Uric acid lowering therapy (ULT) can be effective in gout if taken correctly (1), but non-adherence is a known problem (2). Although patients' adherence barriers regarding ULT, such as lack of knowledge on disease and therapy, and beliefs, have been widely studied (3), less is known physicians' beliefs.To investigate the physicians' beliefs on ULT treatment in both primary and secondary care in the Netherlands.Cross-sectional study among all rheumatologists of the Sint Maartenskliniek and to all General Practitioners (GPs) of 17 practices, participating in the practice-based research network Family Medicine Network Nijmegen, Netherlands. All participants filled out the beliefs about medication questionnaire (BMQ), adjusted for physicians; in addition data were collected on physician characteristics including working experience in total and gout consultations. The BMQ consists of two parts, a specific part with 10 questions about beliefs on necessity (N=5) and concerns (N=5) regarding ULT and a general part with 8 questions about beliefs on harms (N=4) and overuse (N=4) regarding medication in general. Each question is scored on a Likert-scale from 1-5, a higher score corresponds to higher beliefs on that category. Sum scores for all four categories were calculated. With the total scores on the specific BMQ including necessity and concerns beliefs, physicians were classified in four different categories (Table 1)(4).In total 112 physicians received the questionnaire, 28 of 37 rheumatologists (76%) and 45 of 75 GPs (60%) responded. Rheumatologists had less years of experience than GPs (median 8.5 years (IQR 3 – 14) versus (vs) 13 years (IQR 8-20)) and less hours of patient contact per week (15 hours (IQR 8.5 – 20) vs 24 hours (IQR 20 – 30)). Rheumatologists reported more consultations for gout per week than GPs: median 4 (IQR 1 – 6.6) vs 1 (IQR 0.2– 1).Rheumatologists scored higher on the BMQ necessity scale, 17.5 (95% CI 16.6 – 18.5) compared to GPs 16.1 (95% CI 15.1 – 17.1). GPs scored higher on BMQ concern scale, 12.1 (95% CI 11.4 – 12.7) compared to rheumatologists, 10.4 (95% CI 9.7 – 11.2). On medication in general, GPs scored higher on both overuse and harms scales compared to rheumatologists, 11.3 (95% CI 10.7 – 12) versus 9.9 (95% CI 9 – 10.7)and 8.3 (95% CI 7.9 – 8.7) vs 7.1 (95% CI 6.5 – 7.7), respectively. Table 1 shows classification according to the BMQ specific for both groups.Table 1.Classification based on the adapted BMQRheumatologists (N=28)GPs (N=45)Acceptant (%)19 (67.9)16 (35.6)Ambivalent (%)08 (17.8)Sceptic (%)1 (3.6)5 (11.1)Indifferent (%)8 (28.6)16 (35.6)For the majority of rheumatologist the necessity beliefs outweighs concern beliefs towards the use of ULT outweighs concern beliefs. GPs show a more heterogenic profile, including acceptant, indifferent and ambivalent beliefs towards ULT use. GPs also show higher harm and overuse concerns regarding medication in general. Next step is to investigate possible associations with actual ULT use and disease outcome.[1]Doherty M, et al. Lancet (London, England). 2018;392(10156):1403-12.[2]Reach G. Joint, bone, spine: revue du rhumatisme. 2011;78(5):456-9.[3]Harrold LR et al. Chronic illness. 2010;6(4):263-71.[4]Toelichting BMQ. [updated 2011-12-10; cited 2021-01-28] Available trough: https://meetinstrumentenzorg.nl/instrumenten/beliefs-about-medicine-questionnaire-bmq-bmq-specific-bmq-general/This study is sponsored by GrünenthalFrouwke Veenstra: None declared., Johanna Vriezekolk: None declared., Henk J Schers: None declared., Noortje van Herwaarden: None declared., Bart van den Bemt Speakers bureau: Pfizer, AbbVie, UCB, Biogen and Sandoz, Consultant of: Delivered consultancy work for UCB, Novartis and Pfizer, Grant/research support from: UCB, Pfizer and Abbvie, Marcel Flendrie Consultant of: M. Flendrie has received consultancy fees from Menarini and Grunenthal., Grant/research support from: M. Flendrie has received grants from Menarini and Grunenthal.


Small island developing states face unique constraints to the provision of electricity services in rural areas, given their geographical features, and the small scale of government bureaucracies and markets. In small island developing states situated in the Pacific Ocean, these factors have resulted in some of the lowest electrification rates in the world. Seventy percent of Pacific islanders are without access to power; a figure that is equivalent to access rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite higher income levels in the Pacific. Past efforts by government and aid organizations to expand electricity access in rural areas have achieved negligible success, given regulatory frameworks that do not encourage grid extension, and the absence of effective institutional frameworks for operation and maintenance of decentralized systems. This paper argues that the binding constraint to rural electrification in Pacific small island developing states is the failure of regulatory frameworks to establish a viable business model for investment. Regulatory reform is needed that creates commercial incentives for private and public sector power utilities to provide power in rural areas, both through extension of electricity networks and decentralized power provision. Regulatory reform could also address past problems with the operation and maintenance of decentralized systems.


Using an Euler discretization to simulate a mean-reverting CEV process gives rise to the problem that while the process itself is guaranteed to be nonnegative, the discretization is not. Although an exact and efficient simulation algorithm exists for this process, at present this is not the case for the CEV-SV stochastic volatility model, with the Heston model as a special case, where the variance is modelled as a mean-reverting CEV process. Consequently, when using an Euler discretization, one must carefully think about how to fix negative variances. Our contribution is threefold. Firstly, we unify all Euler fixes into a single general framework. Secondly, we introduce the new full truncation scheme, tailored to minimize the positive bias found when pricing European options. Thirdly and finally, we numerically compare all Euler fixes to recent quasi-second order schemes of Kahl and Jäckel, and Ninomiya and Victoir, as well as to the exact scheme of Broadie and Kaya. The choice of fix is found to be extremely important. The full truncation scheme outperforms all considered biased schemes in terms of bias and root-mean-squared error.


Publication bias is the tendency for investigations with primarily nonstatis- tically significant findings to be withheld from the research record. Because publication bias has serious negative consequences for research and practice, we gathered informa- tion about the prevalence and predictors of publication bias in the computer science education literature. From an initial random sample of 352 recent computer science education articles, we reviewed the 38 empirical articles that used inferential statistical analyses. We found that (a) the proportion of articles reporting primarily statistically significant findings in computer science education was very similar to the proportion in medical research, (b) that an article's having a female first author was a strong predictor of an article's having primarily statistically significant results, and (c) that there was a tendency for authors to emphasize statistically significant findings and deemphasize nonstatistically significant findings. Neither whether an investigation was reported in a journal or conference proceeding nor whether the source of funding was disclosed were significant predictors of an article's having statistically positive results.


Digital forensics procedures should be developed to obtain digital evidence with regard to legal requirements such as admissibility, authenticity, completeness, reliability and believability. On the other hand, Trojan banking malware incident has grown significantly and creates a great threat to online banking users globally. This type of malware is known to use anti-forensic technique to avoid forensic detection. Moreover, there are numerous works and researches that impose the drawbacks on post-mortem forensics approach in dealing with evidence that only resided on non-persistence memory or non-volatile memory. There are works that reveal the disadvantage of live-response approach on incident response that might compromise the evidence as well. For the last four years, there is notably developed on memory forensics approach that focusing on malware incidents. This paper demonstrates the procedures that use three different forensics approaches on three different Trojan banking malware samples: Cridex, ZeuS and SpyEye. The aim of this work is to obtain the proper forensics approach on Trojan banking malware incidents. The paper also uses a network forensics approach to gather and analyse the network-based evidence.


The synthesis of peptides by amide bond formation between suitably protected amino acids is a fundamental part of the drug discovery process. However, the required coupling and deprotection reactions are routinely carried out in dichloromethane and DMF, both of which have serious toxicity concerns and generate waste solvent which constitutes the vast majority of the waste generated during peptide synthesis. In this work, propylene carbonate has been shown to be a green polar aprotic solvent which can be used to replace dichloromethane and DMF in both solution- and solid-phase peptide synthesis. Solution-phase chemistry was carried out with Boc/benzyl protecting groups to the tetrapeptide stage, no epimerisation occurred during these syntheses and chemical yields for both coupling and deprotection reactions in propylene carbonate were at least comparable to those obtained in conventional solvents. Solid-phase peptide synthesis was carried out using Fmoc protected amino acids on a ChemMatrix resin and was used to prepare the biologically relevant nonapeptide bradykinin with comparable purity to a sample prepared in DMF.


A total of five continental associations for lexicography are currently active. Although this division is entirely artificial - as each association welcomes lexicographic endeavours in any of the world's languages - the cut-up remains practical. AFRILEX, founded in 1995, is one of the younger siblings, given that the DSNA had already been created twenty years earlier. Three of the five continental associations also have 'their' own journal, as may be seen in the table below.


