The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) in the second orbital Landau level at filling factor 5/2 remains enigmatic and motivates our work. We consider the effect of the quasi-2D nature of the experimental FQH system on a number of FQH states (fillings 1/3, 1/5, 1/2) in the lowest, second, and third Landau levels (LLL, SLL, TLL,) by calculating the overlap, as a function of quasi-2D layer thickness, between the exact ground state of a model Hamiltonian and the consensus variational wavefunctions (Laughlin wavefunction for 1/3 and 1/5 and the Moore-Read Pfaffian wavefunction for 1/2). Using large overlap as a stability, or FQHE robustness, criterion we find the FQHE does not occur in the TLL (for any thickness), is the most robust for zero thickness in the LLL for 1/3 and 1/5 and for 11/5 in the SLL, and is most robust at finite-thickness (4-5 magnetic lengths) in the SLL for the mysterious 5/2 state and the 7/3 state. No FQHE is found at 1/2 in the LLL for any thickness. We examine the orbital effects of an in-plane (parallel) magnetic field finding its application effectively reduces the thickness and could destroy the FQHE at 5/2 and 7/3, while enhancing it at 11/5 as well as for LLL FQHE states. The in-plane field effects could thus be qualitatively different in the LLL and the SLL by virtue of magneto-orbital coupling through the finite thickness effect. In the torus geometry, we show the appearance of the threefold topological degeneracy expected for the Pfaffian state which is enhanced by thickness corroborating our findings from overlap calculations. Our results have ramifications for wavefunction engineering--the possibility of creating an optimal experimental system where the 5/2 FQHE state is more likely described by the Pfaffian state with applications to topological quantum computing.


The U.S. Supreme Court has declared it unconstitutional to execute death row inmates who are too insane to understand the fact of their pending execution and the reasons behind it. The Court has not specified, however, what mechanisms a state may constitutionally employ to render such an inmate sane enough to execute. This Note addresses whether states may forcibly administer antipsychotic drugs to insane death row inmates in order to restore their competence for execution. It concludes that states violate both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments when execution is preceded by forcible medication with antipsychotic drugs. First, as soon as an execution date is set, a forcible medication program ceases to meet the constitutional requirement that it be "medically appropriate" because it no longer comports with the ethical standards of the medical profession, and it subverts treatment into a degrading punishment unique to incompetent death row inmates. Second, this scheme violates inmates' rights to due process because the state's interest in execution does not outweigh both an inmate's privacy interest and the state's own interest in preserving the integrity of the medical community when execution will be replaced by a life sentence without the possibility of parole.


The paper aimed at the consideration of the relationships between two major parts of the Planet: its living space and resource area under the development of scientific and technological progress, and a process of humanity globalization at large. The main out-come of the paper is that the more human society develops the total sum of living spaces is diminished and its living quality is going down. In short, so called scientific and technological progress transforms a living space into resource area. This process means that risks and dis-asters inevitably accompanied this process only enhances this transformation. The less such relatively safe living spaces remains on the Earth, the conflicts and wars for access to and possessing them are growing. As a result, this process acquires an irreversible character.


In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies-that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games-has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetitively reductive commonplaces of violence, sexism, and addiction. In other words, beyond the headline-friendly modern topoi that now dominate the discourse of Game Studies, what issues, approaches, and insights are being, if not erased, then displaced? This volume gathers together a host of scholars from different countries, institutions, disciplines, departments, and ranks, in order to present original and evocative scholarship on digital game culture. Collectively, the contributors reject the commonplaces that have come to define digital games as apolitical or as somehow outside of the imbricated processes of cultural production that govern the medium itself. As an alternative, they offer essays that explore video game theory, ludic spaces and temporalities, and video game rhetorics. Importantly, the authors emphasize throughout that digital games should be understood on their own terms: literally, this assertion necessitates the serious reconsideration of terms borrowed from other academic disciplines; figuratively, the claim embeds the embrace of game play in the continuing investigation of digital games as cultural forms. Put another way, by questioning the received wisdom that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child's play or of invidious mass entertainment, the authors productively engage with ludic ambiguities.


E-waste is a term used to describe electrical and electronic products that enter the waste stream. Currently, it is the fastest growing stream of municipal waste. Informal disposal of E-waste may cause serious health and pollution problems to humans as well as the environment. Although E-waste may represent less than 5% of the total waste discarded into landfills, yet it includes more than 70% of overall toxic waste. Not only the exact amount of E-waste generated in the UAE is unknown, but it is continuously increasing with the advent of new electronic products. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis is to assess the current and future quantities of E-waste in Abu Dhabi emirate. A questionnaire was developed to estimate the generated Ewaste quantities for three products; namely, laptops, desktops and mobile phones. Copies of this questionnaire have been distributed to the public in Al-Ain and Abu Dhabi cities to collect data about the Ewaste. This data was used to estimate the current and future quantities of E-waste. The estimated quantities of generated Ewaste in Abu Dhabi are for three products 1,151,000 mobile phones, 464,000 laptops, and 300,000 desktops. The future quantities of E-waste are predicted based on the life span of each product. They were estimated to be 827,000 laptops, 223,000 desktops, and 1,618,000 mobile phones. The results also indicated that 78% of residents in Abu Dhabi are aware of the adverse effects of E-waste and they are ready to dispose E-waste in an environmental friendly manner. This study will help government and agencies to plan for E-waste management based on the estimated quantities of E-waste.


need to increase the access of the citizens to basic education and achieve reform in the education sector, prompted Federal Government of Nigeria to inaugurate Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme in 1999. There was however the expectation that every individual that seeks the basic education will complete the required training and thus enjoy the literacy, numeracy, and communicative skills dividends; further their education or become self-sustained in the society. Amid the implementation of this programme, with the commitment of stupendous financial, human, and material resources to it, it is obvious that not all the children that seek the basic education are completing their training while many among those that complete it do so at additional cost. This paper examines the issue of wastage amid Universal Basic Education programme implementation in Nigeria. Evidences that buttressed the prevalence of the issue of wastage amid the implementation of the programme were gathered from literature just as measures to combat it and ensure that the investment on the programme yield the expected dividends such as: adequate funding of the UBE Programme, recruitment, training and motivation of teachers, combating poverty, provision of adequate infrastructure and facilities; tackling of corruption; proper mobilization of parents against the withdrawal of children from schools; creation of scholarships and bursary opportunities for students at federal, state and local levels, supported by private sector contributions; provision of jobs for graduates of educational institutions; effective monitoring of schools and teachers, among others, were raised.


Identifying and classifying action potential shapes in extracellular neural waveforms have long been the subject of research, and although several algorithms for this purpose have been successfully applied, their use has been limited by some outstanding problems. The first is how to determine shapes of the action potentials in the waveform and, second, how to decide how many shapes are distinct. A harder problem is that action potentials frequently overlap making difficult both the determination of the shapes and the classification of the spikes. In this report, a solution to each of these problems is obtained by applying Bayesian probability theory. By defining a probabilistic model of the waveform, the probability of both the form and number of spike shapes can be quantified. In addition, this framework is used to obtain an efficient algorithm for the decomposition of arbitrarily complex overlap sequences. This algorithm can extract many times more information than previous methods and facilitates the extracellular investigation of neuronal classes and of interactions within neuronal circuits.


The aim of this study was to characterize preferences of farmers with Red Danish Cattle (RDC) or Jersey herds. A breed-specific survey was established to characterize preferences of farmers for improvements in ten traits, by means of pairwise rankings using the online software 1000Minds. These pairwise rankings were based on equal economic worth of trait improvements. The RDC-survey was filled in by 87 farmers and the Jersey-survey by 76 farmers. Both RDC and Jersey herds had the highest preference for improvements in mastitis, followed by milk production. The lowest preference was given to calving difficulty. By means of a cluster analysis distinct clusters of farmers were identified and named according to the trait improvements that were the most preferred per cluster. RDC herds were divided into three different clusters: Robustness, Production & Health, and Production & Fertility. The Jersey herds were divided into the clusters Production & Fertility, Production & Robustness, and Survival. For RDC herds we found that the cluster Production & Fertility had the highest percentage of organic farmers (50%), the lowest percentage of crossbreeding and the lowest yields and herd size. The cluster Robustness had the highest yields and the highest prevalence of udder disorders, and these farmers ranked production traits very low and mastitis very high. For Jersey herds, the percentage of dead cows was highest for the cluster Survival. This cluster also ranked mastitis the highest compared to the other clusters, and contained herds with the highest prevalence of
udder disorders. These results suggest that farmers choose to improve traits that are more problematic in their herds. This study shows that heterogeneity exists in farmers' preferences for trait improvements and that some herd characteristics can be linked to the different farmer clusters. The results from this study give a strong basis for setting up customized indexes or breeding goals for the different farmer clusters, which might increase the uptake of genetic merit.


