designed for easy changing of surrounding textures


The Gara, Yalea, and Gounkoto Au deposits of the >17 Moz Loulo mining district, largely hosted by the Kofi series metasediments, are located several kilometers to the east of the 650-Mt Fe skarn deposits in the adjacent Falémé batholith. The Au deposits are interpreted to have formed through phase separation of an aqueous-carbonic fluid, which locally mixed with a hypersaline brine of metaevaporite origin. Recognition of an intrusive relationship between the Falémé batholith and Kofi series opens the possibility that the Fe skarns and Au deposits are part of the same mineral system. In this paper, we combine new δ13C, δ18O, and δ34S data from the Karakaene Ndi skarn, Au occurrences along the western margin of the Kofi series, and zircons within plutonic rocks of the Falémé batholith. We combine these with existing data from the Loulo Au deposits to model the contribution of magmatic volatiles to Au mineralization.
 C and O isotope compositions of auriferous carbonate-quartz-sulfide veins from the Loulo Au deposits have wide ranges (δ13C: –21.7 to –4.5‰ and δ18O: 11.8 to 23.2‰), whereas values from carbonate veins in Kofi series Au prospects close to the Falémé batholith and the Karakaene Ndi Fe skarn deposit have more restricted ranges (δ13C: –16.8 to –3.7‰, δ18O: 11.4 to 17.2‰, and δ13C: –3.0 ± 1‰, δ18O: 12.6 ± 1‰, respectively). Kofi series dolostones have generally higher isotopic values (δ13C: –3.1 to 1.3‰ and δ18O: 19.1 to 23.3‰). Pyrite from Kofi series Au prospects adjacent to the Falémé batholith have a wide range of δ34S values (–4.6 to 14.2‰), similar to pyrite from the Karakaene Ndi skarn (2.8 to 11.9‰), whereas δ34S values of pyrite and arsenopyrite from the Loulo deposits are consistently >6‰.
 Comparison of the C and O isotope data with water-rock reaction models indicates the Loulo Au deposits formed primarily through unmixing of an aqueous carbonic fluid derived from the devolatilization of sedimentary rocks with an organic carbon component. Isotopic data are permissive of the hypersaline brine that enhanced this phase separation including components derived from both Kofi series evaporite horizons interlayered with the dolostones and a magmatic-hydrothermal brine. This magmatic-hydrothermal component is particularly apparent in O, C, and S isotope data from the Gara deposit and Au prospects immediately adjacent to the Falémé batholith.


There are four broad topics covered in Agile Project Management: opportunity, principles, framework and practices. The opportunity lies in creating innovative products and services-things that are new, different, and creative.These are products that can't be defined completely in the beginning but evolve over time through experimentation, exploration, and adaptation.The book discusses the Agile Revolution; describe the value and principles that actuate APM; cover the APM process framework and individual practices; examine how agile principles are used and underscores; and how APM helps address the changing nature of new product development.


The rise of nationalistic political leaders has spanned the globe—from Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen in the West, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Middle East, to Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte in the East. To varying degrees, each of these leaders espouse an "our country first" mentality, skepticism or outright hostility toward multilateral institutions and global trade, and leadership styles that emphasize ethnic or group identification, distrust of immigrants, and increased assertiveness sometimes bordering on bluster and aggression.
How do we measure this phenomenon called globalization? What are some underlying causes of the backlash against globalization? Is national progress incompatible with global progress? Has globalization stopped or slowed in recent years? Is nationalism—or a "my country first" approach—compatible with economic growth? What leadership qualities are needed for a 21st-century civilization? Are leadership styles that emphasize strength of personality, ethnic or group identification, and increased assertiveness compatible with human progress and civilization? In the most general sense, does human evolution suggest a dominant role for competition—or cooperation?


Supramolecular Coordination Compounds (SCCs) represent the power of Coordination Chemistry methodologies to self-assemble discrete architectures with targeted properties. SCCs are generally synthesised in solution, with isolat-ed fully-coordinated metal atoms as structural nodes, thus severely limited as metal-based catalysts. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) show unique features to act as chemical nanoreactors for the in-situ synthesis and stabilization of otherwise not accessible functional species. Here, we present the self-assembly of PdII SCCs within the confined space of a preformed MOF (SCCs@MOF) and its post-assembly metalation to give a PdII-AuIII supramolecular assembly, crys-tallography underpinned. These SCCs@MOF catalyse the coupling of boronic acids and/or alkynes, representative multisite metallic-catalysed reactions in which traditional SCCs tend to decompose, and retain its structural integrity as consequence of the synergetic hybridization between SCCs and MOF. These results open new avenues in both the synthesis of novel SCCs and their use on heterogeneous metal-based Supramolecular Catalysis.


Objectives: A current priority for UK healthcare administrations is the improvement of patient safety and the delivery of compassionate care. Following a public inquiry into failures at one hospital in England (Francis Report 2013) NHS organisations have been required to strengthen leadership and management to achieve better outcomes This poster outlines the practical steps taken by one healthcare provider to effect culture change through targeted management development, and the measured impact of change in terms of organisational performance and staff engagement and commitment.
Population: The organisation provides a broad range of mental health, learning disability and community care services. Following a merger of services in 2011 the organisation doubled in size and needed to harmonise services, integrate professional groups and enhance corporate alignment with the requirements of regional funding agencies. A management development programme was established to distil the evidence base linking staff engagement and cultures of high quality care and to disseminate this learning to all staff with line management responsibility.
Methods: The programme was launched in October 2013 and delivered off-site to cohorts of 18 managers at a time, as three 2 day modules. A core element is a strong focus on managing effective appraisals and giving performance based feedback, in light of the evidence of a link between appraisal and patient outcomes (West 2002) By May 2016, 570 mangers had completed the course (86% of all managers in the organisation). An action learning approach and a range of evaluation methods are used to assess the impact of the course including, participant feedback, project outcomes, results of the annual staff survey and external auditor's reports
Findings: The benefits resulting from this investment substantially outweigh the costs and challenges of sustaining the programme in face of increasing financial pressure. Specific benefits cited by attendees are: confidence building, the opportunity for collective problem solving and feeling valued by the organisation. The staff survey has seen an average increase of 18% in satisfaction in areas relating to engagement and commitment; and a 30% increase in belief that 'we are providing high quality services to our patients/service user' (from 43% in 2012 to 73% in 2015). At an organisational level a number of reputational benefits have been, in part, attributed to the programme: one course initiated project has been short listed for a national award. Directly attributable to the programme is an improvement in performance appraisal uptake and quality of the appraisal (with an 8 % increase in staff reporting that they had a well-structured appraisal one year after launch of the programme)
Conclusion: This organisational journey is offered as a realistic, tested and evaluated model of workforce development for organisations facing similar challenges. Clear focus on evidence based management, an organisation-wide approach to management development and an explicit focus on culture change behaviours underpin the success of the programme


A Minnesota program has received funding to expand its suicide prevention efforts. The Thrive Range program, which provides mental health and substance abuse resources to rural parts of St. Louis County, won the four-year grant from the state department of health. The funding will help the program work with local health care systems to adopt the Zero Suicide model and support the rollout of a mental health and substance abuse program in schools. Thrive Range will also use the grant to provide free access to mental health and substance abuse resources on its website, with a particular focus on preventing suicide among men and veterans.


How do we pay for the digital public sphere? In the Second Gilded Age, the answer is primarily through digital surveillance and through finding ever new ways to make money out of personal data. Digital capitalism in the Second Gilded Age features an implicit bargain: a seemingly unlimited freedom to speak in exchange for the right to surveil and manipulate end users.

To protect freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age we must distinguish the values of free speech from the judicially created doctrines of the First Amendment. That is because the practical freedom to speak online depends on a privately owned and operated infrastructure of digital communication to which the First Amendment does not apply. As a result, the protection of digital free expression has increasingly begun to detach from the judicial doctrines of the First Amendment. This makes the First Amendment increasingly irrelevant to protecting digital speech. Indeed, in the Second Gilded Age, the judicially created doctrines of First Amendment law become most important as potential obstacles to reform. They create constitutional difficulties for attempts to regulate private infrastructure owners in order to protect free speech values and personal privacy.

Protecting freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age requires us to focus on the political economy of digital speech: how we pay for the digital public sphere, the dangers the digital political economy creates for end users, and the kinds of reforms that would best protect their interests in speech and privacy.

This essay uses the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal of March 2018 to explain how the conditions that make free speech possible have changed from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. That controversy is a characteristic scandal of the Second Gilded Age because it centers on how digital infrastructure companies make their money and how they affect the public sphere in the process. The scandal also highlights a central problem for freedom of speech in the Second Gilded Age: Digital privacy undergirds our freedom of expression, but the way we pay for freedom of expression perpetually threatens our digital privacy and subjects us to dangers of manipulation and overreaching.

The great irony is that an era that promised unbounded opportunities for freedom of expression is also an era of increasing digital control and surveillance. The same technological advances allow both results. The essay concludes by briefly introducing a reform proposal advocated in my previous work: that we should consider digital media companies as information fiduciaries who have duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty toward their end users.