The purpose of research is to determine the usability of mobile learning in undergraduate teacher education. In the first part of the study, researches on mobile learning opportunities in undergraduate teacher education and teacher education are examined. In the second part of the study, infrastructure and readiness for mobile learning of prospective teachers are examined in terms of some variables. The research is designed in survey model. The sample of the research is composed of 454 prospective teachers who study in the 1st and 4th grade of Firat University Faculty of Education. Participant demographic form and the readiness scale for mobile learning developed by Lin, Lin, Yeh and Wang (2016) adapted to Turkish by Gokceaslan, Solmaz and Kukul (2016) is used as data collection tool. Statistical techniques such as mean, frequency, percentage, t test, one way anova are used in the analysis of the data. The research findings revealed by examining the relevant researches show that mobile learning offers important opportunities for undergraduate teacher education. Prospective teachers have mobile tools necessary for mobile learning and have opportunities access to internet. It is determined that prospective teachers frequently use mobile tools and use mobile tools partially for educational purposes. It is determined that the level of prospective teachers' readiness for mobile learning has partially high (= 3.60) and the level of prospective teachers' readiness for mobile learning is not differ according to gender, educational level and department variables. But prospective teachers' readiness for mobile learning differs according to the daily average internet usage time. The results of the research show that mobile learning is an approach that should be taken into account for undergraduate teacher education.


Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" is the unexpected story of how one creature's journey out of the water made the human body what it is today - and one man's voyage of discovery in search of our origins. Have you ever wondered why our bodies look and work and fail the way they do? One of the world's leading experts in evolutionary history, Neil Shubin reveals the secrets of our biology: why if we want to understand our limbs we should take a close look at Tiktaalik, the first fish capable of doing a push-up; why if we want to know why we hiccup, the answer is in the way fish breathe; and why it is that fish teeth are surprisingly similar to human breasts. "This would be Darwin's book of the year". ("Sunday Telegraph"). "An intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story". (Oliver Sacks, author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"). "Delightful ...his enthusiasm is infectious". (Steven D. Levitt, author of "Freakonomics"). "Profoundly fascinating ...a magisterial work ...expressed so clearly and with such good humour". ("Financial Times"). "Will make you think about your organs in ways you have never considered before". ("Sunday Times"). Neil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently Chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Chicago.


In early embryo development, polarity is established as early as the one-cell stage, when sperm entry triggers the asymmetric distribution of proteins and generation of an anteroposterior axis. Jenkins et al. now report the identity of a sperm-donated factor that affects protein polarity and the actomyosin cytoskeleton within the early nematode embryo. At fertilization, the sperm contributes CYK-4 protein to the egg. Proteins that participate with CYK-4 for polarity initiation include RHO-1, a member of the RhoA family of guanosine triphosphatases (GTPases), and ECT-2, a guanine nucleotide exchange factor. CYK-4 is a GTPase activating protein. ECT-2 and RHO-1 proteins promote, but CYK-4 inhibits, activated myosin light chain and actomyosin contractility. Because CYK-4 is expressed in sperm of other species, it will be of interest to know whether this polarity mechanism is conserved among other species that display actomyosin contraction. N. Jenkins, J. R. Saam, S. E. Mango, CYK-4/GAP provides a localized cue to initiate anteroposterior polarity upon fertilization. Science 313, 1298-1301 (2006). [Abstract] [Full Text]


A few years ago, a perceptually-tuned grayscale character generation technique was developed in order to automatically synthesize grayscale characters looking like manually-tuned pixmap characters. Weight and contrast controlled grayscale characters are obtained by grid-fitting the scaled character contours. However, this technique requires that hinting information be added to the outline font description. Adding hinting information to each outline character generally requires a considerable amount of human intervention. Our component-based parametrisable font system is a newly developed font description and reproduction technology. It incorporates for each basic character shape a software method responsible for the synthesis of an instance of that character. A given font is synthesized by providing appropriate font parameters to these character synthesis methods. Numerous concrete fonts can be derived by simply varying the parameters. Such variations offer high flexibility for synthesizing derived fonts (variations in condensation, weight and contrast) and enable saving a considerable amount of storage space. This paper shows that with component-based parametrisable fonts, high quality perceptually-tuned grayscale characters can be generated without requiring hinting information. Generating perceptually-tuned grayscale characters with parametrized component-based fonts consists in automatically adapting the phase of some of the character's parameters in respect to the underlying grid and in ensuring that thin character parts are strong enough not to disappear (weight-control).


Land Suitability analysis is important for preparation of Development Plan. The planning requires undertaking study of topography, water resources, land utilization, and development needs. The RS & GIS techniques offers suitable analytical opportunity to study variables required for selection of sites for various uses. This paper presents process adopted for the preparation of development plan of Anand Vidyanagar Karamsad Urban Development Authority (AVKUDA), regarding the land suitability analysis. The location and types of land to be protected were identified using RS Data and GIS analysis. Keywords— AVKUDA; Land Suitability; Planning; RS & GIS


We have developed a finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method and a novel geometric ray-tracing model for the calculation of light scattering by hexagonal ice crystals. In the FDTD method we use a staggered Cartesian grid with the implementation of an efficient absorbing boundary condition for the truncation of the computation domain. We introduce the Maxwell–Garnett rule to compute the mean values of the dielectric constant at grid points to reduce the inaccuracy produced by the staircasing approximation. The phase matrix elements and the scattering efficiencies for the scattering of visible light by two-dimensional long circular ice cylinders match closely those computed from the exact solution for size parameters as large as 60, with maximum differences less than 5%. In the new ray-tracing model we invoke the principle of geometric optics to evaluate the reflection and the refraction of localized waves, from which the electric and magnetic fields at the particle surface (near field) can be computed. Based on the equivalence theorem, the near field can subsequently be transformed to the far field, in which the phase interferences are fully accounted for. The phase functions and the scattering efficiencies for hexagonal ice crystals computed from the new geometric ray-tracing method compare reasonably well with the FDTD results for size parameters larger than approximately 20. When absorption is involved in geometric ray tracing, the adjusted real and imaginary refractive indices and Fresnel formulas are derived for practical applications based on the fundamental wave theory.


Harbors, whenever possible, are established in estuaries to take advantage of the existing natural safety and protection conditions. To keep harbors in a safe and usable way, periodic dredging works are carried out. The expansion of harbor's activities and the growth of maritime traffic may lead to changes in the harbor's layout or to improvements of navigation channels and basin depths. Such design adjustments entail changes in estuarine hydrodynamics, and therefore the usual dredging rates are subject to alteration, namely, tending to increase. It is then important to assess the influence of the harbor's new layout on the solid transport pattern and how its effects can be minimized, aiming the reduction of economic and environmental impacts. Within this context, in this chapter estuary hydrodynamics and sedimentation-erosion patterns are summarized. Also, the modeling methodology for planning and management of dredging works which uses geo-processing automatic GIS environment, developed by the Portuguese harbor authority, is presented. Finally, the case study of harbor of Portimão is also described showing the implementation of the referred methodology.


[1] We retrieve tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns for May 2004 to April 2005 from the SCIAMACHY satellite instrument to derive top-down emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2) via inverse modeling with a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). Simulated NO2 vertical profiles used in the retrieval are evaluated with airborne measurements over and downwind of North America (ICARTT); a northern midlatitude lightning source of 1.6 Tg N yr−1 minimizes bias in the retrieval. Retrieved NO2 columns are validated (r2 = 0.60, slope = 0.82) with coincident airborne in situ measurements. The top-down emissions are combined with a priori information from a bottom-up emission inventory with error weighting to achieve an improved a posteriori estimate of the global distribution of surface NOx emissions. Our a posteriori NOx emission inventory for land surface NOx emissions (46.1 Tg N yr−1) is 22% larger than the GEIA-based a priori bottom-up inventory for 1998, a difference that reflects rising anthropogenic emissions, especially from East Asia. A posteriori NOx emissions for East Asia (9.8 Tg N yr−1) exceed those from other continents. The a posteriori inventory improves the GEOS-Chem simulation of NOx, peroxyacetylnitrate, and nitric acid with respect to airborne in situ measurements over and downwind of New York City. The a posteriori is 7% larger than the EDGAR 3.2FT2000 global inventory, 3% larger than the NEI99 inventory for the United States, and 68% larger than a regional inventory for 2000 for eastern Asia. SCIAMACHY NO2 columns over the North Atlantic show a weak plume from lightning NOx.


This study assesses the presence, fate and effects of five environmentally relevant pharmaceuticals and eight of their corresponding human metabolites in Lake Geneva. Over a 10-month period, lake samples were taken at various depths and locations in the Vidy Bay. Among the targeted metabolites, six were detected with concentrations ranging from 5 to > 100 ng∙L-1. The highest concentrations were detected above the wastewater treatment plant outfall, supporting the assumption that wastewater represents the main source of human metabolites to the lake. The metabolites were less recalcitrant to environmental degradation than their parent. Nevertheless, their presence in the aquatic environment may lead to an increase of the ecotoxicological risk.


We consider nonlinear stochastic programming problems with probabilistic constraints. The concept of a p-efficient point of a probability distribution is used to derive equivalent problem formulations, and necessary and sufficient optimality conditions. We analyze the dual functional and its subdifferential. Two numerical methods are developed based on approximations of the p-efficient frontier. The algorithms yield an optimal solution for problems involving r-concave probability distributions. For arbitrary distributions, the algorithms provide upper and lower bounds for the optimal value and nearly optimal solutions. The operation of the methods is illustrated on a cash matching problem with a probabilistic liquidity constraint.


