There is a generalized feeling among lawyers today that the legal "profession" is eroding into the legal "business." However, the lack of hard evidence of change has made it easy to dismiss this feeling as no more than nostalgia for a non-existent "golden age" of professionalism. Nevertheless, erosion of any sort is a slow-moving, gradual process, and its visible effects only become noticeable as they accumulate with the passage of time. The effects of what appears to be a true erosion in the professionalism of the tax bar have recently begun to accumulate, providing evidence that the generalized impression of a decline may actually be grounded in reality. The evidence of this decline in professionalism takes the form of a growing number of articles in lay publications (e.g., The New York Times and Forbes magazine) that provide the general public with technical discussions of legal, but ethically questionable, tax avoidance techniques. The essay focuses on two groups of such articles that have appeared in The New York Times during 2002. The essay first provides a description of the tax avoidance techniques discussed in the articles and of how public attention effectively shut those techniques down. Next, as a prelude to discussing the impact of these events on the law as a profession, the meaning of the term "profession" is explored. It is contended that, when used to refer to the practice of law, the term "profession" is used in its sociological sense and describes an occupation whose members (i) have mastered an esoteric body of knowledge, (ii) are altruistic, and (iii) are self-regulating. Then, with this definition in mind, the events surrounding the apparent demise of each of these tax avoidance techniques are analyzed. Based on this analysis, it is concluded that these events undermine the rationale for granting the legal profession the right of self-regulation. By contributing to the erosion of the legal profession's claim to one of the defining characteristics of a "profession" these events necessarily contribute to the erosion of the legal profession's more fundamental claim to the benefits and privileges of professional status. The purpose of the essay is to document and draw attention to this evidence, as its implications for the profession seem to have been overlooked by commentators. It is hoped that, by drawing attention to this evidence, the essay will spur members of the tax bar to reflect seriously on (i) their own actions and how they may have contributed to the erosion in professionalism and (ii) more broadly, whether the standard of conduct to which they actively hold themselves and their peers is sufficiently rigorous.


In 1982 civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson criticized President Ronald Reagan's attacks on busing to coerce school desegregation for targeting "not the bus, but us" (Wolters, 1996). Two decades later, the United States Supreme Court ended the thirty-two-year-old Charlotte, North Carolina, plan which had launched the era of court-ordered busing (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools). The same year, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which authorized federal funding and state testing of the nation's public school students. In lieu of busing, this law was also targeting "us," the largely minority underclass for whom Jackson purported to speak in 1982. Yet this time the Republican president was not implicitly assaulting minorities; he was seeking to aid them. Despite this significant change in policy, however, one outcome remained the same: public schools increasingly divided by race and class. This article will provide a brief history of the school desegregation policies of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower through Bill Clinton, based on secondary and primary sources, then examine the initial school desegregation efforts of President George W. Bush, based largely on contemporary primary sources. It argues that the early returns on the Bush Presidency show that despite his genuinely good intentions, President Bush, like his predecessors, has been unable to overcome this difficult history of racial segregation in the nation's public schools. George W. Bush would become the first Republican president to fight a "war on poverty," yet only the latest president of either party to struggle in the battle for school desegregation. In many ways, for a variety of reasons, this battle was over before it began. The History of Presidents and School Desegregation Each president in the five decades preceding Bush fought school segregation in his own way. Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy acted belatedly yet forcefully while Lyndon Johnson moved quickly yet ineffectively against de jure school segregation. Richard Nixon virtually eliminated de jure school segregation, but accepted de facto separation. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, like Nixon, denounced busing to coerce school desegregation, but did little to stop it. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spoke and acted so firmly against court-ordered busing that Bill Clinton, who also opposed compulsory school desegregation, wouldn't even have to mention it. On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court unanimously repudiated de jure school segregation. The enforcement of this decision fell first to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who disagreed with the ruling as a violation of states' rights and an invitation to the massive resistance which followed (Roark, 2002). Eisenhower much preferred the second Brown v. Board of Education decision a year later, which permitted Southern state governments to desegregate their public schools "with all deliberate speed." Eisenhower nonetheless dispatched federal troops to enforce Brown at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, desegregated the nation's capital and military bases, and established federal civil rights agencies through the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. When he left office in 1961, however, only 0.2 percent of Black children in the Deep South attended desegregated schools (Burk, 1984). After two and one-half years of failing to enact federal aid to elementary and secondary education, in part because of the opposition of Southern conservatives to funding desegregated schools and resistance by Northern liberals to funding segregated schools, Democratic President John F. Kennedy in June 1963 finally opted to separate education from civil rights in proposing a stand-alone civil rights law. With two-thirds of the public now in favor of school desegregation, this bold new approach would be popular (McAndrews, 1991). …


We consider a utility-maximization problem in a general semimartingale financial model, subject to constraints on the number of shares held in each risky asset. These constraints are modeled by predictable convex-set-valued processes whose values do not necessarily contain the origin; that is, it may be inadmissible for an investor to hold no risky investment at all. Such a setup subsumes the classical constrained utility-maximization problem, as well as the problem where illiquid assets or a random endowment are present. Our main result establishes the existence of optimal trading strategies in such models under no smoothness requirements on the utility function. The result also shows that, up to attainment, the dual optimization problem can be posed over a set of countably-additive probability measures, thus eschewing the need for the usual finitely-additive enlargement.


Antitrust law explicitly depends on market definition. Many issues in IP law also depend on market definition, though that definition is rarely explicit.Applying antitrust's traditional market definition to IP goods leads to some startling results. Despite the received wisdom that IP rights don't necessarily confer market power, a wide array of IP rights do exactly that under traditional antitrust principles. This result requires us to rethink both the overly-rigid way we define markets in antitrust law and the competitive consequences of granting IP protection. Both antitrust and IP must begin to think realistically about those consequences, rather than falling back on rigid formulas or recitation of the mantra that there is no conflict between IP and antitrust.


Knowledge economy, which is characterized by the complex and dynamic competitive environments, knowledge-based resources (human capital, structural capital and market capital) represent the source of competitive advantage for the firms. In order to be able to seize the opportunities, make product and process innovations, be proactive in the market place, entrepreneurial firms have to reconfigure their intangible assets (Jantunen et al., 2005). The objective of this research is to empirically examine intellectual capital as a competitive knowledge resource of firms, initiate entrepreneurial climate that affect the organizational performance as financial and innovative outcomes. Recent conceptual models suggest that entrepreneurial orientation depends on the acquisition, the integration and the exploitation of knowledge (Hayton, 2002). According to this conceptual framework a model is developed to examine the direct and the mediator relation between intellectual capital and entrepreneurial orientation. To investigate the stated relationships data will be collected from Turkey's Top 500 Industrial Enterprises. Questionnaires are prepared by the researchers based on the measurement instrument used by Subramaniam &Youndt (2005), Bontis (1998) and Dess & Lumpkin (1996) after the preliminary survey that is done for the reliability and validity analysis of the measurement instrument which is modified for cultural differences and for the purposes of this study, will be distributed via mail and the internet site. Data will then be analyzed by the SPSS statistical program.


The article exemplifies and presents the characteristics of linguistic imperialism, linguistic capital accumulation following the same pattern as capitalist economic dominance. The text summarizes the way English was established in the colonial period. Many of the mechanisms of linguistic hierarchy have been maintained and intensified since then, as African and Indian scholarship demonstrates. Language plays a key role in education, the World Bank taking over where colonial regimes left off. Anglo-American efforts to maintain global English dominance have intensified since 1945 and are central to the present-day world 'order', as the postcolonial is subsumed under global empire, assisted by English linguistic neoimperialism. Some scholars who deny the existence of linguistic imperialism are reported on, and the complexity of language policy in European integration is demonstrated. The article concludes by setting out how the deceptive term 'lingua franca' needs to be challenged, and lists ways of exploring English as project, process, and product, setting out key research questions. The constraints of a short article only permit glimpses of a rapidly evolving scene, the visible tip of the English iceberg.


Background: In 2007, the patient's right to specialized pediatric palliative home care (SPPHC) became law in Germany. In Lower Saxony, a German federal state with a low population density, an adequate care for children suffering from life-limiting conditions (LLC) should be ensured in the context of low patient numbers and low numbers of specialists. A close cooperation with regional primary health care providers can facilitate the performance of this task. Nursing home services play a decisive role in delivering pediatric palliative home care. Methods : The descriptive retrospective study aimed on the evaluation of nursing home services involvement in and contribution to palliative care in children and adolescents. A second aim was to implement a SPPHC to assure an optimal care provision. Therefore, a standardized questionnaire survey was disseminated to 22 home nursing services, 14 (63%) of them returned the completed form. Data analysis was descriptive. The evaluated needs have been included in the conception of a comprehensive SPPHC in Lower Saxony which was implemented in 2010. Results: In 2008, the home nursing services reported on 168 patients suffering from life-limiting conditions. As incentives for delivering palliative home care, the nursing teams emphasized the support by a specialized team, a 24-hour on-call duty and the increase of educational programs. To meet this demand, a SPPHC was implemented. Since April 2010, a central office undertakes the coordination and administration, while different regional teams comprising nursing, medical and psycho-social specialists care for the children and adolescents suffering from complex conditions due to LLC. Additionally a central hotline service provides 24/7 specialist availability. During the first three years of operation, the SPPHC providers were involved in the management of 131 children suffering from LLC. In total, 6452 hours of SPPHC were delivered, predominantly spent on joint patient care with regional health care providers like nursing teams or resident physicians (30.2%), driving time (22.5%) and coordination of care (15.3%). Nurses specialized in pediatric palliative care delivered 45.3% of SPPHC in Lower Saxony. Conclusions: The provision of a comprehensive SPPHC in a region of low population density is possible. A high percentage of coordinative and logistic efforts is needed to enable the specialist care in each child and all areas. General nursing services and nurses specialized in pediatric palliative care as part of the SPPHC play a crucial role in delivering palliative home care for children and adolescents with LLC .


