Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet, by Nili Scharf Gold. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2008. 445 pp. $35.00. Nili Sharf Gold's book is important because it contains a report on the life of the poet and his writing until 1948. The report is supported by the author's visits to Wurzburg Germany, Amichai's childhood town, and is based on the author's interviews with Amichai's friends and contemporaries, on letters that Amichai wrote during the months between September 1947 and April 1948 to Ruth Z., a lover who moved to the U.S. and there married someone else, and on documents from Amichai's literary estate in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. At the same time, this is a wasted book because of its excited, exaggerated, speculative, and baseless conclusions and because of the invalid use of them (see, for example, what Robert Alter has written in the December 22, 2008 issue of the New Republic). It seems that the author forgot the lesson Amichai teaches in his poem "And we shall not get excited." The description of Amichai's childhood in Wurzburg and his life in Eretz Israel, a land he was brought to by his parents when he was twelve years old, and his love affair with a woman who moved to the U.S. before the eruption of 1948 Independence War are a real contribution to a full biography of the poet, a biography that has not yet been written. The survey of the contents of Amichai's letters to the woman and of documents from the estate is important and new. Nili Gold does not provide direct contact with the documents themselves; the information about the documents is provided indirectly by the interpretation of texts which are not present in the book (probably their publication rights were not granted). The author's central factual claims are, as stated, interesting and draw attention to aspects of Amichai's life and poetry that have not been seriously discussed until now. Some of them are biographical: details about his childhood and his family in Wurzburg, the circumstances of the family's immigration to Eretz Israel, the story about "litde Ruth," a classmate, his enlistment in the British Army, and the story of his love for Ruth Z. Some of them relate to his poetry: his affinity to the his childhood language, German, continued to accompany him also in adulthood, among other things as a background to his Hebrew writing (according to Gold the archive includes German versions of drafts of poems and even of complete poems that were later translated into Hebrew), information on earlier and different versions of known poems, and a fledgling work that can explain his early poetry and representation of his early poetic thought (despite its problematic presentation in the book). But Nili Gold is not satisfied with these findings. She argues for a complete change in the interpretation of Amichai poetry from now on. For this claim there is no real foundation. The attempt to interpret Amichai's poems on the basis of "German" or biographical hidden strata - to which many tiresome pages are dedicated - is neither convincing nor interesting. The greatness of Amichai as a Hebrew poet is not predicated on a German unconscious and translation work. Amichai was not by any interpretation "a German poet in Hebrew mask," although it is possible to identify remnants of German vocabulary and syntax in his language games (the same as remnants of Yiddish and Russian in the Hebrew of earlier poets). The biographical interpretation of poems in which there appear words such as train) translator) or snow' is imperfect, does not payoff poetically, and lacks the power to compete with existential interpretations of the same poems. The identification of components of the story of his relations with Ruth Z. in his later poems does not make her the heroine of these poems and cannot subordinate the variety of details in a poem to that story." We loved here" interweaves perhaps the British mandate curfew with a trip in the Jordan valley of the period, but its ending hints significandy at the days after the Independence War, while he constructs a compound picture of a couple that opens with falling in love and terminates in the routines of life together, that cannot relate to Ruth Z. …


In many envisioned mobile ad hoc networks, nodes are expected to periodically beacon to advertise their presence. In this way, they can receive messages addressed to them or participate in routing operations. Yet, these beacons leak information about the nodes and thus hamper their privacy. A classic remedy consists of each node making use of (certified) pseudonyms and changing its pseudonym in specific locations called mix zones. Of course, privacy is then higher if the pseudonyms are short-lived (i.e., nodes have a short distance-to-confusion), but pseudonyms can be costly, as they are usually obtained from an external authority. In this paper, we provide a detailed analytical evaluation of the age of pseudonyms based on differential equations. We corroborate this model by a set of simulations. This paper thus provides a detailed quantitative framework for selecting the parameters of a pseudonym-based privacy system in peer-to-peer wireless networks.


"Pure food" became the rallying cry among a divergent group of campaigners who lobbied Congress for a law regulating foods and drugs. James Harvey Young reveals the complex and pluralistic nature not only of that crusade but also of the broader Progressive movement of which it was a significant strand. In the vivid style familiar to readers of his earlier works, The Toadstool Millionaires and The Medical Messiahs, Young sets the pure food movement in the context of changing technology and medical theory and describes pioneering laws to control imported drugs and domestic oleomargarine. He explains controversy within the pure food coalition, showing how farming and business groups sought competitive commercial advantage, while consumer advocates wished to promote commercial integrity and advance public health. The author focuses on how the public became increasingly fearful of hazards in adulterated foods and narcotic nostrums and how Congress finally achieved the compromises necessary to pass the Food and Drugs Act and the meat inspection law of 1906.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Much of the literature on risk regulation concerns "first-order" risks — e.g., those addressed by environmental law or workplace safety rules. But scholars recently have suggested that risk regulation can provide a helpful framework for thinking about "second-order," or political, risks arising from allocations of power and institutional design. Although a few commentators have utilized this perspective to suggest connections between risk regulation and particular areas of constitutional law, in this essay, we take a broader view. Building on the existing literature, we argue that the selection of constitutional decision rules is a judicial effort to regulate the political risk that government officials will violate constitutional principles. After making the case that judicial doctrinal formation is helpfully viewed as a species of political risk regulation, we discuss some implications of this risk regulation model and pose some questions for future research. We conclude that the risk regulation model reinforces the notion that the formation of doctrine is a temporally extended process, rather than a one-time event, and it provides a metric by which that doctrine can be evaluated. Additionally, the risk regulation model helps explain some of the more commonly critiqued features of constitutional law. Finally, the risk regulation model raises important questions that merit further investigation: (1) Should we trust judicial perceptions of and responses to political risk? (2) What influences risk assessment among judges, and are those influences (and resulting assessments) normatively defensible? (3) What connection, if any, exists between judicial risk assessment and the myriad doctrinal formulae employed by the Supreme Court?


A new 25 minute radiophonic ethnodrama by Paul Antick and Jo Langton, Smith in Belfast is the account of one man's journey through a series of situations and conversations, the contents of which refer in sometimes roundabout ways to the linguistic, legal, architectural, social and sartorial aftermath(s) of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland.  Composed of a series of relatively unsettling, often absurdly oblique vignettes - staged in pubs, 'chippers', parks and on street corners - Smith in Belfast culminates in the troubling impersonation - by its English protagonist Smith - of an ex-paramilitary tour guide careering though memories of old photographs and film footage of 'the Troubles' in front of a concerned group of visitors somewhere on the Falls Road. As Brexit negotiations stumble on, Smith in Belfast – an expurgated version of which originally aired on Resonance FM in 2017 - is a strange and timely reminder that although the war in Northern Ireland may be over, many of the contradictions that fuelled the conflict there, contradictions that ostensibly turned on the relationship between issues of national sovereignty and social identity, have never been entirely resolved. Smith in Belfast is a radiophonic alert to the possibility that the pain Brexit could conceivably inflict on the province (and beyond) might, in the face of political solipsism and creeping English nationalism, potentially involve more than a hike in the price of wine. Note that although this production explicitly references some 'real life' historical figures and events, and also (apparently) draws on conversations and situations its author enjoyed on the 'Troubles tours' of Belfast he attended during the summer of 2014, it, like all of the characters in it, is almost emphatically fictional.


While the District lost jobs during the 1970-1971 and 1974-1975 recessions, most manufacturing jobs were subse quently regained. But the District lost far more jobs—over 900,000—from 1979 to 1983 and only a small fraction have since been recovered. That severe recessionary period set the stage for ex tensive and ongoing industrial restruc turing. It also annihilated many manufacturing jobs. Because manufac turing jobs generally are higher paid than other jobs, their disappearance has heavily contributed to the Midwest's per capita income drop.


Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals' disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance, two of the three schools in this study circumvented these rules to recruit and retain a population that would meet local accountability targets. This article brings together sensemaking and social network theories to offer a theoretical account of schools' management of choice in an era of accountability. In doing so, the author demonstrates that principals' sensemaking about the accountability and choice systems occurred within the interorganizational networks in which they were embedded and was strongly conditioned by their own professional biographies and worldviews. Principals' networks offered access to resources that could be activated to make sense of the accountability and choice systems. How principals perceived accountability and choice policies influenced whether they activated their social networks for assistance in strategically managing the choice process, as well as how they made sense of advice available to them through these networks. Once activated, principals' networks provided uneven access to instrumental and expressive resources. Taken together, these results suggest that schools respond to accountability and choice plans in varied ways that are not simply a function of their short-term incentives.


Stretchable hydrogel microfibers as a novel type of ionic conductors are promising in gaining skin‐like sensing applications in more diverse scenarios. However, it remains a great challenge to fabricate coating‐free but water‐retaining conductive hydrogel microfibers with a good balance of spinnability and mechanical strength. Here the old yet significant redox chemistry of Fe‐citrate complex is employed to solve this issue in the continuous draw‐spinning process of poly(acrylamide‐co‐sodium acrylate) hydrogel microfibers and microfiber nets from a water/glycerol solution. The resultant microfibers are ionically conductive, highly stretchable, and uniform with tunable diameters. Furthermore, the presence of redox‐reversible Fe‐citrate complex and glycerol endows the fibers with good anti‐freezing, water‐retaining, and environmentally intelligent properties. Humidity and UV light can finely mediate the stiffness of hydrogel microfibers; conversely, the ionic conductance of microfibers is also responsive to light, humidity, and strain, which enables the highly sensitive perception of environmental changes. The present draw‐spinning strategy provides more possibilities for coating‐free conductive hydrogel microfibers with a variety of responsive and sensing applications.