The current work examined the influence of pedagogical agents as social models to increase females' interest in engineering. Seventy-nine female undergraduate students rated pedagogical agents on a series of factors (e.g., most like themselves, most like an engineer, and most prefer to learn from). The agents were identical with the exception of differing by appearance/image in four aspects (age, gender, attractiveness, "coolness"). After selecting the agent from which they most preferred to learn, participants interacted with it for approximately 15 minutes and received a persuasive message about engineering. Results indicated that the women were more likely to choose a female, attractive, young, and cool agent as most like themselves and the one they most wanted to be like. However, they tended to select male, older, uncool agents as the most like engineers and tended to choose to learn about engineering from agents that were male and attractive, but uncool. Interacting with an agent had a positive impact on math-related beliefs. Specifically, the women reported more positive math and science related beliefs compared to their attitudes at the beginning of the semester and compared to a group of women who did not interact with an agent. Further, among the women who viewed an agent, the older version of the agent had a stronger positive influence on their math-related beliefs than the younger agent.


Objective:Significant deficiencies exist in the communication of prognosis for patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation after acute illness, in part because of clinician uncertainty about long-term outcomes. We sought to refine a mortality prediction model for patients requiring prolonged ventilation using a multicentered study design. Design:Cohort study. Setting:Five geographically diverse tertiary care medical centers in the United States (California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Washington). Patients:Two hundred sixty adult patients who received at least 21 days of mechanical ventilation after acute illness. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:For the probability model, we included age, platelet count, and requirement for vasopressors and/or hemodialysis, each measured on day 21 of mechanical ventilation, in a logistic regression model with 1-yr mortality as the outcome variable. We subsequently modified a simplified prognostic scoring rule (ProVent score) by categorizing the risk variables (age 18–49, 50–64, and ≥65 yrs; platelet count 0–150 and >150; vasopressors; hemodialysis) in another logistic regression model and assigning points to variables according to &bgr; coefficient values. Overall mortality at 1 yr was 48%. The area under the curve of the receiver operator characteristic curve for the primary ProVent probability model was 0.79 (95% confidence interval 0.75–0.81), and the p value for the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit statistic was .89. The area under the curve for the categorical model was 0.77, and the p value for the goodness-of-fit statistic was .34. The area under the curve for the ProVent score was 0.76, and the p value for the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit statistic was .60. For the 50 patients with a ProVent score >2, only one patient was able to be discharged directly home, and 1-yr mortality was 86%. Conclusion:The ProVent probability model is a simple and reproducible model that can accurately identify patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation who are at high risk of 1-yr mortality. (Crit Care Med 2012; 40:–1176)


The Weather Research and Forecast model at ⅓° resolution is used to simulate the statistics of tropical cyclone (TC) activity in the present climate of the South Pacific. In addition to the large-scale conditions, the model is shown to reproduce a wide range of mesoscale convective systems. Tropical cyclones grow from the most intense of these systems formed along the South Pacific convergence zone (SPCZ) and sometimes develop into hurricanes. The three-dimensional structure of simulated tropical cyclones is in excellent agreement with dropsondes and satellite observations. The mean seasonal and spatial distributions of TC genesis and occurrence are also in good agreement with the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) data. It is noted, however, that the spatial pattern of TC activity is shifted to the northeast because of a similar bias in the environmental forcing. Over the whole genesis area, 8.2 ± 3.5 cyclones are produced seasonally in the model, compared with 6.6 ± 3.0 in the JTWC data. Part of the interannual variability is associated with El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO-driven displacement of the SPCZ position produces a dipole pattern of correlation and results in a weaker correlation when the opposing correlations of the dipole are amalgamated over the entire South Pacific region. As a result, environmentally forced variability at the regional scale is relatively weak, that is, of comparable order to stochastic variability (±1.7 cyclones yr−1), which is estimated from a 10-yr climatological simulation. Stochastic variability appears essentially related to mesoscale interactions, which also affect TC tracks and the resulting occurrence.


This paper sets out the contrasting story of the planning, development and management of the Causeway Coastal Route and the Saint Patrick's Trail as part of the development of a broader programme of 'signature development' projects designed to create the wow factor and offer international standout for Northern Ireland. The research sits within a domain, namely linear tourism attractions, that has received limited academic attention which is surprising as most regions claim to have a trail or route of varying levels of significance, be that local, regional, national or even international. The paper situates the two cases within a broad generic model/schema of possible route experience: entire route visited, certain nodes visited, section and nodes visited, and nodes visited that are connected to the route itself. The history behind both routes are explored, the Causeway Coastal Route is essentially a general touring sightseeing route which has been given the label of being 'the essential Irish journey', connecting several 'big build' visitor attractions, including the Walled City of Derry, the 1st UK city of culture (2013), the Giant's Causeway World Heritage Site which saw the opening of a new visitor centre in July 2012, and the opening of Titanic Belfast in April 2012, the capital; city's premier maritime heritage attraction. In contrast, the Saint Patrick's trail is a themed religious/pilgrimage route, connecting places and spaces associated with Saint Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland. It was designed as a literal and metaphorical series of journeys through landscape and culture, myth and reality that allows visitors to follow in the footsteps of Patrick's personal journey from ordinary man to saint. The aim was also to allow people to reflect on how his legacy has shaped the contemporary landscape, culture and Christian heritage of Ireland. In essence the route centres on several attraction clusters within three key nodes, at the start and end of the route and a key intervening opportunity node of attractions around the believed burial site of the Saint.A stakeholder analysis was undertaken for both routes in 2012, involving deep interviews with respect to each route in relation to wider 'big build' projects, challenges in planning and development of both routes and issues regarding management, involving the type of partnerships that are in place, interpretation at attractions at nodes along or near to the routes, as well as wider service issues involving accommodation and hospitality provision. The results of the stakeholder analysis revealed that with the routes formalised, footfall at key attractions has risen as well as on the routes themselves. A consistent 'message' is effectively being presented to visitors via bespoke interpretation panels that are specific in look for each of the routes. Stakeholder analysis of the 'other' however revealed contrasting views of the extent to which the routes offered 'international standout' and 'value for money'.


Cloud computing is considered to be a new service provider technology for users and businesses. However, the cloud environment is facing a number of challenges. Resource allocation in a way that is optimum for users and cloud providers is difficult because of lack of data sharing between them. On the other hand, job scheduling is a basic issue and at the same time a big challenge in reaching high efficiency in the cloud computing environment. In this paper, "the cloud resources management problem" is investigated that includes allocation and scheduling of computing resources, such that providers achieve the high efficiency of resources and users receive their needed applications in an efficient manner and with minimum cost. For this purpose, a group technology based non-linear mathematical model is presented with an aim at minimization of load difference of servers, number of transfers between servers, number of active virtual machines, maximum construction time, the cost of performing jobs and active servers energy consumption. To solve the model, a meta-heuristic multi-objective hybrid Genetic and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is proposed for resource allocation and scheduling. In order to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the algorithm, a number of problems with different dimensions are randomly created and accordingly the efficiency and convergence capability of the suggested algorithm is investigated. The results indicated that the proposed hybrid method has had an acceptable performance in generating high quality, diverse and sparse solutions.


In pursuit of energy harvesting from ocean waves, our recent progress on studying wave interaction with a lift-type rotor is discussed in this paper. The particular focus is on the characterization of the rotor's unidirectional responsiveness in waves. The rotor consists of six hydrofoil blades in two sets. One blade set has three blades laid out as a vertical-axis wind turbine of the Darrieus type. The other blade set has three blades configured like a Wells turbine. In combination, the formed rotor can be driven by flows in any direction to perform a unidirectional rotation about its vertically mounted shaft. This unidirectional responsiveness of the rotor also holds in waves, making the rotor an effective device for wave energy conversion. For the parametric study of the rotor, hydrofoil blades using different cross-sectional profiles and chord lengths have been employed to configure the rotor. The rotor was then tested in a wave flume under various wave conditions in a freewheeling mode. Experimental results were analyzed and discussed. The yielded research findings will greatly enhance the fundamental understanding of the rotor performance in waves and effectively guide the prototype rotor development for practical applications.


The paper assesses the status of formal library and information science (LIS) education provided in India. It is based on a study carried out to bring out the perspective and the challenges in LIS education by analyzing the LIS courses, its structure and contents, availability of faculty, research contribution, infrastructural facilities, etc. A total of 33 universities, representing each region of India, were selected as sample. Content analysis method was applied to analyse the contents of the websites under eight categories. Findings reveal that a diversified level of LIS courses is observed to suit the demand and employability of students at various job levels. LIS courses are updated and designed to meet the objectives of an advanced LIS curriculum. Lack of adequate faculty is found to be a major setback in imparting quality LIS education. The paper recommends establishment of a national accreditation council for LIS education to uphold quality and standard in LIS courses. More of technology oriented practical components as well as scope to develop soft skill and professional ethics should figure in the syllabus. The paper has originality as it contributes to the knowledge regarding current state of LIS education in India. It attempts to draw attention of the financing and regulatory authorities of higher education to focus on developing needed faculties and facilities urgently.