We consider the scheduling problem in a new slotted optical network called TWIN. The TWIN architecture possesses interesting properties, which may offer solutions for next-generation optical networks. Besides, TWIN has the ability to support quality of service (QoS) by controlling two important parameters: queueing delay and delay variance. However, to the best of our knowledge, the existing scheduling algorithms in TWIN focused mainly on maximizing the throughput and ignored the consideration of QoS. We formulate the scheduling problem into an integer linear programming problem and propose a heuristic--virtual topology-based dynamic scheduling (VTBDS) algorithm to solve it fast and efficiently. Besides, we derive an analytical model for TWIN and investigate the performance of VTBDS in it. By means of simulations, we demonstrate that our model approximates the TWIN network very well, and VTBDS incurs smaller queueing delay and delay variance, which are advantageous for guaranteeing better QoS.


The VIX index, based on the volatility implied by options on the S&P 500 index, is one of the most watched market indicators. Futures and options written on the VIX are among the most actively traded derivative contracts. But the VIX is quite different from other derivatives underliers. One can't buy and hold implied volatility, so the cost-of-carry model followed by nearly all futures contracts on financial instruments and storable commodities does not work for the VIX. For nonstorable underlyings, the futures price is not constrained by arbitrage against the cash market and is mostly determined by the market's forecast of the spot price at futures maturity. If the VIX futures price is the market's expectation about implied volatility at contract maturity, the futures basis may contain information about which way the VIX is going to move next to close the gap. On the other hand, if VIX futures prices contain a volatility risk premium, the future should lie above the spot VIX on average and is expected to converge toward the spot VIX over time, rather than the reverse. This risk premium can be captured on average by shorting the nearby VIX contract, but the position is exposed to risk that VIX may spike upward if the stock market falls sharply. This risk can be partly hedged using long contracts in the S&P index future. The authors examine these issues and find, as previous researchers have, that the VIX futures basis does not predict the change in the VIX. However, a hedged trade to capture the volatility risk premium can be highly profitable.

http://www.efmaefm.org/0EFMAMEETINGS/EFMA ANNUAL MEETINGS/2013-Reading/papers/VIX paper_EFMA.pdf


Analysis of growth performance of principal foodgrain crops in North Bihar (India) revealed that their production recorded positive growth rates during post green revolution period. Wheat was the only crop which recorded positive growth rates in area, production and productivity across the zone over different sub-periods. There has not been substantial increase in area under rice during period under investigation. Moreover, a declining trend in rice area has been observed during early nineties. The study of instability indicated that wheat, maize and arhar witnessed a continuous decline in instability over the period under study. The decline in stability in the production of these crops has been caused mainly by adoption of improved technology in crop production. The spectacular growth in production was associated with increase in instability but it started declining after the perfection in technology.


Regular endurance exercise training induces beneficial functional and health effects in human skeletal muscle. The putative contribution to the training response of the epigenome as a mediator between genes and environment has not been clarified. Here we investigated the contribution of DNA methylation and associated transcriptomic changes in a well-controlled human intervention study. Training effects were mirrored by significant alterations in DNA methylation and gene expression in regions with a homogeneous muscle energetics and remodeling ontology. Moreover, a signature of DNA methylation and gene expression separated the samples based on training and gender. Differential DNA methylation was predominantly observed in enhancers, gene bodies and intergenic regions and less in CpG islands or promoters. We identified transcriptional regulator binding motifs of MRF, MEF2 and ETS proteins in the proximity of the changing sites. A transcriptional network analysis revealed modules harboring distinct ontologies and, interestingly, the overall direction of the changes of methylation within each module was inversely correlated to expression changes. In conclusion, we show that highly consistent and associated modifications in methylation and expression, concordant with observed health-enhancing phenotypic adaptations, are induced by a physiological stimulus.


BACKGROUND
Real-time ultrasound (US) in central venous catheterization is superior to pre-procedure US. However, moving real-time US into routine practice is impeded by its perceived expense and difficulty. Currently, pre-procedure US and landmark (LM) methods are most widely used. We investigated these techniques in internal jugular vein (IJV) catheterization in respect of operator experience, complications, and risk factors.

METHODS
In an observational non-randomized study, we investigated 606 of ∼1300 procedures, that is, 200 patients were treated under pre-procedure US and 406 under LM [pathfinder (PF) n=202, direct cannulation (DC) n=204]. We recorded first needle pass success rate, success rate after the third attempt, and the cannulation time. Procedures were performed by inexperienced (<100) or experienced (>100 catheterizations) operators.

RESULTS
Pre-procedure US was associated with more successful attempts and shorter cannulation times. Under pre-procedure US, 88% of first attempts were successful and 100% of third attempts. The median (range) cannulation time was 39 (10-330) s. Under PF, only 56% of first, and 87% of third, attempts were successful with a median (range) cannulation time of 100 (25-3600) s. Under DC, 61% of first and 89% of third attempts were successful; the median (range) cannulation time was 70 (10-3600) s. Remarkably, inexperienced operators using pre-procedure US (n=38) were significantly faster than experienced operators using PF or DC (n=343) (cannulation time: median 60 s, range 12-330, for inexperienced; 60 s, range 10-3600, for experienced). First puncture success rates were higher (pre-procedure US, inexperienced 84%, PF or DC, experienced 57%).

CONCLUSIONS
Pre-procedure US for IJV catheterization is safe, quick, and superior to LM.


Abstract: When it comes to supporting democracy and human rights initiatives internationally, Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey present a range of behaviors. A review of voting patterns at the United Nations over six years, coupled with an analysis of each country's behavior at other international organizations, reveals an enduring cleavage for and against external interference in internal affairs. South Korea and Turkey, anchored for decades in Western security alliances, are sympathetic to most multilateral human rights initiatives. Brazil positions itself as a fence-sitter as it seeks political autonomy and regional and global leadership. India, South Africa and Indonesia are squarely in the non-interventionist camp, though all three recently have taken some positive steps.


We present an impactoclastic density current model for terrestrial meteorite impact ejecta emplacement that is based on a hitherto-unreported threefold sequence of lithofacies in the recently identified Stac Fada impact ejecta outflow blanket in Scotland. Massive suevite (division A) grades seamlessly up into massive suevite containing whole and broken accretionary lapilli (division B), and this is overlain by a thin layer of clast-supported dust pellets (division C). The sequence closely resembles sequences in accretionary lapilli-bearing ignimbrites emplaced by pyroclastic density currents at volcanoes, and we deduce similar emplacement mechanisms. We propose that ≥99% of the thickness of the Stac Fada ejecta blanket as seen at outcrop was deposited from a single depletive (spatially decelerating), granular fluid–based density current that rapidly waxed and then waned. A previously unreported thin layer of pellets (division C) records direct fallout from a residual atmospheric dust plume. We propose that the impactoclastic density current was density stratified and comprised a ground-hugging component of granular fluid passing up into less concentrated, more turbulent levels and a buoyant, dilute upper component. Larger rock fragments rolled and saltated within the basal granular fluid. In the buoyant plume, dust agglomerated into pellets, and these dropped into lower, more vigorous levels of the density current, where successive concentric layers of fine dust accreted to them as they circulated and hardened. The resultant accretionary lapilli sedimented through the granular fluid into lower levels of the current and were deposited from its base. Dust pellets continued to form in the residual atmospheric dust plume after passage of the density current and fell out to form the thin layer (division C) of framework-supported pellets at the top of the ejecta blanket. The impactoclastic density current model may have applications to finer-grained parts of some continuous impact ejecta blankets elsewhere on Earth as well as on Mars and Venus, where features indicating flow processes are evident.


GaN quantum dots (QDs) in an AlN matrix have been grown on Si(111) by molecular-beam epitaxy. The growth of GaN deposited at 800 °C on AlN has been investigated in situ by reflection high-energy electron diffraction. It is found that a growth interruption performed at GaN thicknesses larger than three molecular monolayers (8 A) instantaneously leads to the formation of three-dimensional islands. This is used to grow GaN/AlN QDs on Si(111). Depending on their sizes, intense room-temperature photoluminescence is observed from blue to orange. Finally, we demonstrate that stacking of QD planes with properly chosen dot sizes gives rise to white light emission.


This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment with financially motivated participants that is used to compare alternative proposals for managing the time path of emissions allowance prices in the face of random firm-specific and market-level structural shocks. In this setting, market performance measures such as social surplus are enhanced by the use of a price collar (auction reserve price and soft price cap). Comparable performance enhancements are not observed with the implementation of a quantity collar that adjusts auction quantities in response to privately held inventories of unused allowances. In fact, in some specifications, the quantity collar performed worse than no stabilization policy at all. The experiment implemented a specific set of structural elements, and extrapolation to other settings should be done with caution. Nevertheless, an examination of the observed behavioral patterns and deviations from optimal behavior suggests that a price collar has an important (although perhaps not exclusive) role to play in constructing an effective market stability reserve policy.