Research on physical activity for cancer survivors suggests a relationship with improved quality of life. The aim of this study was to explore if there was also a relationship of physical activity with sleep difficulties and fatigue, common effects of cancer and its treatments. Recruitment was by posters and flyers in medical waiting rooms and by letter of invitation. Thirty-two breast and 59 prostate cancer survivors completed the questionnaire. Poor sleep quality was reported by 57.8%. A greater proportion of breast cancer (36.7%) than prostate cancer survivors (15.5%) reported poor sleep latency, and sleep disturbance (48.4% vs. 17.2%). The mean minutes of moderate physical activity was lower among participants reporting poor sleep quality [F(1,89) = 11.36, P < 0.001]. A greater proportion of breast cancer (65.7%) than prostate cancer survivors (43.1%) reported high fatigue. Participants who reported no physical activity had significantly greater fatigue (M = 31) than those reporting high physical activity levels (M = 42). While at an early stage of research, results are suggestive of a relationship of physical activity with sleep problems among cancer survivors. Findings have implications for improving quality of life as poor sleep was associated with greater fatigue and regular physical activity shows promise as an aid to alleviating these problems.


The present thesis is concerned with Human-Computer Interaction in the context of what we call "social television": the recent embracement of television systems, internet technologies, and social services. The ultimate research goal of this thesis is the development of novel, appropriate interaction concepts to support social television users – located either in situ (mobile in the field) or at-home – dealing with both user-generated or authoritative (professional) contents.
To develop concrete interaction concepts and to empirically validate their suitability, the present thesis puts a narrow focus on the event participation where spectators share the very same location and happening. Event participation is certainly a great way for many to get involved in a fun activity and to form a community. The so-called local-scope mass events – such as stadium -based sporting events – attract a large number of spectators to witness and experience the live atmosphere of something extraordinary in-situ. Moreover, the availability of a variety of event-related multimedia content – such as professional broadcasts and user-generated content – enables an even larger number of TV viewers to follow live happenings remotely at
homes.
Beside all inherent advantages that each type of the event participation offers, they suffer from several limitations. The monotony of a single (and thus restricted) viewing perspective, particularly in all-seater event venues, may potentially result in missing important moments, scenes and sub-events that occur out of the view of or far away from spectators. As another consequence of being physically restricted to a particular seat, social interaction of spectators is limited to nearby people. On the other hand, TV viewers following the event remotely require more immediate and less distracting interaction modalities at homes. Moreover, they may feel socially disconnected as there is less proper and immediate way to share their excitement, opinion, and support for their team which may mar event experiences. The present thesis aims at reducing these deficiencies by leveraging late technology trends, in particular mobile video sharing and body-centric sensing approaches. The contributions of the present thesis are placed alongside three main research directions.
The first, in-situ experiences, explores how mobile user-generated content (particularly video) sharing in real-time can support the coconstruction of experiences during local-scope mass events. It particularly focuses on investigating the design requirements and guidelines for mobile systems supporting both multicamera viewing perspective and social interactions in-situ. Based on an iterative design process, it further contributes a set of novel interaction techniques for user-generated livevideo sharing which are then evaluated in two field studies. The results indicatethat the novel digital experience with live video on mobile devices enhances the overall event experiences in-situ.
The second research direction, at-home experiences, looks at how viewers can interact with televisions in a less-distracting way, particularly while watching a live program. It focuses on device-less and body-centric interaction that goes beyond the traditional button-based remote control paradigm. In this light, two novel bodybased TV user interfaces are proposed supporting the whole body and hand-based inputs. The findings of a set of user studies confirmed that leveraging the human body as an interface for the television has various advantages – such as being omnipresent, device-less, and eyes-free – and thus can enhance the experience of TV watching activity in living room settings.
Finally, the third research direction, home-field (connected) experiences, addresses how the gap between people participating the event in the field and following it from home can be bridged. The social patterns and preferences of TV viewers for watching – not only live coverage of mass events but also other main TV genres – with non-collocated people are initially examined. The analysis leads to a set of requirements that served as rationale for the design of interaction techniques to connect sport fans in both realms. This is achieved through sharing mobile live video sharing as well as implicit gestural information of viewers in front of the TV. An early user feedback evaluation reveals a great potential for mutually contributing to the event engagement, potentially leading to more immersive and socially connected experiences during live sporting events.


A generation of digital natives are living their lives in fundamentally different ways from previous generations. The rapid advance of the internet and mobile telephones, and the adoption of online social media, mean that substantial parts of the social lives of young people are played out in online settings. This has implications for how young people discuss and seek help for mental health problems. This commentary discusses the role of online forums for young people who self-harm. Practitioners need to understand the potential harms and benefits, and explore how benefits can be harnessed and harms minimised.


Vol. 214, No. 1, January 2017. Pages [143–163][1].

The authors regret that in their original paper, the left two micrographs in Fig. 7 C appeared as duplicates. The corrected figure appears below. The online HTML and PDF versions of this article have been corrected. The error only remains in the


Purpose: Research has indicated that interactive shared book reading can support a wide range of early language skills and that children who are read to regularly in the early years learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary, and become more successful readers at school. Despite the large volume of research suggesting interactive shared reading is beneficial for language development, two fundamental issues remain outstanding: whether shared book reading interventions are equally effective (a) for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds and (b) for a range of language skills.Method: To address these issues, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of two 6-week interactive shared reading interventions on a range of language skills in children across the socioeconomic spectrum. One hundred and fifty children aged between 2;6 and 3;0 (years;months) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a pause reading, a dialogic reading, or an active shared reading control condition.Results: The findings indicated that the interventions were effective at changing caregiver reading behaviors. However, the interventions did not boost children's language skills over and above the effect of an active reading control condition. There were also no effects of socioeconomic status.Conclusion: This randomized controlled trial showed that caregivers from all socioeconomic backgrounds successfully adopted an interactive shared reading style. However, while the interventions were effective at increasing caregivers' use of interactive shared book reading behaviors, this did not have a significant impact on the children's language skills. The findings are discussed in terms of practical implications and future research.Supplemental Material S1. Family questionnaire.Supplemental Material S2. List of books used in study.Supplemental Material S3. Example reading diary page. Supplemental Material S4. Box 1 - Dialogic Reading.Supplemental Material S5. Dialogic caregiver information.Supplemental Material S6. Box 2 - Pause Reading.Supplemental Material S7. Pause caregiver information. Supplemental Material S8. Control caregiver information. Supplemental Material S9. Caregiver book reading behaviors coding scheme.Supplemental Material S10. Descriptive statistics.Supplemental Material S11. Regression models using post intervention parental reading scores as the fidelity measure.Supplemental Material S12. Full analyses. Supplemental Material S13. Data, scripts, and output files. Noble, C., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Jessop, A., Coates, A., Sawyer, H., Taylor-Ims, R., & Rowland, C. F. (2020). The impact of interactive shared book reading on children's language skills: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00288


The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence measures. Surprisingly, an equally important problem, estimating an unknown Markov chain from its samples, is still far from understood. We consider two problems related to the min-max risk (expected loss) of estimating an unknown $k$-state Markov chain from its $n$ sequential samples: predicting the conditional distribution of the next sample with respect to the KL-divergence, and estimating the transition matrix with respect to a natural loss induced by KL or a more general $f$-divergence measure.
For the first measure, we determine the min-max prediction risk to within a linear factor in the alphabet size, showing it is $\Omega(k\log\log n\ / n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(k^2\log\log n\ / n)$. For the second, if the transition probabilities can be arbitrarily small, then only trivial uniform risk upper bounds can be derived. We therefore consider transition probabilities that are bounded away from zero, and resolve the problem for essentially all sufficiently smooth $f$-divergences, including KL-, $L_2$-, Chi-squared, Hellinger, and Alpha-divergences.


Multifaceted causes and consequences of food insecurity require collaborative work across multiple academic disciplines and with various community partners in order to build sustainable solutions. Interdisciplinary teams require thoughtful considerations of time devoted to team-building exercises, paying particular attention to understanding members' values. Teams must find points of convergence, develop mutually agreed upon common language, and openly discuss needs and expectations. This paper describes the process of building a community-university Food Mapping Team to address food security. The FMT initiative allows for a well-coordinated exploration of data collection methods that capitalize on the diverse interdisciplinary expertise and resources of university researchers and extensive knowledge of community partners, whose work can inform, and be impacted by, these efforts. We provide a set of processes used to form our partnership and describe our decision-making process in the development of a community food security research project. We also include a self-assessment of the research planning and implementation process that our team used and describe areas of improvement for other community-university groups to consider.


The proliferation of mobile devices has driven the mobile marketing to surge in the past few years. Emerging as a new type of mobile marketing, mobile location-based services (MLBSs) have attracted intense attention recently. Unfortunately, current MLBSs have a lot of limitations and raise many concerns, especially about system security and users' privacy. In this paper, we propose a new location-based rewarding system, called LocaWard, where mobile users can collect location-based tokens from token distributors, and then redeem their gathered tokens at token collectors for beneficial rewards. Tokens act as virtual currency. The token distributors and collectors can be any commercial entities or merchants that wish to attract customers through such a promotion system, such as stores, restaurants, and car rental companies. We develop a security and privacy aware location-based rewarding protocol for the LocaWard system, and prove the completeness and soundness of the protocol. Moreover, we show that the system is resilient to various attacks and mobile users' privacy can be well protected in the meantime. We finally implement the system and conduct extensive experiments to validate the system efficiency in terms of computation, communication, energy consumption, and storage costs.