Background: Several local and systemic conditions predispose the eye to the development of dry eye disorders due to tear film dysfunction, which is presented in variable degrees of eye irritations and inflammation. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is among the most common risk factors of dry eye disease (DED). It is more common in older females than males. Tear film assessment can be tested with some simple tests such as Schirmer's test (ST), fluorescein strip (FS) (breakup time [BUT]) test, and lissamine green strip (LGS) test. Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the tear film dysfunction in diabetic patients with ST, FS papers, and LGS papers and compare their diagnostic values. Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional hospital-based study, consecutive 126 diabetic patients were examined at Jabir Abu Eliz Diabetic Center in Khartoum for their tear film dysfunction. All selected patients had simultaneously undergone ST, FS (BUT) test, and LGS test in the same order and equal definite intervals in all patients over a 2-month period (September 1, 2013–November 1, 2013). Clinical and personal information was obtained by direct patients and chart review before complete ophthalmic examinations. Results: The mean age of the study group was 53 ± 12.1 years (30–78 years). Fifty-seven patients (45.2%) were female and 69 (54.8%) were male. In the age group, 11 (8.7%) patients were of type I DM, whereas 115 (91.3%) of type II DM. Forty-four (34.9%) patients had good DM control and 82 (65.1%) had poor DM control. The ST results of the current study demonstrated the presence of 142 patients (56.3%) in the "normal Schirmer's grade," 49 patients (19.4%) in "mild-to-moderate Schirmer's grade," and 61 patients (24.2%) in "severe Schirmer's grade." In the BUT "FS" test, 165 patients (65.5%) gave normal results, whereas 87 patients (34.5%) showed severe tear dysfunction results, with a highly significant difference with P = 0.001. Whereas, in the LGS test, 201 patients (79.8%) were of "normal grade" results and 51 patients (20.2%) were "mild-to-moderate" grade. Conclusion: DED is an important feature of poorly controlled DM, which can be easily detected by performing a variety of simple quick tests such as the ST, fluorescein tear BUT test, and LGS test. There is notable variation among these three tears; therefore, a combination of any two tests is necessary. There is a strong correlation between qualities of the DM control, duration of DM, and severity of DED.


The Law and Finance account of the ubiquity of controlling shareholders in developing markets is based on conditions in the capital market: poor shareholder protection law prevents controlling shareholders from parting with control out of fear of exploitation by a new controlling shareholder who acquires a controlling position in the market. This explanation, however, does not address why we observe any minority shareholders in such markets, or why controlling shareholders in developing markets are most often family-based. This paper looks at the impact of bad law on shareholder distribution in a very different way. Developing countries typically provide not only poor minority protection, but poor commercial law generally. Specifically, the paper considers the impact on the distribution of shareholders of conditions in the product market, where the driving legal influence is the quality of commercial law that supports the corporation's actual business activities, and where the presence of a controlling family shareholder may help support reputation-based trading in a bad commercial law environment.


Reason for withdrawal from publication

Authors have made no progress with this protocol in over two years due to difficulties with identifying potentially suitable studies. The protocol has been withdrawn. To view the published versions of this article, please click the 'Other versions' tab.


T cell receptor (TCR) gene transfer is a convenient method to produce antigen‐specific T cells for adoptive therapy. However, the expression of two TCR in T cells could impair their function or cause unwanted effects by mixed TCR heterodimers. With five different TCR and four different T cells, either mouse or human, we show that some TCR are strong – in terms of cell surface expression – and replace weak TCR on the cell surface, resulting in exchange of antigen specificity. Two strong TCR are co‐expressed. A mouse TCR replaces human TCR on human T cells. Even though it is still poorly understood why some TCRα/β combinations are preferentially expressed on T cells, our data suggest that, in the future, designer T cells with exclusive tumor reactivity can be generated by T cell engineering.


We describe the case of a twenty-nine year-old woman presenting a lamellar desquamation on the abdomen, submammary folds and on the limbs. During recent years the patient suffered neither from bowel disorders, nor from dryness of the skin. Laboratory tests revealed high values of parathormone and a high level of antiendomysial antibodies. The total bone-mineral density was about 78% of normal levels. A duodenal mucous membrane specimen showed total atrophy of the villi. Skin biopsy revealed an acquired ichthyosis mimicking an ichthyosis vulgaris. The patient underwent a gluten-free diet, supported by folic acid and vitamin D and six months later, after the regression of secondary hyperparathyroidism, a remarkable improvement of the cutaneous symptoms was obtained.


The late-medieval French Debat des herauts d'armes reinforces a sense of French collective identity within its readership by providing a comparison of France and England in which France is systematically presented as superior. This chapter will argue that the Debate Betwene the Heralds, John Coke's 1549 translation of the Debat, appropriates and manipulates the source material in order to make it acceptable to a patriotic English readership during a period of war between England and France. Nevertheless, by 'rewriting' his source, Coke retains its fundamental purpose: the promotion of positive collective self-identity against a largely negative representation of the cultural and political other. The chapter will therefore illustrate the important role played by translation in the imagining of collective identity.


Semiconductor based micro- and nano-structures grown in a systematic and controlled way using selective area growth are emerging as a promising route toward devices for integrated optical circuitry in optoelectronics and photonics field. This dissertation focuses on the experimental investigation of the nonlinear optical effects in selectively grown gallium nitride micro-pyramids that act as optical cavities, zinc oxide submicron rods and indium gallium nitride multiple quantum well core shell submicron tubes on the apex of GaN micro pyramids that act as optical antennae. Localized spatial excitation of these low dimensional semiconductor structures was optimized for nonlinear optical light (NLO) generation due to second harmonic generation (SHG) and multi-photon luminescence (MPL). The evolution of both processes are mapped along the symmetric axis of the individual structures for multiple fundamental input frequencies of light. Effects such as cavity formation of generated light, electron-hole plasma generation and coherent emission are observed. The efficiency and tunability of the frequency conversion that can be achieved in the individual structures of various geometries are estimated. By controlling the local excitation cross-section within the structures along with modulation of optical excitation intensity, the nonlinear optical process generated in these structures can be manipulated to generate coherent light in the UV-Blue region via SHG process or green emission via MPL process. The results show that these unique structures hold the potential to convert red input pulsed light into blue output pulsed light which is highly directional.


Apatite has recently gained considerable attention as a mineral with many uses within the Earth and planetary sciences. Apatite chemistry has recently given new insight into a wide range of geological processes and tools, for example, magmatism, metasomatism, planetary geochemistry, and geochronology. We expand the utility of apatite here by presenting a novel way to fingerprint magma chemistry and petrogenesis using apatite inclusions within robust titanite and zircon. We present trace element data from apatite mineral inclusions shielded within magmatic zircon and titanite. Importantly, apatite inclusion and host titanite chemistries detailed in this study allow estimation of the whole-rock Sr and SiO2. We show how these data can be used to assess the degree of fractionation of the host magma and to calculate key trace element abundances and ratios. We demonstrate that the inclusions can be linked to discrete periods in the crystallization history of the host phases, thus providing insight into petrogenesis. The results highlight that apatite compositions might discriminate modern granitoids (younger than 2.5 Ga) from Archean–Proterozoic transitional granitoid compositions (sanukitoid signatures). Development of such a petrological tool has important potential for interpretation of provenance and a better understanding of the secular evolution of the continental crust, including that of early Earth.


Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services based on them both locally and through a Facebook application, and plans to make this information useful beyond the boundaries of arXiv.


Control applications are considered to be among the core applications in cyber-physical and embedded realtime systems, for which jitter is typically an important factor. This paper investigates whether it is possible to guarantee certain amount of jitter for a given set of applications on a shared platform. The effect of jitter on the stability of control applications and its relation with the latency will be discussed. The importance arises from the fact that it is considerably easier to manage the constant part of the delay (known as latency), while the process of coping with the varying part of the delay (known as jitter) is more involved. The proposed solution guarantees certain jitter limits, and at the same time does not lead to overly pessimistic latency values. The results are later used in a design optimization problem to minimize the resource utilized.


IMPORTANCE
Ayres Sensory Integration® is an evidence-based practice that requires a comprehensive assessment before intervention. The Evaluation in Ayres Sensory Integration (EASI) is intended for this purpose, and psychometric data are needed to determine its validity and reliability.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the internal consistency of four EASI Praxis tests and their validity as developmental measures.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional developmental design.

SETTING
Participants' homes.

PARTICIPANTS
Typically developing children and young adolescents, ages 6 to 12 yr (N = 234). Outcomes and Measures: We analyzed four EASI Praxis tests using Cronbach's α, Pearson correlation coefficients, and one-way analysis of variance to explore internal consistency and developmental trends.

RESULTS
The findings indicate moderate to high internal consistency for all tests. Significant correlations between age and praxis scores indicate that the EASI Praxis tests are sensitive to developmental changes.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
Occupational therapists can have confidence in the internal consistency and sensitivity to developmental changes of these praxis scores through early adolescence. What This Article Adds: Occupational therapists administering EASI Praxis tests can have confidence that they consistently measure praxis ability and are sensitive to developmental changes across ages 6 to 12 yr. The results suggest that praxis continues to develop into early adolescence, and adolescents may benefit from assessment and intervention targeting praxis ability.