Soil losses and the subsequent sediment delivery constitute significant environmental threats. Climate change is likely to have an impact on the availability of water and therefore on sediment yield in catchments. In this context, quantifying the sediment response to an increased atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change is of utmost importance to the proper management of rural catchments. However, quantitative assessment of climate change impact remains a complex task. In this study, the potential medium (2031–2060) and long-term (2069–2098) impacts of projected changes of temperature, rainfall and CO2 concentration on sediment yield in a small rural catchment located in NW Spain were evaluated using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. Climate change scenarios were created using future climate data projected by regional climate models from the ENSEMBLES project and two CO2 concentration scenarios (550 and 660 ppm). The results showed that climate change would have a noticeable impact on suspended sediment if the forecast temperature, rainfall and CO2 concentration changes included in this study were met. Overall, suspended sediment is expected to decrease (2031–2060: −11%, 2069–2098: −8%) compared to the baseline period (1981–2010), mainly due to decreased streamflow. However, an increase in sediment transport in winter is predicted, possibly associated with increased erosion in cultivated areas (11%–17%), suggesting that, at this time of the year, the effect of soil detachment prevails over sediment transport capacity. Consequently, management practices aimed at reducing soil erosion in cultivated areas should be carried out, because these are the main source of sediment in the study area.


The World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Survey (BRSS) data can be used to gain insights into bank regulatory/supervisory styles across countries. The data illustrate the differences in regulation/supervision among crisis, non-crisis and BRICS countries, and highlight changes in regulation and supervision during the crisis period. The results indicate that the crisis countries had weaker regulatory and supervisory frameworks than those in emerging countries during the crisis. As a distinct block BRICS countries demonstrated uniqueness in their regulatory/supervisory styles, which are similar neither to those in the crisis countries nor to those in the non-crisis countries.


The level of second-harmonic generation (SHG) in poled low-water fused silica was altered by preannealing in aqueous and dry-nitrogen atmospheres. The effect of water and heat was found to depend on the lot from which the material originated. The effect on the SHG of either a wet or a dry preanneal was sometimes found to be reversible by the opposite preannealing process. For both wet and dry preannealed samples the SHG was found to have both near-surface (<25-μm) and bulk (≈1.5-mm) components. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) data revealed the presence of Si and Ge E′ defect sites and showed that the relative concentrations of these sites was altered by the preannealing processes. EPR and SHG data provided evidence for a second-order bond effect along with a third-order hole-filling effect as sources of the nonlinearity.


Cultural practices used for crop management can influence numbers of weed seeds in the soil seed bank. This paper reports results of field experiments conducted for 6 yr to examine changes in weed seed numbers due to management practices. We evaluated the effect of tillage, herbicide application, and interrow cultivation on weed seed numbers in a soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]/corn (Zea mays L.) rotation and in continuous corn. Treatment effects on weed seed numbers were more repetitive in soybean/corn than continuous corn. Foxtails (Setaria spp.) were the weed class most affected by treatments. Weed seeds were uniformly distributed among sampling depths in conventional tillage and concentrated near the soil surface in reduced tillage and no-tillage. We expected weed seeds to become more numerous in the top 5 em of soil as tillage was reduced. Tillage, as a main effect, rarely influenced weed seed numbers; therefore, we inferred that weed seed losses at the surface must have increased in reduced-tillage plots. Seed numbers were uniform among soil depths if herbicides were broadcast, but differed if herbiddes were banded or omitted, due to increased seed deposition at the surface. Tillage affected vertical distribution of seeds, while the quantity of weed seeds in the top 5 cm of soil was regulated by weed control practices. This indicates that reducing weed seed deposition could be helpful for maintaining weed seeds in reduced-tillage systems at numbers similar to those of intensively tilled systems.


There has been phenomenal and tremendous growth of PE's in India. They were established to attain the 'commanding heights' of the economy of the country and achieve rapid growth of industrialization and economic development. Some of these PEs later became 'white elephant' and started incurring losses. Several of them became chronically sick industries. The Govt. declared the disinvestment process, which began in 1991 with the sale of minority stakes in some PE's, shifted focus to strategic sales during 1999-2000 to 2003-04. The present UPA Govt. announced that, all disinvestment will be considered on a transparent and consultative case-by-case basis. The Govt. has approved the constitution of a "National Investment Fund" comprising of proceeds from disinvestment. The present paper is an attempt to discuss same important issues such as restructuring, valuation of equity, Mechanism of disinvestment, Application of disinvestment proceeds, Parliamentary approval and political issues.


In this paper, we consider the framework of partitioned edge learning for iteratively training a large-scale model using many resource-constrained devices (called workers). To this end, in each iteration, the model is dynamically partitioned into parametric blocks, which are downloaded to worker groups for updating using their local data. Then, the local updates are uploaded to and cascaded by the server for updating a global model. To reduce resource usage by minimizing the total learning-and-communication latency, this work focuses on the novel joint design of parameter (computation load) and bandwidth allocation (for downloading and uploading). Two design approaches are adopted. First, a practical sequential approach, called partially integrated parameter-and-bandwidth allocation (PABA), yields one scheme, namely parameter aware bandwidth allocation. It allocates the largest bandwidth to the slowest worker. Second, PABA are jointly optimized. Despite its being a nonconvex problem, an efficient and optimal solution algorithm is derived by intelligently nesting a bisection search and solving a convex problem. Experimental results using real data demonstrate that integrating PABA can substantially improve the performance of partitioned edge learning in terms of latency (by e.g., 46%) and accuracy (by e.g., 4%).


Background Evidence from observational studies suggests an increased risk of HIV acquisition among women using depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) contraception. Methods Within the context of a South African programme to increase women's access to the intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD), we conducted a pragmatic, open-label, parallel-arm, randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the IUD versus injectable progestogen contraception (IPC) at two South African hospitals. The primary outcome was pregnancy; secondary outcomes included HIV acquisition. Consenting women attending termination of pregnancy services were randomised after pregnancy termination between July 2009 and November 2012. Condoms were promoted for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Voluntary HIV testing was offered at baseline and at 12 or more months later. Findings on HIV acquisition are reported in this article. Results HIV acquisition data were available for 1290 initially HIV-negative women who underwent a final study interview at a median of 20 months after randomisation to IPC or an IUD. Baseline group characteristics were comparable. In the IPC group, 545/656 (83%) of participants received DMPA, 96 (15%) received injectable norethisterone enanthate, 14 (2%) received the IUD and one received oral contraception. In the IUD group 609 (96%) received the IUD, 20 (3%) received IPC and 5 (1%) had missing data. According to intention-to-treat analysis, HIV acquisition occurred in 20/656 (3.0%) women in the IPC arm and 22/634 (3.5%) women in the IUD arm (IPC vs IUD, risk ratio 0.88; 95% confidence interval 0.48–1.59; p=0.7). Conclusions This sub-study was underpowered to rule out moderate differences in HIV risk, but confirms the feasibility of randomised trial methodology to address this question. Larger RCTs are needed to determine the relative risks of various contraceptive methods on HIV acquisition with greater precision. Trial registration number Pan African Clinical Trials Registry number PACTR201409000880157 (04-09-2014).


Corporations are legal entities designed to foster certain kinds of collective economic activity. The decisionmaking power within a corporation ultimately rests with a board of directors elected by shareholders. Shareholders, however, do not use anything like a conventional ballot in these elections; instead, they fill out a "proxy ballot," delivered to them by the incumbent board. This proxy ballot lists only the incumbent board's chosen nominees, very often the board members themselves. If a shareholder wants to run for director or propose another nominee for the board, she needs to provide all other shareholders with a separate proxy ballot — an expensive and complicated proposition. For over seventy years, the Securities & Exchange Commission has considered various means of wresting exclusive control of the proxy ballot from corporate boards. In 2010, pursuant to direct Congressional authorization, the agency finally succeeded, enacting Rule 14a-11. The rule should have given shareholders access to a corporation's proxy ballot for director nominations, thereby reducing the costs for shareholders and diminishing the longstanding barriers to a more robust corporate democracy. But within a year of the rule's enactment, and to the surprise of almost every observer, the D.C. Circuit struck down the rule in Business Roundtable v. SEC as an arbitrary and capricious exercise of agency power. The court's ruling relies upon perceived failings in the Commission's economic analysis. But it is the court's economic analysis that is open to scrutiny and criticism. Over the past few decades, corporate law and economics scholarship has become adept at containing and eliding certain contradictions of its basic principles. The reasoning in Business Roundtable represents a facile reflection of these principles — a reflection that thereby magnifies the underlying flaws. As a result, the D.C. Circuit's decision to strike down Rule 14a-11 rests on a false version of shareholder democracy, one that undermines the very market principles that it purports to advance. It ignores the benefits of true shareholder democracy and focuses instead on costs that are routine for any functioning electoral system. By drawing distorted conclusions from certain tropes of corporate law and economics scholarship, the court essentially codified a strange new set of requirements for administrative agencies like the Commission. We fear that, unless it is corrected over time, this bad law and economics will cow regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, into adhering to a crabbed and inchoate vision of corporate governance. And we hope that substantive criticism of the opinion, such as that represented in this article, will demonstrate that the court's errors need not be replicated by others.