Using a first principles approach, we investigated the catalytic activity of a noble metal-free n-doped (C → B, O → N) hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) monolayer for CO oxidation. The CO adsorption ability and hence the preferred Eiley–Rideal (ER) and Langmuir–Hinshelwood (LH) mechanism for CO oxidation is dopant-dependent: CO is chemisorbed on O-doped h-BN (OBN) while it physically interacts with the C-doped h-BN (CBN) surface. Even though both C and O doping create similar donor states below the Fermi level (Ef), O doping results in a larger bond length of O–B1 (one of the nearest B atom), out-of-plane displacement of the B1 atom, and less positive charge on the B1 atom, synergistically contributing to higher atomic activity. The presence of a pre-adsorbed O2 molecule on both types of surfaces eliminates any chances of CO poisoning of the surface, and CO oxidation prefers to proceed via the ER mechanism with a small activation barrier. The high values of Sabatier activities suggest that the doped h-BN surface is superior to Au55and Pt55nanoclusters. In case of CO oxidation by means of the LH mechanism, a stable O2⋯CO intermediate is produced, which requires a high barrier energy to break the O–O bond. However, the presence of a H2O molecule increases the activity of the catalyst and helps in catalytic CO de-poisoning.


Abstract. Airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) measurements carried out in the southern Sierra Nevada in 2010 in the snow-free and peak-snow-accumulation periods were analyzed for topographic and vegetation effects on snow accumulation. Point-cloud data were processed from four primarily mixed-conifer forest sites covering the main snow-accumulation zone, with a total surveyed area of over 106 km2. The percentage of pixels with at least one snow-depth measurement was observed to increase from 65–90 to 99 % as the sampling resolution of the lidar point cloud was increased from 1 to 5 m. However, a coarser resolution risks undersampling the under-canopy snow relative to snow in open areas and was estimated to result in at least a 10 cm overestimate of snow depth over the main snow-accumulation region between 2000 and 3000 m, where 28 % of the area had no measurements. Analysis of the 1 m gridded data showed consistent patterns across the four sites, dominated by orographic effects on precipitation. Elevation explained 43 % of snow-depth variability, with slope, aspect and canopy penetration fraction explaining another 14 % over the elevation range of 1500–3300 m. The relative importance of the four variables varied with elevation and canopy cover, but all were statistically significant over the area studied. The difference between mean snow depth in open versus under-canopy areas increased with elevation in the rain–snow transition zone (1500–1800 m) and was about 35 p 10 cm above 1800 m. Lidar has the potential to transform estimation of snow depth across mountain basins, and including local canopy effects is both feasible and important for accurate assessments.


Background: The presence of a pathologic fracture in an osteosarcoma has been considered a poor prognostic factor and an indication for immediate amputation. The purpose of the present study was to determine, in the current era of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, whether a pathologic fracture in an osteosarcoma has prognostic importance and whether limb salvage can be safely performed in such patients without compromising clinical outcome. Methods: In a cooperative effort of the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society, members from eight institutions provided retrospective data on fifty-two patients with osteosarcoma who had a pathologic fracture and on fifty-five patients with osteosarcoma who had not had a pathologic fracture and had been followed for at least two years or until disease recurrence, metastasis, or death. The two groups were matched for patient age and tumor location. Outcomes examined were survival and local recurrence. A subgroup analysis was performed to assess differences in outcome within the group with the pathologic fracture. Results: The five-year estimated survival rates were 55% for the group with a pathologic fracture and 77% for the group without a fracture (p = 0.02). The rate of survival without a local recurrence at five years was 75% for the group with a fracture and 96% for the group without a fracture (p = 0.007). In the group with a fracture, seven (23%) of the thirty patients managed with limb salvage and four (18%) of the twenty-two managed with an amputation had a local recurrence (p = 0.75). Eleven (37%) of the thirty patients with a fracture who were managed with limb salvage and ten (45%) of the twenty-two patients with a fracture who were managed with an amputation died of the disease (p = 0.50). Five patients underwent open reduction and internal fixation followed by limb-salvage surgery. Two of them had a local recurrence and died at an average of eight months postoperatively. The remaining three patients were alive at an average of 6.1 years postoperatively. Local disease control and the survival of these patients were not significantly different from those for the thirty-three patients who were treated with nonoperative immobilization of the fracture followed by limb-salvage surgery. Conclusions: Patients with osteosarcoma who present with a pathologic fracture or sustain one during preoperative chemotherapy have an increased risk of local recurrence and a decreased rate of survival compared with patients who have not sustained a pathologic fracture. The performance of a limb-salvage procedure in carefully selected patients with a pathologic fracture does not significantly increase the risk of local recurrence or death. Factors predictive of improved outcome, such as the response to chemotherapy and union of the fracture, should be taken into account when limb salvage is being considered.


Inhibition of platelet activation is a cornerstone of adjunctive medical treatment during and after percutaneous coronary interventions with stent implantation (PCI-S) in order to prevent acute and long term thrombotic complications. Dual antiplatelet therapy (DAT) with aspirin and clopidogrel has been proven to be very effective at preventing adverse events such as acute and subacute stent thrombosis, myocardial infarction, and death after coronary stenting, for both bare metal stents (BMS) and drug eluting stents (DES). Oral anticoagulation (OAC) is the recommended treatment for patients at risk of thromboembolic events due to atrial fibrillation, mechanical heart valves, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and left ventricular thrombi. The number of patients who have an indication for both DAT and OAC is increasing, since more patients who are already on OAC are scheduled for percutaneous coronary interventions and some patients who are on DAT will develop a medical condition which requires OAC. Consequently, these patients need triple antithrombotic therapy, consisting of aspirin, clopidogrel and OAC. There is a concern, however, that this "triple therapy" leads to increased bleeding events and physicians are cautious in prescribing the combination of DAT and OAC.

In the first part of this article, we review the studies and present the evidence that have led to the current recommendations for either DAT or OAC in the specific medical conditions. We will evaluate when OAC and DAT might be interchangeable, and whether one or the other of these regimens might be temporarily discontinued. We will focus on patients requiring OAC with a recent stent implantation or who are scheduled for a PCI-S. The second part of this review focuses on the currently available data on triple therapy and will provide guidance on how to manage these patients and how long the duration of treatment should be.

Dual antiplatelet therapy with …


Convergence proposes the enhancement of the Internet with a novel, content-centric, publishsubscribe service model based on the versatile digital item (VDI): a common container for all kinds of digital content, including digital representations of real-world resources. VDIs will serve the needs of the future Internet, providing a homogeneous method for handling structured information, incorporating security and privacy mechanisms. CONVERGENCE subsumes the following areas of research: definition of the VDI as a new fundamental unit of distribution and transaction;content-centric networking functionality to complement or replace IP-address-based routing;security and privacy protection mechanisms;open-source middleware, including a community dictionary service to enable rich semantic searches;applications, tested under real-life conditions. This book shows how CONVERGENCE allows publishing, searching and subscribing to any content. Creators can publish their content by wrapping it and its descriptions into a VDI, setting rights for other users to access this content, monitor its use, and communicate with people using it; they may even update or revoke content previously published. Access to content is more efficient, as search engines exploit VDI metadata for indexing, and the network uses the content name to ensure users always access the copy closest to them. Every node in the network is a content cache; handover is easy; multicast is natural; peer-to-peer is built-in; time/space-decoupling is possible. Application developers can exploit CONVERGENCEs middleware and network without having to resort to proprietary/ad hoc solutions for common/supporting functionality. Operators can use the network more efficiently, better controlling information transfer and related revenues flows. Network design, operation and management are simplified by integrating diverse functions and avoiding patches and stopgap solutions. Whether as a text for graduate students working on the future of the Internet, or a resource for practitioners providing e-commerce or multimedia services, or scientists defining new technologies, CONVERGENCE will make a valuable contribution to the future shape of the Internet.


We demonstrate three-dimensional quenched narrow-line laser cooling and trapping of 40Ca. With 5 ms of cooling time we can transfer 28% of the atoms from a magneto-optic trap based on the strong 423-nm cooling line to a trap based on the narrow 657-nm clock transition (which is quenched by an intercombination line at 552 nm), thereby reducing the atoms' temperature from 2 mK to 10 μK. This reduction in temperature should help to reduce the overall systematic frequency uncertainty for our Ca optical frequency standard to <1 Hz. Additional pulsed, quenched, narrow-line third-stage cooling in one dimension yields subrecoil temperatures as low as 300 nK and makes possible the observation of high-contrast two-pulse Ramsey spectroscopic line shapes.


Scholarly debate in screen translation (ST) regarding quality issues often hinges on the complexity of specifying quality standards for such a heterogeneous market in terms of typology of translation (i.e. dubbing, subtitling, voice-over etc.) and the wide range of credence attributes which might contribute to the creation of quality standards for these products. Moreover, the situation is further complicated by the issue of "Quality according to whom?": operators; service providers; end users, or all three? However complicated these problems may seem, this paper attempts to look for answers. Total Quality Management (TQM) and attribute-based approaches already widely used to measure customer satisfaction in media studies will be put forward as tentative instruments to determine quality in ST.


