The incidence of emotional disorders in children and young people is an escalating concern (NHS Digital, 2018). Although schools play a pivotal role in promoting students' wellbeing and supporting pupils with psychological difficulties (Department of Health & Department for Education, 2017), there are gaps in school-based research in the field. There is, therefore, a demand for real-world evaluations of interventions to provide evidence-based models of good practice.

Book of Beasties (BoB) is a mental wellness card game predominantly targeted at school-aged children (6-13 years). It aims to de-stigmatise the discourses surrounding mental health issues in schools by raising pupils' emotional literacy whilst promoting positive models of mental health and wellbeing. BoB is a manualised game, delivered by trained facilitators to small groups (up to five children) and consists of five 60-minute, weekly sessions.

This mixed methods, exploratory, pilot study aims to investigate the social validity of BoB; the acceptability of and satisfaction with the sessions experienced by recipients and other stakeholders (teachers and parents/carers. It also aims to test the suitability of selected measures for assessing the impact the intervention has on the children who participate.

References
Participants comprised year 5 pupils (n=8) (Four pupils were allocated to the intervention group (IG) and four to the comparison group); parents/carers (n=8), and class teachers (n=2). Quantitative measures included: Emotional Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ-30-UK) (Reiffe, Oosterveld, Miers, Meerum Terwogt, & Ly, 2008); Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ-CA) (Gross & John, 2003); Mood Questionnaire (MQ) (Reiffe, Meerum Terwogt, & Bosch, 2004); and Parent-Rating Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (P-ERQ) (Guzenhauser, Suchodoletz & McClelland, 2017). Qualitative methods comprised observations; a focus group with IG children; and semi-structured interviews with parents/carers and class teachers.

Data analysis is expected to be completed by September 2019. It is anticipated that findings from this pilot research will help inform the design of a larger-scale, full evaluation of the Book of Beasties intervention with the potential to inform evidence-based policy and practice in the area of children's and young people's mental health.

Department of Health & Department for Education (2017). Transforming children and young people's mental health provision: a green paper. London: Crown Publications
Gross. J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 348-362.
Guzenhauser, C., von Suchodoletz, A., & McClelland, M.M. (2017). Measuring cognitive reappraisal and expressive symptoms in children: A parent-rating version of the emotion regulation questionnaire. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14 (4), 489-497. DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2016.1236018
NHS Digital (2018). National study of health and wellbeing: Children and young people. London: NHS Digital. Available via: https://files.digital.nhs.uk/F6/A5706C/MHCYP%202017%20Summary.pdf
Rieiffe, C., Meerum Terwogt, M., & Bosch, J. (2004). Emotional awareness and somatic complaints in children. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1, 37-47.
Rieffe, C., Oosterveld, P., Miers, A. C., Meerum Terwogt, M., & Ly, V. (2008). Emotion awareness and internalising symptoms in children and adolescents: The Emotion Awareness Questionnaire revised. Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 756-761


The last few years have seen a proliferation of attempts by various institutions to create a framework that would enable analysts to have a broad overview of all transactions in the Malawian economy. It was decided that 1998, the most recent year for which a comprehensive data set is available, would be the base year for the SAM. The National Statistical Office conducted a major household survey which provided information on budget shares, incomes and many other social-economic characteristics of households.


In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony contrasts the uses of metaphor in Nevi'im and the New Testament. According to Hazony, metaphor is employed by Jesus to obscure teachings, but the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures use metaphor to make teachings intelligible. However, this understanding of metaphor is too simplistic to capture the scope of metaphorical statements made by the Hebrew prophets. In this paper, I suggest that an important set of philosophical arguments are advanced by the prophets in ways not captured by current interpretive methodologies. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first half, I argue against Hazony's assessment of Nevi'im. In the second, I forward my position on the philosophical dimensions of Nevi'im: that prophetic writings reveal important moral facts about God's nature and the ways in which we should respond to him in both action and emotion. Appealing to the works of Dru Johnson, Eleonore Stump and Linda Zagzebski, I show that the writings of the Hebrew prophets may in fact advance certain arguments about the emotions and motivations of God. Through the collected writings of Nevi'im, God functions as an exemplar for those receiving the words of the prophets.