ABSTRACT Contemporary sonic artworks often use field recordings from places of historic or social significance to address political issues. This article discusses relevant works for radio and fixed media by Peter Cusack, Jacob Kirkegaard, Eliška Cílková, Anna Friz and Public Studio, Stéphane Garin and Sylvestre Gobart, Ultra-red, and Matthew Herbert and outlines how they use both audio and visual/textual information to create awareness of the issues inscribed in these places, from current environmental concerns to the memory of genocide and displacement.


Taking care of migrants constitutes a new challenge for the actual operative structures of the services in general and for the sanitary service in particular, requiring a global and permanent rethinking with regards to both the offer and the procedures for decoding the requests. What determines the complexity of offering care while respecting differences is the fact that it can not be done without the professionals individually deconstructing racism and maturing an anti-racist awareness. However, attention to this question is neither widespread nor shared during the training of doctors and of health service workers in general. It is necessary, therefore, to broaden the traditional staff-client relationship (usually articulated in the dyad staff-subject/client-object) until it is recognized that both parts have a double role, both as a subject and as an object, within the aid process. The transcultural model is based on the concept of reciprocity. What the transcultural relationship involves is a parallel process of a redefinition of identity, both of the doctor or health service worker and of the client: it is necessary for both to question parameters that they considered certain, overcoming their inevitable resistance in the process. It appears necessary to explore within the training programs the strategies that people, in this specific case the professionals whose work regards health, adopt to avoid challenging racism and the implications that these can have in their daily duties.


Abstract. Conventional methods to estimate land surface temperature (LST) from space rely on the thermal infrared (TIR) spectral window and is limited to cloud-free scenes. To also provide LST estimates during periods with clouds, a new method was developed to estimate LST based on passive-microwave (MW) observations. The MW-LST product is informed by six polar-orbiting satellites to create a global record with up to eight observations per day for each 0.25° resolution grid box. For days with sufficient observations, a continuous diurnal temperature cycle (DTC) was fitted. The main characteristics of the DTC were scaled to match those of a geostationary TIR-LST product. This paper tests the cloud tolerance of the MW-LST product. In particular, we demonstrate its stable performance with respect to flux tower observation sites (four in Europe and nine in the United States), over a range of cloudiness conditions up to heavily overcast skies. The results show that TIR-based LST has slightly better performance than MW-LST for clear-sky observations but suffers an increasing negative bias as cloud cover increases. This negative bias is caused by incomplete masking of cloud-covered areas within the TIR scene that affects many applications of TIR-LST. In contrast, for MW-LST we find no direct impact of clouds on its accuracy and bias. MW-LST can therefore be used to improve TIR cloud screening. Moreover, the ability to provide LST estimates for cloud-covered surfaces can help expand current clear-sky-only satellite retrieval products to all-weather applications.


: Transient Tachypnea of new born (TTN) is one of the parenchymal disorders of the lung. It usually occurs in neonatal age i.e. within 6-12 hours of birth. Salbutamol in nebulized form can be helpful in controlling TTN in neonates. But scarce data is available locally in this regard. Objective: To compare the mean change in respiratory rate with salbutamol nebulization versus placebo for treatment of transient tacyopnea of newborn. Study Design: Randomized Control Trial. Paediatric Hospital, Duration: Six months after the approval of the synopsis i.e. from August 2018 to Feburary 2019. Data Collection: 100 neonates fulfilling selection criteria were enrolled in the study. Informed consent was obtained from parents. Demographic information was also noted. All baseline respiratory rate were noted. Neonates were divided into two groups by lottery method. Neonates in Treatment group were nebulized with Salbutamol. Placebo group was nebulized with Normal Saline. Then neonates were followed-up in N.I.C.U after 4 hours of second nebulization. After 4 hours, respiratory rates were assessed and change in respiratory rate was noted. Both groups were compared for mean reduction in respiratory rate by using independent sample t-test. Results: In nebulized salbutamol, group, mean respiratory rate was changed from 79.62±8.18bpm to 52.06±4.96bpm. This was a significant decrease (p<0.05). In placebo group, mean respiratory rate was changed from 81.88±8.86bpm to 62.50±6.75bpm. This was significant decrease (p<0.05). The difference between both groups at baseline was insignificant while after 4 hours was significant. The mean changed in respiratory rate with nebulized salbutamol was 27.56±6.83bpm while with placebo was 19.35±9.83bpm. There was significant difference in mean reduction in respiratory rate (p<0.05). Conclusion: It has been proved that nebulized salbutamol can be helpful in reducing respiratory rate significantly in neonates with TTN as compared to placebo.


Skiing and snowboarding have become more acrobatic with terrain park jumps and other manmade features playing a prominent role in an increase in serious spinal cord injuries. Yet these jumps rarely, if ever, involve formal or detailed design or engineering. This paper presents a coherent theory and methodology for the design of ski jump landing surfaces. The motion of the skier center of mass is modeled. Although jumpers may land in many configurations, we assume that the probability of severe landing injury is correlated with the component of skier velocity perpendicular normal to the landing surface v or, more understandably, with the corresponding equivalent fall height EFH . The requirement that v and EFH be small is satisfied by making the landing surface nearly parallel to the skier flight path at landing. Safer landing surfaces that limit EFH to a given value are shown to satisfy a first order ordinary differential equation ODE . Having chosen an EFH deemed safe enough by the designer, integration of this ODE provides members of an infinite family of landing surfaces that limit the EFH to the desired value, for any jumper in-run velocity. Using the takeoff ramp angle as another design variable, one can choose a member of this family to fit on almost any available jump site. The formulation incorporates the fact that skiers can slightly modify velocity direction and magnitude at takeoff by jumping and is valid for any landing body configuration. Such landing surfaces can still yield exhilarating flight experiences with relatively large flight times and air height above the surface, but without the danger posed by jumps created in an ad hoc manner, which can expose the skier to much larger unsafe equivalent fall heights.


In this paper a study of waveguide photodetectors based on InAs/InP(100) quantum dot (QD) active material are presented for the first time. These detectors are fabricated using the layer stack of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and are compatible with the active-passive integration technology. We investigated dark current, responsivity as well as spectral response and bandwidth of the detectors. It is demonstrated that the devices meet the requirements for swept-source optical coherent tomography (SS-OCT) around 1.7 μm. A rate equation model for QD-SOAs was modified and applied to the results to understand the dynamics of the devices. The model showed a good match to the measurements in the 1.6 to 1.8 μm wavelength range by fitting only one of the carrier escape rates. An equivalent circuit model was used to determine the capacitances which dominated the electrical bandwidth.


Similarity join processing in the streaming environment has many practical applications such as sensor networks, object tracking and monitoring, and so on. Previous works usually assume that stream processing is conducted over precise data. In this paper, we study an important problem of similarity join processing on stream data that inherently contain uncertainty (or called uncertain data streams), where the incoming data at each time stamp are uncertain and imprecise. Specifically, we formalize this problem as join on uncertain data streams (USJ), which can guarantee the accuracy of USJ answers over uncertain data. To tackle the challenges with respect to efficiency and effectiveness such as limited memory and small response time, we propose effective pruning methods on both object and sample levels to filter out false alarms. We integrate the proposed pruning methods into an efficient query procedure that can incrementally maintain the USJ answers. Most importantly, we further design a novel strategy, namely, adaptive superset prejoin (ASP), to maintain a superset of USJ candidate pairs. ASP is in light of our proposed formal cost model such that the average USJ processing cost is minimized. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approaches.


"Witkeys" are websites in China that form a rapidly growing web-based knowledge market. A user who posts a task also offers a small fee, and many other users submit their answers to compete. The Witkey sites fall in-between aspects of the now-defunct Google Answers (vetted experts answer questions for a fee) and Yahoo Answers (anyone can answer or ask a question). As such, these sites promise new possibilities for knowledge-sharing online communities, perhaps fostering the freelance marketplace of the future. In this paper, we investigate one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. In particular, we apply social network prestige measures to a novel construction of user and task networks based on competitive outcomes to discover the underlying properties of both users and tasks. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach: Our analysis allows us to infer relative expertise of the users and provides an understanding of the participation structure in Taskcn. The results suggest challenges and opportunities for this kind of knowledge sharing medium.


Abstract. Surface sediments collected from deep slopes and basins (1018–4087 m depth) of the oligotrophic eastern Mediterranean Sea have been analysed for bulk elemental and isotopic composition of organic carbon, total nitrogen and selected lipid biomarkers, jointly with grain size distribution and other geochemical proxies. The distribution and sources of sedimentary organic matter (OM) have been subsequently assessed and general environmental variables, such as water column depth and physical circulation patterns, have been examined as causative factors of deep-sea sediment characteristics. Lithogenic and biogenic carbonates are the dominant sedimentary fractions, accounting for up to 85.4 and 66.5 % of the total weight respectively. The low OC and TN contents in the surface sediments of the study area, which ranged from 0.15 to 1.15 % and 0.06 to 0.11 % respectively, reflect the oligotrophic character of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Both bulk and molecular organic tracers reflect a mixed contribution from autochthonous and allochthonous sources for the sedimentary OM, as indicated by relatively degraded marine OM, terrestrial plant waxes and anthropogenic OM (e.g. degraded petroleum by-products) respectively. Wide regional variations have been observed amongst the studied proxies, which reflect the multiple factors controlling sedimentation in the deep eastern Mediterranean Sea. Our findings highlight the role of deep eastern Mediterranean basins as depocentres of organic-rich fine-grained sediments (mean 5.4 ± 2.4 μm), with OM accumulation and burial being attributed to aggregation mechanisms and hydrodynamic sorting. A multi-proxy approach is applied aiming to investigate the biogeochemical composition of sediment samples, which sheds new light on the sources and transport mechanisms along with the impact of preservation vs. diagenetic processes on the composition of sedimentary OM in the deep basins of the oligotrophic eastern Mediterranean Sea.