Learn how to define strategies for cloud adoption of your Oracle database landscape. Understand private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud computing in order to successfully design and manage databases in the cloud. The Cloud DBA-Oracleprovides an overview of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) that you can use in defining your cloud adoption strategy. In-depth details of various cloud service providers for Oracle database are given, including Oracle Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Database administration techniques relevant to hosting databases in the cloud are shown in the book as well as the technical details needed to perform all database administration tasks and activities, such as migration to the cloud, backup in the cloud, and new database setup in the cloud. You will learn from real-world business cases and practical examples of administration of Oracle database in the cloud, highlighting the challenges faced and solutions implemented. What you will learn: Cloud computing concepts from the DBA perspective, such as private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloudTechnical details of all aspects of cloud database administration Challenges faced during setup of databases in private cloud or database migration to public cloud Key points to be kept in mind during database administration in the cloudPractical examples of successful Oracle database cloud migration and support Who Is This Book For All levels of IT professionals, from executives responsible for determining database strategies to database administrators and database architects who manage and design databases.


Particle bed arrangements (e.g. sphere-pac and vipac) are considered as alternative fuel-forms for nuclear fission of actinides. The fuel material is potentially UO2, MOX or an Inert Matrix such as yttria-stabilized zirconia. A disadvantage of ceramic particle fuel is its low thermal conductivity at startup. The macroscopic structure of a particle bed (e.g. spherical particles in sphere-pac) hinders heat transport prior to sintering. To remedy this situation, a novel cer-met concept is proposed and studied in this work. In the sphere-pac model with two well differing size fractions, one material can be distributed evenly into the other one. In this case, the ceramic material (e.g. yttria stabilized zirconia) and the metallic component (e.g. zirconium) are the large and small size fractions respectively. Calculations for this initial fuel configuration show a significant enhancement of the thermal conductivity. Sintering occurs following startup and especially at the center of the fuel. The macroscopic sphere-pac arrangement then transforms into a porous-pellet-like structure. Sintering experiments have been performed to investigate these effects. In the cer-met arrangement the restructuring was enhanced. Therefore heat transport improves even as the metallic component becomes oxidized.


Abstract : Games provide fertile research domains for algorithmic research. Often, game research helps solve real-world problems through the testing and refinement of search algorithms in game domains. Other times, game research finds limits for certain algorithms. For example, the game of Go proved intractable for the Min-Max with Alpha-Beta pruning algorithm leading to the popularity of Monte-Carlo based search algorithms. Although effective in Go, and game domains once ruled by Alpha-Beta such as Lines of Action, Monte-Carlo methods appear to have limits too as they fall short in tactical domains such as Hex and Chess. In a continuation of this type of research, two new games, Crossings and Epaminondas, are presented, analyzed and used to test two Monte-Carlo based algorithms: Upper Confidence Bounds applied to Trees (UCT) and Heuristic Guided UCT (HUCT). Results indicate that heuristic knowledge can positively affect UCT?s performance in the lower complexity domain of Crossings. However, both agents perform worse in the higher complexity domain of Epaminondas. This identifies Epaminondas as another domain that poses difficulties for Monte Carlo agents.


Background Hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts are available in Qatar. A rich archival heritage of Islamic world and Qatar are preserved in the Qatar National Library (QNL). A number of international projects have been carried out in different parts of the world to digitize Arabic manuscripts, for example by the World Digital Library in cooperation with several international bodies, such as UNESCO, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and King-Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Still, the above engines do not have the ability or interface to find words inside the image of a manuscript. Our indexing system was implemented on different Arabic manuscripts datasets including samples from the QNL. Objectives The goal of this research project is to be able to query for words in images of any manuscripts database, and point out the word location in the images and the equivalent text. It shows the results of the query to the user who can then view the text in our interactive website. As demonstrated in Figure 1, the website interface is aiding the users to find their query easily. Methods Through our project, we designed and implemented a novel indexing system. In that work, we present an algorithm for automatic segmentation of manuscripts. The segmented page is then manually annotated to correct mistakes in segmentation. During the correction phase information about the image is extracted and stored in a database. This extracted information is then indexed and the users can use our search interface to easily find words in any ancient manuscripts that have been added to the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first word search system for manuscripts that use text queries to highlight the search terms in the manuscript image. Results The focal challenge in this project is the segmentation of handwritten Arabic manuscripts to index the word by word. Therefore, manually correction of the automatic segmentation of the manuscript was added to get 100% segmentation rate. This paper discuss a robotic method indexing Arabic manuscripts that has not been developed previously for handwritten manuscripts: providing an interactive website for the word search engine, to index, store, and provide users with searching and highlighting capability in the document image. Conclusions We considered the need for converting the words available in handwritten documents into electronic data with the goal of enabling it to become searchable online. A system prototype applying the proposed and described approach is being developed and experimentally tested, to fully demonstrate the capabilities of the website on Arabic manuscripts. An overview of the initial experimental studies is presented. We expect the proposed word retrieval system to take the search in manuscripts to a new level.


Today's mobile phone users are faced with large numbers of notifications on social media, ranging from new followers on Twitter and emails to messages received from WhatsApp and Facebook. These digital alerts continuously disrupt activities through instant calls for attention. This paper examines closely the way everyday users interact with notifications and their impact on users' emotion. Fifty users were recruited to download our application NotiMind and use it over a five-week period. Users' phones collected thousands of social and system notifications along with affect data collected via self-reported Positive and Negative Affect Schedule tests three times a day. Results showed a noticeable correlation between positive affective measures and keyboard activities. When large numbers of post and remove notifications occur, a corresponding increase in negative affective measures is detected. Our predictive model has achieved a good accuracy level using three different "in the wild" classifiers (F-measure 74%–78% within-subject model, 72%–76% global model). Our findings show that it is possible to automatically predict when people are experiencing positive, neutral, or negative affective states based on interactions with notifications. We also show how our findings open the door to a wide range of applications in relation to emotion awareness on social and mobile communication.


SUMMARY Phosphoribosyl diphosphate (PRPP) is an important intermediate in cellular metabolism. PRPP is synthesized by PRPP synthase, as follows: ribose 5-phosphate + ATP → PRPP + AMP. PRPP is ubiquitously found in living organisms and is used in substitution reactions with the formation of glycosidic bonds. PRPP is utilized in the biosynthesis of purine and pyrimidine nucleotides, the amino acids histidine and tryptophan, the cofactors NAD and tetrahydromethanopterin, arabinosyl monophosphodecaprenol, and certain aminoglycoside antibiotics. The participation of PRPP in each of these metabolic pathways is reviewed. Central to the metabolism of PRPP is PRPP synthase, which has been studied from all kingdoms of life by classical mechanistic procedures. The results of these analyses are unified with recent progress in molecular enzymology and the elucidation of the three-dimensional structures of PRPP synthases from eubacteria, archaea, and humans. The structures and mechanisms of catalysis of the five diphosphoryltransferases are compared, as are those of selected enzymes of diphosphoryl transfer, phosphoryl transfer, and nucleotidyl transfer reactions. PRPP is used as a substrate by a large number phosphoribosyltransferases. The protein structures and reaction mechanisms of these phosphoribosyltransferases vary and demonstrate the versatility of PRPP as an intermediate in cellular physiology. PRPP synthases appear to have originated from a phosphoribosyltransferase during evolution, as demonstrated by phylogenetic analysis. PRPP, furthermore, is an effector molecule of purine and pyrimidine nucleotide biosynthesis, either by binding to PurR or PyrR regulatory proteins or as an allosteric activator of carbamoylphosphate synthetase. Genetic analyses have disclosed a number of mutants altered in the PRPP synthase-specifying genes in humans as well as bacterial species.


Background. Lay understanding of cancer prevention, screening, and survival may influence health behavior and health outcomes. Methods. Data were from the 2005 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS). In our analyses, we describe population (N=5586) beliefs about cancer prevention, detection, and survival for colon, lung, and skin cancer and compare beliefs with state-of-science evidence. We examined differences by sociodemographic subgroups. Results. A majority of respondents responded consistently with state-of-science evidence in prevention for colon (78.2%), lung (81.2%), and skin cancer (83.5%). Respondents' perceptions of screening for colon cancer were generally consistent with state-of-science evidence (89.9%); however, fewer respondents' responded consistently with state-of-science in screening for lung (12.6%) and skin cancer (11.9%). Finally, respondents' estimates of survival/cure of colon (66.2%) and skin cancer (63.6%) were consistent with state-of-the-science evidence in survival; however, a minority of respondents' estimates of lung cancer survival (17.33%) were consistent with state-of-science. Sociodemographic associates of state-of-science consistent responses included younger age, greater education, and White race. Conclusions. Public knowledge of cancer prevention, screening, and survival varies by type of cancer, levels of evidence, and sociodemographic factors. These findings provide an evidence base for improving public awareness and understanding of cancer prevention, screening, and survival.