Aggregate level simulation procedures have been used in many areas of marketing. In this paper we show how individual level simulations may be used support marketing theory development. More specifically, we show how a certain type of simulations that is based on complex systems studies (in this case Stochastic Cellular Automata) may be used to generalize diffusion theory one of the fundamental theories of new product marketing. Cellular Automata models are simulations of global consequences, based on local interactions between individual members of a population, that are widely used in complex system analysis across disciplines. In this study we demonstrate how the Cellular Automata approach can help untangle complex marketing research problems. Specifically, we address two major issues facing current theory of innovation diffusion: The first is general lack of data at the individual level, while the second is the resultant inability of marketing researchers to empirically validate the main assumptions used in the aggregate models of innovation diffusion. Using a computer-based Cellular Automata Diffusion Simulation, we demonstrate how such problems can be overcome. More specifically, we show that relaxing the commonly used assumption of homogeneity in the consumers' communication behavior is not a barrier to aggregate modeling. Thus we show that notwithstanding some exceptions, the well-known Bass model performs well on aggregate data when the assumption that that all adopters have a possible equal effect on all other potential adopters is relaxed. Through Cellular Automata we are better able to understand how individual level assumptions influence aggregate level parameter values, and learn the strengths and limitations of the aggregate level analysis. We believe that this study can serve as a demonstration towards a much wider use of Cellular Automata models for complex marketing research phenomena.


Globalization. Sustainability. Technology. Diversity. Learning. Convergence of the public and private sectors. These are the big issues on the minds of young leaders today--the challenges they most want to, and must, pursue. In Passion and Purpose, dozens of recent Harvard Business School MBAs share personal stories on assuming the mantle of leadership in ways unlike any previous generation. In candid accounts of their successes and setbacks--from launching start-ups to taking on the family business to helping kids in the Arabian Gulf to harnessing new technology and developing clean energy--they reveal how the next generation of ideas, aspirations, and practices are shaping business and redefining leadership around the world. Drawing on insights from a survey of 500 students from top U.S. business schools, Passion and Purpose provides an overview of big, hot-button issues, followed by firsthand accounts from young leaders who are tackling these issues head-on. Their personal stories are rounded out with broader perspectives from established luminaries in business, academia, and the public sector, including Dominic Barton (Managing Director of McKinsey & Company), Nitin Nohria (dean of Harvard Business School), David Gergen (CNN analyst, presidential advisor and director of Harvard's Center for Public Leadership), Carter Roberts (CEO of World Wildlife Fund), and many others. Passion and Purpose offers profound insight into the values and vision of tomorrow's leaders, and inspiration and ideas for all aspiring leaders who hope to lead change in the world.


Line-transect estimates of abundance generally assume that distances and angles to animals are measured without error. Biased distance measurements will lead to corresponding bias in abundance estimates. Efforts to address this have been made, but measuring distance to cetaceans at sea remains problematic. Four distance-estimation experiments were conducted to explore relationships between estimated and measured distance. Heteroscedasticity was found in all four cases. Preliminary evidence suggested that an observer differed in the ability to judge distance to fixed, continuously-visible cues and ephemeral, cetacean cues, which calls into the question the common practice of using marker buoys as cetacean proxies in distance-estimation experiments. Two studies found visual estimates to be positively biased, and two studies found reticule measurements to be negatively biased. Suitable correction factors were developed to address systematic bias from visual estimates, but these varied widely among observers and were sometimes non-linear. Errors in three studies showed positive skew, suggesting that ranges were overestimated to a larger degree than they were underestimated. If reticule and photogrammetric measurements yield log-normally distributed errors generally, then a least-squares regression will always overestimate the correction factor, underestimate range, and overestimate abundance. Photogrammetric methods to measure range to cetaceans performed well, and their use is encouraged. When measurements cannot be made to all sightings, however, it is recommended that experiments be conducted that generate sufficient sample size (of the target species, across typical survey conditions, and beyond the maximum range that most estimates will be made during the survey) to assess error distributions, examine evidence for non-linearity, and to consider inter-observer differences. Distance experiments, and training on survey protocols, can be conducted using ships of opportunity prior to the beginning of a dedicated survey, which would improve observer efficiency while reducing the costs of dedicated vessel time.


This study examines the relationship between inflation uncertainty and price components in general price level. It examines which price components at general price level cause inflation uncertainty, and also which price components are more affected by such uncertainty. The Turkish economy is observed with regard to the time period between January 2003 and September 2011, and inflation uncertainty is obtained by being defined as conditional variance within the inflation process, which itself is estimated according to not only a function of its past values, but also a set of data including money supply, industrial production index, exchange rate, and interest rate. The relationship between price components and inflation uncertainty is analysed, using Granger Causality Test, Impulse Response and Variance Decompositions Analysis. As per the findings, the effect of inflation uncertainty on the price components of general price level, and similarly, the effects of price components of general price level on the inflation uncertainty differ.


The ability of cats (Fells catus) to colonize most land habitats worldwide led to an increasing number of feral cat populations in many areas where food resources are easily available. High densities of feral cats in urban areas, particularly in conservancies, have the potential to impact negatively on both human and local wildlife populations. Of particular interest was the Howard College Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a registered conservancy where there are differing opinions concerning the resident feral cat population. Consequently methods of controlling feral cat populations and the implications of these methods were reviewed. Despite various methods of feral cat population control existing there are two basic categories: either eradication or reproductive regulation. It is suggested that to control the feral cat population effectively in this urban conservancy, a suitable and ongoing sterilization programme, that is run in conjunction with a feral cat feeding programme, needs to be Implemented. Both programmes need to be long-term and overseen by management. The feral cat population needs to be maintained at a level that allows the lowest migration rate into the conservancy, as well as a predation rate that will not negatively affect the resident wildlife populations. This may require some removal of feral cats at the start of a programme. Whatever management actions are followed, a monitoring programme must be put in place to document how effective the actions are.


Experimental investigations have been reported on steady state natural convection from the outer surface of horizontal ducts in air. Five ducts have been used with aspect ratios (Γ=duct height/duct width) of 2, 1, and 0.5. The ducts are heated using internal constant heat flux heating elements. The temperatures along the surface and peripheral directions of the duct wall are measured. Longitudinal (circumference averaged) heat transfer coefficients along the side of each duct are obtained for laminar and transition regimes of natural convection heat transfer. Total overall averaged heat transfer coefficients are also obtained. Longitudinal (circumference averaged) Nusselt numbers are evaluated and correlated using the modified Rayleigh numbers for transition regime using the axial distance as a characteristic length. Furthermore, total overall averaged Nusselt numbers are correlated with the modified Rayleigh numbers, the aspect ratio, and area ratio for the laminar and transition regimes. The longitudinal or total averaged heat transfer coefficients are observed to decrease in the laminar region and to increase in the transition region. Laminar regimes are obtained only at very small heat fluxes, otherwise, transitions are observed.


We describe the synthesis of a novel biphenyl azobenzene derivative exhibiting: (i) a protected thiol anchoring group in the α-position to readily form self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on Au surfaces; and (ii) a terminal perfluorinated benzene ring in the ω-position to modify the surface properties. The design of this molecule ensured both an efficient in situ photoswitching between the trans and cis isomers when chemisorbed on Au(111), due to the presence of a biphenyl bridge between the thiol protected anchoring group and the azo dye, and a significant variation of the work function of the SAM in the two isomeric states, induced by the perfluorinated phenyl head group. By exploiting the light responsive nature of the chemisorbed molecules, it is possible to dynamically modify in situ the work function of the SAM-covered electrode, as demonstrated both experimentally and by quantum-chemical calculations, revealing changes in work function up to 220 meV. These findings are relevant for tuning the work function of metallic electrodes, and hence to dynamically modulate charge injection at metal-semiconductor interfaces for organic opto-electronic applications.


Gaseous diffusion was historically the most widely used technology for military production of highly enriched uranium. Since June 2013, all gaseous diffusion enrichment plants worldwide are permanently shut down. The experience with decommissioning some of these plants has shown that they contain large amounts of uranium particles deposited in the cascade equipment. This article evaluates the potential of using uranium particle deposition to understand and reconstruct the operating histories of gaseous diffusion enrichment plants. First, a squared-off cascade enrichment model is derived to estimate the enrichment capacity of a reference plant. Then, using a cross-flow filtration model, the mass of solid uranium particles deposited over time in the tubular separation membranes of the stage diffusers is calculated. Finally, potential techniques to characterize these uranium deposits and help reconstruct the operating history of the plant are assessed.