BACKGROUND
As financial constraints can be a barrier to accessing HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART), we argue for the removal of copayment requirements from HIV medications in South Australia.

METHODS
Using a simple mathematical model informed by available behavioural and biological data and reflecting the HIV epidemiology in South Australia, we calculated the expected number of new HIV transmissions caused by persons who are not currently on ART compared with transmissions for people on ART. The extra financial investment required to cover the copayments to prevent an HIV infection was compared with the treatment costs saved due to averting HIV infections.

RESULTS
It was estimated that one HIV infection is prevented per year for every 31.4 persons (median, 24.0-42.7 interquartile range (IQR)) who receive treatment. By considering the incremental change in costs and outcomes of a change in program from the current status quo, it would cost the health sector $17860 per infection averted (median, $13651-24287 IQR) if ART is provided as a three-dose, three-drug combination without requirements for user-pay copayments.

CONCLUSIONS
The costs of removing copayment fees for ART are less than the costs of treating extra HIV infections that would result under current conditions. Removing the copayment requirement for HIV medication would be cost-effective from a governmental perspective.


Abstract. The net surface exchange of CO2 for the years 2002–2007 is inferred from 12 181 atmospheric CO2 concentration data with a time-dependent Bayesian synthesis inversion scheme. Monthly CO2 fluxes are optimized for 30 regions of the North America and 20 regions for the rest of the globe. Although there have been many previous multiyear inversion studies, the reliability of atmospheric inversion techniques has not yet been systematically evaluated for quantifying regional interannual variability in the carbon cycle. In this study, the global interannual variability of the CO2 flux is found to be dominated by terrestrial ecosystems, particularly by tropical land, and the variations of regional terrestrial carbon fluxes are closely related to climate variations. These interannual variations are mostly caused by abnormal meteorological conditions in a few months in the year or part of a growing season and cannot be well represented using annual means, suggesting that we should pay attention to finer temporal climate variations in ecosystem modeling. We find that, excluding fossil fuel and biomass burning emissions, terrestrial ecosystems and oceans absorb an average of 3.63 ± 0.49 and 1.94 ± 0.41 Pg C yr−1, respectively. The terrestrial uptake is mainly in northern land while the tropical and southern lands contribute 0.62 ± 0.47, and 0.67 ± 0.34 Pg C yr−1 to the sink, respectively. In North America, terrestrial ecosystems absorb 0.89 ± 0.18 Pg C yr−1 on average with a strong flux density found in the south-east of the continent.


Waste management is one of the most crucial part of the sustainability concept. In Turkey, waste management of the small household appliances under waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) category still remains as an issue to handle although its production is very large and long-established. The main reason is that many of the household appliances' wastes are not properly treated in waste management process despite the fact that Turkey is a country which has recovery and collection targets. This outboard of wastes non-treated in an environmentally friendly way, such as recycling or reuse, gives rise to environmental damage. The aim of this paper is to integrate a system dynamics and fuzzy cognitive mapping model in order to evaluate and develop recovery options of small household appliances' wastes which are not treated according to the regulations in Turkey. The first part of the proposed model is to build a system dynamics model by developing recovery options for small household appliances' waste management while the second part is to evaluate the relations between supporting factors of recovery options by using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping.


The authors analyze the increasing use of refundable tax credits targeted to low- and moderate-income households in the Federal individual income tax and determine their implications for rural America. To identify rural and urban households, the analysis matches a zip code approximation of the 2006 Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes with Internal Revenue Service Individual Income Tax zip code and related data. These data are then used to examine the impact of the recent expansions to income tax credit programs on affected households. The analysis finds that expansions to both the refundable and nonrefundable portions of the Earned Income and Child Tax credits have provided a major source of income support for low-income workers and their families. This is especially true in the South, where the rural poor are concentrated.


Geography has long been a stepchild of U.S. education. Now, with accountability pressures shrinking the curriculum, there is even less of a chance that geography will take its place as a separate subject. Mr. Thornton suggests that the best solution might be to integrate a geography strand into American history courses, which seem to hold a secure place in the schools. ********** ALTHOUGH U.S. troops have been on the ground there since 2003, as of 2006 only 37% of young Americans could find Iraq on a map. (1) Laments that young Americans are geographically illiterate have been around for a long time, of course. Every now and then, some test or poll reveals how little geography young Americans know. The usual response is alarm. Critics, who range from businesspeople and politicians to geographers and educators, rail against the failings of schools in teaching geography. Today, geography faces stiff curricular competition from the continuing emphasis of policy makers on the three R's and science. In many places, this competition seems to have squeezed out any systematic attention to geography or the other social studies, particularly in elementary school. What's more, it doesn't look like things are going to turn around anytime soon. Although I cannot do much about the amount of geography states and school districts require, I propose one step that may help improve school geography: meaningfully integrate the subject into the teaching of American history, which enjoys a secure place in school programs. (2) This step may do more to ensure that solid attention is paid to geography than the patchwork of reforms of the past few decades, which have varied in their intrinsic worth, breadth of dissemination, and effectiveness of implementation. (3) Curiously, despite its intuitive appeal, the idea of teaching geography in American history courses has seldom attracted sustained attention. In addition to creating a new space for geography, this approach offers an educational bonus: enriching the meaning of American history. As recent scholarship attests, (4) contemporary historians are showing fresh appreciation for Frederick Jackson Turner's insight that "the master key to American history is to be found in the relation of geography to that history." (5) Moreover, with some imagination, it may be possible to incorporate a significant amount of geography into the standard American history survey courses without adding to their length. Before proceeding, I wish to underscore that I am not suggesting that we do away with geography as a separate subject where it already exists or that geography be taught solely in history courses. Rather, I am proposing that one possible way of helping to improve geographic education could be its meaningful integration with history. Such integration, at a minimum, would be far more educationally defensible than well-publicized attempts to improve geography through such methods as geography bees, which do little or nothing to build substantial knowledge of geographic concepts and relationships. GEOGRAPHY AS THE 'POOR RELATION' Young people who don't know Berlin from Baghdad or can't locate the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf on a globe are not a new phenomenon in American education. Even more significant, however, is the lack of understanding of geographic relationships. A recent news report about security at the nation's ports, for example, pointed out that few Americans appreciate how much of their daily livelihood depends on seaborne goods. Lucy Sprague Mitchell's description of children in the 1930s living in a world of disconnected "end-products" still seems apt. (6) It also seems to be overlooked--or forgotten--that decades of reports, including those from prestigious task forces and learned societies, have bemoaned geographic illiteracy but have generally failed to shift the priorities of policy makers. To understand why geography--which is, after all, routinely flagged by authorities from various ideological perspectives as "basic," along with math, English, science, and history--fares so poorly in American education requires a brief look back. …


One of the primary purposes of pavement management systems (PMS's) is to select maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) treatments at the optimum time during the life of each pavement in a network of roads. The M&R selections are typically based on surface condition and other available historical data. Surface distress data provides a good indication of the functional condition of a pavement and some distresses (examplealligator cracking) provide an indication of structural problems. However, assignment of M&R treatments could be improved if pavement structural capacity was considered in the evaluations. A falling weight deflectometer (FWD) is a common non-destructive testing tool used to assess structural capacity of pavements. However, the relatively slow rate of testing and the need for traffic control often precludes its use on a broad network level. In response to the need for rapid collection of structural data on a network level, the Rolling Wheel Deflectometer (RWD) was developed. The RWD is an innovative device that uses a series of lasers mounted beneath the bed of a custom-built 53-foot (16 meter) semi-trailer to measure a continuous profile of pavement deflections under the trailer's 18-kip (8,164 kg) single axle load while traveling at traffic speed. This paper presents the results of a study that evaluated the structural capacity of a sampling of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's (PennDOT's) roads using the RWD and compares the results to other conventional methods. The use of structural data from the RWD for network level PMS is also demonstrated through the study.


OBJECTIVE: To compare nurse practitioners with senior house officers (SHOs) for their ability to request and interpret correctly a limited range of x ray views of patients attending a minor injuries unit. DESIGN: Retrospective analysis of case records. METHODS: 150 accident and emergency (A&E) records with x ray requests were randomly selected from the SHOs' first, second, and third 2-month period of their 6-month appointments; 150 record cards were randomly selected from a nearby minor injuries unit over the same period. Copies of the records were reviewed blind and a decision made as to whether x ray requests were appropriate; x ray interpretation was compared with that of a consultant radiologist. RESULTS: 106 x rays were taken on the MIU patients (71%) and 124 on the A&E patients (83%). There was no statistically significant differences in the ability of the nurse practitioners and the SHOs to request and interpret appropriate x rays. In both groups the decision to carry out an x ray was considered appropriate in 70% of patients; x rays were positive in about one third. The sensitivity of radiological interpretation was 93% in both groups, and there were 2% missed positives. CONCLUSIONS: Appropriately trained nursae practitioners are at least as good as SHOs in recognising the need for an x ray and are as competent in their interpretation.