Emergencies, by definition, are unpredictable and rapid response is key requirement in emergency management. Globally, a significant number of deaths occur each year, caused by excessive delays in rescue activities. Vehicles embedded with sophisticated technologies, along with roads equipped with advanced infrastructure, can play a vital role in the timely identification and notification of roadside incidents. However, such infrastructure and technologically-rich vehicles are rarely available in less developed countries. Hence, in such countries, low-cost solutions are required to address the issue. Systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) have begun to be used to detect and report roadside incidents. The majority of the systems designed forth is purpose involve the use of the cloud to compute, manage, and store information. However, the centralization and remoteness of cloud resources can result in an increased delay that raises serious concerns about its feasibility in emergency situations; in life-threatening situations, all delays should be minimized where feasible. To address the problem of latency, fog computing has emerged as a middleware paradigm that brings the cloud-like resources closer to end devices. In light of this, the research proposed here leverages the advantages of sophisticated features of smartphones and fog computing to propose and develop low-cost and delay-aware accident detection and response systems, which we term Emergency Response and Disaster Management System (ERDMS). An Android application is developed that utilizes smartphone sensors for the detection of incidents. When an accident is detected, a plan of action is devised. Initially a nearby hospital is located using the Global Positioning System (GPS). The emergency department of the hospital is notified about the accident that directs an ambulance to the accident site. In addition, the family contacts of the victim are also informed about the accident. All the required computation is performed on the nearby available fog nodes. Moreover, the proposed scheme is simulated using iFog sim to evaluate and compare the performance using fog nodes and cloud data centres.


A comprehensive taxonomic study based on comparative morphology of Scorzonera, here maintained in its wide sense, is presented for the territory of Turkey. This study has produced several changes of classification at sectional and species ranks. An updated list of Scorzonera taxa occurring in Turkey, along with their infrageneric classification, is provided. A new section, S. sect. Anatolia Makbul & Coskunc., is described. Chromosome numbers, threat categories, and distribution maps are given for 6 endemic taxa (S. boissieri, S. karabelensis, S. longiana, S. sandrasica, S. ulrichii, and S. zorkunensis) placed in or transferred to the newly described section. A revised identification key to all Scorzonera species in Turkey is presented.


Raw city sewage irrigation seems to affect population densities of keratinophilic fungal communities, with the highest population densities being found in the heavily polluted field soils, while the lowest population densities occur in non-polluted field soils. However, basic similarities in the biodiversity of keratinophilic fungal communities exist in both non-polluted and polluted field soils and raw city sewage. Comparable numbers of fungal species exist in these habitats, and the species most commonly found include Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus candidus, Geotrichum candidum, and Paecilomyces lilacinus. Field soils receiving either raw city sewage or normal irrigation water were shown to be rich in pathogenic and potentially pathogenic keratinophilic fungi, including dermatophytes, with raw city sewage yielding the highest percentage, followed by moderately polluted fields, non-polluted fields, and heavily polluted fields. Dermatophytes and their related fungi recovered from these habitats include Microsporum gypseum, Trichophyton ajelloi, Arthroderma cuniculi, A. curreyi, Chrysosporium keratinophilum, C. tropicum and C. pannorum. The ability of 55 cycloheximide-resistant fungal species (117 isolates) to degrade human hair in vitro was investigated. The species were recovered from polluted (raw city wastewater-irrigation) and non-polluted (normal irrigation) field soils and raw city wastewater. The intensity of keratinolytic activity (IKA) was estimated on a scale of 0-100, based on morphological expression of keratinolysis. A high percentage of the species tested (48/55, 87%) demonstrated a varying degree of keratinolytic activity. Five species (Chrysosporium keratinophilum, Microsporum gypseum, Penicillium frequentans, Rhizopus stolonifer, and Trichophyton ajelloi) showed strong IKA, and were capable of producing invasive structures related to radial penetration and surface erosion contemporaneously. On the other hand, seven of all the tested species, including Acremonium species, Aspergillus carneus, Nectria inventa, Penicillium citrinum, Paecilomyces variotii, Plectosphaerella cucumerina, and Verticillium nubilum, showed no keratinolytic activity. The keratinolytic activity of the following species is recorded in this study for the first time: Acremonium strictum, Chrysosporium pannorum, Cladosporium herbarum, Fusarium tricinctum, Gliocladium viride, Humicola fuscoatra var. fuscoatra, Nectria ventricosa, Penicillium griseofulvum, P. islandicum, Verticillium catenulatum, and V. psalliotae. Isolates of the same species can vary in their IKAs. Thus, such a characteristic does not seem to be constant or speciesspecific.


Distributed dataflow systems (DDS) are widely employed in graph processing and machine learning (ML), where many of these algorithms are iterative in nature. Typically, DDS achieve fault-tolerance using checkpointing mechanisms or they exploit algorithmic properties to enable fault-tolerance without the need for checkpoints. Recently, for graph processing, we proposed utilizing
 unblocking checkpointing
 , to parallelize the execution pipeline and checkpoint writing, as well as
 confined recovery
 , to enable fast recovery upon partial node failures. Furthermore, for ML algorithms implemented using broadcast variables, we proposed utilizing
 replica recovery
 , to leverage broadcast variable replicas and facilitate failure recovery checkpointing-free. In this demonstration, we showcase these fault-tolerance techniques using Apache Flink. Attendees will be able to: (i) run representative iterative algorithms including PageRank, Connected Components, and K-Means, (ii) explore the internal behavior of DDS under the influence of unblocking checkpointing, and (iii) trigger failures, to observe the effects of confined recovery and replica recovery.


This work proposes the use of a low-cost software-based puff controlled hands-free spinning keyboard for mobile phones as an alternative interaction technology for people with motor disabilities. It attempts to explore the processing of the audio from the microphone in mobile phones to select characters from a spinning keyboard. A proof of concept of this work is demonstrated by the implementation and experimentation of a mobile application prototype that enables users to perform text input through "puffing" interaction.


Access to private funds is limited to an elite class of investors -- wealthy individuals and large institutions. Individuals of more modest means -- "retail investors" -- face more limited investment choices; generally they can only invest in mutual funds. In spite of this inequitable division, the current regulatory climate will lead to an even further expansion of the private fund industry. This article argues that this loosening regulatory climate could lead to a talent drain amongst registered funds, could narrow the investment choices available to retail investors, and could deepen the already troubling income gap between wealthy and average earners. With respect to a possible talent drain, as it becomes easier for issuers to avoid the arduous registration requirements of the federal securities laws, many investment advisers will simply "go private" by instead offering hedge funds or other private investments. In assessing privileged access to strategies, since private funds are permitted to engage in more flexible trading strategies through the use of derivatives and other exotic instruments, elite investors have better opportunities for wealth maximization and diversification. A large body of empirical research has also found that private fund advisers often have privileged access to valuable information regarding upcoming investments. To the extent that this privileged access continues to grow, the options available to retail investors will continue to decline. From a broader perspective, this could magnify the financial challenges facing retail investors, some of which include dwindling retirement savings and declining property values, as well as deepen the already troubling income gap in this country. Alternative frameworks could entail; (1) loosening the capital restrictions that apply to mutual funds so that retail investors can access a greater degree of financial innovation, or (2) tightening the existing freedoms that apply to private funds, so as to level the playing field between retail and elite investors. However, the long-term and short-term effects to systemic risk, investor protection, and capital formation, would have to be thoroughly investigated before adopting any proposed solution along this spectrum. This would necessarily require enhanced coordination between the SEC and CFTC, and improved collaboration with related industries (e.g., economic, financial, banking, quantitative analysis, etc.).


The ever-increasing use of the Internet in Malaysia provides a developing prospect for E-marketers. Such marketers' awareness of the factors affecting Malaysian's shopping attitudes and intentions is crucial to further develop their marketing strategies in converting potential customers into active ones, while maintaining the existing online customers.
Purchase intention is an important determinant of online shopping behavior and represents the best estimates of future behavior available to market researchers. From an e-commerce perspective, understanding of the Theory of Reasoned Action, Theory Planned Behavior, and Technology Acceptance Model could provide a valid basis for explaining and predicting consumers' intentions towards adopting online shopping behavior.This study sets out to examine the factors influencing students' online shopping attitudes and intentions at Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) through a five-pint Likert scale self-administered questionnaire. The instrument has demonstrated acceptable levels of internal consistency, reliability, and content validity according to previous documented studies. A sample of 370 students was selected among postgraduate students at Universiti Putra Malaysia. Descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation, partial correlation, multiple regression, and path analysis were employed to achieve the objectives of the study.
The results of the study showed that the level of online shopping intention was relatively high and direction of attitude towards online shopping was positive among the postgraduate students. Moreover, it was found that utilitarian orientation and hedonic orientation, perceived benefits and demographic characteristics (gender, age, and income) were significantly and positively correlated with the attitude towards online shopping. In addition, the result revealed that the perceived behavioural control and attitude were significantly and positively correlated with online shopping intention. Finally, the finding identified that the trust in the construct of perceived behavioural control and attitude had higher direct effect whereas utilitarian orientation, convenience, prices and wider selection, and income had higher indirect effect on the students' online shopping intention.