Based on the premise that language consists of two major dimensions: linguistic and socio-cultural, the present study discusses the way men and women are socialized into differing gender roles and shows how the linguistic usage of men and women reflects these differences. And, with this in mind, Miller's Death of a Salesman is analyzed with a view to seeing whether Miller delineated his characters according to the stylistic variations in male-female interaction. The umbrella, under which the co-variation of language and gender is examined, is the relationship between language and power. The rationale, then, is that absence of serious attention to such a relationship is a major weakness of linguistic theory in the 21st century. It is hoped that the present study will be a modest contribution towards a clear understanding of the interrelationship between language, gender and power. The present study stresses the fact that gender differentiation in language does not exist in a vacuum, it interacts in a complex way with other kinds of social differentiation. Language and gender are inextricably linked. But the fact that gender is accomplished through talk is only now being addressed seriously by sociolinguists.


This paper describes our solution for the MSR Video to Language Challenge. We start from the popular ConvNet + LSTM model, which we extend with two novel modules. One is early embedding, which enriches the current low-level input to LSTM by tag embeddings. The other is late reranking, for re-scoring generated sentences in terms of their relevance to a specific video. The modules are inspired by recent works on image captioning, repurposed and redesigned for video. As experiments on the MSR-VTT validation set show, the joint use of these two modules add a clear improvement over a non-trivial ConvNet + LSTM baseline under four performance metrics. The viability of the proposed solution is further confirmed by the blind test by the organizers. Our system is ranked at the 4th place in terms of overall performance, while scoring the best CIDEr-D, which measures the human-likeness of generated captions.


Abstract : The ability to rapidly produce and deploy information technology (IT) based capabilities in the United States Department of Defense (DOD) that meet the ever-evolving needs of the Warfighter is a challenging endeavor. DOD acquisition projects typically follow a highly structured, top-down, step-by-step process, based on the assumption that an end state is known. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in modern IT projects. Long development cycles and rapidly changing requirements make it difficult to properly identify the end state of an IT system at the onset of the project. Agile development is an industry accepted software development practice that is now beginning to emerge in Government programs. This report includes background information on Agile principles and methodologies from peer-reviewed industry and academic materials, MITRE technical reports, as well as interviews with members of DOD Programs that have implemented Agile development methodologies. This report describes how Agile development principles can be applied to an IT systems engineering effort, and explains how an Agile methodology could be used to benefit DOD Government acquisition and development programs. This report is intended to be used as a guidebook, to provide specific recommendations regarding the implementation of an Agile methodology. This handbook will be a living document and will be updated as lessons are learned.


We propose and study properties of maximum likelihood estimators in the class of conditional transformation models. Based on a suitable explicit parameterization of the unconditional or conditional transformation function, we establish a cascade of increasingly complex transformation models that can be estimated, compared and analysed in the maximum likelihood framework. Models for the unconditional or conditional distribution function of any univariate response variable can be set up and estimated in the same theoretical and computational framework simply by choosing an appropriate transformation function and parameterization thereof. The ability to evaluate the distribution function directly allows us to estimate models based on the exact likelihood, especially in the presence of random censoring or truncation. For discrete and continuous responses, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators. A reference software implementation of maximum likelihood‐based estimation for conditional transformation models that allows the same flexibility as the theory developed here was employed to illustrate the wide range of possible applications.


Developing efficient and guaranteed nonconvex algorithms has been an important challenge in modern machine learning. Algorithms with good empirical performance such as stochastic gradient descent often lack theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we analyze the class of homotopy or continuation methods for global optimization of nonconvex functions. These methods start from an objective function that is efficient to optimize (e.g. convex), and progressively modify it to obtain the required objective, and the solutions are passed along the homotopy path. For the challenging problem of tensor PCA, we prove global convergence of the homotopy method in the "high noise" regime. The signal-to-noise requirement for our algorithm is tight in the sense that it matches the recovery guarantee for the best degree-4 sum-of-squares algorithm. In addition, we prove a phase transition along the homotopy path for tensor PCA. This allows to simplify the homotopy method to a local search algorithm, viz., tensor power iterations, with a specific initialization and a noise injection procedure, while retaining the theoretical guarantees.


Compelled commercial speech, including mandatory labeling and the disclosure of factually true information, should not be seen as a separate category of speech under the First Amendment. Rather, compelled commercial speech should be subject to the same level of protection as commercial speech generally. This means commercial speech compulsions, such as mandatory disclosures and labeling requirements, must be supported by a substantial government interest. The assertion of a consumer "right to know" does not constitute such an interest and cannot, by itself, justify compelled commercial speech. Allowing such a justification for compelled commercial speech would eviscerate any meaningful First Amendment protection against compelled commercial speech and, threaten core First Amendment values. Such protection against speech compulsions will not inhibit government efforts to protect consumers nor prevent consumers from obtaining desired information about products and services. A dynamic market discovery process, with only limited and targeted government interventions, is a more effective way to serve the consumer interest in more complete information about goods and services. Most existing compelled disclosure requirements are consistent with this approach to compelled commercial speech, but some new and proposed disclosure requirements, including those for genetically modified organisms, are likely unconstitutional.


YouTube's significance is partly to do with its pre-history, write HENRY JENKINS and JOHN HARTLEY YouTube: home port for lip-syncers, karaoke singers, trainspotters, birdwatchers, skateboarders, hip-hoppers, small-time wrestling federations, educators, third-wave feminists, churches, proud parents, poetry slammers, gamers, human rights activists, hobbyists. It gets ten hours of new content every minute. Where did all that come from? There is much that is new about YouTube, but there is also much that is old. The emergence of ?Do-It-Yourself? cultures of all kinds over the past several decades paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption and diverse use of new media. YouTube has gone from nowhere to cultural ubiquity in a couple of years because we already know what to do with it. Among its precursors were the zines of the political and cultural avant-garde of the 1970s and ?80s, closely tied to the growth of punk rock and the emergence of Riot Grrl feminism. They were also part of a larger history of amateur publishing; the science fiction fan community can be traced back to the 1920s. These DIY -- or DIWO: do it with others-- impulses spilled over from print zines to include mix tapes and home videos. Modern cyberculture can trace its roots back to the 1960s, with ?people?s radio,? early video activism, underground newspapers and comics; all efforts to deploy low-cost media tools and practices towards alternative ends. Many early netizens explicitly embraced the value of participatory culture. These utopian pioneers would greet YouTube?s amateurs not as mindless kids but as the fulfilment of their hopes and a validation of their predictions. The digital revolution rhetoric has assumed new media displaces the old. But YouTube exemplifies a ?convergence culture,? with its complex interactions and collaborations between corporate and grassroots media. YouTube does not so much change the conditions of production as alter the contexts of circulation and reception. Amateur, activist and avant-garde works now reach a larger public. Yet, many of those earlier advocates remain sceptical that a commercial company such as YouTube can enable alternative politics. If we want to see a more democratic culture, they argue, we need anti-corporate outlets, greater diversity among participants, more debate about whose work gets seen and how it is valued. But as Geekcorps?s founder, Ethan Zuckerman, says, any medium sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also, under the right circumstances, be deployed to bring down a government. Right now, people are learning how to produce, upload and circulate content. What happens next is up to us all. With YouTube, there is almost infinite scope for creative content and new ideas to be produced without the need for avant-garde leadership, expert filtering or institutional control. The so-called long tail of self-made content is accessible to anyone near a computer terminal. While most people can read, very few publish in print. Hence active contribution to science, journalism and even fictional storytelling has been restricted to expert elites, while most of the general population makes do with ready-made entertainment. But the internet does not distinguish between literacy and publication. So now we are entering a new kind of digital literacy, where everyone is a publisher and whole populations have the chance to contribute as well as consume. We can use the internet for daydreaming, mischief and time-wasting, but we can also move on to other functionality levels and purposes, including science, journalism and works of the imagination. You can find all this on YouTube. If we see YouTube as operating without a history, we erase the politics behind those struggles to prepare the way, and we may end up accepting far less than what we bargained for, or what might be possible if we participate. By reclaiming what happened before, we will have a basis for judging how well YouTube is serving participatory culture and the growth of knowledge among all sections of society. We may also find openings for ?a critique, a goal, a community, and a context? of the kind that motivated earlier DIY media-makers. As they say in The Matrix: ?I don?t know the future. I didn?t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it?s going to begin.? ? Henry Jenkins co-directs the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor John Hartley is the research director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Creative Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology. This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.


Duplication is a technique frequently employed to achieve high reliability for a repairable system. Although the philosophy of duplication is that it takes two faults to place a system out of service, there are generally some critical single faults that cause a system failure. This paper considers the effect of such a set of faults on a repairable system's reliability. It is shown that even a small number of such faults may severely degrade the mean time to system failure and the expected downtime for an otherwise highly reliable system.


ABSTRACT I analyse epistemic and non-epistemic factors involved in expert advisory practices and decision-making relating to the regulation of health claims in the US, EU, and Japan. I consider the changes that have taken place, historically, in regulatory policies in all three cases in order to confirm the hypothesis that not only epistemic, but also non-epistemic factors and values determine the methodological decisions on which expert assessments are based for the authorization of health claims. I found that the current European, US, and Japanese assessment systems are based on different kinds of what have been termed 'epistemic policies' and that these policies and other characteristics shape what might be identified as differing 'policy styles' in the regulation of health claims.