Across Africa, ambitions to achieve inclusive and sustainable development are being undermined by inadequate investment in the care economy. Women and girls are providing millions of hours of unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW) – a provision which props up the economy and underpins society, yet remains under-recognized, undervalued and under-invested in.  While inattention to care policy and the unequal distribution of UCDW has stalled gender equality in every country globally, this brief focuses on the specific barriers that UCDW creates for sustainable development in Africa. It explains how investing in quality, accessible and affordable public services and infrastructure in Africa can address heavy and unequal UCDW and unlock progress across multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The brief draws on research and programming experience from Oxfam's Women's Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) programme. Active since 2014, the programme addresses UCDW as a key driver of gender inequality and is implemented in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and the Philippines. This paper draws on WE-Care initiatives in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and presents evidence-based solutions from these five countries to address UCDW across the continent.


The fact that Ben Sira seemingly has a negative attitude towards women or femininity can easily lead to the assumption that the work has a negative attitude toward sexuality. However, this thesis will seek to demonstrate that the author's view on sexuality is complex, subtle, and depends on the context of the individual sayings. First of all we have to make a distinction between the attitudes of the writer of the original Hebrew text of the book and that of the Greek translator. The two texts, produced in different social settings, circumstances, times and places, differ substantially at times in regard to sexuality. Therefore it is essential to treat them separately and to compare them. In addition, the Book of Ben Sira, the longest Jewish wisdom book, is a complex combination of carefully composed wisdom poems that structure the whole work, and of teachings on everyday issues including marriage, family life, self-control, desires and passions, and sexual promiscuity. The openness about issues of eroticism that characterizes some of the poems concerning personified female wisdom is unprecedented in the wisdom writings of Second Temple Judaism. Similarly, the sage dedicates a greater number of passages than other wisdom books, to the discussion of social relations especially in regard to family. In so doing his regular point of departure seems to be what benefits or damages these relations mean, and whether they bring disgrace to a person, especially through sexuality. These all have bearings on the author's and translator's views of sexuality, including the position a person or situation under discussion might have in the sage's social value system. Therefore the thesis examines the wisdom poems, and all sayings that concern sexuality found in discussions of passions, relations with parents, daughters and sons, wives and husbands, and warnings against sexual wrongdoing, including prostitution and adultery. All this is done with a special regard to the differences between the Hebrew original text and the Greek translation.


The low divergent Dammann grating is researched for the potential applications in aerospace. A laser-beam writing system is developed for writing the low divergent Dammann grating. The uniformity and efficiency of the Dammann grating are presented in this letter. The novelty of this letter is to demonstrate a low-cost and effective method to fabricate low divergent Dammann grating.


This paper extends previous work on focus+context visualizations of tree-structured data, introducing an efficient, space-constrained, multi-focal tree layout algorithm ("TreeBlock") and techniques at both the system and interactive levels for dealing with scale. These contributions are realized in a new version of the Degree-Of-Interest Tree browser, supporting real-time interactive visualization and exploration of data sets containing on the order of a million nodes.


Abstract The Neotropics are the most species-rich area of the planet. Understanding the origin and maintenance of this diversity is an important goal of ecology and evolutionary biology. Success in this endeavor relies heavily on the past work of taxonomists who have collected specimens and produced the floras and monographs that constitute the foundation for the study of plant diversity. To illustrate this, we visualize collecting efforts through time and identify the importance of past taxonomic and collection efforts in generating the bulk of specimen data that broad-scale analyses rely on today. To demonstrate the importance of taxonomy for the study of Neotropical biodiversity, we showcase selected plant groups in which in-depth taxonomic understanding has facilitated exciting evolutionary and ecological research and highlight the teams of scientists who have built on the legacy of Alwyn Gentry, one of the most prolific taxonomists of the late 20th century. We also discuss challenges faced by taxonomists, including perceived subjectivity, difficulty in measuring impact, and the need to become more interdisciplinary. We end with potential solutions going forward, including integration of taxonomists in interdisciplinary research, advocacy for continued collection efforts, increased funding for alpha taxonomic research that is performed with increasingly replicable methodology, and explicit decolonization efforts to increase inclusivity and equity in the field of taxonomy. Acknowledging the central role of taxonomy and taxonomists is essential to accurately and completely describe Neotropical biodiversity patterns in an age of unprecedented extinction risk and conservation need.


As an itinerant draughtsman, fortifications engineer, painter, and rhetorician, Hans Vredeman de Vries has never fit smoothly into 19th and 20th century historical narratives that insist upon the idea of 'national schools'. The separation contemporary historians have often unwittingly placed between Vredeman's work as a graphic designer and as an architect seems inconsistent with the reality of the sixteenth century, and is often predicated upon stylistic and periodic designations defined by the Italian Renaissance. This essay's survey of historiography on Vredeman reveals a picture where 19th and 20th century authors are often at odds with writers from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, who appear less apt to draw sharp distinctions between Vredeman's role as an architectural designer and artist. As pattern books, Vredeman's series' were by nature subject to widely varying uses and receptions, more so even than other types of prints bound to historical or propagandistic narratives. The market for and reception of Vredeman's architectural books and print series during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is also characterized by exceptional diversity in terms of distribution and classification. During Vredeman's stays in Antwerp between 1561-1570 and 1575-1586 demand for the new specialty of architectural prints appears to have remained relatively stable in the Netherlands, thanks largely to the initial popularity of imported 'perspective' designs by Jean Cousin and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, as the collections of Philips II at the Escorial or Ferdinand of Tyrol at Ambras demonstrate. In such collections Vredeman's works also held an appeal for practicing artists and architects. Vincenzo Scamozzi, for example, owned an album that included plates from Vredeman's Den Eersten Boek and Das ander Beuch, as well as a complete edition of Architectura. Meanwhile from inventories it is clear that many Dutch 17th century. painters possessed 'perspectiefboeken' authored by Vredeman de Vries, specifically. Vredeman and his milieu became relatively unpopular in an atmosphere of architectural classicism after 1700. Only after a re-evaluation of 'mannerist' art and architecture had begun among Viennese art historians in the late nineteenth century, and increased authority was granted to the idea of Dutch (and Belgian) national schools was Hans Vredeman de Vries' work to again receive extensive consideration. In 1870 photolithographic reproductions of several Vredeman volumes from the Brussels library of G.A. van Trigt were published. Soon after monographic treatments by Schoy (1876) and Peters (1895) would independently claim Vredeman as part of divergent architectural heritages, introducing to the artist's reputation a kind of nationalistic tone which colored his subsequent study. Yet Schoy and Peters also insisted upon Vredeman's place in the idea of an Netherlandish architectural Renaissance. This idea has influenced many postwar studies of his undertakings, such as Mielke (1967) and Forssman (1956). Meanwhile, Vredeman's reputation as an indigenously Netherlandish specialist in perspectiven has placed him into many broader discussions about art practice as well as perception and optics, as in Alpers (1983). This at a time when Vredeman's eccentric reputation has made him again attractive to art- and architectural histories interested in materials traditionally excluded by older stylistic categories.


Experimental diabetes is associated with complex changes in renal nitric oxide (NO) bioavailability. We explored the effect of diabetes on renal cortical protein expression of endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) with respect to several determinants of its enzymatic function, such as eNOS expression, membrane localization, phosphorylation, and dimerization, in moderately hyperglycemic streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats compared with nondiabetic control rats and diabetic rats with intensive insulin treatment to achieve near-normal metabolic control. We studied renal cortical expression and localization of caveolin-1 (CAV-1), an endogenous modulator of eNOS function. Despite similar whole-cell eNOS expression in all groups, eNOS monomer and dimer in membrane fractions were reduced in moderately hyperglycemic diabetic rats compared with control rats; the opposite trend was apparent in the cytosol. Stimulatory phosphorylation of eNOS (Ser1177) was also reduced in moderately hyperglycemic diabetic rats. eNOS colocalized and interacted with CAV-1 in endothelial cells throughout the renal vascular tree both in control and moderately hyperglycemic diabetic rats. However, the abundance of membrane-localized CAV-1 was decreased in diabetic kidneys. Intensive insulin treatment reversed the effects of diabetes on each of these parameters. In summary, we observed diabetes-mediated alterations in eNOS and CAV-1 expression that are consistent with the view of decreased bioavailability of renal eNOS-derived NO.


Romania's ethnical entirety is made up of several ethnical minorities, 20 of them being represented in the national parliament. This study aims to present the main demographic aspects which characterize the Bulgarian minority in Romania. We focused on the following elements: territorial distribution of the Bulgarians, numerical evolution during the 1930-2011 period, outlining the number of inhabitants for the future 10 and 25 years, the structure by urban-rural environment, age, gender, the marital status, socio-economic structure, level of education, religion and native language.


Get the basics on four key web programming tools in one great book!PHP, JavaScript, and HTML5 are essential programming languages for creating dynamic websites that work with the MySQL database. PHP and MySQL provide a robust, easy-to-learn, open-source solution for creating superb e-commerce sites and content management. JavaScript and HTML5 add support for the most current multimedia effects. This one-stop guide gives you what you need to know about all four! Seven self-contained minibooks cover web technologies, HTML5 and CSS3, PHP programming, MySQL databases, JavaScript, PHP with templates, and web applications. Addresses how PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and HTML5 are vital tools for creating dynamic, database-driven websites and are especially important for e-commerce sitesServes as essential reading for web designers who are new to these technologies, offering a crash course covering all of these powerful technologies in this handy volume of seven self-contained minibooksCovers how to program in PHP and how to create and administer a MySQL database as well as how to manipulate MySQL data via a web interfaceShows how to create a secure website and how to code popular e-business applications such as login programs and shopping cartsWith seven books in one, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript & HTML5 All-in-One For Dummies will turn your website into the center of attention in no time at all.