This is not a law review article. Rather, it is a brief description of the legal battle over whether to remove the feeding and hydration tube which is keeping Terri Schiavo alive. The battle of and for "public opinion," (1) which has also been waged over this issue is beyond the scope of what I have to say here. The legal battle is not about whether Terri has a hypothetical right to refuse medical treatment under the privacy guarantee in the Florida Constitution. Article I, Section 23 is "an independent, freestanding constitutional provision which declares the fundamental right to privacy." (2) So, clearly, she has that right if certain conditions exist. She must be in a persistent vegetative state (3) and--there being no form of advanced directive (4)--there must be clear and convincing evidence of what her wishes would have been if she could have envisioned her situation while still physically able to make her wishes known. (5) Therefore, the battle has centered on whether Terri is or is not in a persistent vegetative state and what would Terri's wishes be regarding the continued life support provided by the feeding and hydration tube if she could tell us. This brief commentary is based primarily upon the briefs submitted by the petitioner, Michael Schiavo, and the respondent, Governor Jeb Bush. Two District Court of Appeal cases are also cited. Finally, I have relied on my own knowledge as a teacher of the Florida Constitution. This protracted battle, or at least the initial circumstances leading to it, began on February 29, 1990 when Terri "suffered cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital." (6) This multi-year battle which was primarily between her husband as guardian and her parents (7) apparently ended when the circuit court, having found both the above conditions met, (8) directed "the guardian to remove the 'nutrition and hydration tube' on October 15, 2003." (9) It was removed on that date. (10) But the battle was not over. A new player had now taken the field. The Florida Legislature with virtually unprecedented speed enacted legislation that gave the Governor legal grounds to have the feeding and hydration tube replaced. This was accomplished on October 21, 2003. (11) The guardian, Terri's husband, sought to have the law declared unconstitutional and the entry of a "permanent injunction prohibiting its effect and any actions taken by state officials pursuant to its terms." (12) The grounds alleged in support of this motion were, generally stated, that: 1) Terri's rights under the Florida constitutional privacy guarantee had been violated by the Legislature and the Governor; 2) The legislation was a violation of "separation of powers;" 3) The legislation violated "equal protection;" 4) The legislation was a bill of attainder; 5) The legislation was an "invalid special law;" and 6) The legislation was "unconstitutionally vague." (13) The respondent's brief on behalf of Governor Jeb Bush basically denied the various grounds for unconstitutionality put forward by Mr. Schiavo as petitioner. (14) In addition, the Governor proposed that the request for an injunction was improper because, among other things, the Governor was new to the case and, hence, none of the prior findings were binding upon him. The Governor contended that he should have the opportunity to establish that Terri's privacy rights were not violated by the feeding and hydration tube. (15). As I am writing this brief comment, I am looking at a February 13, 2004 decision of the Second District Court of Appeal reversing the circuit judge's refusal to allow the Governor to take "the deposition of seven witnesses." (16) The court reversed the circuit judge's protective order because "[a] complete bar to the taking of any depositions may cause harm to the Governor that will not be remediable on appeal from a final judgment." (17) As the court's opinion explained, this was not an unqualified victory for the Governor. …


The importance of managing the extended enterprise is a recurrent theme, and many consider supply chains to be the next frontier of opportunities to improve profitability and competitive advantage for organizations. Building on prior work that has identified the value creation capabilities of integrated digital platforms and relational conditions, the paper draws upon social capital theory to develop an organizing framework for developing supply chain integration capabilities. We assert that both IT and relational capabilities constitute the social capital available to firms in the supply network and draw upon Nahapiet and Ghosal's (1998) work to identify the specific facets structural, relational and cognitive social capital that are relevant in the context of supply chain integration. This framework enables us to evaluate structural relational and cognitive social capital as a platform for managing collective action and as a source of creating and sharing knowledge. A research model is developed and empirically validated that investigates the impact of different facets of social capital on supply chain integration, and subsequently supply chain integration on firm performance. Data from 110 manufacturing and retail firms was used to test the model to provide empirical support for the proposed research model.


Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM), Pitch control system, Braking Resistor (BR), and Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) have recently been reported as stabilization methods for fixed-speed wind generator systems. Although the individual technologies are well documented, a comparative study of these systems has not been reported so far. This paper aims to fill in the gap, and provides a comprehensive analysis of these stabilization methods for fixed-speed wind generator systems. The analysis is performed in terms of transient stability enhancement, controller complexity, and cost. A novel feature of this work is that the transient stability analysis of wind generator system is carried out considering unsuccessful reclosing of circuit breakers. Simulation results demonstrate that the SMES is the most effective means of transient stability enhancement and minimization of both power and voltage fluctuations, but it is the most expensive device. The STATCOM is a cost-effective solution for transient stability enhancement and minimization of voltage fluctuations. The BR is the simplest in structure and a cost-effective solution for transient stability enhancement. The pitch controller is the cheapest one, but its response is much slower than that of other devices.


Geospatial information of many kinds, from topographic maps to scientific data, is increasingly being made available through web mapping services. These allow georeferenced map images to be served from data stores and displayed in websites and geographic information systems, where they can be integrated with other geographic information. The Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) standard has been widely adopted in diverse communities for sharing data in this way. However, current services typically provide little or no information about the quality or accuracy of the data they serve. In this paper we will describe the design and implementation of a new "quality-enabled" profile of WMS, which we call "WMS-Q". This describes how information about data quality can be transmitted to the user through WMS. Such information can exist at many levels, from entire datasets to individual measurements, and includes the many different ways in which data uncertainty can be expressed. We also describe proposed extensions to the Symbology Encoding specification, which include provision for visualizing uncertainty in raster data in a number of different ways, including contours, shading and bivariate colour maps. We shall also describe new open-source implementations of the new specifications, which include both clients and servers.


During high summer 1721, while rioters and bankrupts gathered outside Parliament, Robert Walpole's new ministry forced through a bill to clear up the wreckage left by the stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the visionary projects swept away when it burst. In early August the President of the Royal Society Isaac Newton, a major investor in South Sea stock, and the Society's projectors, learned of a new commercial scheme promising apparently automatic profits, a project for a perpetual motion. Their informants were a young Viennese courtier Joseph Emmanuel Fischer von Erlach, a contact of Desaguliers recently engaged in industrial espionage in northern England, and the Leiden physics professor Willem 'sGravesande, who had visited London five years earlier. They reported that they had been summoned to a remarkable series of demonstrations in the castle of Weissenstein, the seat of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. In a carefully guarded room of the castle there was set up a hollow wooden wheel covered in oilcloth, about 12 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick on an axle 6 feet in length. Its designer, a Saxon engineer and clockmaker Johann Bessler, who travelled Germany under the name Orffyreus, had been in Kassel for four years, published schemes for perpetual motion and been appointed commercial councillor. The Landgrave, well-known as a patron of advanced engineering schemes, commissioned him to build a new machine and put it on show before expert witnesses (Figure 1).


Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity in postheparin plasma of 38 normolipidemic volunteers was related to the magnitude of postprandial lipemia after a fat meal, to triglyceride content of high density lipoprotein2 (HDL2), to hepatic lipase (HL) activity, and to HDL2 levels. LPL activity correlated indirectly with lipemia, triglyceride content of HDL2, HL activity, and levels of HDL2 but not of HDL3. HL activity correlated directly with lipemia and indirectly with HDL2 levels. Triglyceride content of HDL2 correlated directly with lipemia and indirectly with HDL2 levels. In HDL2, abundance of apolipoprotein (apo) A-II and the apoA-I/apoA-II ratio varied widely. The latter correlated positively with LPL activity and HDL2 levels, and, inversely, with HL activity, lipemia, and triglyceride content of HDL2. The study suggests that HDL-cholesterol is not an independent parameter of lipid transport, but is strongly affected by triglyceride metabolism through lipolytic enzymes, as exemplified by postprandial lipemia that affect both composition and plasma levels of HDL2.


In this CEPS commentary, Andrei Marcu welcomes the recent announcement by President Xi Jinping that China will start a national emissions trading scheme in 2017. Calling it a "genuine game changer" in the global climate talks, Marcu describes the decision as giving a much-needed boost to carbon markets and cap-and-trade as the preferred way forward for those economies that have the capacity, the depth and the breadth for a liquid carbon market.


We investigate the reconstruction capabilities of the dark matter mass and spin-independent cross section from future ton-scale direct detection experiments using germanium, xenon, or argon as targets. Adopting realistic values for the exposure, energy threshold, and resolution of dark matter experiments which will come online within 5 to 10 years, the degree of complementarity between different targets is quantified. We investigate how the uncertainty in the astrophysical parameters controlling the local dark matter density and velocity distribution affects the reconstruction. For a 50 GeV WIMP, astrophysical uncertainties degrade the accuracy in the mass reconstruction by up to a factor of $\ensuremath{\sim}4$ for xenon and germanium, compared to the case when astrophysical quantities are fixed. However, the combination of argon, germanium, and xenon data increases the constraining power by a factor of $\ensuremath{\sim}2$ compared to germanium or xenon alone. We show that future direct detection experiments can achieve self-calibration of some astrophysical parameters, and they will be able to constrain the WIMP mass with only very weak external astrophysical constraints.