SUMMARY Geophysical data from the Amazon Cone Experiment are used to determine the structure and evolution of the French Guiana and Northeast Brazil continental margin, and to better understand the origin and development of along-margin segmentation. A 427-km-long combined multichannel reflection and wide-angle refraction seismic profile acquired across the southern French Guiana margin is interpreted, where plate reconstructions suggest a rift-type setting. The resulting model shows a crustal structure in which 35‐37-km-thick pre-rift continental crust is thinned by a factor of 6.4 over a distance of ∼70 km associated with continental breakup and the initiation and establishment of seafloor spreading. The ocean‐continent boundary is a transition zone up to 45 km in width, in which the two-layered oceanic-type crustal structure develops. Although relatively thin at 3.5‐5.0 km, such thin oceanic crust appears characteristic of the margin as a whole. There is no evidence of rift-related magmatism, either as seaward-dipping sequences in the reflection data or as a high velocity region in the lower crust in the P-wave velocity model, and as a such the margin is identified as non-volcanic in type. However, there is also no evidence of the rotated fault block and graben structures characteristic of rifted margins. Consequently, the thin oceanic crust, the rapidity of continental crustal thinning and the absence of characteristic riftrelated structures leads to the conclusion that the southern French Guiana margin has instead developed in an oblique rift setting, in which transform motion also played a significant role in the evolution of the resulting crustal structure and along-margin segmentation in structural style.


The article critically re-interrogates three high profile cases of white racism at South Africa's former 'open universities' to highlight the way in which existing debates around academic freedom fail to come to terms with questions of racial injustice after apartheid. The cases covered are the Makgoba affair at Wits, the Mamdani affair at the University of Cape Town, and the Shell affair at Rhodes. It is argued that the genuine transformation of higher education requires recognizing and addressing the dynamics of systemic white racism.


PRaVDA
Radiotherapy is a fundamental weapon in the battle against cancer with some 40% of patients receiving it as part of their treatment. Proton therapy (PT) enables a lower integrated radiation dose to a patient receiving radiotherapy (compared to x-rays) due to the finite range of protons and so allows more accurate targeting of the dose. The underlying physics that permits this is the proton's Bragg peak, which increases the dose deposited at a tumour site, even if deep inside the body, as well as reducing the dose to neighbouring healthy tissue. However, PT is more sensitive to uncertainties in both treatment planning and delivery than conventional x-ray treatment .

To overcome these limitations of these uncertainities in planning and delivering PT, the Wellcome Trust is funding the PRaVDA Consortium to develop new concepts and instrumentation to provide accurate information about the proton beam's dose, energy and profile before and during treatment.

PRaVDA is a team of leading instrumentation engineers and scientists, medical, high-energy and nuclear physicists and oncologists from the Universities of Birmingham, Lincoln, Liverpool and Surrey, the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, the iThemba Laboratories (Cape Town, South Africa).

A few facts and figures.

Each year over 320 thousand people are diagnosed with cancer in the UK
More than 1 in 3 people in the UK will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime.
The main cancer treatments are surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy; with 40% of patients receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment.
Around 120,000 cancer patients in the UK, and millions worldwide, benefit from radiotherapy every year.
Radiotherapy helps cure more people than cancer drugs and is generally the lowest cost treatment option.
Wordwide there are over 40 operational proton therapy centres with many more planned.
UK Department of Health confirmed in December 2011 that proton therapy will be made available for patients in the UK through two new treatment centres, in London and Manchester. Patients will be able to have treatment here from 2017.

PRaVDA will be the world's first silicon-based detector system that will allow the in-situ monitoring of the incident dose, in terms of its fluence, energy and distribution both prior and during treatment; and provide quality images during treatment as well as realise interactive proton computerised tomography (CT) – the ultimate aspiration for radiotherapy.

This three-year adventurous project brings together the UK's leading detector and instrumentation scientists together with medical physicists and oncologists in close partnership with industry and other stakeholders. PRaVDA has use of the UK's only research proton facility for extensive testing, and guaranteed access to other cyclotrons at key PT treatment centres; together with unique skills in designing novel detectors that lie at the heart of PRaVDA.


BACKGROUND
Current research on the continuum of smoking initiation has largely focused on phases of progressing frequency of smoking. To gain more insight into reasons some adolescents do, and others do not, proceed to advanced levels of smoking behavior, a continuum in which two categories of ex-smoking are proposed is examined.

METHODS
Standardized scores on psychosocial predictors of smoking among adolescent nonsmoking deciders and quitters were compared cross-sectionally with those of the categories of never smokers, triers, experimenters, and regular smokers (n = 23,317).

RESULTS
Never smokers, triers, experimenters, and regular smokers had significantly different characteristics with regard to psychosocial predictors of smoking (P < 0.01), with scores of never smokers indicating that they were least at risk of smoking in the future and those of regular smokers indicating that they were most at risk. Scores of nonsmoking deciders showed that they were less at risk than triers and experimenters and more at risk than never smokers. Quitters seemed to have less risky psychosocial characteristics than experimenters and more risky characteristics than nonsmoking deciders.

CONCLUSIONS
Studying transitions of smoking behavior based on six possible phases (i.e., never smoking, nonsmoking deciding, trying, experimenting, regular smoking, and quitting) might lead to more valid insights into predictors of adolescent smoking behavior.


Extracting insight from the enormous quantity of data generated from molecular simulations requires the identification of a small number of collective variables whose corresponding low-dimensional free-energy landscape retains the essential features of the underlying system. Data-driven techniques provide a systematic route to constructing this landscape, without the need for extensive a priori intuition into the relevant driving forces. In particular, autoencoders are powerful tools for dimensionality reduction, as they naturally force an information bottleneck and, thereby, a low-dimensional embedding of the essential features. While variational autoencoders ensure continuity of the embedding by assuming a unimodal Gaussian prior, this is at odds with the multi-basin free-energy landscapes that typically arise from the identification of meaningful collective variables. In this work, we incorporate this physical intuition into the prior by employing a Gaussian mixture variational autoencoder (GMVAE), which encourages the separation of metastable states within the embedding. The GMVAE performs dimensionality reduction and clustering within a single unified framework, and is capable of identifying the inherent dimensionality of the input data, in terms of the number of Gaussians required to categorize the data. We illustrate our approach on two toy models, alanine dipeptide, and a challenging disordered peptide ensemble, demonstrating the enhanced clustering effect of the GMVAE prior compared to standard VAEs. The resulting embeddings appear to be promising representations for constructing Markov state models, highlighting the transferability of the dimensionality reduction from static equilibrium properties to dynamics.


Abstract This paper aims to explain the adaptation of North Korean elite defectors who fled from North Korea. Data used for the purpose of this article came from surveys of North Korean defectors conducted in the late 2000's. Findings of the realized research indicate that the majority of senior defectors are experiencing less psychological and material issues when adjusting to society than regular North Korean defectors. The paper will proceed in three steps: explaining the notion of defectors, outlining their background, and focusing on their adaptation in South. Although defectors as a whole has emerged as of the most research group as a minority in South Korea, the so-called senior defectors have hardly been spotlighted. Basically North Korean senior defectors are supposed to strengthen the anti-Kim movement and legitimize the power of the South Korean government and the image of South Korea abroad. What has to be enlightened upon is the fact that North Korean senior defectors partially disagree with the integration policy of South Korean authorities. A major research question emerges: How are the experience of elite defectors localized in South Korea? How do their specific identities impact their opinion within the South Korean society? The aim of the article is also to categorize senior defectors and to provide in a single document a list of senior North Korea defectors based abroad. This kind of information is only available for Korean speaking readers. I wanted to make it accessible to the Englishspeaking community.


There are bad deficits and there are good deficits. What makes a fiscal deficit good or bad depends on both the context in which the deficit is run and the reason that the deficit is rising. The belief that it is unquestionably foolish to adopt policies that directly or indirectly increase the government's annual borrowing on the financial markets - which is what it means to run a budget deficit - is not the universal truth that the current conventional wisdom might imply. Budget deficits are potentially dangerous and must be monitored carefully, but they are not always, inevitably, completely, and irreversibly horrific. Far from it. Knowing that deficits are not evil incarnate raises some difficult questions, however, most notably whether it is dangerous for policy makers or economists to admit publicly that deficits might sometimes be the result of wise policy choices. While there is always a danger that such knowledge can be distorted and misused, I argue in this article that we have a responsibility to adjust our public discussion of budget deficits to admit that there are good deficits as well as bad. Enhancing the discourse requires us to remind ourselves what it is about budget deficits that can make them harmful, both in the long term and the short term, as a necessary step in understanding when deficits can be beneficial. Only then can we have a full and honest discussion of our taxing and spending policies.


The purpose of the current paper is to help improve our understanding of v^^hy people donate money to athletic support groups, which motivations are most prevalent among donors, and how motivations differ across three schools. Four thousand one hundred and thirty-seven responses (from 1,579 athletic support group donors at three universities) to an open-ended question about donor motivation were content analyzed. Results suggest that primary motives include supporting and improving the athletic program, receiving tickets, helping student-athletes, deriving entertainment and enjoyment, supporting and promoting the university (non-athletic programs), receiving membership benefits, repaying past benefits received, helping and enhancing the community, and psychological commitment. Comparisons to past research efforts (and comparisons among the three schools) are discussed and directions for future research are offered.