The criminal adjudicatory process is meant in part to help crime victims heal. But for some crime victims, the process is re-victimizing. For decades, efforts have been made to make the criminal process fairer and more humane for victims. For example, state and federal laws are now designed to keep victims informed, allow them to be heard at sentencing, and afford them monetary restitution. But these efforts, while important, have not persuaded crime victims to trust criminal process. For example, sexual assaults remain grossly under-reported and under-prosecuted. Less than 1 percent of sexual assault crimes result in a felony conviction. Even the few victims who do receive their promised retributive outcome are not necessarily healed by the process.

Reform efforts seem to presuppose that victims of crime – or victims of particular crimes such as sexual assault – are essentially the same and have essentially the same need, namely, a need for the offender to be criminally prosecuted and sent to prison to serve the longest sentence the law allows. However, sexual assault victims are a diverse group – racially, ethnically, socio-economically, and with respect to sexual identity – and they suffer varied harms because sexual assault encompasses a wide realm of misconduct and victim-offender relationships or lack thereof. Even when victims suffer similar harms and come from similar backgrounds, they often have distinct, though sometimes overlapping, needs and objectives. Some have no desire to participate in the criminal adjudication process at all. Some will be re-traumatized by a successful criminal prosecution, even with the implementation of procedural reforms promoted by the victims' rights movement and others.

Proceeding from the premise that victims are a diverse group with differing needs, we focus on victims who might prefer, and be better served by, a non-adversarial process that is centered on their needs, namely, restorative justice. However much improved, adversarial adjudication directed at convicting and incarcerating offenders risks re-traumatizing victims rather than promoting healing. It denies victims any significant control over the process, including control over their own narratives. We explore the value of restorative justice processes as an alternative that, in many criminal cases, may be preferable from victims' perspective. We acknowledge that restorative justice processes are rarely employed in sexual assault cases in the United States and that prosecutors may have reasons, independent of victims' perceived interests, for preferring the adversary process, a criminal conviction and imprisonment. Further, some victims' advocates regard restorative justice as particularly inappropriate in the context of sexual assaults. Nonetheless, we suggest that when victims voluntarily choose to engage in a restorative justice process, it may be healing, because it gives victims agency in seeking a reckoning that fits with their particular needs and offers possibilities for addressing and repairing the harm that a criminal prosecution cannot.


We introduce and study a combinatorial optimization problem motivated by the question in the title. In the simple case where you use all objects in your room equally often, we investigate asymptotics of the optimal time to clean up in terms of the number of objects in your room. In particular, we prove a logarithmic upper bound, solve an approximate version of this problem, and conjecture a precise logarithmic asymptotic.


Femtosecond beats in time-delayed forward degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) with incoherent light in liquid and solid materials have been observed, and their origin is discussed. It is shown that the oscillations are due to the interference between pure DFWM signal and Rayleigh scattering from the excitation beams. It is also shown that, if this effect is not taken into account, incorrect conclusions can be reached.


In this paper, we present results from an online survey with 1,510 participants and an interview study with 31 participants on (secure) mobile instant messaging. Our goal was to uncover how much of a role security and privacy played in people's decisions to use a mobile instant messenger. In the interview study, we recruited a balanced sample of IT-security experts and non-experts, as well as an equal split of users of mobile instant messengers that are advertised as being more secure and/or private (e.g., Threema) than traditional mobile IMs. Our results suggest that peer influence is what primarily drives people to use a particular mobile IM, even for secure/private IMs, and that security and privacy play minor roles.


Human epidemiologic data indicate that nutrition during prenatal and early postnatal development can affect susceptibility to various chronic diseases in adulthood (the developmental origins hypothesis). Controlled studies in animal models corroborate that nutritional exposures during critical periods of development wield lasting influences on gene expression and metabolism, but our understanding of the fundamental biological mechanisms underlying such phenomena remains rudimentary. Nutritional influences on the developmental establishment of epigenetic gene regulatory mechanisms could link early nutrition to adult chronic disease susceptibility. Just as genetic variation contributes to individual susceptibility to chronic disease, it is increasingly evident that so too does epigenetic variation. Very little is known about the factors that contribute to interindividual variation in epigenotype. It is critically important to determine whether nutrition and other en
 vironmental influences during development affect the establishment of human epigenotype. Most previous studies of nutritional influences on epigenetic regulation have focused on nutrients known to affect one-carbon metabolism. For example, supplementation during development with methyl donors including folic acid and vitamin B12 appears to induce DNA hypermethylation at specific loci by increasing the flux through the DNA methylation pathway. This article will consider the mechanisms by which fatty acid nutrition during prenatal and early postnatal nutrition might affect the establishment of epigenetic gene regulatory mechanisms. Choline, a component of the phospholipid phosphatidylcholine, stands at the intersection of lipid and one-carbon metabolism; upon conversion to betaine, its three methyl groups are available to one-carbon metabolism. Potentially much more important than providing methyl groups for DNA methylation, dietary fatty acids could affect the establishment o
 f
 epigenetic mechanisms by stimulating transcription of specific genes during critical developmental windows. For example, the peroxisome proliferator activated receptor-a (PPAR-a) transcription factor is activated by a variety of fatty acids to transactivate specific genes. PPAR-amediated transcriptional activation during critical ontogenic periods could impede epigenetic silencing of genes involved in fatty acid metabolism. Lastly, recent data indicate that lipids and lipoprotein components interact directly with chromatin structure to influence gene expression. Hence, intake of specific dietary fatty acids during development could induce persistent changes in gene expression by altering the establishment of epigenetic mechanisms. Keywords: DNA methylation, Developmental origins, Epigenetics, Metabolic imprinting, Nutrition


In order to understand the applicability of multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) to the building design process, a MDO framework, titled Evolutionary Energy Performance Feedback for Design (EEPFD), along with the prototype tool, H.D.S. Beagle, were developed to support designers with the incorporation of partially automated performance feedback during the early stages of design. This paper presents 2 experimental case studies, one from the design profession and the other from a design studio, that evaluate the applicability and impact of EEPFD on the early stage design process. Through these two case studies two different interaction and automation approaches for applying EEPFD are explored as part of the framework validation. Observed benefits, challenges and suggestions of EEPFD's implementation are then presented and discussed.


Definitions, differences and relationships between formal, non-formal and informal learning have long been contentious. There has been a significant change in language and reference from adult education to what amounts to forms of learning categorised by their modes of facilitation. Nonetheless, there is currently a renewed interest in the recognition of non-formal and informal learning internationally and in Australia. This has been evidenced through the New OECD Activity on Recognition of Non-Formal and Informal Learning and recent policy developments in Australia. These developments have implications for the recognition of skills derived from informal and non-formal learning, especially for those disadvantaged in the labour market. This paper reports on data from a learning grid in a Learning Survey of labour market program participants (n = 172) from northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. We find that life (informal learning) and work experience (non-formal learning) are relatively more important for gaining self-reported skills than formal training/study. We conclude by arguing for a holistic focus on the dynamic interrelatedness of these forms of learning rather than being constrained by a deterministic dichotomy between formality and informality.


ABSTRACT Automated vehicles (AVs) could completely change mobility in the coming years and decades. As AVs are still under development and gathering empirical data for further analysis is not yet possible, existing studies mainly applied models and simulations to assess their impact. This paper provides a comprehensive review of modelling studies investigating the impacts of AVs on travel behaviour and land use. It shows that AVs are mostly found to increase vehicle miles travelled and reduce public transport and slow modes share. This particularly applies to private AVs, which are also leading to a more dispersed urban growth pattern. Shared automated vehicle fleets, conversely, could have positive impacts, including reducing the overall number of vehicles and parking spaces. Moreover, if it is assumed that automation would make the public transport system more efficient, AVs could lead to a favouring of urbanisation processes. However, results are very sensitive to model assumptions which are still very uncertain (e.g. the perception of time in AVs) and more research to gain further insight should have priority in future research as well as the development of the models and their further adaptation to AVs.