The feeding systems of durophagous vertebrates are well suited for studying how the performance of feeding structures is affected by growth. For these animals, feeding structures that deviate from isometric growth (i.e. allometry) may be biologically meaningful in terms of disproportionate increases in bite-force generation across ontogeny. We measured body size, cranial morphology and bite-force generation in an ontogenetic series of loggerhead musk turtles Sternotherus minor and compared the scaling coefficients with predictions based on isometry. We found that morphological growth in S. minor is characterized by positive allometry in the dimensions of the head and beak (rhamphotheca) relative to body and head size. Because negative allometry or isometry in head size relative to body size is a nearly universal trait among vertebrates, S. minor appears to be unique in this regard. In addition, we found that bite forces scaled with positive allometry relative to nearly all morphological measurements. These results suggest that modified lever mechanics, and/or increased physiological cross-sectional area through changes in muscle architecture (i.e. fiber lengths, degree of pennation) of the jaw adductor musculature may have more explanatory power for bite-force generation than external head measures in this taxon. Lastly, we found that bite force scaled with negative allometry relative to lower beak depth and symphyseal length, indicating that the development of high bite forces requires a disproportionately more robust mandible. These results indicate how deviations from isometric growth may make it possible for durophagous vertebrates to generate, transfer and dissipate mechanical forces during growth.


The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the latest of seven UN missions in the country, stretching over 20 years of international involvement. If the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) mission has had a 'stabilizing' influence on the country following Aristide's forced exile since 2004, a string of sexual scandals and the cholera scandal has progressively contributed to modify the local perception of the mission, seen as yet another foreign 'occupation' in Haiti. This article argues that while the resistance to the UN in Haiti is clearly contextual – linked to certain events and actions of certain individuals – it is also, and more fundamentally, structural in form. The article explores themes around the local resistance encountered by the UN in Haiti, using James Scott's multi-levelled approach of the landscape of resistance to highlight the complex nature of statebuilding in Haiti, while linking the more recent form of resistance to MINUSTAH to the specific securitization approach adopted by the mission and its restrictive mindset.


Abstract The pillaring of smectites (two saponites and a montmorillonite) with various Ti precursors was studied. The minerals were intercalated with 'classical' Ti precursors, such as titanium tetrachloride and titanium tetraethoxide, and also with new precursors, such as solutions of titanium tetraisopropoxide in acetic acid, or titanium (bis (ethylacetoacetato) diisopropoxide) in acetone. A complete characterization of the intercalated solids was carried out and a comparison of the properties of the solids as a function of the precursors used in the intercalation established. The influence of the severe conditions in which the intercalation with Ti oligomers is usually carried out (low pH and/or high temperature) on the properties of the intercalated solids was analysed. Intercalation with TiCl4 and Ti(EtO)4 strongly affected the structure of the clays, not by acid attack on the octahedral sheet, but mainly by disaggregation of particles. Ti(isop)4 was found to be less aggressive for the clays, while Ti(etacet)2(isop)2 did not form pillared solids but organo-clays, and therefore was of no use as a pillaring agent. The solids were thermally stable up to 300°C, showing a high specific surface area.


Two random samples of women aged 55-64 living in the Vale of Glamorgan and the Rhondda Fach were followed up for 20 years. In each sample heights, weights, serum cholesterol concentrations, and specific causes of death were noted and the Quetelet index (weight/height2) calculated. The two samples were combined for analysis of total mortality. In the combined sample there was a strong positive association between Quetlet index and both total mortality and mortality from ischaemic heart disease. Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that both of these associations were significant, as was the strong positive association between Quetelet index and mortailty from ischaemic heart disease in the samples considered separately. There was no significant association between cholesterol concentration and mortality from ischaemic heart disease in each sample. There was a small negative association between cholesterol concentration and both total mortaility in the combined sample and ischaemic heart disease in the Rhondda Fach sample. These results suggest that the Quetelet index is important for prognosis, whereas the serum cholesterol concentration is not.


In a major transformation of our times, governmental organizations are increasingly turning to faith-based groups to pro vide basic public services, including education. Faith-government partnering derives its power symbolically from a higher order than the secular state; the secular world of technical education is meta phorically encircled and uplifted by sacrilized forces. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tanzania and in the United States, and on analysis of education policy documents and reports, this article argues that faith-based governmental programs operate by a logic of hierarchical encompassment, a logic by which state education dis courses of accountability, efficiency, and standards first supercede and transform the ideal of religious-moral education, defining all citizens as equally protected before the law, and then reinstate reli gious-moral instruction as a higher order value that, in turn, en compasses technically trained citizens through an ethic that values religion, spirituality, and faith in one God.


Who Supports Political Islam and Why? An Individual-Level and Country-Level Analysis Based on Data from 56 Surveys in 15 Muslim-Majority Countries in the Middle East and North Africa Background and Significance Islam today occupies a central place in discussions and debates about governance in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, whether, to what extent, and in what ways Islamic institutions, officials and laws should play a central role, or at least an important role, in government and political affairs are among the most important, and also the most contested, questions pertaining to governance in the region at the present time. As Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, wrote in April 2011 in connection with the democratic transition struggling at the time to take shape in his country, Islamist groups can no longer be excluded from political life but neither does one group speak for Islam nor should the nation's religious heritage interfere with the civil nature of its political processes. Thus, he concluded, Egypt's revolution has swept away decades of authoritarian rule but it has also "highlighted an issue that Egyptians will grapple with as they consolidate their democracy: the role of religion in political life." Concerns about the place of Islam in political affairs, and about the relationship between democracy and Islam, are equally important elsewhere in the region. The Secretary General of Tunisia's Islamist al-Nahda Party, Hamadi Jebali, described the political challenges facing his country in a May 2011 public lecture and asked, "What kind of Democracy for the New Tunisia: Islamic or Secular?" And again, about the same time, an Iraqi constitutional lawyer and media personality, Tariq Harb, wrote that a central element in the struggle to define his country's political future is the question of how "to balance religion and secularism." These and many similar statements addressed to the question of Islam's role in government and political affairs were made against the background of political transitions set in motion by the spontaneous and frequently massive popular uprisings that shook the Arab world at the end of 2010 and the first months of 2011 – events popularly known at the time as the Arab Spring. Initially in Egypt and Tunisia, but soon elsewhere as well, most notably in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Libya but also in other countries, protesters came into the streets and public squares to express their anger at decades of what they believed to be misrule by governing regimes that were authoritarian, corrupt, and concerned only with their own privilege and that of their friends. Islamist parties and movements were not in the forefront of these uprisings, although in at least some countries they were involved, sometime heavily, in subsequent political developments. But the questions raised at the time by Gomaa, Jebali, Harb and many others were not only, or not primarily, about the political space that should or should not be given to Islamist movements. These questions were deeper and more fundamental, and they were not new even if possibility of a political transition gave them increased salience and greater urgency in some countries. At most, the uprisings and possibilities for a political transition intensified long-standing and largely unresolved debates about whether, how, and to what extent a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population should be ruled by a government and legal system that are in some significant way meaningfully Islamic. Hypotheses and Analyses It is against this background that my study focuses on the perceptions, judgments and preferences of ordinary citizens about the role that Islam should play in government and political affairs. Drawing on a new dataset constructed by the merging of 56 nationally representative public opinion surveys carried out between 1988 and 2014, I test hypotheses about the explanatory power in shaping attitudes toward political Islam of (1) cultural values, such as those pertaining to the status and rights of women; (2) political evaluations, specifically those concerning the legitimacy and performance of the government in power; (3) economic factors, specifically the degree to which the economic circumstances of the individual are advantageous or disadvantageous; and (4) information and exposure, particularly the variation in the learning experiences associated with education. Judgment about political Islam is the dependent variable in the regression analyses by which these hypothesis and the causal stories associated with each are tested. The analysis includes control variables, including, and particularly, personal religiosity. Although the data are pooled in the initial analyses, they are subsequently disaggregated by gender and age, taken in combination, in order to see if whether or not each hypothesis and the associated causal story has more explanatory power among some subsets of the population than others. These regressions are also run separately for individuals who reside in countries where the government has a strong Islamic connection and countries where such a connection is weak or non-existent. To the individual-level analysis outlined above is added a survey-level, or country-level, analysis in which findings are mapped across countries. More specifically, findings about individual-level relationships, both in general and for demographic subsets of the population, are treated as dependent variables and country attributes are treated as independent variables. Dependent variable measures are both (1) whether or not the individual-level relationship is statistically significant in each survey, and (2) the survey-specific regression coefficients resulting from the individual-level analysis. Independent variables include a large number of political, economic, societal, and demographic country attributes. Information about each attribute at the time the country was surveyed, and also lagged measures for many attributes, was collected and included in the dataset. The addition of this second level of analysis makes it possible not only determine the degree to which various individual-level factors play a role in shaping the attitudes toward political Islam held by ordinary citizens, and whether and how this differs across within-country demographic subsets of the population, but also to identify and characterize the national political, economic, and societal environments in which any of these individual-level causal stories is disproportionately likely to obtain. Data and Measures Space does not permit providing at present a detailed description of the data and a full account of the measures to be employed. Instead, I am attaching a PPT that includes among its many slides: a list of the 56 surveys in the dataset (N = 82,489), giving the country and year in which each was conducted and the sample size; a list of the country attributes on which information has been collected and included in the dataset; and a list of some of the questions about Islam's role in government and political affairs that have been employed to derive a measure of attitude toward political Islam. Almost all surveys contained several of these questions, although in a small number of surveys only one or two were asked. Although beyond the scope of the present discussion, measurement operations included assessments of validity and reliability and procedures to establish conceptual equivalence between measured derived from surveys in which only some of the same questions were asked. Finally, more broadly, the PPT presents preliminary findings from a partial analysis of the data.