This paper describes the development and evaluation of a model-based approach for minimizing peak cooling demand using energy storage inherent in building structures. On any day where the strategy is invoked, the building is precooled with zone temperature setpoints at the low end of comfort prior to a demand-limiting period. The zone temperatures are then adjusted upwards during the demand-limiting period following a trajectory that keeps the peak cooling load below a specified target. The cooling demand target and setpoint trajectory are determined using a building model that is trained using field data. The overall approach was demonstrated for a building representative of a small commercial facility. The first step involved training the inverse model using a few weeks of hourly data. The model was then used to study the potential for peak load reduction and to determine setpoint trajectories that were implemented at the site. The demand-limiting strategy resulted in approximately 30% reductions in peak cooling loads compared to night setup control for a 5-hour on-peak period of 1 PM to 6 PM.


This paper examines the source of price discovery in the Australian Dollar currency market. The time-varying relationship between changes in quotes posted by cash market dealers and changes in currency futures quotes is estimated. The cash market quotations identif Y the eleven dealers posting the quotes, as well as geographical location of the dealers (Australia or overseas). Reported results show that price discovery originates in the cash market in any trading period. Amongst CUlTency dealers, the results imply that local desks are price leaders during Australian trading hours. Though some foreign desks do contribute to price discovery during the European and US trading hours, price leadership of local desks is also found to extend to this period. These findings are consistent with the proposition that local desks can provide significant price discovery in the Australian DoJIar cUlTency market during Australian daytime.


Continual environmental degradation and an unfair distribution of environmental burdens and benefits are two great challenges for humanity. Economic growth is often taken for granted when planning for the future. However, it is often argued that maintaining economic growth conflicts with keeping human activities adjusted to ecological boundaries and finite resources, at least for the more-developed countries. With this paper, we present sustainability goals for building and planning in Sweden to be achieved by 2050 in a context of limited or even negative economic growth. These goals should ensure that all groups in society have sufficient resources and a good life within planetary boundaries. We select four goals in a participatory process: two environmental goals related to climate change and land use and two social goals related to welfare and participation. Our results show that achieving the environmental goals will require significant reductions of Sweden's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use compared to today's levels. Regarding the social goals, these are, in many aspects, reasonably well fulfilled in Sweden today, although disparities remain between groups of citizens. The main challenge, however, is to ensure that these goals are fulfilled even within environmental limits and if economic growth should halt.


Methylation catalyzed by the DNA methyltransferases affects the C5 position of cytosine residues in DNA. This physiological process is active from the embryo conception, throughout all its developmental steps, and also later for the maintenance of the adult organism. Excess methylated cytosine in tumor suppressor genes is a consistent hallmark of human cancers. However, DNA methylation variation is now acknowledged to significantly contribute to genetic and common diseases. DNA methyltransferases became attractive therapeutic targets as DNA demethylation, in vitro, brought cancer cell differentiation and apoptosis. Inhibitors are already in use, alone or in combination, to treat myeloid malignancies, while clinical assays are ongoing for other diseases. DNA methylation and histone modifications are intimately correlated with epigenetic heritable modifications of gene expression that are independent of changes in the genetic sequence. Common initiatives for epigenetic research have built public databases with useful resources. The recent discovery of 5-hydroxymethyl cytosine has added new questions and challenges for the epigenome community. We review here knowledge about DNA methylation to provide researchers with the information needed to make more active inhibitors for the benefit of patients. Because of space limitations, many important works cannot be cited. We refer the reader to reviews containing these references.


Train harder, recover quickly, and improve performance! Today's top athletes rely on sport massage to stay healthy, at the top of their game, and a step ahead of the competition. With Massage for Sport Performance, you can too. In this special book and DVD package, renowned sport massage therapist Michael McGillicuddy demonstrates the same techniques he has used to train and prepare the world's elite track and field athletes for Olympic competition. "Massage" "for Sport Performance "will show you how to - perform both self-massage and partner-assisted massage; - administer the most effective routines for pre- and postcompetition; - stretch, warm up, and activate primary muscles; - treat critical muscle groups for elevated performance; - speed recovery; and - minimize injury, pain, and fatigue. Throughout you'll also find advice, tips, and variations for specific sports as well as massage recommendations for basketball, running, track and field, soccer, and swimming. With step-by-step instruction, photo sequences, and video demonstrations of the primary techniques, "Massage for Sport" "Performance" is the definitive guide for players, coaches, and athletes alike.


Pakistan is among the countries that have already crossed the water scarcity line, and the situation is worsened due to the recent pandemic. This is because the major budget of the country is shifted to primary healthcare activities from other development projects that included water treatment and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, water-borne diseases have increased drastically in the past few months. Therefore, there is a dire need to address this issue on a priority basis to ameliorate the worsening situation. One possible solution is to shift the focus/load from mega-projects that require a plethora of resources, money, and time to small domestic-scale systems for water treatment. For this purpose, domestic-scale solar stills are designed, fabricated, and tested in one of the harshest climatic condition areas of Pakistan, Rahim Yar Khan. A comprehensive overview of the regional climatology, including wind speed, solar potential, and ambient temperature is presented for the whole year. The analysis shows that the proposed system can adequately resolve the drinking water problems of deprived areas of Pakistan. The average water productivity of 1.5 L/d/m2 is achieved with a total investment of PKR 3000 (<$20). This real site testing data will serve as a guideline for similar system design in other arid areas globally.


The lipopolysaccharide (O) and flagellar (H) surface antigens of Escherichia coli are targets for serotyping that have traditionally been used to identify pathogenic lineages of E. coli. As serotyping has several limitations, public health reference laboratories are increasingly moving towards whole genome sequencing (WGS) for the rapid characterisation of bacterial isolates. Here we present a method to rapidly and accurately serotype E. coli isolates from raw, short read sequence data, leveraging the known genetic basis for the biosynthesis of O- and H-antigens. Our approach bypasses the need for de novo genome assembly by directly screening WGS reads against a curated database of alleles linked to known E. coli O-groups and H-types (the EcOH database) using the software package SRST2. We validated our approach by comparing in silico results with those obtained via serological phenotyping of 197 enteropathogenic (EPEC) isolates. We also demonstrated the utility of our method to characterise enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) and the uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) epidemic clone ST131, and for in silico serotyping of foodborne outbreak-related isolates in the public GenomeTrakr database.


Background and objective: For practical policy purposes variables describing disability and impairment should be aggregated into broader factors. By using data from a Norwegian mandatory system the objective of this study was to analyse whether the number of factors describing the need for long-term care differs between recipients of home care and nursing home residents and according to the age or gender of long-term care recipients. The hierarchical order of the variables within each factor is determined to assess whether there are important informational gaps in the description of recipients. Methods: Data are from a mandatory system characterizing all recipients of public long term care in Norway. Two groups of public care recipients were included: elderly (67 years and older) individuals receiving home care services (N = 2,493) and patients in nursing homes (N = 1,218). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response analysis (IRT) were used to determine the number of factors and the hierarchical structures of the variables. Results: Two factors were sufficient to characterise need for both nursing home residents and home dwelling elderly. This result is not sensitive to stratification by age and gender. IRT analysis revealed large informational gaps suggesting that the used instrument fails to sufficiently capture important aspects of user needs. Conclusions: Factorization suggests that all elderly long term care users can be adequately described along two dimensions; on reflecting physical disability and one reflecting cognitive impairment. However, both the number of factors and the variable contained in each factor are likely to depend on the instrument used to characterise LTC users. Large informational gaps suggest a need to supplement the national information system used in Norway.


In contrast to the random deployment method for wireless sensor networks, there are various applications that require manual deployment. While the deployment is costly and usually there is no change in the position of the nodes, it is better to evaluate the deployment scheme before doing it. There are different existing metrics to evaluate a deployment including coverage, connectivity, network lifetime, and cost. With emerging real applications of WSNs, it has become a must to evaluate the deployments with more realistic metrics and model. In this paper we have proposed an accumulative path reliability rate metric, regarding the hop-based nature of routing in these networks, to measure the connectivity between two nodes that are not adjacent. We have applied the metric to existing deployment methods and analysed the results.


The Sheep-pig is one of Dick King-Smith's most famous tales. It shot to further fame when the film adaptation, Babe, was released in 1995. 'Why can't I learn to be a Sheep-Pig?' When Babe, the little orphaned piglet, is won at a fair by Farmer Hogget, he is adopted by Fly, the kind-hearted sheep-dog. Babe is determined to learn everything he can from Fly. He knows he can't be a sheep-dog. But maybe, just maybe, he might be a sheep-pig. "An unexpectedly thrilling, funny charmer of a book". (Guardian). "Dick King-Smith is a huge favourite with children". (Observer). Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award. Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the country of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. He wrote a great number of children's books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry's Mad, Noah's Brother, The Queen's Nose, Martin's Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet's Hare (winner of the Children's Book Award in 1995). In 2009 he was made an OBE for services to children's literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.