There is ample evidence that well-being, measured in various ways, is positively related to economic freedom across countries. Does this relationship hold at the sub-national level? Answering that question is the purpose of this study. Using regression analysis, we test whether economic freedom has an independent effect on well-being across states in the U.S. Our evidence indicates that, at the state-level, improvements in economic freedom lead to higher levels of well-being even after controlling for other economic factors. We also find that the relationship between well-being and economic freedom differs significantly across regions in the United States.


INTRODUCTION Sexuality and sexual satisfaction are fundamental aspects of marriages and close relationships and are related to overall couple happiness and durability. The identification of factors that promote close relationship satisfaction and stability is crucial to the understanding of marital functioning, and it has been consistently demonstrated that sexual satisfaction figures prominently as a predictor of global marital satisfaction and distress (Sprecher & Cate, 2004; Liu, 2003; Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Laumann et al., 1994; Bridges et al., 2004; Hassebrauck & Fehr, 2002). Yet, relationship scientists have neglected the subject of marital and close relationship sexuality although marriage represents the only context that is universally accepted as a context for sexual relationships and expression (Christopher & Kisler, 2004). Sexual behaviors and attitudes outside the context of a close relationship are more likely to be investigated than those within one (Call et al., 1995; Trudel, 2002; Greenblat, 1982). Likewise, research on sexuality in close relationships has too often focused on Caucasian, middle-class American samples and cannot provide a coherent understanding of sexuality within a variety of close relationships. Investigations of sexuality within lesbian, gay male, and ethnically diverse relationships are even scarcer than the database on heterosexual, Caucasian couple samples, making it difficult to fully generalize what little is known about close relationship sexuality. Additionally, most studies of sexual satisfaction in close relationships are primarily limited to reports of coital frequency, which are erroneously employed as sole indicators of overall sexual and marital health. Research reveals that although coital rates decline with the relationship's duration, this decrease does not necessarily affect couples' sexual satisfaction. Likewise, current conceptualizations and research of sexuality only identify a meager number of behaviors as "sexual." However, behaviors of physical affection, such as hugging, kissing, eye contact, and holding hands, in addition to genital sex, may enhance and contribute to the experience of physical intimacy and sexual satisfaction in the daily life of a relationship (DeLamater & Hyde, 2004). Lastly, it is essential that current frameworks of marital and close relationship sexuality expand to incorporate biological theoretical models of sex. Evolutionary psychology maintains that humans have evolved the capability to create relationships and sexual satisfaction in relationships in order to insure reproductive success. When couples are both satisfied with their relationship and sexually satisfied, they increase the chances of transmitting their genes to subsequent generations. Specifically, sexual strategies theory, as defined by David Buss, argues that females should be more satisfied with both sex and their relationships when their male partners behave lovingly and affectionately with them, and these caring men, in turn, are more likely to be more satisfied with a high frequency of sexual activity in order to ensure reproductive success (Buss, 1994, in Sprecher & Cate, 2004). The current study aimed to contribute to this burgeoning area of research by investigating cross-sectionally the linkage between sexual satisfaction, satisfaction with physical affection, sexual jealousy, and relationship satisfaction, and examine whether these interconnections vary with gender. Specifically, this study looked at the strength of associations between individuals' reports of the frequency and acceptability of partners' behaviors (i.e. physical and verbal affection, sexual activity, and inappropriate sexual behavior with another person), and explored how these associations changed with gender. Additionally, this study endeavored to analyze how different types of relationships (heterosexual and homosexual) diverge and correspond to one another in terms of biological gender, and how these interactions parallel and possibly substantiate evolutionary theory. …


Dependable Systems for Sentient Computing Andrew Rice Computers and electronic devices are continuing to proliferate throughout our lives. Sentient Computing systems aim to reduce the time and effort required to interact with these devices by composing them into systems which fade into the background of the user's perception. Failures are a significant problem in this scenario because their occurrence will pull the system into the foreground as the user attempts to discover and understand the fault. However, attempting to exist and interact with users in a real, unpredictable, physical environment rather than a wellconstrained virtual environment makes failures inevitable. This dissertation describes a study of dependability. A dependable system permits applications to discover the extent of failures and to adapt accordingly such that their continued behaviour is intuitive to users of the system. Cantag, a reliable marker-based machine-vision system, has been developed to aid the investigation of dependability. The description of Cantag includes specific contributions for marker tracking such as rotationally invariant coding schemes and reliable back-projection for circular tags. An analysis of Cantag's theoretical performance is presented and compared to its real-world behaviour. This analysis is used to develop optimised tag designs and performance metrics. The use of validation is proposed to permit runtime calculation of observable metrics and verification of system components. Formal proof methods are combined with a logical validation framework to show the validity of performance optimisations.