As the complexity of model transformations grows, there is an increasing need to count on methods, mechanisms, and tools for checking their correctness, i.e., the alignment between specifications and implementations. In this paper we present a light-weight and static approach for locating the faulty rules in model transformations, based on matching functions that automatically establish these alignments using the metamodel footprints, i.e., the metamodel elements used. The approach is implemented for the combination of Tracts and ATL, both residing in the Eclipse Modeling Framework, and is supported by the corresponding toolkit. An evaluation discussing the accuracy and the limitations of the approach is also provided. Furthermore, we identify the kinds of transformations which are most suitable for validation with the proposed approach and use mutation techniques to evaluate its effectiveness.


A large proportion of electricity in the UAE is consumed in meeting air conditioning cooling demands in buildings where, up to 80% of a buildings total electricity demand is for cooling. With projected climate changes in the UAE predicting an increase in annual mean temperature of 2.80C and minimal reductions in relative humidity and global solar radiation by 2050, cooling energy demands are set to increase. This paper reports on a study of how the climatic drivers of cooling energy demand change under a 'businessas-usual' scenario of climate change. A typical UAE office building is simulated under generated annual hourly weather datasets of 2020, 2050 and 2080. The results show an increase in cooling demand of 22.2% by 2050 and 40.0% by 2080. The comparative effect of climate changes on a number of heat gain sources and paths are examined and discussed to identify the most effective solutions for improving resilience.


This article discusses how to combine service learning, and specifically a living wage research project, with radical political economy-based undergraduate economics courses to promote critical thinking, civic engagement, and active learning in students. The authors explore how instructors can integrate service learning into the teaching of political economy. In addition, the article describes the authors' experiences with living wage projects that they have implemented. The article makes the argument that the combination of experiential learning and political economics enriches the course experience for students significantly, leaving a much more lasting impression on students than a standard economics class.


Acoustic excitation produced by jet-engine effluxes was simulated in a progressive wave tube (APWT) facility with a computer-based control system. The APWT siren is driven by a signal generated numerically in a PC and then converted into analog form. Characteristics of the acoustic pressure measured by a microphone are analyzed in digital form and compared with those prescribed for simulation. Divergence is compensated by immediate modification of the driving signal and this action is repeated in the form of iterative process until the test specification is attained. Typical power spectral density (PSD) shapes with maxima at low and high frequencies were simulated. A "tailoring" approach has been also achieved when a test specification was determined directly from field measurements for the particular aircraft under consideration. Since acoustic pressure signals of high level differ from the Gaussian random process model, particularly in terms of asymmetric probability density function, a method has been developed to make the driving signal also non-Gaussian by simulating skewness and kurtosis parameters of the APWT acoustic excitation simultaneously with PSD control. Experimental results with Gaussian and non-Gaussian characteristics obtained for various PSD specifications including sharp and narrow peaks are presented in the paper.


The association between our ancestors and fire, somewhere around six to four million years ago, had a tremendous impact on human evolution, transforming our earliest human ancestor, a being communicating without speech but with insight, reason, manual dexterity, highly developed social organization, and the capability of experimenting with this new technology. As it first associated with and then began to tame fire, this extraordinary being began to distance itself from its primate relatives, taking a path that would alter its environment, physiology, and self-image. Based on her extensive research with nonhuman primates, anthropologist Frances Burton details the stages of the conquest of fire and the systems it affected. Her study examines the natural occurrence of fire and describes the effects light has on human physiology. She constructs possible variations of our earliest human ancestor and its way of life, utilizing archaeological and anthropological evidence of the earliest human-controlled fires to explore the profound physical and biological impacts fire had on human evolution.


Due to the threat of COVID-19 pandemic, personal protection equipment (PPE) has raised lots of attentions to protect people from infection. This unprecedented virus can be spread through airborne, respiratory droplets and social contact. Although there are some devices and PPEs for people who are conscious and able to obey the social distance policy, to protect infants is still challenging. Baby is one of the vulnerable groups to the disease but there is no appropriate PPE when baby needs to be exposed to irresistible events like visiting a hospital, receiving vaccination or being accompanied by parents who come home from work). In this study, a concept of smart baby protective tent is developed. The simple hardware offers a quick assembly using PVC pipes, 3D-printed joints and a transparent cover sheet to create an independent and safe space from direct and indirect infection through breathing or saliva. With two additional parts, the smart baby protective tent can thereby provide clear air circulation and modern care. A fan system equipped with a clamp for a disposable medical-certified mask is applied to supply clean and circulated air for the babies. Functional sensors are attached to detect essential signals like body temperature, environment temperature, humidity, vibration, brightness, sound, CO2, and PM 2.5. These received signals are processed via a micro-controller and can be uploaded to personal social media in order to increase caregivers' awareness of the babies' situation inside the tent. © 2021 by ASME.


The 'dark side' of organizations has been represented in the literature as dysfunctional or abnormal, while more critical scholars regard it a condition of the 'normal' way in which organizations operate within a capitalist system. Drawing on the work of Franz Kafka, this paper develops a critique of both approaches. It is argued that we can learn much from Kafka because his representations challenge a top-down view of power and, therefore, suggest that there is light in the darkness. These insights are applied to a case study of a United Kingdom bank, to explore how managers, who are often neglected in critical accounts, are constituted through power relations, and how in the process of enrolling and controlling others, they discipline themselves. In taking this approach, the paper makes four main contributions. First, it elucidates how the 'dark side' has become an integral feature of everyday life in a contemporary organization and, second, it indicates limitations to the power that managers are able to exercise. Third, it explores how managers are fabricated as particular types of subject as they endeavour to discipline others, and finally it argues that whole layers of management can be understood as victims of the 'dark side'.


Abstract. We present a full-mission data product of carbon monoxide (CO) vertical column densities using the 2310–2338 nm SCIAMACHY reflectance measurements over clear-sky land scenes for the period January 2003–April 2012. The retrieval employs the SICOR algorithm, which will be used for operational data processing of the Sentinel-5 Precursor mission. The retrieval approach infers simultaneously carbon monoxide, methane and water vapour column densities together with a Lambertian surface albedo from individual SCIAMACHY measurements employing a non-scattering radiative transfer model. To account for the radiometric instrument degradation including the formation of an ice-layer on the 2.3 µm detector array, we consider clear-sky measurements over the Sahara as a natural calibration target. For these specific measurements, we spectrally calibrate the SCIAMACHY measurements and determine a spectral radiometric offset and the width of the instrument spectral response function as a function of time for the entire operational phase of the mission. We show that the smoothing error of individual clear-sky CO retrievals is less than ±1 ppb and thus this error contribution does not need to be accounted for in the validation considering the much higher retrieval noise. The CO data product is validated against measurements of ground-based Fourier transform infrared spectrometers at 27 stations of the NDACC-IRWG and TCCON network and MOZAIC/IAGOS aircraft measurements at 26 airports worldwide. Overall, we find a good agreement with TCCON measurements with a mean bias b  = −1.2 ppb and a station-to-station bias with σ   = 7.2 ppb. The negative sign of the bias means a low bias of SCIAMACHY CO with respect to TCCON. For the NDACC-IRWG network, we obtain a larger mean station bias of b  = −9.2 ppb with σ  = 8.1 ppb and for the MOZAIC/IAGOS measurements we find b  = −6.4 ppb with σ  = 5.6 ppb. The SCIAMACHY data set is subject to a small but significant bias trend of 1.47 ± 0.25 ppb yr−1. After trend correction, the bias with respect to MOZAIC/IAGOS observation is 2.5 ppb, with respect to TCCON measurements it is −4.6 ppb and with respect to NDACC-IRWG measurements −8.4 ppb. Hence, a discrepancy of 3.8 ppb remains between the global biases with NDACC-IRWG and TCCON, which is confirmed by directly comparing NDACC-IRWG and TCCON measurements. Generally, the scatter of the individual SCIAMACHY CO retrievals is high and dominated by large measurement noise. Hence, for practical usage of the data set, averaging of individual retrievals is required. As an example, we show that monthly mean SCIAMACHY CO retrievals, averaged separately over Northern and Southern Africa, reflect the spatial and temporal variability of biomass burning events in agreement with the global chemical transport model TM5.


Ever since Westerners arrived in Japan, we have been intrigued by geisha. This fascination has spawned a wealth of fictional creations from Madame Butterfly to Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha". The reality of the geisha's existence has rarely been described. Contrary to popular opinion, geisha are not prostitutes but literally "arts people". Their accomplishments might include singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument but, above all, they are masters of the art of conversation, soothing worries of highly paid businessmen who can afford their attentions. The real secret history of the geisha is explored here.