The electron transport and magnetoresistance (MR) were investigated in high quality crystalline epitaxial Fe(001) and Au(001) films and exchange coupled Au/Fe/Au/Fe/GaAs(001) trilayer structures. Fits to the experimental data were based on the semiclassical Boltzmann equation, which incorporates the electronic properties obtained from first-principles local density functional calculations. The fits require a surprisingly high asymmetry for the spin dependent electron lifetimes in Fe, τ↓/τ↑=10 at room temperature. Despite the large atomic terraces at the Au/vacuum and Fe/GaAs interfaces the scattering at the outer interfaces was found to be diffuse. The origin of MR in Au/Fe/Au/Fe/GaAs(001) structures is due to electron channeling in the Au spacer layer. The measured MR is consistent with the diffusivity parameters s↑=0.55, s↓=0.77 at the metal–metal interfaces.


Lebanon's option in favor of a "weak" state implied that armed forces remained voluntarily limited and under-equipped. Traditionally, external defense was neglected and the state kept neutral in international and regional conflicts while the relation between militarization and state-building was deliberately distended. In the wake of the civil war priority was given to the reconstruction of military and police institutions, erected as a "central pillar" of the state. From 1990 to 2005, this reconstruction remained impeded due to the enduring segmentation of the society and the imposed percolation of Syrian political culture, and because state's security remained under regional threats. Then, 2005 witnessed a reconfiguration of the national scene, the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the reinforcement of security cooperation with the West. The paper explores a main hypothesis: post-2005 Lebanon remained a state with limited sovereignty with a "bifurcated" defense strategy and little military capability. Armed forces were prone to fragmentation along primordial identities, and sometimes privatized. Authoritarianism loomed as the ultimate recourse against state dissolution and societal strife. The paper is organized in two sections: (1) The first section shows how reconstruction of national armed forces remained precluded by lack of national sovereignty, due to Syrian rule and Israeli occupation. The transformation of war rendered obsolete the numerous but poorly equipped and inadequately trained Lebanese army in contrast to Hezbollah's "national resistance" as illustrated during the summer 2006 war waged by Israel and in the struggle against Fatah al-Islam in 2007. (2) The second section argues that the segmentation of society percolated into armed forces resulting in the alienation of some confessional groups from the army and the involvement of some military in trans-boundary political economic networks. Sectarianism in the security institutions mirrored the re-confessionalisation of the society and impeded their capacity to police the domestic scene.


What better way to learn something than from the inside? Novell Linux Desktop 9 Administrator's Handbook brings you inside the system and inside the only Novell authorized administrator's handbook for the new Novell Linux Desktop (NLD). Learn how NLD interacts with other Novell components and how to integrate security throughout the operating system. You'll also cover: Working with graphical interfaces, devices and file systems How to boot, initialize, shutdown and run levels Linux administrationWith the help of Novell Linux Desktop 9 Administrator's Handbook, you will master the administration of Novell Linux Desktop 9 systems.


IMPORTANCE
Knowledge regarding the reliability of pegboard tests when used to measure dexterity in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) is currently limited.

OBJECTIVE
To examine the test-retest and interrater reliability of the 9-Hole Peg Test (9HPT) and Purdue Pegboard Test (PPT) in people with PD.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional observational study. For test-retest reliability, tests were completed on 2 days, 1 wk apart, in the "on" phase and "end-of-dose" period of participants' medication cycle. For interrater reliability, occupational therapists and physical therapists rated prerecorded pegboard test performance of participants with PD.

SETTING
Test-retest reliability was determined in participants' homes or in a university department. Interrater reliability was determined in a university department or a hospital setting.

PARTICIPANTS
Test-retest reliability was determined with volunteers diagnosed with PD (N = 30). Interrater reliability was determined with a convenience sample of occupational and physical therapists (N = 11).

OUTCOMES AND MEASURES
The 9HPT and PPT are commonly used measures of manual dexterity.

RESULTS
PPT subtests showed higher test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients [ICCs] ≥ .90) in both phases of the medication cycle compared with the 9HPT (ICCs = .70-.81). Minimal detectable change scores indicated acceptable measurement error for both tools. Interrater reliability for recorded performance of each measure was very good (ICCs > .99), with no calculable measurement error.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
Although both tools showed adequate test-retest and interrater reliability, results suggest that the PPT may be a more reliable measure of dexterity loss in people with PD.

WHAT THIS ARTICLE ADDS
This study informs the clinical measurement of the loss of manual dexterity in people with PD, a frequent problem reported by people living with this disorder.


Estimating greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other emissions (especially diesel particulates) is an increasingly important basis for regional policy analysis. According to the EPA (2010a), the transportation sector contributed 27.2% of total GHG emissions in 2008, and 50% of these were from truck operations. This research focuses on estimating GHGs and other emissions (e.g., PM) from freight movements on roads in California as well as the concurrent effects of various mitigation scenarios. The study demonstrates that interregional freight flow data, along with FAF data can be important data sources for emission models. The results are useful not only for estimating GHGs and other emissions based on estimated freight flows, but also for evaluating area-specific environmental impacts of policy alternatives. The analysis shows that emissions impacts vary by study area as well as by policy. A policy alternative that has a significant impact in a specific area may have a trivial impact in a broader region. Also, an emissions reduction in one area may be because of emissions increases in another area. Therefore, it is important to simulate possible emissions impacts by applying a spatially disaggregated model to help decision makers weigh alternatives. The study can also be applied for analyzing environmental justice when the emission results are disaggregated into small areas.


Abstract Procurement method over time has proven to have significant influence on the successful delivery of construction projects. Making the right decision in the selection of a procurement option to adopt is therefore crucial if a project is to succeed. This study therefore assessed the cost and time performance of selected public building projects procured using traditional, direct labour and management procurement options in Ondo State, Nigeria. A pro forma was used to gather cost and time data from government procuring entities in the state. In addition, a structured questionnaire was used to obtain information from construction professionals in these procuring entities, in order to ascertain the factors influencing the choice of procurement options adopted. The cost and time data gathered were analyzed using percentages and the paired-samples t-test, while those gathered on the factors influencing the choice of procurement options were analyzed using mean item scores and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results revealed that although there is no significant difference between the initial and final costs of the assessed projects, some measure of cost overrun still exists. In addition, a considerable amount of time overrun was experienced on projects executed using the three different procurement options. The most significant factors influencing the choice of a procurement option are price competition, speed, time certainty and complexity of the project. It is believed that the findings of this study will provide public procuring entities with insight on the cost and time capability of these procurement methods and aid them in selecting the procurement option that will help in delivering public building projects within the budget and on schedule.


It's little wonder that longtime Windows users are migrating in droves to the new Mac. They're fed up with the virus-prone Windows way of life, and they're lured by Apple's well-deserved reputation for producing great all-around computers that are reliable, user-friendly, well designed, and now--with the $500 Mac mini--extremely affordable, too. Whether you're drawn to the Mac's stability, its stunning digital media suite, or the fact that a whole computer can look and feel as slick as your iPod, you can quickly and easily become a Mac convert. But consider yourself warned: a Mac isn't just a Windows machine in a prettier box; it's a whole different animal and a whole new computing experience.If you're contemplating--or have already made--the switch from a Windows PC to a Mac, you need Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition. This incomparable guide delivers what Apple doesn't: everything you need to know to successfully and painlessly move to a Mac.The latest reprint of this book has been updated to reflect the new generation of Mac models that run on Intel chips. There's even a new appendix that guides you through the installation of Windows XP on your Macintosh (using adapter software like Boot Camp or Parallels), so that you have the best of all worlds: a single, beautiful machine that can run 100 percent of the world's desktop software. (Note to people who've already bought the book: This appendix is available as a free PDF download from missingmanuals.com.)Missing Manual series creator and bestselling author David Pogue teams up with 17-year-old whiz kid and founder of GoldfishSoft (www.goldfishsoft.com) Adam Goldstein to cover every aspect of switching to a Mac--things like transferring email, files, and addresses from a PC to a Mac; getting acquainted with the Mac's interface; adapting to Mac versions of familiar programs (including Microsoft Office); setting up a network to share files with PCs and Macs; and using the printers, scanners, and other peripherals you already own.Covering the latest in Mac OS X v.10.4 "Tiger," Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition explains the hundreds of innovative new features to the Mac OS and how you can understand and make the very most of each.Whether you're a novice or a power user, Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition, teaches you how to smoothly and seamlessly replace (or supplement) your Windows machine--in a refreshingly funny and down-to-earth style--with a mighty Mac.


This paper gauges the effect of financial deepening and bank outreach on informality using micro data from the Indian manufacturing sector and exploiting cross-industry variation in the need for external finance. We distinguish between two channels through which access to finance can reduce informality: reducing the entry barrier to the formal sector and increasing productivity of formal firms. We find that bank outreach has a stronger effect on reducing the incidence of informality by cutting barriers to entering the formal economy, especially for smaller firms, and thus diminishing opportunistic informality. In comparison, financial deepening increases the productivity of formal sector firms while it has no significant impact on informal sector firms.


Just before the First World War, German agricultural economists and social-welfare experts constructed a new social category – rural female youth, whose mobility provoked growing alarm. Framing rural flight in terms of gender and generation allowed experts to focus on its demographic, economic, and moral threats, and rural female youth became a target for reform. These debates presaged a wave of popular anxiety over rural female youth that expanded dramatically during the Weimar Republic. However, prewar court testimonies of runaway maids in rural Saxony suggest that some rural girls understood their mobility in terms of 'getting ahead', and resisted efforts to restrict their occupational, social, and spatial horizons.