White-box cryptography is the last security barrier for a cryptographic software implementation deployed in an untrusted environment. The principle of internal encodings is a commonly used white-box technique to protect block cipher implementations. It consists in representing an implementation as a network of look-up tables which are then encoded using randomly generated bijections (the internal encodings). When this approach is implemented based on nibble (i.e. 4-bit wide) encodings, the protected implementation has been shown to be vulnerable to differential computation analysis (DCA). The latter is essentially an adaptation of differential power analysis techniques to computation traces consisting of runtime information, e.g., memory accesses, of the target software. In order to thwart DCA, it has then been suggested to use wider encodings, and in particular byte encodings, at least to protect the outer rounds of the block cipher which are the prime targets of DCA.In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of when and why DCA works. We pinpoint the properties of the target variables and the encodings that make the attack (in)feasible. In particular, we show that DCA can break encodings wider than 4-bit, such as byte encodings. Additionally, we propose new DCA-like attacks inspired from side-channel analysis techniques. Specifically, we describe a collision attack particularly effective against the internal encoding countermeasure. We also investigate mutual information analysis (MIA) which naturally applies in this context. Compared to the original DCA, these attacks are also passive and they require very limited knowledge of the attacked implementation, but they achieve significant improvements in terms of trace complexity. All the analyses of our work are experimentally backed up with various attack simulation results. We also verified the practicability of our analyses and attack techniques against a publicly available white-box AES implementation protected with byte encodings –which DCA has failed to break before– and against a "masked" white-box AES implementation –which intends to resist DCA.


This study considers e-commerce adoption by SMEs in developing countries and, in particular,
SMEs in Indonesia. It not only explores the extent of e-commerce adoption by SMEs in
Indonesia and the determinant factors of e-commerce adoption but also the post-adoption
benefits of e-commerce. It adds to the extant literature by considering both 'downstream' and
'upstream' factors within the context of developing countries. Many existing studies only
consider upstream or downstream issues and in the context of developed countries. The focus
is not on business organizations in general but SMEs in particular.
The significance of this study is due to the limited current studies regarding e-commerce
adoption in SMEs that were conducted developing countries.
Eleven factors were identified as the determinant factors of e-commerce adoption and fifteen post adoption (upstream) benefits were identified. A combination of questionnaires and semistructured interviews were used in the data collection. Three hundred and one questionnaires provided quantitative data which was analysed by using regression analysis and ANOVA. The twenty-two, semi-structured interviews provided qualitative data about the reasons why these SMEs adopted e-commerce and the actual benefits realised by them, and all of that gave useful support to the questionnaire results. Data collection was in late 2013 / early 2014.
This study found that six factors, namely perceived benefits, technology readiness, external support, manager/owners innovativeness, manager/owners IT experience and manager/owners IT ability, have a positive and significant correlation with e-commerce adoption. Then, extending market reach; increased sales; improved external communication; improved company image; improved speed of processing; and increased employee productivity were found as the top six e-commerce benefits perceived by the Indonesian SMEs. In addition to this, the adoption of e-commerce has a positive and significance impact on SMEs market performance and communication performance.
The findings have implications for the Indonesian government, IT vendors and the SME
owners. The low level of e-commerce adoption by Indonesian SMEs certainly has an implication for the Indonesian government. The results of this study could help them to increase further, and better target, effective programmers to encourage the adoption of ecommerce by Indonesian SMEs.
For IT vendors, this condition would be an opportunity for them in promoting their products
and services. In order to increase their success, they should also consider the determinant factors of e-commerce adoption. Many SME owners want to raise their level of adoption so that they can excel in competition This thesis makes a contribution to theory and practice by providing for Indonesian SMEs in
particular, and SMEs in developing countries in general, a holistic picture of e-commerce
adoption; the extent of e-commerce adoption; and, the determinant factors leading to adoption
and the post adoption benefits.