Social meetings provide important venues for people to get connected. However, it is challenging to explore reasons of social gathering, identify its key impact factors, and further use it to support people's social activities. In this paper, we present an embodied visual analytics system, which highlights analyzing and displaying social-cluster related information in real time. In the system, each user represents a data point in a high-dimensional dataset, and their positions reflect a 2D projection of the dataset, by using weighted multidimensional scaling. As users move and socialize with others, the 2D projection is dynamically updated, and relevant information of user clusters is visually analyzed and presented through dimension reduction techniques. We conducted informal social meetings with participants who were a mix of strangers and friends. We found that there are 3 stages of social gathering, corresponding to different interactions in the system. Our results also suggest that the system assists social gathering with dimension reduction visualizations.


A new basic structure of a dispersive-compensation filter, called a chirped-cavity dispersion-compensator (CCDC) filter, was designed to offer the advantages of small ripples in both reflectance and group-delay dispersion (GDD). This filter provides a high dispersion compensation, like the Gires-Tournois interferometer (GTI) filter, and a wide working bandwidth, like the chirped mirror (CM). The structure of the CCDC is a cavity-type Fabry-Perot filter with a spacer layer (2 mH or 2 mL) and a chirped high reflector. The CCDC filter can provide a negative GDD of -50 fs2 over a bandwidth of 56 THz with half the optical thickness of the CM or the GTI.


Numerical solutions of partial differential equations enable a broad range of scientific research. The Dedalus Project is a flexible, open-source, parallelized computational framework for solving general partial differential equations using spectral methods. Dedalus translates plain-text strings describing partial differential equations into efficient solvers. This paper details the numerical method that enables this translation, describes the design and implementation of the codebase, and illustrates its capabilities with a variety of example problems. The numerical method is a first-order generalized tau formulation that discretizes equations into banded matrices. This method is implemented with an object-oriented design. Classes for spectral bases and domains manage the discretization and automatic parallel distribution of variables. Discretized fields and mathematical operators are symbolically manipulated with a basic computer algebra system. Initial value, boundary value, and eigenvalue problems are efficiently solved using high-performance linear algebra, transform, and parallel communication libraries. Custom analysis outputs can also be specified in plain text and stored in self-describing portable formats. The performance of the code is evaluated with a parallel scaling benchmark and a comparison to a finite-volume code. The features and flexibility of the codebase are illustrated by solving several examples: the nonlinear Schrodinger equation on a graph, a supersonic magnetohydrodynamic vortex, quasigeostrophic flow, Stokes flow in a cylindrical annulus, normal modes of a radiative atmosphere, and diamagnetic levitation. The Dedalus code and the example problems are available online at this http URL.


Atomic absorption spectrophotometry has been critically evaluated as a method for the determination of traces of arsenic, lead, nickel, and zinc in copper. With careful matrix compensation, reliable (±5%–6%) results were obtained down to lower concentration limits of 0.025% for arsenic, 0.002% for lead, 0.003% for nickel, and 0.002% for zinc. Copper was found to interfere strongly with the determination of nickel in dilute nitric acid solutions. The use of the nitrous oxide—acetylene flame was found mandatory for the determination of arsenic. This work suggests at least limited applicability of atomic absorption to the problem of tracing the origin of ancient copper metal by impurity patterns.


The paper discusses the conditions for case marking on partitive constructions in direct object position in Turkish and some related languages. We focus on Turkish and then turn to some details of corresponding constructions in some other Turkic languages and in Standard Mongolian. Turkish exhibits Differential Object Marking, which primarily depends on the semantic-pragmatic factor of specificity. Partitive constructions with the ablative for the superset in Turkish come in different forms, depending on how the subset expression is realized: (a) by a lexical noun as head, (b) by the classifier tane 'item', functioning as a "dummy noun", and (c) by a numeral, quantifier or adjective. Case marking of the direct object is optional for (a), and obligatory for (most instances of) (c). This type of obligatory case marking is dependent on the obligatory marking of the adjective, quantifier or numeral with a default 3 rd person singular agreement suffix, which then requires case marking. Construction (b) does not allow for case marking, when the classifier is bare; when the classifier is followed by the default 3 rd person singular agreement marking, that marking requires obligatory case morphology, just like in construction (c). We hypothesize that structural case marking can either express the semantic-pragmatic condition of specificity in terms of referential anchoring or it must obey a formal condition, namely the requirement of the agreement suffix to be followed by overt case. The languages we have studied show an interesting micro-variation. They differ (among other properties) with respect to classifiers – in particular, with respect to whether they have [+human] classifiers or not. In addition, one language among the languages under investigation, namely Kirghiz, substitutes the agreement marker in its function as a filler of the partitive's nominal head by a different marker: a morpheme expressing a set. Here, the agreement marker is used to express specificity, given that its presence is not required for formal reasons. In direct object partitive constructions with subset expressions that are expressed as full noun phrase/lexical noun heads (option (a) above), overt accusative case indicates specificity in most of the investigated languages. In options (b) and (c), the investigated languages provide different patterns when marking the referential status of the partitive heads, thus indicating the variation among these languages with respect to the nominal category feature of the partitive heads involved. This article is part of the Special Collection:  Partitives


This article is a plea for changes in the scholarly dialogue about "evergreening" by drug companies. Allegations that drug companies engage in "evergreening" are pervasive in legal scholarship, economic scholarship, medical and health policy scholarship, and policy writing, and they have prompted significant policymaking proposals. This Article was motivated by concern that the metaphor has not been fully explained and that policymaking in response might therefore be premature. It canvasses and assesses the scholarly literature — more than 300 articles — discussing or mentioning "evergreening." It catalogues the definitions, the examples, and the empirical studies. Scholars use the term when describing certain actions taken by the innovative companies that develop and introduce new medicines to market. But they are inconsistent in their descriptions of the circumstances to which the term applies. And though most claim the innovator has "extended" something in these circumstances, they do not agree on the particulars. The literature is similarly in disarray about what has been "evergreened" — an invention, a product, a price, a patent, or something else entirely. All of this makes it hard to know from the literature what exactly scholars are writing about. After sorting through the definitions and examples — and considering the legal framework and practical landscape in which drug innovators and their generic competitors operate — this Article offers an answer and, more importantly, identifies the implicit normative claim. In simple terms the normative claim in the literature is something like this: "an innovator should not enjoy an exclusive market and supra-competitive pricing for innovations that stem in some fashion from a separate innovation for which it already enjoyed a 20-year patent term. Or at least, a drug innovator should not." This Article does not defend, or reject, this normative claim. Instead, it makes a different claim: that policymaking should be based on descriptive scholarship that is careful and precise about the relevant law and facts, normative work that is clear and candid about its claim and thorough in its reasoning, and empirical studies that document the actual problem the normative proposals and policymaking proposals are meant to address. Significant policymaking would be premature today, because we have not yet produced this body of work. Constant use of the "evergreening" metaphor may be obscuring this failure. The Article concludes with recommendations for scholars continuing to work on these topics, focusing on ways that we can provide quality work to assist policymakers considering the normative claim.


This study was performed to determine the efficacies of Lavandula officinalis, Foeniculum vulgare, and Laurus nobilis essential oils on the control of Varroa destructor (Acari: Varroidae), the most common parasite of honeybees (Apis mellifera L.). Experimental colonies from the province of Bursa, Turkey, were divided into 5 homogeneous groups of 8 hives each. The 3 essential oils plus thymol (Thymovar®, an essential oil-based drug with known efficacy that was used for comparison) were applied to 1 group each and 1 group was left untreated as a control. Each group was treated during 3 seasons, 2 consecutive autumns and 1 spring. Efficacies of the essential oils were determined by the Henderson-Tilton formula and the significance between the oils was determined by Tukey's multiple comparison test. In the first autumn, the highest efficacy was detected in Thymovar (79.4%) followed by L. nobilis (76.7%), L. officinalis (76.4%), and F. vulgare (74.5%) essential oils. In spring, the efficacy rates were 83.8% in L. officinalis, 81.8% in Thymovar, 78.8% in F. vulgare, and 70.8% in L. nobilis. In the second autumn, the efficacy rates were 78.4% in Thymovar, 76.6% in L. officinalis, 71.9% in F. vulgare, and 65.2% in L. nobilis respectively. No abnormal deaths were seen in adult bees during the treatment period.


Robert Buckman, a medical oncologist, and George Lewith, a homoeopathic physician, met in Southampton while filming "Magic or Medicine?," a television series of four programmes about what can and might be learnt from the popularity of complementary medicine. In particular, the series showed how the effect of the patient's and the doctor's beliefs affected the relationship between them. The two doctors so enjoyed talking with each other that they carried on their debate in letters to each other over the next year. We think that their exchange merits a wider readership.

Dear George,

The profession-wide debate on homoeopathy seems to have polarised into a dispute about evidence and mechanism, and as a result we seem to have lost sight of a separate issue—namely, that of the benefit to the patient. I propose that we divide the debate into two distinct issues. One issue is whether highly diluted extracts prepared by succussion can have an effect on disease processes. The second issue is whether patients feel better when they take homoeopathic remedies. If they do, what does it mean and what should we do about it?