ABSTRACT: In modern building construction design, floor spans are becoming longer. Hence, steel framed structures have become more competitive when compared with traditional reinforced concrete framed buildings. In order to minimise the structural section of the composite sections, and for economic reasons, steel perforated beams are designed to act compositely with the floor slab. When the concrete slab lies within the steel flanges, as in the Ultra Shallow Floor Beam (USFB), there is an additional benefit when considering fire resistance. The aim of this study is to investigate the contribution of the concrete in composite cellular beams in the case where the concrete slab lies between the beam flanges of a steel section, when resisting vertical shear forces. The concrete between the flanges enhances the load-carrying capacity by providing a load path to transfer the shear force. Four specimens of steel-concrete composite beams with web openings in the steel section were tested in this study. One bare steel section with web openings was also tested as a comparison. This is the first such investigation of the failure mode under shear resistance (Vierendeel action) of the Ultra Shallow Floor Beam. In the test specimens, the web opening diameter is 76% of the beam depth, which is the largest currently available. This represents the worst case in terms of Vierendeel bending forces generated in the vicinity of the web openings. The smaller the hole is, the easier it is for the trapped concrete between the flanges to transfer shear across the opening. The results from the composite beam tests show a significant increase in shear resistance. The percentage of the shear capacity improvement of the particular case is presented herein as well as the failure mode of the composite beams. The shear enhancement demonstrated in this study has been utilised software that is used in design practice.


Variance in partisan choice among South African voters can be predicted on the basis of what is known about the way voters see economic trends, evaluate government performance, perceive political parties, and rate party leaders. However, in this analysis it is demonstrated that factors related to racial divisions shape and filter how voters perceive political performance, and to some extent lead different voters to emphasize different performance criteria. But race does not affect the way voters make decisions. Thus, South Africa's opposition parties are weak not because black voters, the overwhelming majority of the electorate, operate with a decision-making apparatus that emphasizes unity over performance or is hostile to pluralism and opposition. Rather, support for the African National Congress can be accounted for first, by positive ratings of its performance in government and second, by the fact that those black voters dissatisfied with the performance of the African National Congress (ANC) do not see a legitimate alternative among the existing opposition parties.


Volkswagen Group's utilisation of a 'defeat device' to produce inaccurate results for vehicle emissions tests in multiple consumer states, leads it to face potentially crippling fines, possible criminal liability, civil suits, and detriment to its own company caused by the loss of trust. However, this article considers a further issue, namely implications of the violations on taxation legislation and pursuant claims for losses as a result of lost tax revenue or recalculated taxes.With vehicles falling outside of the tax band they were purchased within, there is confusion around the world about how this will affect the tax status of the vehicles and those that own them. Vehicles could be re-banded or reassessed for a variety of different tax purposes, increasing the tax liability of the vehicle historically and prospectively to reflect the actual emissions or fuel consumption based on how the charge is designed.Through a comparative study, this article considers varying tax issues in several different countries across the globe for which the manufacturer may be liable for the life of the vehicle. This will seek to establish the scale of the potential liability for Volkswagen ( VW ) Group that has not yet been explored. Finally it examines how international cooperation could produce more satisfactory settlements for nations and customers.


In Australia, the widespread clearing of native vegetation has resulted in large areas of once-productive agricultural land being affected by rising saline groundwaters. There is considerable interest among farmers and rural landowners throughout Western Australia, in the possibilities that inland saline aquaculture may offer for a potentially productive use of land and water resources that can no longer support traditional agriculture. Black bream (Acanthopagrus butcheri) appear to be an ideal candidate for the developing saline aquaculture industry of inland Western Australia, however their current maximum growth rates are too slow for profitable production. The high productivity of modern breeds of terrestrial livestock species is primarily due to genetic improvement programs utilising selective breeding, and similar gains have also been made where they have been implemented for aquatic species. Before the growth rate of black bream can be genetically improved, however, it is necessary to estimate both the extent of genetic improvement required and the extent of genetic (co)variation in those growth traits which will be subject to, or affected by, selection. The aims of this study were to:

(1) Determine the extent of genetic improvement in growth rate required for black bream to be considered as a profitable aquaculture species.
(2) Estimate the potential for growth rate to be improved through heterosis when different black bream strains are crossbred.
(3) Estimate the additive genetic variation for growth rate, which exists within populations of black bream.
(4) Estimate the genetic (co)variation which exists between growth rate and other production traits.

A partial budget analysis investigated whether enhanced growth rates of black bream would improve profitability and justify a genetic improvement program. It was conducted for two different fish production systems; a commercial operation that incurred more operating expenses due to costs associated with farm initiation (stand-alone farm model) and an existing farm that diversified into aquaculture using the saline water resources of established farm dams (integrated farm model). Sensitivity analyses indicated that a 33% increase in growth rate to at least 200g/annum would allow either production system to return a profit at a farm-gate price of AUS$6/kg whole fish, with fish survival rates of 98% for the stand-alone farm and 65% for the integrated farm model. These results provided a breeding objective, being an improvement in growth rate by at least 33%.

A complete diallel cross of two black bream populations was used to estimate the comparative advantages that might be gained from straight-breeding and crossbreeding. At 90 days of age, the growth traits of standard length, total length and wet weight, varied significantly among all straight-bred and crossbred lines, and among half-sib groups within lines. Differences among half-sib groups explained 6.8% of the total variance in standard length, 8.3% in total length and 7.1% in wet weight, giving estimated heritabilities over all lines of 0.27 plus-minus 0.11 for standard length, 0.33 plus-minus 0.13 for total length and 0.28 plus-minus 0.12 for wet weight. There was no evidence for heterosis in any traits when straight-bred and crossbred lines were compared, and phenotypic (rP = 0.95 - 0.98) and genetic (rG = 0.63 - 0.69) correlations were high among all growth traits.

I used the estimated heritability for wet weight of 0.28 to optimise a factorial mating design from a single population, and to estimate the contribution of additive genetic, nonadditive genetic and maternal effects to variation in growth traits of black bream at 75, 130 and 180 days of age in the hatchery. Maternal genetic and environmental effects were greatest at 75 days of age, accounting for 9.1% of total phenotypic variance in wet weight, 11.4% of variance in standard length and 8.8% of variance in total length. At later ages maternal effects were much reduced, explaining 0.8 - 3.7% of phenotypic variance in growth traits. Additive genetic effects were greatest at 130 days of age, when they accounted for 17.4% of total phenotypic variance in wet weight, 21.4% of variance in standard length and 18.7% of variance in total length. Additive genetic effects were negligible (<1%) at 75 days of age and 4.8 - 5.5% of total phenotypic variance in growth traits at 180 days of age. Non-additive genetic effects (which also included common environmental effects due to families being raised in the same tank) explained 5.8 - 7.3% of total phenotypic variance in growth traits at 75 days of age, but were much smaller at later ages. Variable stocking densities among tanks up to 75 days significantly affected all growth trait measurements below 180 days of age.

One of the most important of these traits is feed conversion efficiency. Feed conversion efficiency (FCE) is the effectiveness with which feed is converted to saleable fish product. Feed costs are a major input to aquaculture production systems and genetic changes in FCE may therefore have an important influence on profitability. FCE is usually expressed by a composite measure that combines feed intake and growth rate. The two most common measures are feed conversion ratio (feed intake/weight gain over a specified time interval) and its inverse, feed efficiency. Feed conversion ratio and feed efficiency are measures of gross FCE, because they do not distinguish between the separate energy requirements of growth and maintenance. There is abundant evidence of substantial genetic variation in FCE and its component traits in terrestrial livestock species and, although data are few, the same is likely for cultured fish species. The major problems with selecting from this variation to genetically improve FCE in fish species are:

* It appears impractical to measure feed intake on individual fish, so that family mean data must be used.
* We do not know the optimal time period over which to test fish for FCE.
* We do not know the genetic correlations between FCE under apparent satiation or restricted intake conditions, or between FCE at different times in the production cycle.

I measured the relationships between feed intake to apparent satiety and weight gain in replicate half-sib families of black bream at four times over a 56-day test period. After 42 days, I found significant additive genetic variance in both weight gain and feed intake, and a stabilisation in family group variation in both traits. This indicates that 42 days is the minimum test period over which to measure genetic variation for FCE in black bream. There were high, positive phenotypic (and probably genetic) correlations between weight gain and feed intake after 42 days. There was no detectable genetic variation for either feed efficiency (weight gain/feed intake), or residual feed intake, which is the difference between the actual feed intake of an individual and the intake predicted from its body weight and growth rate. I argue that selection for improved FCE might be better achieved not by using a composite measure, but by using a weighted selection index that accounts for the genetic covariance among weight gain, feed intake and other correlated traits.