With the rapid information explosion of news, making personalized news recommendation for users becomes an increasingly challenging problem. Many existing recommendation methods that regard the recommendation procedure as the static process, have achieved better recommendation performance. However, they usually fail with the dynamic diversity of news and user's interests, or ignore the importance of sequential information of user's clicking selection. In this paper, taking full advantages of convolution neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN) and attention mechanism, we propose a deep attention neural network DAN for news recommendation. Our DAN model presents to use attention-based parallel CNN for aggregating user's interest features and attention-based RNN for capturing richer hidden sequential features of user's clicks, and combines these features for new recommendation. We conduct experiment on real-world news data sets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed DAN model.


A major part of the plasma in the Earth's magnetotail is populated through transport of plasma from the solar wind via the magnetotail lobes. In this paper, we present a statistical study of plasma convection in the lobes for different directions of the interplanetary magnetic field and for different geomagnetic disturbance levels. The data set used in this study consists of roughly 340 000 one-minute vector measurements of the plasma convection from the Cluster Electron Drift Instrument (EDI) obtained during the period February 2001 to June 2007. The results show that both convection magnitude and direction are largely controlled by the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). For a southward IMF, there is a strong convection towards the central plasma sheet with convection velocities around 10 km s −1 . During periods of northward IMF, the lobe convection is almost stagnant. A B y dominated IMF causes a rotation of the convection patterns in the tail with an oppositely directed dawn-dusk component of the convection for the northern and southern lobe. Our results also show that there is an overall persistent duskward component, which is most likely a result of conductivity gradients in the footpoints of the magnetic field lines in the ionosphere.


Halogenated graphene derivatives are interesting due to their outstanding physical and chemical properties. In this paper, we present various methods for the synthesis of chlorinated graphene derivatives from graphene oxide and thermally reduced graphene. We performed exfoliation of graphene oxide in a chlorine atmosphere, plasma assisted exfoliation of graphite oxide using microwave radiation and finally direct chlorination of thermally reduced graphene by liquid chlorine under deep UV irradiation. The influence of the chlorination method on the resulting chlorinated graphenes was investigated by characterization of the graphenes, which was carried out using various techniques, including SEM, SEMEDS, high-resolution XPS, FTIR, STA and Raman spectroscopy. Electrochemical properties were investigated by cyclic voltammetry. Although the graphenes were structurally similar, they involved remarkably different chlorine concentrations. The most highly chlorinated graphene exhibits a chlorine concentration of 11.7 at%. Chlorinated graphenes with such properties could be used for reversible chlorine storage or as a starting material for further chemical modifications.


Previous models of fault-propagation folding used kink-band geometries to approximate folding in front of propagating thrusts. However, kink-band kinematics cannot replicate the curved fold surfaces and complex strain patterns in natural and experimental fault-propagation folds, which also occur in front of steeper reverse and normal faults. Fault-propagation fold hinges tighten and converge downward, forming a triangular zone of penetrative deformation focused on the tip of the propagating fault. The downward convergence of deformation in fault-propagation folds can be modeled as triangular shear zones. "Trishear," here defined as distributed, strain-compatible shear in a triangular (in profile) shear zone, provides an alternate kinematic model for fault-propagation folds. Trishear is analogous to simple shear in a tabular shear zone except that area balance in a triangular shear zone requires curved displacement oblique to the fault slip direction. Incremental computer models of trishear folding can replicate many geometric features of fault-propagation folds, including variably curved fold hinges, downward-tightening fold surfaces, heterogeneous strains, and multiple fault-propagation trajectories.


Patients with cancer have an increased risk of venous thromboembolism. Upper extremity venous system is a peculiar site, and little is known about the clinical course in patients with cancer. Electronic medical records were searched for patients with cancer with a diagnosis of upper extremity venous thrombosis. Individual patient data were reviewed. Eighty-seven patients were identified, and the median age was 52.4. The most common underlying malignancies were breast (23.0%), colorectal (18.4%), and gastroesophageal (18.4%). Median time from cancer diagnosis to upper extremity venous thromboembolism (UEDVT) was 3.44 months. Subclavian vein was the most common involved site (56.3%) and 54.0% patients had a central venous catheter; 50.6% of patients developed a complication; pulmonary embolism (PE) in 9.2%, superior vena cava (SVC) syndrome in 14.9%, and 26.4% had postthrombotic syndrome. In patients with isolated single vein thrombosis, complications were higher in the subset with internal jugular vein involvement compared to other sites (68.2% vs 52.2%) as were complications in patients with non-catheter-related thrombosis compared to patients with a central venous catheter in place (55% vs 27.7%). Median overall survival from time of cancer and UEDVT diagnoses was 29.6 and 13.25 months, respectively. In conclusion, UEDVT is an uncommon event. Around 50% developed a complication including PE, SVC or postthrombotic syndromes. Larger studies are needed to better identify risks associated with thrombosis and the best therapeutic approach and duration in this unique subset of patients with cancer.


As an inherently sustainable and affordable building method, prefabrication has enjoyed a revival in recent years, attracting clients and architects alike. Low construction costs, efficiency, and sustainability make prefabrication an attractive solution for contemporary interior designers. Off-site production for interior design elements has been the norm for centuries, from the first Asian paper screens to the packaged kitchens of the mid-twentieth century, but it has rarely been the topic of serious discussion. In Inside Prefab, author Deborah Schneiderman offers a fascinating history of prefabricated interior design, followed by twenty-four contemporary case studies. The richly illustrated examples in this book range from interior walls, kitchens, bathrooms, furniture, and offices to complete prefabricated house interiors. This first book-length discussion and showcase of the prefabricated interior environment includes projects by established architects such as Shigeru Ban, Atelier Tekuto, and Greg Lynn, as well as up-and-coming firms


Objective To develop a nontraumatic oral health classification that could estimate the burden of oral health-related visits in North Carolina (NC) Emergency Departments (EDs) using syndromic surveillance system data. Introduction Lack of access to regular dental care often results in costly, oral health visits to EDs that could otherwise have been prevented or managed by a dentist (1). Most studies on oral health-related visits to EDs have used a wide range of classifications from different databases, but none have used syndromic surveillance data. The volume, frequency, and included details of syndromic data enabled timely burden estimates of nontraumatic oral health visits for NC EDs. Methods Literature review, input by subject matter experts (SMEs), and analysis of syndromic data was used to create the nontraumatic oral health classification. BioSense, a near real-time, national-level, electronic health surveillance system was the source of the NC ED syndromic data. Visits with at least one oral health-related ICD-9-CM code were extracted for NC fiscal years 2008–2010. Univariate analyses of chief complaint (CC) and final diagnosis data along with SME consultation were used to determine the CC substrings and 'white list' of ICD-9-CM codes used as inclusion criteria to classify visits as oral health-related. These analyses and consultations also determined the trauma-related codes and substrings used to exclude visits. Results Table 1 shows all nontraumatic oral health-related ICD-9-CM codes used for the characterization. Codes likely related to the types of dental emergencies that routine dental care could not have prevented were excluded. Approximately 275,000 patient records were evaluated to determine the CC substrings. The final CC substrings chosen (Table 1) represented over 56% of visits in the candidate record dataset. Over 334,000 BioSense patient records were evaluated, and SMEs reviewed the 32 ICD-9-CM codes that co-occurred most commonly in visits containing oral health-related ICD-9-CM codes to determine which co-occurring ICD-9-CM codes (white list, Table 1) could be present and still maintain the main reason for the visit as an oral health-related problem. Trauma-related visit criteria used for exclusion were derived from a subset of BioSense sub-syndromes (Falls; Fractures and dislocation; Injury, NOS; Sprains and strains; and Motor vehicle traffic accidents) and from selected CC substrings ('assault', 'fight', and 'brawl'). In summary, an ED visit had a nontraumatic oral health classification if it contained 1) an oral health-related CC substring with no trauma-related ICD-9-CM codes or CC substrings or 2) an oral health-related ICD-9 code accompanied by no oral health-related or trauma-related CC substrings and with no other diagnosis codes except for those on the whitelist. Conclusions There is increasing demand to determine ways to use syndromic surveillance data in an alternative way for population health surveillance. This use of BioSense data provided a practical classification of patient records for the tracking of nontraumatic oral health-related visits to NC EDs. Visit estimates created using this classification in combination with other pertinent information could prove useful to policymakers when deciding upon resource allocation aimed at reducing this unnecessary burden on the NC ED system. The large volume of records in syndromic surveillance systems offers substantial weight of evidence for alternative use in epidemiological studies; however, accurate classification of records is required to select cases of interest. While data volume precludes validation of every included record, a combination of human expertise and data analysis can provide credible classification criteria.


We find the analytical expression for the threshold intensity necessary to launch ultraslow light pulses in a metamaterial with simultaneous cubic electric and magnetic nonlinearity. The roles played by the permittivity, the permeability, the electric cubic nonlinearity, the magnetic cubic nonlinearity and the pulse duration are clearly identified and discussed.


As CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli made worldwide headlines by obtaining marketing rights to pyrimethamine (Daraprim) and quickly increasing the price 5000 percent, from $13.50 to $750 per pill. In addition to increasing price, Turing initiated another less widely appreciated move — it changed the distribution scheme for the drug. Before its acquisition by Turing, pyrimethamine was widely available. But in the months before the price hike, apparently as a condition of the sale to Turing, pyrimethamine was switched to a controlled distribution system called Daraprim Direct, in which prescriptions or supplies could be obtained only from a single source, Walgreen's Specialty Pharmacy. The Daraprim Direct system made it impossible for anyone other than registered clients to obtain the drug. This could include other manufacturers wishing to obtain samples for use in bioequivalence studies supporting a generic application. The restricted distribution scheme thus could allow Turing to prevent generic versions of the drug from reaching the market.This Essay addresses the question of whether Turing's behavior violates the antitrust laws. Part I describes the typical distribution systems in the pharmaceutical industry. Part II examines monopoly power and considers whether Daraprim possessed such power. Part III considers the second element of monopolization claims, exclusionary conduct, and explores whether Turing engaged in such behavior. Part IV then reaches beyond pyrimethamine to offer additional examples of similar conduct. Given that the Federal Trade Commission and N.Y. Attorney General are currently conducting antitrust investigations of this behavior, this Essay offers a framework for analysis.


Partial vertical integration is common in many telecommunication and media markets in Israel. That is, there are many cases in which the supplier of an input holds a partial (often controlling) stake in the input's customer (which we call the "distributor" for concreteness), or the distributor holds a partial ownership (often controlling) stake in the supplier.2 This is in contrast to full vertical integration, in which the supplier holds 100% of the distributor's equity, or the distributor holds 100% of the supplier's equity. For example, since early 2010, when it took over Bezeq, Eurocom Communications Ltd. which imports Nokia cellular phones to Israel has an indirect control over Pelephone, which is the third largest cellular operator in Israel and buys cellular phones from Eurocom for its customers. However, even though Eurocom now indirectly controls Pelephone, its stake in Pelephone is far below 100%. Similarly, Bezeq International Ltd., which is fully owned by Bezeq, currently holds a 67% stake in Walla! Communications Ltd., which operates the Walla internet portal. Walla, Bezeq International and Bezeq, are (partially) vertically integrated because Walla requires internet-access services that Bezeq International supplies, and it also requires access to the infrastructure that Bezeq supplies.


This paper attempts to clarify the reasons for the rapid growth of FDI in developing countries, particularly East Asian countries, compared with that of FDI in developed countries. To do this, we will examine the mechanics of HFDI and VFDI, in order to shed light on the role of trade costs. Our empirical analysis by estimating a multinomial logit model of Japanese firms f FDI choices reveals that the reduction in trade costs between host and home countries attracts even less productive VFDI firms. In contrast, it does not attract HFDI firms. Since developing countries, particularly East Asian countries, have experienced a relatively rapid decrease in trade costs with Japan, our results indicate that the increase in VFDI through trade cost reduction has led to the recent relative surge of FDIs in developing countries.


Altered fire regimes play a key role in shrub expansion in grasslands worldwide. We assessed how season and type or intensity of fire affected the growth and demography of Rhus glabra, a common woody invader in North American mesic grasslands. Fire during any season killed 99% of ramets but stimulated new ramet recruitment from belowground buds, resulting in a near-complete turnover of ramet populations. During the first 2 years following fire, populations on spring-burned sites had the greatest post-fire ramet densities and population growth rates, and winter- and spring-burned populations showed the highest resprouting rates. However, after 10 years, R. glabra cover on summer-burned sites was 3.5 times greater than on autumn- or winter-burned treatments. Thus, short-term post-fire responses may not be good predictors of long-term changes in abundance. Low-intensity spring backfires resulted in the highest ramet population growth rates, whereas high-intensity headfires in any season resulted in slower growth, and populations burned with low-intensity winter fires declined. In addition, season of fire influenced browsing pressure, suggesting that plant responses may be partially a result of indirect effects of fire on rates of herbivory. Overall, our results demonstrate that the application of frequent autumn or winter backfires is an effective management tool for limiting R. glabra expansion in grasslands, and that long-term data are critical for management decision-making, particularly in systems characterised by high interannual climate variability.


This paper provides empirical evidence showing the effect of airline cooperation on the interline fares paid by international passengers. The analysis focuses on two measures of cooperation, codesharing and antitrust immunity, and the results show that their partial effects are both negative. The presence of codesharing on an international interline itinerary reduces the fare by 817, with the exact number depending on the sample used and the estimation method. Moreover, the presence of antitrust immunity reduces the fare by 1321. Codesharing and immunity are substitutes, however, in the sense that their combined effect is smaller than the sum of their partial effects. Taking account of this difference, which is captured by an interaction variable in the regressions, the combined effect ranges between 17 and 30. These results provide strong evidence that airline cooperation in the fare-setting process generates substantial benefits for interline passengers.


Yeast glycolytic oscillations have been studied since the 1950s in cell‐free extracts and intact cells. For intact cells, sustained oscillations have so far only been observed at the population level, i.e. for synchronized cultures at high biomass concentrations. Using optical tweezers to position yeast cells in a microfluidic chamber, we were able to observe sustained oscillations in individual isolated cells. Using a detailed kinetic model for the cellular reactions, we simulated the heterogeneity in the response of the individual cells, assuming small differences in a single internal parameter. This is the first time that sustained limit‐cycle oscillations have been demonstrated in isolated yeast cells.


This thesis aims to understand the ways in which the historical film has vexed its many critics, and in doing so will look beyond its perceived inadequacies to provide a new appreciation of its character, appeal, f unction and development. I have attempted to achieve these goals through a substantial generic study of the British historical film, utilizing notions of myth and ideas derived from reception studies. In terms of overall approach, this project is an example of what David Bordwell has called 'middle-level research', applying theory to a problem-driven, in-depth, empirical investigation. In following the precepts of middle-level research, it is an additional aim of my thesis to contribute to theoretical and methodological debates surrounding the writing of film history and the study of film genre. In chapter one, I review the literature which addresses questions of historical film and film history, and in chapter two I discuss the various ways in which a generic consideration can be conducted, with particular reference to the work of Rick Altman and the idea of genre as mythic-ritual. Beginning in 1930, after which date a coherent genre begins to emerge, I apply the approach expounded in chapters one and two to a wide range of primary sources for British cinema, including Kine Weekly, Sight and Sound , the memoir, the pressbook, and a number of audience surveys. Ile result, in chapters three and four, is an original overview of the British historical film genre in the period until 1980. Chapter five then situates the British historical film in relation to the genres (both British and American) which lie adjacent to it, and chapter six examines the genre and its history in the 1980s, through detailed case-studies of Lady Jane, Chariots of Fire and Henry V. Finally, my conclusions are worked out by setting the genre as I have defined it in the context of two pertinent concepts - British national cinema and British national identity - and the discourses associated with them, in order to elicit key themes and issues. The main thrust of my argument is that recent work on 'the costume film', by Pam Cook, Sue Harper and others, has tended to distort the nature of the British historical film, ignoring generic distinctions made by those who produced and consumed the films in question. I hope that my analysis, and my archival research in particular, will lay a foundation for a clearer and fuller future understanding of films which represent the past.


Abstract : The study of genetic variation in populations is of great interest for the study of the evolutionary history of humans and other species. Improvement in sequencing technology has resulted in the availability of many large datasets of genetic data. Computational methods have therefore become quite important in analyzing these data. Two important problems that have been studied using genetic data are population stratification (modeling individual ancestry with respect to ancestral populations) and genetic association (finding genetic polymorphisms that affect a trait). In this thesis, we develop methods to improve our understanding of these two problems. For the population stratification problem, we develop hierarchical Bayesian models that incorporate the evolutionary processes that are known to affect genetic variation. By developing mStruct, we show that modeling more evolutionary processes improves the accuracy of the recovered population structure. We demonstrate how nonparametric Bayesian processes can be used to address the question of choosing the optimal number of ancestral populations that describe the genetic diversity of a given sample of individuals. We also examine how sampling bias in genotyping study design can affect results of population structure analysis and propose a probabilistic framework for modeling and correcting sample selection bias. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have vastly improved our understanding of many diseases. However, such studies have failed to uncover much of the variation responsible for a number of common multi-factorial diseases and complex traits. We show how artificial selection experiments on model organisms can be used to better understand the nature of genetic associations. We demonstrate using simulations that using data from artificial selection experiments improves the performance of conventional methods of performing association.