Let me start by describing what I saw when, with the film crew of Magic or Medicine?, I visited your practice in Southampton and watched you taking histories from, examining, talking with, and prescribing for your patients. I said to you at the time that your clinical skills—and particularly your interpersonal skills—were among the best I have ever seen. I also said (and it was not idle chatter) that a video of you in action should be shown to every medical student in the world as an example of what good doctoring looks like. It seemed to me that when I walked into your consulting room the most powerful medication in the room was sitting …


Background: The gut microbiota is altered in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), and cardiovascular risk increases with progressive CKD. This study examined the potential link between short chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which are produced by the gut microbiota, and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with CKD. Methods: SCFAs were measured using a targeted liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry platform in baseline plasma samples from 214 patients with CKD enrolled in the Clinical Phenotyping Resource and Biobank Core; 81 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and 133 without CAD were randomly assigned to training and validation subsets. The primary outcome was a history of CAD and the secondary outcome was a composite history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) at enrollment. Results: We found significantly higher levels of the SCFA valerate among patients with CAD as compared with patients without CAD in the training set (p < 0.001). The valerate concentrations were also significantly higher among subjects with composite outcomes of CVD compared to those without CVD (p = 0.006). These results were subsequently replicated in the validation set. Logistic regression analysis revealed a strong independent association between plasma valerate levels and CVD in both training and validation sets. When valerate was added to the base clinical model comprising of diabetes, hypertension, urinary protein-creatinine ratio, and estimated glomerular filtration rate, it increased the c-statistics for predicting CVD from 0.68 to 0.79 (p = 0.02) in the training set, an observation which was confirmed in the validation set. Conclusion: This study provides evidence for alterations in gut-microbiota-derived SCFAs with advancing CKD, demonstrates the association of higher plasma valerate levels with pre-existing CVD, and reveals areas for future exploration of cardiovascular risk in patients with CKD.


Neurodegenerative properties of acrylamide were studied in vitro by exposure of differentiated SH-SY5Y human neuroblastoma cells for 72 h. The number of neurites per cell and the total cellular protein content were determined every 24 h throughout the exposure and the subsequent 96-h recovery period. Using kinetic data on the metabolism of acrylamide in rat, a biokinetic model was constructed in which the in vitro toxicity data were integrated. Using this model, we estimated the acute and subchronic toxicity of acrylamide for the rat in vivo. These estimations were compared to experimentally derived lowest observed effect doses (LOEDs) for daily intraperitoneal exposure (1, 10, 30, and 90 days) to acrylamide. The estimated LOEDs differed maximally twofold from the experimental LOEDs, and the nonlinear response to acrylamide exposure over time was simulated correctly. It is concluded that the integration of the present in vitro toxicity data with kinetic data gives adequate estimates of acute and subchronic neurotoxicity resulting from acrylamide exposure.


The beta-amyloid peptide characteristic of the lesions of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is derived from the amyloid precursor protein (APP), a single transmembrane-spanning protein with several alternatively-spliced variants, some of which contain a Kunitz protease inhibitory (KPI) domain. Although intracellular localisation of APP has been described in many cell types, it has not been characterised in NTera 2 (NT2) neurones, which are the best available model of human CNS neurones. Here, the subcellular distributions of APP and APLP2 (amyloid precursor-like protein 2) were demonstrated, by indirect immunocytochemistry, to be overlapping but not the same in both NT2 stem cells and neurones. No obvious differences were apparent when comparing the locations of either APP or APLP2 in stem cells versus neurones, APLP2 being restricted to the region of the Golgi apparatus, and APP extending into compartments approaching the cell membrane, including growth cones of neurones. Therefore, no clear differences in intracellular routing of these proteins were identified, immunocytochemically, in human CNS-type neurones compared with stem cells, which represent non-neuronal cells. This work emphasised the need to use antibodies that distinguish between APP and APLP2 (which does not contain the beta-amyloid sequence) in studies of APP processing and amyloidogenesis, since only APP was concentrated in compartments beyond the Golgi apparatus. Heat-shock and no feeding had no immunocytochemically detectable effects on APP or APLP2 distributions or 13-amyloid production in NT2 cells. Although a preliminary investigation to establish a protocol by which NT2 cells can be studied by electron microscopy produced only scant cellular material, more recent publications have shown that slight variations on methods tested here give a successful protocol.The expression of KPI-containing APP in human brains has only been described previously in terms of its mRNA. The ratio of KPI-/non-KPI-APP mRNA appears to be elevated in AD (Tanaka et al., 1989; Johnston et al., 1996). A novel polyclonal antibody (Ab993), specific for the KPI-domain epitope, was characterised for use in immunohistochemistry using paraffin-embedded human brain sections. Immunohistochemical staining was enhanced significantly by reduction of sulphydryl bonds with 2-mercaptoethanol, followed by alkylation of the reduced bonds with sodium iodoacetate. Microwaving of sections also enhanced immunolabelling, by a mechanism that was additive to reduction and alkylation. Incubation with 80% formic acid did not increase immunolabelling. KPI-containing protein distribution in normal and AD human brains was characterised by indirect immunohistochemistry. KPI-APP was concentrated mainly in pyramidal cells of the temporal and visual neocortex. In Alzheimer's disease there was a significantly increased incidence of cellular staining for KPI-APP. KPI-containing protein was closely related to the pathology of AD. It was found in association with the tangle-bearing population of neurones, blood vessels including those affected by cerebro-vascular amyloid, within the neuropil and in association with plaques. This evidence corroborates that supplied previously by mRNA data and studies of hAPP transgenic mice in highlighting the importance of this isoform of APP in the pathogenesis of AD.The cytokine transforming growth factor-beta1 (TGF-beta1) is upregulated in AD brains, but its mRNA expression has not been characterised. TGF-beta1 and hAPP(V717F) bigenicmice show accelerated development of AD-like pathology compared with hAPP(V717F) singly transgenic mice (Wyss-Coray et al, 1997). It has been suggested that elevated TGF-beta1 could increase expression of KPI-containing APP isoforms in AD and/or upregulate CNS extracellular matrix proteins that may promote amyloid deposition. TGF-beta1 mRNA in AD and control frozen human brain sections was quantified by in situ hybridization histochemistry. A modest, significant increase in TGF-beta1 mRNA was found in AD temporal cortex and white matter compared to controls, supporting previous immunohistochemical studies.


This article proposes to pay attention on the sources of historical demography in the old eparchy of Arad. At the end of XVIIth century, the Ottoman domination in the zone have been filled with the domination of Habsburgs and the Arad city became a significant orthodox Episcopal centre subordinated in religious plan to the metropolitan of Karlovitz. For the reconstitution and the knowledge of the demographical aspects into old counties Arad and Zarand, we can use many documents, which are preserved in the Departmental Direction of National Archive of Arad. Various censuses, tax conscriptions, wills and especially parochial registers of the marital status are sources of first category. With the methods used by Michel Fleury and Louis Henry this sources are essential to know the behaviours demographic for the various ethnos groups, as well majority Rumanian as the population German, Hungarian, Serb or Jewish which have lived in these places 300 years ago.


On October 3, 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Reader Privacy Act into law. Currently, book service providers within California are prohibited from disclosing to third parties personal information related to their users, including (1) information that "identifies, relates to, describes, or is associated with a particular user," (2) a "unique identifier or Internet Protocol Address," and (3) information that shows a "user's access to or use of a book service or a book, in whole or in partial form." The Act seeks to specifically protect all book formats, including electronic formats. Additionally, the Act establishes a highly protective court order process, requiring an entity to show a compelling interest in the book record and that the record sought cannot be obtained through less intrusive means before the record can be disclosed. For many, the Act is a triumph for privacy protection and champions a first-of-its-kind approach to a clear cut rule about when an entity can access an individual's digital information related to his or her book reading habits. Others, however, see it as nothing more than protecting a miniscule segment of data available to exposure and can provide little protection against mass data collection by other state and federal entities. Thus, California's Reader Privacy Act poses a critical question as new initiatives begin to shape the digital as digital books become more prominent in today's society?This Note argues that state regulations, such as California's Reader Privacy Act, can provide the foundational framework for true digital reader privacy. With such a lack of regulations geared toward protecting the privacy interests of an individual's digital content, specifically his or her digital book data, this Act could serve as the catalyst to multistate and federal regulations that effectively and efficiently create legal barriers in order to protect personal information related to digital books. Part I examines the architecture of digital books, and how their integration with technology and the Internet has created new legal issues about third-party access to a digital book reader's personal information. Part II details how reader privacy has traditionally been addressed on the private, federal, and state levels. This Part also analyzes how California's Reader Privacy Act seeks to address some of the concerns of digital reader privacy. Part III discusses how state regulations can fill the digital void left by laws and policies currently addressing reader privacy and online privacy, and how this could help formulate a national approach to protecting reader privacy in the digital age.


This paper explores the problem of efficiently permuting data stored in VLSI chips in accordance with a predetermined set of permutations. By connecting chips with shared bus interconnections, as opposed to point-to-point interconnections, we show that the number of pins per chip can often be reduced. For example, for infinitely many n, we exhibit permutation architectures with ⌈√n⌉ pins per chip that can realize any of the n cyclic shifts on n chips in one clock tick. When the set of permutations forms a group with p elements, any permutation in the group can be realized in one clock tick by an architecture with O(√p lg p) pins per chip. When the permutation group is abelian, O(√p) pins suffice. These results are all derived from a mathematical characterization of uniform permutation architectures based on the combinatorial notion of a difference cover.


Since the origins of Speculative Freemasonry, the relationship between this institution and women has been controversial, and remains that way after three centuries of Masonic existence. In this article, the history of this relationship in France, from the eighteenth century to the present day is updated. France is an important country in which to analyze this topic, since it has caused a number of debates and diverse projects to incorporate women into the Symbolism.