This dissertation explores how Philadelphia Catholics of the early national period sought to reconcile the conflicting forces of spiritual expression, American citizenship, and Protestant antipathy in their quest to establish an American Catholic identity. Previous historians have posited that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a colonial and early national Catholic identity, articulated by mostly native-born American laypeople and rooted in Enlightenment and republican values, yielded to a European, Ultramontane vision of Catholic community life. It has been assumed that clergy succeeded in squelching lay-led campaigns for ecclesiastical democracy and achieved widespread acquiescence to a more elaborate, authoritarian Church hierarchy as well as a more separatist orientation to the broader Protestant American culture. This study revises the prevailing historiographical formulation by revealing the contributions of the American laity to the reorganization of devotional and parish life in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It also explores Catholics' continued engagement with their Protestant neighbors. The experiences of Philadelphia Catholics demonstrate that collaboration between clergy and laity was crucial to the articulation and implementation of a common spiritual and social identity. Special attention to three key developments in the history of early national Catholicism shed light on how conflicts and collaborations between laypeople and their clerical superiors propelled American Catholic community formation. First, fruitful partnerships between clergy and Catholic publishers made it possible for the faith community to deploy a vibrant culture of print to bolster piety and to connect co-religionists both within and beyond Philadelphia. Second, disagreements over the future of trusteeism (the traditional means of founding and managing new parishes) forced Catholics to renegotiate the balance of power between clergy and laity. Finally, Catholics found it necessary to launch compelling apologetic campaigns in the face of rising nativist hostility. Clergy and laity cooperated to overturn popular misconceptions of Catholic doctrine and to demonstrate the community's respectability in the eyes of Protestants. When taken together, these sites of inquiry reveal that both the clergy and the laity were vital contributors to the creation of a distinctive American Catholic identity. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Daniel K. Richter This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/925


During perceptual tasks involving the discrimination of musical intervals, event-related potentials, specifically the P3, were measured for three subject groups: musicians without absolute pitch, musicians with absolute pitch, and nonmusicians. The two interval-discrimination tasks were a simple two-note contour task and a difficult interval-size discrimination task. Clear effects on the neural waveforms were found for both training and the presence of the absolute pitch ability. In general, training increases the amplitude and shortens the latency of the P3, while the absolute pitch ability reduces the amplitude and shortens the latency, or eliminates the P3 altogether. The absolute pitch effect may be due to the use of a long-term memory strategy involved in the correct performance of the discrimination task rather than performing the task by updating working memory each time a target occurs. Finally, these data are contrasted with those from studies involving sine tones and timbrediscrimination tasks.


CONTEXT
The importance of an abnormal ionized calcium (iCa) measurement in noncritically ill patients is unclear. Furthermore, iCa monitoring is more expensive than measurement of total calcium and consumes more laboratory resources. We hypothesize that most iCa tests are ordered for routine monitoring in asymptomatic patients, and results do not influence clinical management.

OBJECTIVE
To characterize and to intervene on iCa test-ordering practices among our institution's hospital-based internal medicine clinicians.

DESIGN
A quality-improvement project, with retrospective review of clinical records. We retrospectively identified the first 100 consecutive patients admitted to our hospital internal medicine (HIM) services during January 2012 with an iCa test ordered during their hospitalization. We reviewed clinical records to determine the appropriateness of iCa test ordering and of the ordering department. An educational intervention regarding the appropriateness of iCa testing was undertaken targeting HIM clinicians.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The effect of the intervention was assessed by identifying a sample of the first 100 consecutive patients admitted to HIM services during November 2012 and by comparing the proportion of iCa tests ordered by HIM clinicians before and after the intervention.

RESULTS
HIM services were responsible for 38% of iCa measurements before the educational intervention, with the remainder originating primarily from the Emergency Department (29%) and intensive care units (28%). After the intervention, the internal medicine services were responsible for 13% of iCa measurements, which represented a 66% reduction (p = 0.0007).

CONCLUSION
A simple intervention based on clinician education can reduce the frequency of routine iCa monitoring in stable hospitalized patients.


We present high signal-to-noise ratio Gemini and MMT spectroscopy of the optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) 130606A at redshift z = 5.913, discovered by Swift. This is the first high-redshift GRB afterglow to have spectra of comparable quality to those of z ≈ 6 quasars. The data exhibit a smooth continuum at near-infrared wavelengths that is sharply cut off blueward of 8410 Å due to absorption from Lyα at redshift z ≈ 5.91, with some flux transmitted through the Lyα forest between 7000 and 7800 Å. We use column densities inferred from metal absorption lines to constrain the metallicity of the host galaxy between a lower limit of [Si/H] ≳ −1.7 and an upper limit of [S/H] ≲ −0.5 set by the non-detection of S ii absorption. We demonstrate consistency between the dramatic evolution in the transmission fraction of Lyα seen in this spectrum over the redshift range z = 4.9–5.85 with that previously measured from observations of high-redshift quasars. There is an extended redshift interval of Δz = 0.12 in the Lyα forest at z = 5.77 with no detected transmission, leading to a 3σ upper limit on the mean Lyα transmission fraction of ≲0.2% (or (Lyα) > 6.4). This is comparable to the lowest-redshift Gunn–Peterson troughs found in quasar spectra. Some Lyβ and Lyγ transmission is detected in this redshift window, indicating that it is not completely opaque, and hence that the intergalactic medium (IGM) is nonetheless mostly ionized at these redshifts. We set a 2σ upper limit of 0.11 on the neutral fraction of the IGM at the redshift of the GRB from the lack of a Lyα red damping wing, assuming a model with a constant neutral density. GRB 130606A thus for the first time realizes the promise of GRBs as probes of the first galaxies and cosmic reionization.


Challenges in unpredictable markets, changing customer requirements, and advancing information technologies have lead to progression towards service oriented engineering and agile and lean software development. These prevailing approaches to software systems provide solutions to challenges in demanding business environments.Agile and Lean Service-Oriented Development: Foundations, Theory and Practice explores the groundwork of service-oriented and agile and lean development and the conceptual basis and experimental evidences for the combination of the two approaches. Highlighting the best tools and guidelines for these developments in practice, this book is essential for researchers and practitioners in the software development and service computing fields.


Abstract. Inspection of container cranes is an important task to maintain the all-day operation in harbours. In practice, manually carrying out the inspection process is not the best solution due to the complexity, time consumption, and cost. The manual inspection often is performed by specialists who capture images of areas of interest and then check and analyse these images visually. Once a critical area is spotted, industrial climbers are hired to check the part in-situ. The visual pre-inspection should be reliable and accurate, because the in-situ inspection is expensive, but to miss defected areas might lead to a failure of the crane. From this point of view, we came up with the main idea of the joint research project ABC-Inspekt which embodies an exploratory investigation in providing an automatic inspection of container cranes using the technology of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Images, which are captured systematically and regularly, are managed in a database to facilitate access. The access is done by an operator, but also by an image analysis approach which automatically identifies possible defects and stores them back into the database. In this paper, we introduce the database schema, the web frontend for data storage, access, and viewing, and show intermediate results for the data processing workflow.


These two volumes elucidate the manner in which there emerged, on the North China plain, hierarchically structured, functionally specialized social institutions organized on a political and territorial basis during the second millennium BC. They describe the way in which, during subsequent centuries, these institutes were diffused through much of the rest of North and Central China. Author Paul Wheatley equates the emergence of the ceremonial center, as evidenced in Shang China, with a functional and developmental stage in urban genesis, and substantiates his argument with comparative evidence from Nuclear America, Mesopotamia, Egypt, South-East Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Yoruba territories."The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City" seeks in small measure to help redress the current imbalance between our knowledge of the contemporary, Western-style city on the one hand, and of the urbanism characteristic of the traditional world on the other. Those aspects of urban theory which have been derived predominantly from the investigation of Western urbanism, are tested against, rather than applied to ancient China." The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City" examines the cosmological symbolism of the Chinese city, constructed as a world unto itself. It suggests, with a wealth of argument and evidence, that this cosmo-magical role underpinned the functional unity of the city everywhere, until new bases for urban life began to develop in the Hellenistic world. Whereas the majority of previous investigations into the nature of the Chinese city have been undertaken from the standpoint of elites, "The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City" has adopted a point of view closer to that of the social scientist than the geographer.


This paper addresses the problem of data acquisition in ad hoc and sensor networks with mobile sinks and proposes a protocol based on swarm intelligence, SIMPLE, to route data in such environments. The proposed protocol is based on a swarm agent that integrates the residual energy of nodes into the route selection mechanism and maximizes the network's lifetime by evenly balancing the residual energy across nodes and minimizing the protocol overhead. The protocol is robust and scales well with both the network size and in the presence of multiple sinks. An information theoretic lower bound on the protocol overhead associated with the swarm agent advertisement is also obtained. SIMPLE is also shown to have a lower message complexity compared to similar algorithms previously proposed in literature. Simulation results are used to verify SIMPLE's performance and robustness and also to demonstrate its superior performance over existing algorithms.


Each year, the Chief Justice of the United States makes a number of appointments to offices within the Article III judicial establishment. On its face, such a Chief-based appointment practice seems hard to square with the text of Article II, which provides for the appointment of inferior officers by the "courts of law." Scholars have noted the switch from a court-based to a Chief-based appointment system, but generally regard the Chief's authority as constitutionally benign. This Essay explores the origins of the Constitution's choice of the "courts" as the repository of appointment power. The decision was made against the backdrop of an eighteenth century English and colonial judicial practice in which the perquisites of office for chief judges included fees collected from litigants and proceeds from the sale of inferior offices. By switching to salary-paid judges and a court-based appointment system, the framers may have intended to end the corrupting influence of fees and office sales and to create a more transparent, meritocratic process. Certainly when Congress established the first federal court system, it was careful to assign the appointment power to the courts themselves. And when Chief Justice John Jay presided over the Court's first session in February 1790, he refused to make any appointments himself, insisting instead that the task was one for the Court to undertake after consultation with all the Justices. This Essay argues that the Court should reclaim its role as the designated recipient of the power to appoint inferior officers within the Article III bureaucracy. Article III creates a single supreme court, places it atop the federal judicial hierarchy, and requires all other courts and tribunals to remain inferior to that court. Article II underscores the Court's special role by providing for the assignment of appointment power to "courts of law." While the Chief might play a role as the Court's designee, the Court itself has a constitutional duty to oversee the appointment of inferior officers.