This is the entry for "Evolutionary Psychology" in the Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American and Global Perspectives. This entry provides a summary and overview of the science of evolutionary psychology and its implications for the study of law. Understanding how evolution has shaped human nature and individual preferences can provide insight into how to use law to direct individual behavior in pro-social directions and away from anti-social behavior. This essay provides an overview of the science of evolutionary psychology, especially as it manifests itself in human proclivities for cooperation and conflict. In contrast to the Hobbesian view of human nature that implicitly underlies the modern understanding of law, evolutionary psychology provides several models of cooperation in the absence of law. But evolutionary psychology also provides insights into the nature of social conflict and the challenges this presents for legal regulation. Finally, the article describes the research program of law and evolutionary psychology, the testable hypotheses of evolutionary psychology, and the criteria for distinguishing evolutionary explanations of human behavior from legalistic and norms-based theories. JEL Codes: B25, B52, D87, K00.


After the shattering terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became an article of faith in the United States that no amount of emergency preparation could be too much. Medicine swept to the forefront of the nation's defenses as officials poured billions of dollars into vaccines and antidotes, in case the next assault should come from bioterrorism instead of hijacked jets out of the blue.

Now, the government is wondering whether it's possible to go a step too far as it considers conducting anthrax vaccine studies on children.

The ethical dilemma: Should children be experimentally vaccinated against a threat that might never come? Or should the country hold off until an attack, meantime leaving children unprotected against life-threatening bacteria for which adults have a vaccine?

President Barack Obama's administration has turned to a commission to help find an answer. In May, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues signalled it was leaning against the pediatric studies at first blush, while pressing ahead with its inquiry. This followed a vote in the fall of 2011 by another advisory group, the National Biodefense Safety Board, to recommend that the studies proceed if outside experts determined they could be done safely and ethically. A decision is expected by the end of the year.

A week after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when Americans were in a state of high anxiety over the prospect of another imminent blow, a killer struck by sending anthrax spores through the mail. Five people died, 17 were sickened and mailrooms in official Washington and beyond were locked down by people in biohazard suits.

Years later, the killings were blamed on a disturbed federal scientist who committed suicide as authorities closed in, not on terrorists from afar. But the episode demonstrated the ability of an attacker with access to anthrax to distribute it widely and in lethal form — for the price of a postage stamp, no less.

The anthrax vaccine is of a particularly painful variety, causing more than the usual local redness and sometimes sparking fever.

Image courtesy of © 2012 Thinkstock

In one doomsday model drawn by the government, an anthrax attack theoretically exposed more than seven million people, nearly two million of them children. But as time passes without a terrorist attack of any sort, it's become harder to put the fear of doomsday in the population.

"Respectable members of the public do not believe in the threat," nor do they believe the vaccine works, Dr. John S. Parker, chairman of the biodefense safety board, told the presidential commission (http://bioethics.gov/cms/meetings). "But it's clear to me that the facts speak louder."

"If there is an anthrax release," he said, "we must strive to have the same degree of surety of the vaccine's safety in children as it is in adults."

More than 1.2 million adults, most in the armed forces, have received the anthrax vaccine but no one knows the proper dose, the safety or effectiveness in children. It is a particularly painful vaccine, causing more than the usual local redness, sometimes sparking fever and altogether drawing more complaints than the flu shot.

The usual risk–benefit calculations that are considered in devising treatments for childhood diseases don't apply in this instance because, absent an attack or highly unlikely accidental exposure, no child will benefit. This isn't the mumps.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection appealed to the government to come down against such trials, contending they would be a "reckless deviation from the precautionary principal of medical ethics" to subject healthy children to a vaccine studied for a merely theoretical threat.

To be sure, not all would be lost if an attack happened without a protocol for childhood vaccines in place. Powerful antibiotics can deal with immediate exposure and a vaccine administered later can defend against spores that linger in a dormant state. But proponents say the chaotic aftermath of an attack is not the time to be scrambling to immunize children from unleashed pathogens.

Dr. Michael R. Anderson, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says if Washington were dusted with anthrax, adults would quickly get half a milligram in the arm from the national vaccine stockpile. But the child "down at the daycare centre — we have no idea what to give."

Health officials estimate 300 children would be needed for an initial trial and perhaps 1000 for a follow-up.

In an initial, informal sounding of the commissioners, four indicated their opposition to the trials, three were in favor and one wouldn't say.

At least two more public meetings are expected, in August and November, with the commission's report likely by the end of the year — after the Nov. 6 presidential and congressional elections. It so happens that timing might keep the issue from becoming yet another political football.