Since late 1994, open-vent eruptive activity and degassing at Popocatepetl volcano, Mexico, have released large masses of CO2 and SO2. Tephra and lava produced by these eruptions show evidence for mixing of mafic and silicic magmas shortly before eruption. We present the first measurements of dissolved CO2 in the mafic magma end member based on analyses of olivine-hosted melt inclusions that were trapped at pressures as high as ~400 MPa (~15 km depth) beneath the volcano. We combine our data with thermodynamic models to show that degassing of mafic magma at ~150–350 MPa pressure can explain the CO2/SO2 mass ratios (1–8) of volcanic gases released from the volcano during 1995–1997. Our results demonstrate that mafic magma recharge was responsible for the high measured fluxes of CO2 and SO2 from 1995 to 1997. The total SO2 emission of 9 Mt during this period requires intrusion and degassing of a minimum of 0.8 km3 of mafic magma. Only ~0.3% of this new mafic magma has been erupted in the form of mixed (hybrid) lava and tephra. Our results suggest that the ongoing eruption of Popocatepetl is essentially an intrusive event. More generally, we suggest that intrusion and deep degassing may explain the high gas fluxes at some other open-vent volcanoes rather than convection of magma in the uppermost parts of subvolcanic conduits.


The goal of my dissertation is to take a step toward shifting the narrative in engineering from "surviving" to "thriving" so that more engineering students can reach their full potential in college and beyond. Many engineering students experience barriers such as the hardships of engineering culture, which are exacerbated for women and underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities(such as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students). These barriers are well documented in research and well discussed in interventions to support engineering student success, under the assumption that helping students cope with these cultural and systemic barriers will, by itself, lead to their success. My research on engineering thriving challenges this assumption by asserting that the skills engineering students need to succeed academically, socially, and personally differ from the skills they need to "survive" cultural and systemic barriers.This dissertation employs an exploratory multiphase research design, with three studies, to develop a model of thriving for undergraduate engineering students. The first study consists of a scoping literature review of 68 papers to define and characterize engineering thriving as the process in which engineering students develop and refine competencies that allow them to function optimally in engineering programs. From this definition, the second study employs a Delphi process with 47 experts to develop a model of engineering thriving that includes 1) internal thriving competencies; 2) external thriving outcomes; 3) engineering culture, systemic factors, resources, context and situation; and 4) how these three broader categories function together. The third study tests some of these relationships proposed in the model of engineering thriving using structural equation modeling(SEM) on a large dataset of responses by over 2,000 undergraduate U.S. engineering students to a survey that measured various constructs associated with thriving. Findings from the SEM analysis suggest that gratitude was one of the most important competencies for engineering student thriving, and that a holistic model approach accounted for 79% of the variance in engineering students' belongingness and 25% of the variance in perceptions of faculty caring(two external thriving outcomes).Understanding and supporting more engineering thriving has positive implications for students, recruitment and outreach, and engineering programs. Thriving is multidimensional and, thus, supporting engineering students to achieve traditional success metrics (such as academic performance and graduation) goes hand in hand with supporting their personal and social development and wellbeing. Recruitment and outreach of K-12 students can benefit from viewing engineering as an attractive and inspirational career, combating negative stereotypes that currently deter students from pursuing engineering. Engineering programs can benefit from developing a reputation and culture of thriving. However, cultural change requires the collective investment from all members of the engineering community.


Background The current mode of therapy for many patients with musculoskeletal pain is unsatisfactory. Purpose We aimed to assess the impact of adding 4000 IU of vitamin D on pain and serological parameters in patients with musculoskeletal pain. Materials and methods This was a randomized, double-blinded and placebo-controlled study assessing the effect of 4000 IU of orally given vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) (four gel capsules of 1000 IU, (SupHerb, Israel) vs. placebo on different parameters of pain. Eighty patients were enrolled and therapy was given for 3 months. Parameters were scored at three time points: prior to intervention, at week 6 and week 12. Visual analogue scale (VAS) scores of pain perception were recorded following 6 and 12 weeks. We also measured serum levels of leukotriene B4 (LTB4), interleukin 6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) by ELISA. Results The group receiving vitamin D achieved a statistically significant larger decline of their VAS measurement throughout the study compared with the placebo group. The need for analgesic 'rescue therapy' was significantly lower among the vitamin D-treated group. TNFα levels decreased by 54.3% in the group treated with vitamin D and increased by 16.1% in the placebo group. PGE2 decreased by39.2% in the group treated with vitamin D and increased by 16% in the placebo group. LTB4 levels decreased in both groups by 24% (p < 0.05). Conclusion Adding 4000 IU of vitamin D for patients with musculoskeletal pain may lead to a faster decline of consecutive VAS scores and to a decrease in the levels of inflammatory and pain-related cytokines.


This thesis shows the results and patient characteristics of three studies. One study was part of the Dutch Mite Avoidance Study (DUMAS): Effectiveness and effect modification of encasings in house dust mite allergy. The two other studies were two different studies with asthmatic patients recruited from and performed at the asthma centre Heideheuvel. Patient recruitment of the Heideheuvel study took place in the same geographical region in the period 1995-1997; the DUMAS study in 1997 and 1998.

In the DUMAS study patients were selected by using questionnaires where particular atopical core questions were addressed, together with a positive intradermal test or skin prick test for house dust mite. Patients were diagnosed as having reported AR, AA and/or AD on basis of this questionnaire. Then patients were randomised and stratified by age and recruiting centre. After randomisation patients were tested for AA with lung function tests (methacholine, adenosine, histamine); for AR, using nasal provocation tests with HDM and the nasal-score2; and for AD, using the LSS for symptom grading and disease extent together with tests for allergen load and immunological and quality of life (QoL) variables. A difference in diagnoses was made by using questionnaires solely (reported diagnoses) and using questionnaires in combinations with clinical tests (clinical diagnoses). A difference between reported and clinical diagnoses was found in 84 out of 325 patients (25.8 %)(Chapter 2). There was a reported atopical comorbidity of 235 out of 325 patients (72.3 %) and a clinical atopical comorbidity of 177 in 325 patients (54.4 %).

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 show the effects of encasings on clinical, immunological and QoL variables. There was a lack of improvement of AD and AA in the active treatment groups despite a significant decrease in Der p1 and Der p1 + f1 exposure.

QoL becomes an important issue in evaluating effects of treatment in patients with chronic diseases. Several disease specific and generic questionnaires have been developed. Disease specific questionnaires assess the severity of particular disease specific (AA and AD) symptoms on patient's life while generic questionnaires addresses the general "well being". Looking at the prevalence of atopic comorbidity within the selected populations, usage of both kinds of questionnaires is recommended (Chapter 6)
Lack of clinical effect of encasings on AA and AD resulted in a lack in improvement of QoL between the placebo and active treatment groups as measured with disease specific and generic questionnaires in both study populations (Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8). Interestingly, within the AD population the disease specific QCSD and the generic SF-36 questionnaire revealed body-site specific effects of trunk and arms on QoL (Chapter 7, 8)


The research is set to examine Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strikes and academic performance of students in Ekiti State University (EKSU) Ado-Ekiti. The research employed multistage sampling technique to select the faculties and the departments from where six hundred and four (604) respondents were selected, questionnaires and interviews were employed to draw information from respondents. The findings showed that the incessant strikes action by ASUU in Nigeria have disrupted the academic calendar of Universities and this has affected students' academic pursuit and performance, 71.2% of the respondents have experienced ASUU strikes and 51.6% admitted that ASUU strikes have had negative influence on their academics. Almost sixty percent (59.5%) believed that government can find a lasting solution to the problems of ASUU strikes through prompt and rewarding dialogue that grants the request of ASUU timely. The study suggests and recommends that university students should engage themselves in tutorial classes or self-study during the strike action to keep them abreast with academics at resumption, their parents or guardians should ensure that they encourage students engagement in academic activities rather than domestic chores while the strike last, the members and the executives of ASUU should employ other industrial dispute strategies to express their grievances rather than embark on indefinite strike action which obviously paralyses student's academics. The Nigerian Government should also employ the method of prompt dialogue and grant the requests of ASUU in time to prevent erosion and total breakdown of the educational sector.


For image retrieval methods based on bag of visual words, much attention has been paid to enhancing the discriminative powers of the local features. Although retrieved images are usually similar to a query in minutiae, they may be significantly different from a semantic perspective, which can be effectively distinguished by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Such images should not be considered as relevant pairs. To tackle this problem, we propose to construct a dynamic match kernel by adaptively calculating the matching thresholds between query and candidate images based on the pairwise distance among deep CNN features. In contrast to the typical static match kernel which is independent to the global appearance of retrieved images, the dynamic one leverages the semantical similarity as a constraint for determining the matches. Accordingly, we propose a semantic-constrained retrieval framework by incorporating the dynamic match kernel, which focuses on matched patches between relevant images and filters out the ones for irrelevant pairs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed kernel complements recent methods, such as hamming embedding, multiple assignment, local descriptors aggregation, and graph-based re-ranking, while it outperforms the static one under various settings on off-the-shelf evaluation metrics. We also propose to evaluate the matched patches both quantitatively and qualitatively. Extensive experiments on five benchmark data sets and large-scale distractors validate the merits of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art methods for image retrieval.