The growing developments on networked devices, with different communication platforms and capabilities, made the cyber-physical systems an integrating part of most critical industrial infrastructures. Given their increasing integration with corporate networks, in which the industry 4.0 is the most recent driving force, new uncertainties, not only from the tangible physical world, but also from a cyber space perspective, are brought into play. In order to improve the overall resilience of a cyber-physical system, this work proposes a framework based on a distributed middleware that integrates a multiagent topology, where each agent is responsible for coordinating and executing specific tasks. In this framework, both physical and cyber vulnerabilities alike are considered, and the achievement of a correct state awareness and minimum levels of acceptable operation, in response to physical or malicious disturbances, are guaranteed. Experimental results collected with an IPv6-based simulator comprising several distributed computational devices and heterogeneous communication networks show the relevance and inherent benefits of this approach.


Background and Aim: The postoperative shivering is one of the common complications of anesthesia, which can cause increased systemic blood pressure, oxygen consumption, intra optical pressure and heart rate in patients. It is necessary to choose an effective intravenous and the inhaled drugs to reduce postoperative shivering, therefore the aim of this study was to compare Isoflurane and Propofol on shivering among patients undergoing Vitrectomy Surgery. Materials and Methods: In a double-blind clinical trial, 112 patients aged 16 to 75 (ASA class I-III) who underwent the Vitrectomy surgery were randomly classified into two groups of 56 cases. The occurrence of postoperative shivering in recovery were registered in both groups. Findings were analyzed employing the ttest and Chi-square. Statistical significance was accepted for P values of <0.05. Results: There was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of age, sex, Weigh، duration of surgery and duration of anesthesia. The incidence of shivering in recipients of Isoflurane and in recipients of propofol was 12.5% and 32.1% respectively. Conclusion: Using Isoflurane is better than Propofol to reduce the postoperative shivering in patients undergoing the vitrectomy surgery.


A simple stylised model, that incorporates transaction costs, is developed. The Law of One Price (LOP) is assumed to hold with regard to a reference market that is not taken into account in the empirical testing of the Law. It is shown that under these assumptions the empirical tests of the LOP will fail.


OBJECTIVE
Pressure ulcers (PU) are considered harmful conditions that are reasonably prevented if accepted standards of care are followed. They became subject to the payment adjustment for hospitalacquired conditions (HACs) beginning October 1, 2008. We examined several aspects of the accuracy of coding for pressure ulcers under the Medicare Hospital-Acquired Condition Present on Admission (HAC-POA) Program. We used the "4010" claim format as a basis of reference to show some of the issues of the old format, such as the underreporting of pressure ulcer stages on pressure ulcer claims and how the underreporting varied by hospital characteristics. We then used the rate of Stage III and IV pressure ulcer HACs reported in the Hospital Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases data to look at the sensitivity of PU HAC-POA coding to the number of diagnosis fields.

METHODS
We examined Medicare claims data for FYs 2009 and 2010 to examine the degree that the presence of stage codes were underreported on pressure ulcer claims. We selected all claims with a secondary diagnosis code of pressure ulcer site (ICD-9 diagnosis codes 707.00-707.09) that were not reported as POA (POA of "N" or "U"). We then created a binary indicator for the presence of any pressure ulcer stage diagnosis code. We examine the percentage of claims with a diagnosis of a pressure ulcer site code with no accompanying pressure ulcer stage code.

RESULTS
Our results point to underreporting of PU stages under the "4010" format and that the reporting of stage codes varied across hospital type and location. Further, our results indicate that under the "5010" format, a higher number of pressure ulcer HACs can be expected to be reported and we should expect to encounter a larger percentage of pressure ulcers incorrectly coded as POA under the new format.

CONCLUSIONS
The combination of the capture of 25 diagnosis codes under the new "5010" format and the change from ICD-9 to ICD-10 will likely alleviate the observed underreporting of pressure ulcer HACs. However, as long as coding guidelines direct that Stage III and IV pressure ulcers be coded as POA, if a lower stage pressure ulcer was POA and progressed to a higher stage pressure ulcer during the admission, the acquisition of Stage III and IV pressure ulcers in the hospital will be underreported.


Calliostoma ligatum shells inhabited by hermit crabs were weaker than shells inhabited by snails collected at the same locality. When shells of C. ligatum were loaded repetitively to 80% of their predicted failure load, hermit crab-inhabited shells showed an immediate drop in shell strength followed by a progressive further loss of shell strength over the next 18 days. Snailinhabited C. ligatum shells exhibited a decrease in strength after 9 days, but returned to initial values within 18 days of loading. Hermit crabs thus bear shells significantly weaker than they were when borne by the gastropods that produced them. Reported similarities in vulnerability of gastropods and hermit crabs to shell-crushing predators may be artifacts of the metric (critical size) used to compare vulnerabilities. Hermit crabs probably were a significant factor in the diversification of durophagous predators in the Mesozoic, supplying a prey base identical in size and shape to gastropods but with significantly lower resistance to crushing. The unpredictability of strength in hermit-crab inhabited shells may maintain the apparently inefficient indiscriminate attacks common among durophagous predators.


Abstract Navigational freedoms have increasingly come under restrictions because of ecological, economic and security concerns of coastal states. Fishing vessels, oil tankers, ships carrying ultra-hazardous nuclear cargoes and even military vessels have to conform to stringent international, regional and national regulations. Often there is a conflict of interest as maritime activities of one state can interfere with the efforts of others to utilise the sea. The Law of the Sea Convention was adopted to provide a balance among these competing interests. But new state practices have created challenges for the Convention that have to be better understood and dealt with. The balance between navigation and other national interests has continuously changed, and navigational freedoms appear to be disappearing during this evolutionary process.


Part of the Comparative Survey. The French Supreme Administrative Court recently decided in the Zimmer case that a French subsidiary of a foreign parent company, which operated in France under French law as a commissionaire, did not constitute a taxable French permanent establishment in France of the foreign company. The case has been explained in 'Zimmer Case: The Issue of the Deemed Existence of a Permanent Establishment Based on Status as a Commissionaire' by Mr Pierre-Jean Douvier and Ms Xenia Lordkipanidze (17 International Transfer Pricing Journal 4, 2010). Country report about this issue on Sweden.


In order to operate effectively, the legal regulation of the energy sector should be seen as a unified system. After the adoption of liberal laws of electricity power, natural gas and heat the regulatory authority of energy markets in Lithuania need the additional power and competence in order to regulate competitively market energy. The regulation of the energy sector remains ineffective if the economic regulator is not granted additional power required for the proper regulation of new, non-state energy market participants (particularly private and foreign capital). Therefore, only an independent and highly professional institution would be capable of supervising the Lithuanian energy sector in order to prevent market dysfunctions such as speculation, interruptions of supply, anti-competition agreements and so on. The present Lithuanian economic regulator of the energy sector—the National Control Commission for Prices and Energy—is not a typical public administration body, because its main function is to prevent market distortions, and its decisions have to be based solely on economic criteria. The standards of performance of the National Price and Energy Control Commission differ from the other bodies of public administration, which have to consider the political reasons as well. This particularity of performance requires safeguarding the high level of independence of the regulator from political intervention. The development of an economic and legal environment of the energy sector in two decades of independence has caused institutional and functional changes in the National Control Commission for Prices and Energy. The main stages of the development of the National Control Commission for Prices and Energy are the following: (1) period of establishment; (2) acquiring the functions of price supervision and regulation; (3) further expansion of competence from price regulation to economic regulation; (4) obtaining new function of supervision of the market; (5) as well as the supervision and regulation of private energy companies.


Recent years have seen a rapid increase in business robberies in the Western Cape. Most of these robberies affect informal traders in low-income township neighbourhoods. Foreign nationals in these areas appear to be especially vulnerable to such crime. This article focuses on the robbery experiences of Somali traders in Western Cape townships. It highlights the difficulties they face in accessing formal and informal justice in the aftermath of crime, and how criminals' relative impunity leaves Somali shops more vulnerable to attack. It concludes that cross-sectoral efforts are required to tackle the broad social and institutional challenges in addressing business robberies in the province.


Many horticultural crops (food and ornamental) are produced year-round in greenhouses at high latitudes, where the limited availability of natural sunlight restricts plant production during large parts of the year. To enable year-round plant production supplemental light is necessary to enhance photosynthesis, the primary process that drives growth and production. It is therefore not surprising that during the last two decades most of the research effort related to light in greenhouse horticulture has been directed towards optimizing the supplemental light use efficiency for photosynthesis, with emphasis on light intensity, duration and since recently also on light quality. For a long time, high pressure sodium (HPS) lamps were the preferred lamps for supplemental lighting. Nowadays, Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are gaining importance, mostly because of their potentially higher energy efficiency. Another important, less-well known attribute of LEDs is the much better possibility to control light quality. Besides the effect on photosynthesis, light quality also influences plant morphological and developmental processes, mostly mediated by a set of blue, red and far-red photoreceptors (i.e., cryptochromes, phototropins and phytochromes). Several of these processes, such as for instance internode and petiole elongation growth and leaf expansion have a direct impact on productivity via plant photosynthesis as mediated by light interception. Light quality can also induce leaf deformations and epinasty, which can negatively influence biomass production via reduced light interception. In ornamental crops, such as chrysanthemum, leaf deformations can have severe negative impact on the final ornamental value. Other important effects of light quality involve the development of stomatal density and the control of stomatal aperture, which both attribute to stomatal conductance and therefore potentially influence productivity, while also the leaf hydraulic resistance is influenced by light quality. This paper will overview some plant morphological and developmental processes that are influenced by light quality and are important for plant production in protected environments.