Traditional image retrieval systems are content based image retrieval systems which rely on low-level features for indexing and retrieval of images. CBIR systems fail to meet user expectations because of the gap between the low level features used by such systems and the high level perception of images by humans. Semantics based methods have been used to describe images according to their high level features. In this paper, we performed experiments to identify the failure of existing semantics-based methods to retrieve images in a particular semantic category. We have proposed a new semantic category to describe the intra-region color feature. The proposed semantic category complements the existing high level descriptions. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.


The present article discusses a well-known religious philosophical and partially legal doctrine of the "Just war", developed in the Christian tradition by St. Augustine, St. Tomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vittoria, Francisco Suarez, Hugo Grotius and many other thinkers. The main thesis of the doctrine is that war will be just only if it corresponds to certain criteria, such as autoritas principi (waged by the sovereign), justa causa (on just aim) and with recta intentio (animus) or the aim and will to wage war in order to restore justice and not because of personal hate, revenge, lust for glory, etc. However, the impact of the doctrine was not limited by the Middle Ages and the Christian philosophic discourse. This doctrine shaped both emerging international law and international humanitarian law in one or another way. Even though it did not survive intact through the changing reality of the world, it is not so hard to trace the reflections of this doctrine even in contemporary international law. For example, while evaluating the armed conflict we still use the autoritas principi principle (armed conflicts may be fought only by defined subjects such as states or militarily - politically organised dissidents), moreover, when we are dealing with the concept of combatancy, the same principle applies in establishing whether a person is a legal fighter in the conflict or not, because his status directly stems from his belonging to the party of the conflict. With its strictly limited possibilities to use force, the contemporary jus contra bellum also somewhat resembles the doctrine, not only in the sense of justa causa (such as a possibility of unilateral use of force by the state only in self-defence) but also in recta intentio (e.g. the United Nations Security Council may order the use of force only with the intention to re-establish peace). Therefore, even though the doctrine is the product of the Middle Ages thought, it is not forgotten in our days. The possible military strike against Iran in order to stop it from developing nuclear weapon is already discussed in the light of this doctrine. Moreover, authors (though mainly not lawyers) discussing inadequacies of current international legal framework for the use of force (e.g. the need for humanitarian intervention) find their inspiration in the doctrine.


textabstractThe study seeks to provide a better understanding of the way civil judges of lower courts in Poland – a relatively new Member States of the EU - behave in the context of EU law and, moreover, to explain how the national judges adapt to the new legal circumstances created by the law of the European Union. For that purpose, the study examines the way national judges approach the law of the European Union by providing empirical, that is to say quantitative and qualitative data gathered among Polish private law judges of lower courts. The respective data was collected by means of a questionnaire distributed among the respective judges and semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with them.

The present study is a descriptive attempt at evaluating and explaining what is actually happening in the Polish civil courts in the context of EU law application and more precisely how and why national judges participate in the process of legal integration within the European Union. For the foregoing purpose, the study focuses on three a priori established set of problems which relate to the knowledge of EU law and of the mechanisms of its application among national judges, the daily experiences of judges with the application of EU law and their personal attitudes towards the law of the European Union and the new role it imposes on them and the Union itself. The three clusters of variables are scrutinized in a broader institutional and operational legal context of the daily judicial functioning. In that sense, the study first establishes the formal, legal context in which the judges function and respectively it focuses on the way judges personally construct the EU legality, the way they perceive and understand their function as EU law judges and the way they experience the law of the European Union in the daily practice. By and large, the book offers a contextual and nuanced approach to the problem of operation of EU law in the national legal order.


LET'S TALK TOBACCO: AFRICAN AMERICAN PARENT-ADOLESCENT COMMUNICATION ABOUT TOBACCO USE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF PARENTAL SMOKING By: Michell A. Pope A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015 Major Director: Rosalie Corona, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology Tobacco use and the associated health risks are a major public health concern. Research suggests that parents' own tobacco use, caregiver-adolescent antismoking communication, and parenting practices (e.g., prompting, parental monitoring) may work to influence adolescents' tobacco-related attitudes and behavioral outcomes (e.g., refusal efficacy, intentions to use and actual use). Although historically African American adolescents have exhibited lower rates of tobacco use than their racial/ethnic counterparts, there is growing evidence to suggest that this may be changing because of increased use of tobacco products and/or underreporting of the use of alternative tobacco products or ATPs (e.g., cigars, cigarillos), among this population. The present study recruited a communitybased sample of 101 urban African American caregivers that smoke (M = 41.1/SD = 9.9), and their adolescents between the ages of 12-17 (M = 14.4/SD = 1.9) to examine how caregiver tobacco-related messages (both verbal and non-verbal) shape adolescents' tobacco attitudes, and behaviors. Dyads completed paper-pencil surveys separately and were compensated for their time and effort. A majority of the caregivers were single and living in low-income and public housing communities. Results from the analyses revealed high rates of adolescent tobacco use (lifetime) of both cigarettes and alternative tobacco products, and prompting (e.g., caregivers' request that adolescents retrieve, buy, or smoke tobacco products with them). The findings also showed that all of the caregiver variables including: prompting, monitoring, as well as caregiver antismoking messages together impacted adolescents' tobacco-related outcomes including their attitudes about tobacco, refusal efficacy and their intentions to use (at six months and adulthood), and their actual use. The findings underscore the need for more tobacco education that includes not only adolescents, but also parents, and other important caregivers (e.g., extended kin/family members) that helps increases knowledge surrounding the dangers of parental prompting, the importance of parental monitoring of youths whereabouts and peers, as well as parentadolescent antismoking communication in reducing the prevalence of adolescent smoking/tobacco use (including the use of ATPs). This study also highlights the need for tobacco control and policies that limit adolescents' exposure and access to tobacco products particularly among African Americans living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the efficacy of an adjuvanted modified-live bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) vaccine against challenge with a virulent type 2 BVDV strain in calves with or without maternal antibodies against the virus.

DESIGN
Challenge study.

ANIMALS
23 crossbred dairy calves.

PROCEDURES
Calves were fed colostrum containing antibodies against BVDV or colostrum without anti-BVDV antibodies within 6 hours of birth and again 8 to 12 hours after the first feeding. Calves were vaccinated with a commercial modified-live virus combination vaccine or a sham vaccine at approximately 5 weeks of age and challenged with virulent type 2 BVDV 3.5 months after vaccination. Clinical signs of BVDV infection, development of viremia, and variation in WBC counts were recorded for 14 days after challenge exposure.

RESULTS
Calves that received colostrum free of anti-BVDV antibodies and were vaccinated with the sham vaccine developed severe disease (4 of the 7 calves died or were euthanatized). Calves that received colostrum free of anti-BVDV antibodies and were vaccinated and calves that received colostrum with anti-BVDV antibodies and were vaccinated developed only mild or no clinical signs of disease.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Results indicated that the modified-live virus vaccine induced a strong protective immune response in young calves, even when plasma concentrations of maternal antibody were high. In addition, all vaccinated calves were protected against viral shedding, whereas control calves vaccinated with the sham vaccine shed virus for an extended period of time.


A persistent puzzle in antitrust law is whether and when an unlawful agreement could arise from conduct or verbalized communications that fall short of an explicit agreement. While courts have found such tacit agreements to exist in idiosyncratic scenarios, they have failed to articulate a clear and consistent logic for such findings. This Article attempts to fill this gap by proposing a unified theory of tacit agreement. It defines a tacit agreement as an agreement formed by non-explicit communications that enable the alleged coconspirators to have constructive knowledge of one another's conspiratory intent. This approach to tacit agreement is more faithful to the conceptual integrity and the statutory meaning of the agreement requirement under the Sherman Act. More importantly, it provides a flexible yet consistent formula for determining tacit agreements. This formula could be applied to any factual scenarios, including conscious parallelism, parallel conduct preceded by suggestive communications, hub-and-spoke conspiracy, and facilitating practices.