We have identified and characterized sigma receptor sites in porcine gastric fundic mucosa by receptor binding assay techniques using two highly selective radioligands of sigma receptor, (+)-[3H]N-allylnormetazocine (SKF 10,047) and [3H]1,3-di(2-tolyl)guanidine (DTG). Specific binding of (+)-[3H]SKF 10,047 and [3H]DTG in porcine gastric fundic mucosa were saturable, reversible and of high affinity and capacity with Kd: 90.5 nM, Bmax: 1058 fmol/mg of protein and Kd: 53.6 nM, Bmax: 3573.3 fmol/mg of protein, respectively. The inhibitory effects of sigma receptor ligands on specific (+)-[3H]SKF 10,047 binding decreased in the following order: haloperidol > DTG > or = (+)-3-(3-hydroxyphenol)-N- (1-propyl)piperidine (3-PPP) > (+)-SKF 10,047 > (-)-3-PPP > or = dextromethorphan > rimcazole > (-)-SKF 10,047. Specific (+)-[3H]SKF 10,047 binding sites showed stereoselectivity for stereoisomers of SKF 10,047 and 3-PPP and were highly correlated with the profile of sigma-1 sites. On the other hand, the inhibitory effects on specific [3H]DTG binding decreased in the following order: DTG > haloperidol > rimcazole > (+)-3-PPP > or = (-)-3-PPP > dextromethorphan > (+)-SKF 10,047 = (-)-SKF 10,047. Specific [3H]DTG binding sites did not show stereoselectivity and were highly correlated with the profile of sigma-2 sites. These findings indicate that porcine gastric fundic mucosa contains sigma receptor sites with the characteristic of sigma-1 sites and sigma-like sites showing several of the characteristics of sigma-2 sites (putative sigma-2 sites).


The kinase GCN2 is involved in the inhibition of mTORC1 specifically in response to amino acid deprivation. The mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) and general control nonderepressible 2 (GCN2) regulate cellular responses to amino acid availability. In the presence of amino acids, mTORC1 is recruited to the surface of lysosomes, promotes protein translation and cell proliferation, and inhibits autophagy. The kinase GCN2 is activated by amino acid starvation, through dimerization and autophosphorylation that occurs when bound to uncharged tRNAs. GCN2 phosphorylates the eukaryotic initiation factor 2α (eIF2α), which inhibits the translation of most cellular mRNAs but stimulates translation of some mRNAs, including transcripts encoding the stress-responsive transcription factor ATF4. ATF4, in turn, stimulates the expression of genes that promote autophagy, amino acid uptake, and amino acid biosynthesis. Ye et al. found that prolonged leucine deprivation reduced mTORC1 activity and lysosomal localization in mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) in a manner that depended on GCN2. In MEFs and in two human cancer cell lines, leucine starvation caused ATF4 to stimulate the transcription of Sestrin2, which encodes a protein that blocks lysosomal localization of mTORC1. Inhibition of mTORC1 activity and lysosomal localization in leucine-starved MEFs required Sestrin2 and ATF4. Leucine or glutamine deprivation, but not endoplasmic reticulum stress (a process that also inhibits mTORC1 through a pathway involving ATF4 and Sestrin2), involved GCN2-mediated inhibition of mTORC1, indicating that GCN2 was specifically involved in the response to amino acid deprivation. Prolonged glutamine withdrawal caused most Sestrin2–/– MEFs and approximately half of GCN2–/– MEFs to undergo apoptosis, but inhibition of mTORC1 with rapamycin increased survival in both contexts. Thus, in addition to stimulating amino acid acquisition and autophagy, GCN2 also inhibits mTORC1 activity by preventing its translocation to lysosomes. These results also identify a mechanism whereby deprivation of a single amino acid—not only a general decrease in amino acid availability—can inhibit mTORC1 activity to promote cell survival. J. Ye, W. Palm, M. Peng, B. King, T. Lindsten, M. O. Li, C. Koumenis, C. B. Thompson, GCN2 sustains mTORC1 suppression upon amino acid deprivation by inducing Sestrin2. Genes Dev. 29, 2331–2336 (2015). [PubMed]


This thesis aimed to explore the pivotal role that psychological processes play in Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) sequelae at a both conceptual and interventional level.
Initially, a systematic review and meta-analysis examined the available evidence base for the efficacy of psychological interventions in reducing aggressive behaviour following an ABI. In line with the PRISMA guidelines, a literature search identified eleven studies that met the inclusion criteria. As many studies within the neurorehabilitation literature use single-case methodology, the current meta-analysis adopted a novel approach enabling the synthesis of empirical data from both group design and single-case experimental design studies. The results of the meta-analysis demonstrated moderate effect sizes across both types of research design, suggesting significant reductions in aggressive behavior following psychological intervention. Maintenance effects were also reported, but should be interpreted with caution.
A second cross-sectional study explored the discrepancy between subjectively reported cognitive impairment (SCI) and objectively measured cognitive impairment (OCI) following ABI, whilst highlighting the potential role of psychological factors. Twenty-four participants completed objective neuropsychological assessments and a series of psychometric questionnaires assessing psychological affect and perceived cognitive difficulties. A correlation analysis revealed no significant association between objective and subjective cognitive impairment. Conversely, psychological affect, such as anxiety and low mood, demonstrated a significant positive relationship with subjective cognitive impairment. An additional hierarchical regression analysis revealed psychological affect as a significant predictor of subjective cognitive impairment. The regression model found objective cognitive impairment to be non-significant. These findings suggest that an individual's subjective experience of their cognitive difficulties may not be associated with their actual objective cognitive impairment. Other psychological factors may play a more crucial role in patients' appraisals of their cognitive impairments.
The limitations and clinical implications for both papers are discussed.


THE CONSTANT DIPLOMAT Robert Ford in Moscow Charles A. Ruud Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queeris, 303PP, $39.95 cloth ISBN 9780-773535855Robert Ford, diplomat and poet, retired from the Canadian embassy in Moscow in 1980. By then, notwithstanding a serious physical disability, he had survived in the Soviet capital for more than 20 years, 16 as ambassador. He had received the governor general's award for poetry and had been made a companion of the order of Canada for his public service. Among western governments, he was considered an outstanding expert on the Soviet Union.When he retired, Ford had certain ideas about how the record of his long service was to be treated. Apart from his poetry (ultimately published in seven volumes) he wrote two books. The first, Our Man in Moscow. A Diplomat's Reflections on the Soviet Union, appeared in 1989. Ford conceived of this study as falling between a diplomatic memoir and an academic work. It is serious, close to academic in tone and substance, enlivened by the occasional anecdote, but on the whole impersonal. At the same time, apart from an index, it has no scholarly apparatus. Our Man in Moscow was designed to cover the greater part of Ford's professional life. In 1995, this time with considerable editorial assistance, he published a second book. A Moscow Literary Memoir. Among the Great Artists of Russia from 1946 to ic)8o dealt with the other dimension of his life in the Soviet Union - his many contacts with Soviet intellectuals, and in particular, the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, and the aged Lili Brik, once Mayakovsk/s mistress.Yet there remained another source of his writing he wanted published. This was contained in the dispatches and memoranda he had prepared over the years for the Department of External Affairs, on file in Ottawa. He believed these official documents would make a third book, this time in a scholarly edition prepared by a qualified historian. He pursued this project with determination during his lifetime. Now, more than 10 years after his death, it has been realized with the publication of The Constant Diplomat by Charles A. Ruud of the University of Western Ontario.Ruud is a specialist in Russian history. His book is based upon research in primary sources in both the Canadian and Russian official archives, as well as on secondary sources. In addition, he had extensive conversations with Ford and interviewed a number of the ambassador's friends. He has produced a study of over 300 pages, of which some 85 are devoted to appendices, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. In form and style, then, Ruud's work seems to be very much what the ambassador had in mind. The author says, however, that his concept was different from his subject's. He may have concluded that an analysis of Ford's official writings alone would not have made a book. (The chapters devoted to summarizing and commenting on the dispatches run to only about 125 pages.) However that may be, Ruud has added biographical material on Robert Ford's childhood in London, Ontario, his education at Western and Cornell, and his life in retirement, as well as most of a chapter on the ambassador's wife, Thereza, a chapter on Ford's contacts with Soviet intellectuals, and a chapter on his Soviet counterpart in Ottawa, Alexander Yakovlev. These additional elements add colour and interest to the book. …


A boundary scan-based algorithm is presented for testing iterative arrays of identical units such as integrated circuits on silicon wafers, MCMs fabricated on a large area panel, and multiprocessor systems. As all the units are similar, it is critical that the test process be parallelized in order that multiple units may be tested for the cost of testing one unit. With this objective in mind, we propose a parallel and pipelined boundary scan standard-based scheme for testing all units simultaneously. In this scheme, the test vectors and the corresponding correct-response vectors are both scanned into the scan chain of the units in an interleaved fashion, optimally utilizing the resources of every chain to test all units. The comparison of the expected versus the observed response of a unit is performed locally at each unit. Our algorithm provides an order of magnitude speed-up in test time over conventional boundary scan based testing schemes. Further, as the number of chains increases, the test time tends asymptotically toward the optimal. The complete design of the test architecture is also presented.