In his now-defunct campaign for this year's Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry stumbled when conservative critics reminded voters that he had signed an order requiring Texas girls to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus to protect them from cervical cancer.

A rival pronounced it flat out wrong "to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order," proving that when it comes to public health policy, nothing is immune from politics — even immunizations.


In late antiquity, the rising number of ascetics who joined the priesthood faced a pastoral dilemma. Should they follow a traditional, demonstrably administrative, approach to pastoral care, emphasizing doctrinal instruction, the care of the poor, and the celebration of the sacraments? Or should they bring to the parish the ascetic models of spiritual direction, characterized by a more personal spiritual father/spiritual disciple relationship? "Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church" explores the struggles of five clerics (Athanasius, Gregory Naziansen, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian, and Pope Gregory I) to reconcile their ascetic idealism with the reality of pastoral responsibility. Through a close reading of Greek and Latin texts, George E. Demacopoulos explores each pastor's criteria for ordination, his supervision of subordinate clergy, and his methods of spiritual direction. He argues that the evolution in spiritual direction that occurred during this period reflected and informed broader developments in religious practices. Demacopoulos describes the way in which these authors shaped the medieval pastoral traditions of the East and the West. Each of the five struggled to balance the tension between his ascetic idealism and the realities of the lay church. Each offered distinct (and at times very different) solutions to that tension. Scholars and students of late antiquity, the history of Christianity, and historical theology will find a great deal of interest in "Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church". The book will also appeal to those who are actively engaged in Christian ministry.


This study examines the viability of providing electricity to an un-electrified village in North-Eastern Nigeria using a mini-grid based off-grid solar photovoltaic system. The study employs the life-cycle cost to estimate a 25-year life-time cost of an off-grid electrification project using solar photovoltaic panels and compares with the cost of paying for grid-electricity within the same period. Comparing the cost of off-grid electrification with grid-extension is more appropriate; however, data on the cost of grid extension in Northern Nigeria are scarce. Thus, electricity tariff is used as a proxy since the Nigerian electricity market has been deregulated and the electricity tariff is expected to be market-reflective. The result shows that such project will not be economically viable at the prevailing commercial lending rate as it yields a negative net present value. However, the project becomes viable with adequate government support through the reduction in commercial lending rate for such projects and provision of start-up grants (as production subsidy). Such subsidy will not result in economic waste since the target is clearly defined. Apart from government financial incentives, creating necessary support mechanism in terms of legal and regulatory frameworks to encourage private investment will be necessary. In addition, engaging the community in the construction and maintenance of the project will ensure sustainability.


Current estimates suggest that 16% to 22% of children and adolescents in the United States are diagnosed with mental health disorders, and nearly six million children and adolescents experience symptoms that interrupt their daily functioning (Chung, Edgar-Smith, Palmer, Bartholomew, & Delambo, 2008). Understanding the functioning of families seeking mental health services is imperative to tailoring services in order to meet their needs. The purpose of the present study was to explore and describe the functioning of families as they initiate outpatient community mental health services in an effort to better understand their needs and ultimately to tailor the services to meet these needs. Two research questions were posed in the present study: 1) What typology of family functioning exists for families initiating outpatient services from a community mental health treatment facility, and 2) In what specific areas of family functioning are families obtaining unhealthy scores most frequently? This study utilized an exploratory analysis, specifically a k-means cluster analysis, in order to identify and describe a typology of family functioning as perceived by families initiating outpatient mental health services. The findings suggest that three clusters emerged from the data including: 1) families who obtained healthy scores on all of the subscales on the measurement used, 2) families who obtained unhealthy scores on all of the subscales, and 3) families who obtained healthy scores on some of the subscales and unhealthy scores on others. Given that this study is a first in the field, the results have both pertinent research and clinical implications.


INTRODUCTION
Tinnitus, the perception of the sound in the absence of an external acoustic source, disrupts the daily life 1 out of every 200 adults, yet its physiological basis remains largely a mystery. The generation of tinnitus is commonly linked with the impaired functioning of the outer hair cells (OHC) inside the cochlea. Otoacoustic emissions are the objective test used to assess their activity.