Taiwan is a land of diversity. Travelers on Taipei's Rapid Transit Metro hear announcements in four different languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, and Holo. For metro travelers and statesmen alike, this diversity is both a blessing and a burden. With its many ethnic groups and languages, and without a long history as an independent country, Taiwan is finding it difficult to create a tangible national identity that encompasses all of its 23 million residents. For Taiwan's current leaders, there has never been a more important time to construct a distinctly "Taiwanese" national identity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Many members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) see the establishment of national identity as a vital element to Taiwan's quest for eventual independence. The DPP administration of Chen Shui-bian, taking the lead from former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui, has undertaken a revolutionary program of desinification, defining a national Taiwanese identity solely in opposition to that of China. Chen is using the power of the government to impose this supposedly genuine "Taiwanese" identity. The problem is that Chen himself does not seem to know what being "Taiwanese" really means; he can define national identity only in a negative, oppositional way. Chen's efforts to construct national identity are not motivated by genuine concern for the Taiwanese peoples' ambivalence, frustration, or confusion regarding who they really are. Chen, for partisan purposes, is instead politicizing the process of creating national identity in order to pursue Taiwanese independence and, more importantly, to draw a greater separation between what he claims as the "foreign," almost traitorous Kuomintang (KMT) party and his own Democratic Progressive Party. Two types of politicization are at work: first, Chen's partisan motives and their effects, and second, his treatment of national identity as if it were in the realm of politics, when in fact national identity should emerge from the experiences and truths of a nation's history and culture. National identity, in other words, is something with an authenticity of its own, something inherently apolitical. Perhaps the worst result of such politicization is that Taiwanese do not see national identity as a separate and sacred concept on its own; because of Chen's heightened politicization of national identity, many Taiwanese simply relate national identity with a political party, KMT or DPP. This will ultimately fracture Taiwanese society as well as jeopardize the future of Taiwan's international status. If Taiwan desires to make progress on its road to independence or increase its global status, it must work on the formation of a national identity that is free from the chains of political battles and is instead rooted in Taiwan's history, culture, and interactions with other countries in the region. Chen's policies are, ironically, contributing to a further division--even racist polarization--of Taiwanese society. How can Taiwan ever expect to be a nation if it does not bring its own people together first? Taiwanese Politics and National Identity Taiwan's history is largely based on outside influence, particularly China's. Taiwanese aborigines, related to Malay or Polynesians, first settled more than 4,000 years ago. Currently known as "indigenous peoples," they comprise two percent of the Taiwanese population. Historical records indicate that the Chinese first settled in islands off the west coast of Taiwan in the 1100s; and the island was mostly under Chinese authority, with a Dutch interlude, until 1895. From 1895 to 1945, Japan brutally colonized and ruled Taiwan, its first formal colony. The Japanese devastated Taiwanese society with an oppressive rule aimed at turning Taiwanese into obedient and loyal worshippers of the Emperor. When Japan invaded China in 1937, Taiwan was transformed into a factory to produce war materials for Japan. …


This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethi- cal, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and non-discursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots along- side the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.


E-learning environments are mostly associated with systems for tutor-assisted learning, blended learning, or collaborative learning. Static roles and functional structures are the rule. Thereby, the learning environment takes centre stage and users must adapt to the specific characteristics of this learning environment. In contrast to this, we present the concepts of a learning environment that, in its structures, largely adapts to the real world: We assume that all users initially act on an equal basis in the environment. Only when a specific task in a shared workspace of the e-learning environment is to be approached do differences, and thus roles and rights, become relevant.


We present Weight based Realistic Clustering algorithm (WRCA) for energy efficient data collection from human based wireless network such as cell phone based sensor network. The WRCA creates better load balanced and stable clusters for data gathering in a realistic human mobility scenario as compared to WCA algorithm of mobile adhoc networks. Traditional way of stable clustering used to select stable Cluster Heads (CHs) based on instantaneous mobility criteria. While our algorithm incorporate only a pause time weighting parameter to leverage pause time distribution of human mobility for selection of more stable CHs. Load balancing aspect of WRCA tackles realistic scenario of inhomogeneous node distribution. Improvement in load balancing with WRCA assure better aggregation of sensor data and MAC layer performance. This is accomplished by incorporating a density center weighting parameter. This information is used to select density centered CHs. WRCA requires fewer messages to find density centered nodes as compared to TASC. Simulation results demonstrate the overall superiority in performance of the WRCA when mobility according to a realistic mobility model called Self similar Least Action Walk (SLAW) is considered. Simulation result shows that our proposed algorithm consumes 20% less energy and 50% more network lifetime as compared to WCA algorithm.


Article type: Original Article Background: The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) can objectively quantify the severity of stroke. However no information is available about psychometric properties and it's applicability in the Iranian population. Objectives: The present study purposed by utilization of this instrument for neurological deficits measurement due to stroke, to determine the internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity of NIHSS to separate two groups of men and women patients. Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 206 ischemic stroke patients were selected and the internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity of NIHSS were assessed. For this purpose, Barthel index that measures the functional disability was used. Data also were analyzed by Independent ttest, Chi-square, Pearson correlation, Fisher's z tests and bivariate regression analysis. Results: Internal consistency for men (α=0.881), women (α=0.913) and total patients (α=0.893) was excellent. Negative correlation was found between NIHSS and Barthel index in both men (r=-0.43, p<0.0001) and women (r=0.63, p<0.0001) and this relationship estimated to be more significant among women rather than men (p<0.05). In addition, NIHSS scores could significantly predict the Barthel score in both groups (p<0.0001) but the results revealed the more ability of NIHSS in predicting functional disability for women (R 2 =0.40) rather than men (R 2 =0.18). Conclusion: Persian version of NIHSS was reliable and valid instrument that can be applicable in both men and women with ischemic stroke; however, it was found that the degree of concurrent validity is better among women than men.


Abstract:The decline of labor unions in the United States has been central to the rise of wage inequality since the early 1970s. Recently, sociologists have noted that unionization influences inequality through both direct and indirect pathways, reconciled with the concept of the moral economy, broadly shared norms of fairness institutionalized in market rules and customs that can reduce inequality in pay. While the theory of the moral economy has been resonant in the stratification literature, few have held it to empirical scrutiny. The current study assesses how selection bias from unobserved worker-level heterogeneity influences the associations between unionization and wage attainment and dispersion. To do so, I merge data from the Current Population Survey to 33 waves of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Using combinations of variance function regression models, fixed-effects regression models, and dynamic panel models, I find that the magnitudes of associations tend to be reduced by around half after accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. Yet, more critically, the pathways linking unions and wage inequality via the moral economy prove to be remarkably robust to all tests cast upon them. Results highlight the fundamental importance of labor power resources for the contemporary rise of inequality. They provide a micro-level foundation for theories linking unionization and stratification. They identify the importance of union decline for rising earnings volatility. And they provide implications for the fallout of economic well-being for workers following antiunion policy change. Additional theoretical and policy implications are discussed.


We consider the problem of estimating the Doppler shift and rate of a linearly modulated digital signal subject to time selective Rician fading. We derive the Cramer-Rao bounds for the parameters; we propose an estimator, based on the higher-order ambiguity function (HAF), and show that it is consistent. We also establish some interesting results in the context of estimating the parameters of a polynomial phase signal in complex multiplicative noise.


A new method based on a closure partition over a set of some compatibles is proposed for selecting a minimal machine from mutualy independent closure aggregates by simply checking only the trivial covering condition. The closure aggregates are derived from some closure related classes. The latter classes are derived from the closure classes by replacing aU superseded elements with their greatest superseding ones. The compatibles to be considered are some subsets of maximum compatibles related under the state transition or the set inclusion. Closure dependent classes may contain superseded and redundant compatibles but their corresponding closure aggregates have only unsuperseded and irredundant elements. Both of them are closed. However, some closure related class may not be closed and may contain some redundant elements. The remaining unrelated subsets of maximum compatibles are ignored. Superseded or redundant compatibles when they are so determined are also ignored. Thus possible candidates for irredundant closed covers can be yielded and then partitioned under the closure dependence relation.


The characterisation of the physical properties of nanoparticles in their native environment plays a central role in a wide range of fields, from nanoparticle-enhanced drug delivery to environmental nanopollution assessment. Standard optical approaches require long trajectories of nanoparticles dispersed in a medium with known viscosity to characterise their diffusion constant and, thus, their size. However, often only short trajectories are available, while the medium viscosity is unknown, e.g., in most biomedical applications. In this work, we demonstrate a label-free method to quantify size and refractive index of individual subwavelength particles using two orders of magnitude shorter trajectories than required by standard methods, and without assumptions about the physicochemical properties of the medium. We achieve this by developing a weighted average convolutional neural network to analyse the holographic images of the particles. As a proof of principle, we distinguish and quantify size and refractive index of silica and polystyrene particles without prior knowledge of solute viscosity or refractive index. As an example of an application beyond the state of the art, we demonstrate how this technique can monitor the aggregation of polystyrene nanoparticles, revealing the time-resolved dynamics of the monomer number and fractal dimension of individual subwavelength aggregates. This technique opens new possibilities for nanoparticle characterisation with a broad range of applications from biomedicine to environmental monitoring.


The diagnosis and management of pleural infection continues to improve steadily. Recent advances include: newer, smaller, and more comfortable chest drainage catheters; improved pleural pus drainage with the aid of intrapleural fibrinolytics; and improved surgical procedures including thoracoscopic surgery. The optimal size of chest drainage tube remains a matter of debate, with no large data sets available to clarify the optimal tube size. In contrast, there are now small controlled trials of sound basic methodology which suggest a therapeutic role for both fibrinolytics and thoracoscopy. Studies large enough to establish clearly the efficacy and safety of these approaches are now at the planning and recruitment stage.