Most of Sweden's municipalities have forbidden chemical weed control on hard surfaces in towns. This has led to a growing need for new environment-friendly alternatives to chemical weed control. Several municipalities are interested in acetic acid for weed control. Trials have been carried out using acetic acid and Foraform to control weeds. Perstorp Specialkemi Formox have financed these trials. Acetic acid is a natural substance. It is formed when plants decompose under anaerobic conditions and is broken down under aerobic conditions. Previous trials have shown that acetic acid can curb the growth of barley plants' roots and also prevent seeds from germinating. Foraform is a liquid used in farming for ensilating grass. Foraform is made from formic acid (HCOOH), linked to ammonia (NH3) in a chemical compound called ammoniumtetraformiate (HCOONH4 ∙ 3HCOOH). We carried out trials during the summer of 1993 to investigate what concentration of acetic acid and Foraform is required for 90% of the weeds to die (LD90). We used concentrations of 24% and 6%. The test weeds were Sinapis alba and Poa annua. We investigated how the acidity of peat soil was affected by spraying with acetic acid or Foraform. To kill 90% of the Sinapis plants (LD90) treated in the four to six leaf stage required 0.27 l/m2 24% acetic acid (= approximately 0.064 l/m2 100% acetic acid) and 0.29 1/m2 for 24% Foraform (= 0.069 l/m2 100% Foraform). The equivalent values for the 6% concentration was 0.80 l/m2 (= 0.048 1/m2 100% acetic acid) and 0.72 l/m2 (= 0.045 l/m2 100% Foraform) respectively. The plant density in the trial was 354 plants per m2 and the weight of the weeds was 616 grammes per m2. The trial showed that acetic acid and Foraform had a similar effect on the tested weed Sinapis alba. To kill 90% of the Poa annua (34 500 shoots/m2 and 8 cm tall) required 0.28 l/m2 24% Foraform (= approximately 0.068 l/m2 100% Foraform). The LD9O values were 0.96 l/m2 for 6% acetic acid (= 0.058 l/m2 100% acetic acid) and 0.75 l/m2 for 6% Foraform (= 0.045 1/m2 100% Foraform). No conclusion can be drawn from the trials concerning any similarity in effect between acetic acid and Foraform on Poa annua. A smaller quantity of the active substance (dose) was required with 6% solutions than with 24% solutions at (LD9O). The dose could be reduced by a quarter for the acetic acid and by a third for Foraform, when Sinapis alba and Poa annua were treated with 6% solutions. The pH-value of peat soil sank from 7.3 to 5.6 after treatment with 0.24 l/m2 of 24% acetic acid or Foraform. The original pH-value of the soil was restored after two days. Even though the trials with acetic acid and Foraform in concentrations of 6% and 24% show that they can be used for weed control, they cannot be recommended for use on a large scale on hard surfaces until we have investigated their impact on the environment and the implications for the user. Moreover, we lack knowledge and experience of how surrounding vegetation and surface material (concrete, paving etc) are affected by the treatment.


Background Mental health presentations are an increasing part of the paediatric caseload and there is growing evidence that paediatric trainees feel ill-equipped to manage these patients. Only 33% of trainees we surveyed felt that their current training programme enabled them to achieve their curriculum requirements in paediatrics or mental health respectively. CAMHS services are increasingly stretched, raising referral thresholds and making the need for closer working together across disciplines paramount. Aim A working group of paediatric and psychiatry trainees developed the concept of Thinking Together, to tackle this training gap. The scheme involves pairing paediatric and CAMHS trainees to share in each other's clinical encounters to foster a joint way of learning and working together, while fulfilling curriculum competencies that are otherwise difficult to achieve. Method A pilot was launched in March 2016 where trainees from both specialties were paired for a period of 6 months, attending at least two clinical encounters in each setting. Curriculum competencies for both specialties were outlined in a resource pack. Trainees were encouraged to explore a variety of learning possibilities, including clinics, referral meetings and signposting their partner to other relevant clinical opportunities. Results 30 trainees were surveyed and 16 of these completed pre and post pilot evaluation. Prior to participating in Thinking Together, 70% stated they had no experience of working in a jointly delivered paediatric/mental health clinic. 93% of participants felt that their patients benefitted from access to the jointly delivered paediatric and mental health clinics. Confidence in achieving curriculum competencies in paediatrics and mental health respectively, increased to 93% following involvement in the project. Conclusion Our results highlighted that trainees felt they had achieved curriculum competencies in their linked specialty, while improving their capabilities in collaborative, patient-centred practice. Trainees felt the scheme benefitted both their patients and themselves, thinking together through cases and developing a greater appreciation of different professionals' roles and responsibilities. As the burden of mental health grows, with it's irrefutable link to physical well being, we feel schemes such as ours will improve understanding for future trainees between the cross over of mind and body.


In a large distributed system spanning administrative domains such as a Grid, it is desirable to maintain and query dynamic and timely information about active participants such as services, resources and user communities. The web services vision promises that programs are made more flexible and powerful by querying Internet databases (registries) at runtime in order to discover information and network attached third-party building blocks. Services can advertise themselves and related metadata via such databases, enabling the assembly of distributed higher-level components. In support of this vision, this thesis shows how to support expressive general-purpose queries over a view that integrates autonomous dynamic database nodes from a wide range of distributed system topologies. We motivate and justify the assertion that realistic ubiquitous service and resource discovery requires a rich general-purpose query language such as XQuery or SQL. Next, we introduce the Web Service Discovery Architecture (WSDA), which subsumes an array of disparate concepts, interfaces and protocols under a single semi-transparent umbrella. WSDA specifies a small set of orthogonal multi-purpose communication primitives (building blocks) for discovery. These primitives cover service identification, service description retrieval, data publication as well as minimal and powerful query support. The individual primitives can be combined and plugged together by specific clients and services to yield a wide range of behaviors and emerging synergies. Based on WSDA, we introduce the hyper registry, which is a centralized database node for discovery of dynamic distributed content, supporting XQueries over a tuple set from an XML data model. We address the problem of maintaining dynamic and timely information populated from a large variety of unreliable, frequently changing, autonomous and heterogeneous remote data sources. However, in a large cross-organizational system, the set of information tuples is partitioned over many such distributed nodes, for reasons including autonomy, scalability, availability, performance and security. This suggests the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) query technology. Consequently, we take the first steps towards unifying the fields of database management systems and P2P computing. As a result, we propose the WSDA based Unified Peer-to-Peer Database Framework (UPDF) and its associated Peer Database Protocol (PDP), which are unified in the sense that they allow to express specific applications for a wide range of data types (typed or untyped XML, any MIME type), node topologies (e.g. ring, tree, graph), query languages (e.g. XQuery, SQL), query response modes (e.g. Routed, Direct and Referral Response), neighbor selection policies, pipelining, timeout and other scope characteristics. The uniformity and wide applicability of our approach is distinguished from related work, which (1) addresses some but not all problems, and (2) does not propose a unified framework.


Biginelli Reaction between 5-formyl-8-hydroxyquinolinol (FHQ), urea and methyl aceto acetate in the presence of acid was gave methyl 4-(8-hydroxyquinolin-5-yl)-6-methyl-2-oxo-1,2,3,4-tetrahydropyrimidine-5-carboxylate (PYHQ), which was then react with anilne yield 4-(8-hydroxyquinolin-5-yl)-6-methyl-2-oxo-N-phenyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydropyrimidine- 5-carboxamide (PYAHQ). The novel ligand characterized by elemental analysis and spectral studies. The transition metal chelates viz. Cu2+, Ni2+, Co2+, Mn2+ and Zn2+ of PYAHQ were prepared and characterized by metal-ligand (M:L) ratio, IR and reflectance spectroscopies and magnetic properties. The antifungal activity of PYAHQ and its metal chelates was screened against various fungi. The results showed that all these samples were good antifungal agents.


As human populations and the resources required to support societies continue to grow, an increasing number of plant and animal species around the world are facing extinction. Given limited time, space, and money, how do we decide which management actions will be most effective to avert extinctions? In this book, many of the world's leading conservation and population biologists evaluate what has become a key tool in estimating extinction risk and evaluating potential recovery strategies - population viability analysis, or PVA. PVA integrates data on the life history, demography, and genetics of a species with information on environmental variability, using computer models ranging from simple measures of population growth rate to complex spatial simulations, to predict whether a given population will remain viable (i.e., not go extinct) under various management options. A synthetic and objective overview of the latest theoretical and methodological advances, Population Viability Analysis will be crucial reading for conservationists, land managers, and policy makers.


Are you a small-business owner, consultant, or marketing manager for a big company selling an intangible service or hard-to-understand product? Does it take a while to gain your customer's trust and make the sale? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, this Short Cut will walk you through a step-by-step process for generating leads and sales. This Short Cut helps you identify metrics for success, create a plan to hit those metrics, and put in place a system for nurturing leads into successful sales.


Nowadays, critical control systems are a fundamental component contributing to the overall performance of critical infrastructures in our society, most of which belong to the industrial sector. These complex systems include in their design different types of information and communication technology systems, such as wireless (mesh) sensor networks, to carry out control processes in real time. This fact has meant that several communication standards, such as Zigbee PRO, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a, have been specified to ensure coexistence, reliability, and security in their communications. The main purpose of this paper has been to review these three standards and analyze their security. We have identified a set of threats and potential attacks in their routing protocols, and we consequently provide recommendations and countermeasures to help Industry protect its infrastructures.