Flows of cultural heritage in textual practices are vital to sustaining Indigenous communities. Indigenous heritage, whether passed on by oral tradition or ubiquitous social media, can be seen as a "conversation between the past and the future" (Fairclough, 2012, xv). Indigenous heritage involves appropriating memories within a cultural flow to pass on a spiritual legacy. This presentation reports ethnographic research of social media practices in a small independent Aboriginal school in Southeast Queensland, Australia that is resided over by the Yugambeh elders and an Aboriginal principal.

The purpose was to rupture existing notions of white literacies in schools, and to deterritorialize the uses of digital media by dominant cultures in the public sphere. Examples of learning experiences included the following: i. Integrating Indigenous language and knowledge into media text production; ii. Using conversations with Indigenous elders and material artifacts as an entry point for storytelling; iii. Dadirri – spiritual listening in the yarning circle to develop storytelling (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2002); and iv. Writing and publicly sharing oral histories through digital scrapbooking shared via social media. The program aligned with the Australian National Curriculum English (ACARA, 2012), which mandates the teaching of multimodal text creation.

Data sources included a class set of digital scrapbooks collaboratively created in a multi-age primary classroom. The digital scrapbooks combined digitally encoded words, images of material artifacts, and digital music files. A key feature of the writing and digital design task was to retell and digitally display and archive a cultural narrative of significance to the Indigenous Australian community and its memories and material traces of the past for the future.

Data analysis of the students' digital stories involved the application of key themes of negotiated, material, and digitally mediated forms of heritage practice. It drew on Australian Indigenous research by Keddie et al. (2013) to guard against the homogenizing of culture that can arise from a focus on a static view of culture. The interpretation of findings located Indigenous appropriation of social media within broader racialized politics that enables Indigenous literacy to be understood as a dynamic, negotiated, and transgenerational flows of practice.

The findings demonstrate that Indigenous children's use of media production reflects "shifting and negotiated identities" in response to changing media environments that can function to sustain Indigenous cultural heritages (Appadurai, 1696, xv). It demonstrated how the children's experiences of culture are layered over time, as successive generations inherit, interweave, and hear others' cultural stories or maps. It also demonstrated how the children's production of narratives through multimedia can provide a platform for the flow and reconstruction of performative collective memories and "lived traces of a common past" (Giaccardi, 2012). It disrupts notions of cultural reductionism and racial incommensurability that fix and homogenize Indigenous practices within and against a dominant White norm. Recommendations are provided for an approach to appropriating social media in schools that explicitly attends to the dynamic nature of Indigenous practices, negotiated through intercultural constructions and flows, and opening space for a critical anti-racist approach to multimodal text production.


This paper deals with the possible benefits of perceptual learning in artificial intelligence. On the one hand, perceptual learning is more and more studied in neurobiology and is now considered as an essential part of any living system. In fact, perceptual learning and cognitive learning are both necessary for learning and often depend on each other. On the other hand, many works in machine learning are concerned with "abstraction" in order to reduce the amount of complexity related to some learning tasks. In the abstraction framework, perceptual learning can be seen as a specific process that learns how to transform the data before the traditional learning task itself takes place. In this paper, we argue that biologically inspired perceptual learning mechanisms could be used to build efficient low-level abstraction operators that deal with real-world data. To illustrate this, we present an application where perceptual-learning-inspired metaoperators are used to perform an abstraction on an autonomous robot visual perception. The goal of this work is to enable the robot to learn how to identify objects it encounters in its environment.


This article is the first systematic empirical study of how the American criminal justice system discovers and responds to factual error based on actual innocence. The study analyzes a data set of 260 cases of wrongful conviction of the innocent and 200 near misses (i.e., dismissals and acquittals involving an innocent defendant) to better understand the sources of and bases for exoneration; who is responsible for, as well as who opposes, exoneration; the statistical correlates of exoneration; and the primary methods and mechanisms involved in the path to exoneration. This study leads to several findings. First, wrongful convictions are difficult to reverse in the absence of dispositive evidence of innocence. The vast majority of exonerations relied on one or two bases, and even then most required DNA evidence. Second, the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system continues from the trial level to subsequent efforts to exonerate the innocent. Police and prosecutors maintain their roles, infrequently playing a central part in investigating or advocating for exoneration and serving as the largest combined source of opposition to exonerations. Finally, exonerations take a long time, even longer when based on DNA evidence, which appears to be the primary basis for clearing defendants. After examining these findings, the authors advocate for the following changes in the United States criminal justice system: 1) police and prosecutors must take a more active role in the review and reversal of factually erroneous convictions; 2) additional juridical proceedings are needed for the wrongly convicted to prove their innocence even after conviction; 3) efforts must be made to prevent wrongful convictions at the front end because the resources for freeing the wrongly convicted are so limited and the path to exoneration following conviction is filled with formidable challenges.


We investigate the quantum tunneling of electrons in an AA-stacked bilayer graphene (BLG) $n$-$p$ junction and $n$-$p$-$n$ junction. We show that Klein tunneling of an electron can occur in this system. The quasiparticles are not only chiral but are additionally described by a `cone index'. Due to the orthogonality of states with different cone indexes, electron transport across a potential barrier must strictly conserve the cone index and this leads to the protected cone transport which is unique in AA-stacked BLG. Together with the negative refraction of electrons, electrons residing in different cones can be spatially separated according to their cone index when transmitted across an $n$-$p$ junction. This suggests the possibility of `cone-tronic' devices based on AA-stacked BLG. Finally, we calculate the junction conductance of the system.


Expert input can improve clustering performance. In today's collaborative environment, the availability of crowdsourced multiple expert input is becoming common. Given multiple experts' inputs, most existing approaches can only discover one clustering structure. However, data is multi-faceted by nature and can be clustered in different ways (also known as views). In an exploratory analysis problem where ground truth is not known, different experts may have diverse views on how to cluster data. In this paper, we address the problem on how to automatically discover multiple ways to cluster data given potentially diverse inputs from multiple uncertain experts. We propose a novel Bayesian probabilistic model that automatically learns the multiple expert views and the clustering structure associated with each view. The benefits of learning the experts' views include 1) enabling the discovery of multiple diverse clustering structures, and 2) improving the quality of clustering solution in each view by assigning higher weights to experts with higher confidence. In our approach, the expert views, multiple clustering structures and expert confidences are jointly learned via variational inference. Experimental results on synthetic datasets, benchmark datasets and a real-world disease subtyping problem show that our proposed approach outperforms competing baselines, including meta clustering, semisupervised clustering, semi-crowdsourced clustering and consensus clustering.


From the mid‐1950s to the early 1980s the Treasury and the Bank of England successfully advocated a policy of restricting both private and public sector house‐building, as a key but covert instrument of their wider 'stop‐go' macroeconomic policy framework. While the intensity of restrictions varied over the economic cycle, private house‐building was restricted (through limiting mortgage availability) for almost all this period. This was achieved by keeping building society interest rates low relative to other interest rates and thus starving the building society movement of mortgage funds. Mortgage restriction was never publicly discussed and sometimes operated alongside ambitious housing targets and well‐publicized policy initiatives to boost housing demand. This article outlines the evolution of house‐building restriction, together with its impacts on the housing sector and the wider economy. We review the evolution of the policy framework and its consequences, compare the level and stability of British house‐building during this period—historically and relative to other countries—and undertake time‐series econometric analysis of its impacts on both house‐building and house prices. Finally, implications for debates regarding stop‐go policy, Britain's housing problem, and the distributional consequences of government macroeconomic policy are discussed.


The aim of this paper is to extend the analysis of Cuckoo Hashing of Devroye and Morin in 2003. In particular we make several asymptotic results much more precise. We show, that the probability that the construction of a hash table succeeds, is asymptotically $1-c(\varepsilon)/m+O(1/m^2)$ for some explicit $c(\varepsilon)$, where $m$ denotes the size of each of the two tables, $n=m(1- \varepsilon)$ is the number of keys and $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$. The analysis rests on a generating function approach to the so called Cuckoo Graph, a random bipartite graph. We apply a double saddle point method to obtain asymptotic results covering tree sizes, the number of cycles and the probability that no complex component occurs.


Model checking is an efficient technique for verifying properties on reactive systems. Partial-order reduction (POR) and symbolic model checking are two com- mon approaches to deal with the state space explosion problem in model checking. Traditionally, symbolic model checking uses BDDs which can suffer from space blow- up. More recently bounded model checking (BMC) using SAT-based procedures has been used as a very successful alternative to BDDs. However, this approach gives poor results when it is applied to models with a lot of asynchronism. This paper presents an algorithm which combines partial order reduction methods and bounded model check- ing techniques in an original way that allows efficient verification of temporal logic properties (LT LX ) on models featuring asynchronous processes. The encoding to a SAT problem strongly reduces the complexity and non-determinism of each transition step, allowing efficient analysis even with longer execution traces. The starting-point of our work is the Two-Phase algorithm (Namalesu and Gopalakrishnan) which per- forms partial-order reduction on process-based models. At first, we adapt this algo- rithm to the bounded model checking method. Then, we describe our approach for- mally and demonstrate its validity. Finally, we present a prototypal implementation and report encouraging experimental results on a small example