A numerical strip-yield model was developed to simulate creep crack incubation in heat-resistant steels. The model is based on a formulation proposed by Newman (Newman, J. C., Jr., "A Crack-Closure Model for Predicting Fatigue Crack Growth under Aircraft Spectrum Loading," Methods and Models for Predicting Fatigue Crack Growth under Random Loading, ASTM STP 748, J. B. Chang and C. M. Hudson, Eds., ASTM International, West Conshohocken, PA, 1981, pp. 53–84) for fatigue crack growth under variable amplitude loading. The time evolution of the plastic deformation ahead of a crack loaded in tension is modeled using the Norton law for secondary creep stage, and the primary and tertiary creep stages are neglected. The model assumes a pre-existing crack in a specimen and models the behavior of the material prior to the beginning of crack propagation due to creep loading. The evolution with time of the crack-tip plastic zone, crack-tip opening displacement, and yield strength in the plastic zone are computed at constant temperature for center crack panels. Comparison with two previous strip-yield models and experimental data is performed, and good correlation is obtained for several Cr-Mo-V steels. This approach to modeling creep crack incubation has the potential to be applied to other types of cracked specimens under constant or variable amplitude loading.


The skin, gills, and gut are the most extensively studied mucosal organs in fish. These mucosal structures provide the intimate interface between the internal and external milieus and serve as the indispensable first line of defense. They have highly diverse physiological functions. Their role in defense can be highlighted in three shared similarities: their microanatomical structures that serve as the physical barrier and hold the immune cells and the effector molecules; the mucus layer, also a physical barrier, contains an array of potent bioactive molecules; and the resident microbiota. Mucosal surfaces are responsive and plastic to the different changes in the aquatic environment. The direct interaction of the mucosa with the environment offers some important information on both the physiological status of the host and the conditions of the aquatic environment. Increasing attention has been directed to these features in the last year, particularly on how to improve the overall health of the fish through manipulation of mucosal functions and on how the changes in the mucosa, in response to varying environmental factors, can be harnessed to improve husbandry. In this short review, we highlight the current knowledge on how mucosal surfaces respond to various environmental factors relevant to aquaculture and how they may be exploited in fostering sustainable fish farming practices, especially in controlled aquaculture environments.


[1] Observations of Poynting fluxes associated with onset of convection electric fields are essential for understanding of electromagnetic energy transport from the solar wind toward the magnetosphere leading to changes in the convection electric field, which is one of the most fundamental parameters in the magnetosphere-ionosphere coupled system. We present Cluster multispacecraft observations of Poynting fluxes associated with abrupt changes in large-scale electric fields during sudden commencements and southward turning of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). The Cluster spacecraft detected Poynting fluxes dominated by the field-aligned upward component during the preliminary impulse of sudden commencements and in the initial period after southward turning of the IMF. The upward Poynting flux indicates existence of Alfven waves transporting electromagnetic energy from the ionosphere toward the magnetosphere leading to magnetospheric convection changes. The waveguide model and global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation calculating evolution of the Poynting flux following solar wind pressure enhancements also show upward Poynting fluxes propagating from the ionosphere toward the magnetosphere faster than the propagation of compressional waves. We conclude that the ionosphere acts as a channel to transmit electromagnetic energy supplied as field-aligned currents toward a wide region in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system instantaneously, leading to changes in magnetospheric convection electric fields.


"Guy Cohen is the master when it comes to taming the complexities of options. From buying calls and puts to iron butterflies and condors, Guy explains these strategies in a clear and concise manner that options traders of any level can understand. His chapter on options and taxes is especially welcomed (and needed). The Bible of Options Strategies is a straightforward, easy-to-use reference work that should occupy a space on any options trader's bookshelf." -Bernie Schaeffer, Chairman and CEO, Schaeffer's Investment Research, Inc."The author delivers clarity, insight and perception making learning about options a joy, and practicing the art of making money that much easier: truly a bible from a guru." -Alpesh B. Patel, Author and Financial Times Columnist"Guy Cohen truly makes learning about options easy in this fact-filled guide. Bullet points make for a quick and enlightened read, getting to the heart of what you really need to know about each options strategy. This book is a must for any serious trader's library." -Price Headley, Founder, BigTrends.comPick the right options strategies...implement them step-by-step...maximize your profits!Introducing today's first and only comprehensive reference to contemporary options trading!OptionEasy creator Guy Cohen identifies today's popular strategies...and tells you exactly how and when to use each one and what hazards to look out for! It's all here.... Basic Strategies including Buying and shorting shares, calls, and puts. Income Strategies including Covered Call, Naked Put, Bull Put Spread, Bear Call Spread, Long Iron Butterfly, Long Iron Condor, Calendar Call, Diagonal Call... Vertical Spreads including Bull Call Spread, Bull Put Spread, Bear Call Spread, Bear Put Spread, Ladders... Volatility Strategies including Straddle, Strangle, Guts, Short Butterflies, Short Condors... Sideways Strategies including Short Straddle, Short Strangle, Short Guts, Long Butterflies, Long Condors... Leveraged Strategies including Call Ratio Backspread, Put Ratio Backspread, Ratio Spreads... Synthetic Strategies including Collar, Synthetic Call, Synthetic Put, Synthetic Straddles, Synthetic Futures, Combos, Box Spread......and many more strategies...Plus essential tax-saving information, and more! No other book presents this much authoritative, current information on options trading strategies Covers all of today's best income, volatility, leveraged, synthetic, and sideways market strategies Discover why each strategy works, when it's appropriate, and how to use iti??step by step Includes a full chapter on tax issues associated with options strategies By Guy Cohen, whose OptionEasy application has helped thousands of traders achieve breakthrough results!The Bible of Options Strategies is the definitive reference to contemporary options trading: the one book you need by your side whenever you trade.Options expert Guy Cohen systematically presents today's most effective strategies for trading options: how and why they work, when they're appropriate, when they're inappropriate, and how to use each one responsibly and with confidence. The only reference of its kind, this book will help you identify and implement the optimal strategy for every opportunity, trading environment, and goal.© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.


We analyze a two-country model of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Two firms, each of which is originally situated in only one of the two countries, first decide whether to build a plant in the foreign country. Then, they decide whether to relocate R&D activities. Finally, they engage in product-market competition. Our main points are: first, FDI liberalization causes a relocation of R&D activities if intrafirm communication is sufficiently well developed, external spillovers are substantial, competition is not too strong and foreign markets are not too small. Second, such a relocation of R&D activities will usually nevertheless increase domestic welfare since it only occurs if intrafirm communication is well developed and therefore knowledge generated and obtained abroad flows back to the domestic country. Third, the potential of R&D offshoring makes FDI itself more likely. Fourth, when countries are asymmetric, the small-country firm is more likely to offshore its R&D activities into the large country than conversely.


Increasing resistance of Plasmodium falciparum malaria to antimalarial drugs is posing a major threat to the global effort to "Roll Back Malaria". Chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) are being rendered increasingly ineffective, resulting in increasing morbidity, mortality, and economic and social costs. One strategy advocated for delaying the development of resistance to the remaining armory of effective drugs is the wide-scale deployment of artemisinin-based combination therapy. However, the cost of these combinations are higher than most of the currently used monotherapies and alternative non-artemisinin-based combinations. In addition, uncertainty about the actual impact in real-life settings has made them a controversial choice for first-line treatment. The difficulties in measuring the burden of drug resistance and predicting the impact of strategies aimed at its reduction are outlined, and a mathematical model is introduced that is being designed to address these issues and to clarify policy options.


Type 2 diabetes mellitus is considered to be one of the primary causes of premature illness and death in most countries, making the projected increase in prevalence a significant public health concern. A strong association between adiposity, diet, and both insulin resistance and beta-cell dysfunction has long been recognized. A randomized, controlled dietary intervention trial was conducted to test the effects of gastric bypass surgery versus an intense dietary lifestyle intervention on T2DM status. The primary aim of the study was to evaluate the relationship between compliance to the dietary intervention and glycemic control, assessed by hemoglobin A1c, at six months after the start of the intervention. We hypothesized that a higher compliance summary score will be associated with improved glycemic control among individuals in the lifestyle arm, compared to those with lower compliance summary scores. Our secondary aim was to evaluate the relationship between each of the 5 measures of diet quality in the summary score (energy density, percentage of calories from protein, percentage of calories from added sugars, sugar-sweetened beverage intake, and fiber intake) and measures of glycemic control and of adiposity. We hypothesized that better measures of diet quality will each be associated with improved markers of glycemic control. Our study's key findings did not support this hypothesis, as we did not find any significant associations between summary compliance score and HbA1c or other markers of glycemic control, suggesting that stricter compliance to this particular dietary intervention did not lead to lower HbA1c levels at 6 months. Our study's secondary findings were also surprising and largely unsupportive of our hypothesis, raising interesting questions regarding our dietary intervention and future studies.


0AHU The goal of this chapter is to discuss pushouts in the category of algebraic spaces. This can be done with varying assumptions. A fairly general pushout construction is given in [TT13]: one of the morphisms is affine and the other is a closed immersion. We discuss a particular case of this in Section 2 where we assume one of the morphisms is affine and the other is a thickening, a situation that often comes up in deformation theory.