OBJECTIVE
The objective of the investigation was to study the features of Distortion product OtoAcoustic emissions (DPOAE) in a group of tinnitus patients with normal hearing and to find out whether there is any difference in DPOAE findings in the tinnitus patients with normal hearing and in persons with normal hearing with no complaint of tinnitus.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The participants consisted of two groups. The subject group consisted of 16 ears of patients, in which 6 subjects were having tinnitus in both ears while 4 subjects were having tinnitus only in one ear. All subjects were aged between 20 to 60 years with complaint of tinnitus with audiometrically normal hearing. Control group was comprised of 16 audiometrically normal hearing ears of persons who were age and gender matched with the subject groups and had no complaint of tinnitus. Both the subject group as well as control group was subjected for DPOAE test. Findings of both the groups were compared using the unpaired t test.

RESULT AND CONCLUSION
It was observed that the amplitudes of DPOAE were significantly lower in tinnitus patients than that of persons without complaint of tinnitus, at a frequency of 1281-1560, 5120-6250, 7243-8837 Hz, which imply that decrease of DPOAEs amplitudes may be related to the presence of tinnitus. It can be concluded that there is association between tinnitus and reduced OHC activity which indicate the OHC of cochlea are involved in the generation of tinnitus.


Sphagnum is an important peat‐forming genus, which aids the carbon sequestration of peatlands. Sphagnum is sensitive to drought; however, and it is uncertain how well it can recover from long periods without rainfall. Spectral reflectance can be used to assess Sphagnum desiccation damage, and we also tested whether it can be used to detect recovery. Different rainfall simulations were applied to two species of Sphagnum to assess the impact of drought on carbon function. After 80 days all samples were rewetted to assess recovery. The rainfall simulations included inputs analogous to actual precipitation at the field site (Forsinard Flows reserve, Northern Scotland), potential future changes in rainfall, and extended total drought. During the experiment gross primary productivity and respiration were measured. Photosynthesis decreased after approximately 30 days of continuous drought (i.e., days without rain). Spectral reflectance was measured to assess Sphagnum bleaching. The spectral absorption feature of Sphagnum associated with red light (around 650 nm) was affected by drought and did not recover after rewetting during the experimental period. No significant difference was found between the two Sphagnum species studied with respect to their photosynthesis or respiration, but there was a significant difference in optimum water content and spectral reflectance between the two. The results from this study suggest that Sphagnum carbon function is resilient to quite long drought periods, but once damage has occurred recovery is likely to be difficult. The spectral reflectance of Sphagnum can give useful information in assessing whether significant desiccation damage has occurred.


Abstract. A sporadic phenomenon of internal tide resonance (ITR) in the western equatorial Pacific thermocline is shown to precede 11 of 12 major upturns in the Nino 3.4 index between 1992 and 2008. Observed ITR has up to 9 °C semidiurnal temperature excursions indicating thermocline heave, but is invisible in time resolution longer than one day. It is independent of westerly wind bursts (WWB). A hypothesis is advanced that (1) ITR dissipates vorticity, leading to Pacific countercurrent consolidation (PCC) by reducing the vortex stretching term in Sverdrup balance. The consequence of lost vorticity survives ephemeral ITR events; (2) The specific surface area of countercurrents is reduced by PCC, which reduces frictional opposition to zonal gradient pressure, which triggers eastward advection at El Nino onset; (3) PCC also accelerates transfer of potential energy to the "pycnostad" below the Equatorial Undercurrent. This shoals the equatorial thermocline, leading to a distinct mode of equatorially symmetric La Nina (ESLN) characterized by a winter monsoon cell above a "cold eye" that is separated from the South American continent, as in 1998; (4) Precessional southward intertropical convergence zone migration (ITCZ) is an alternate PCC trigger, but its effect is modulated by obliquity; and (5) ESLN causes global cooling in all timescales by (a) reduced Hadley cell water vapor production when its rising branch is above the cold eye, (b) equatorward shift in southern circumpolar westerlies due to Hadley cell constriction, (c) possible CO2 sequestration by increased EUC iron fertilized export production on the equator, and (d) possible adjacent cloud seeding by biogenic dimethyl sulphide. Surprising coincidences of WWB with perigean eclipses suggest a parallel atmospheric tide influence. Proposed PCC-ESLN forcing operates in multiple timescales, beginning where the annual cycle of strong equinoctial tides coincides with the minimum perigee cycle. This forcing corresponds with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in 1997, 2002, and 2006. Next, extreme central eclipses that perturb perigee-sysygy intervals also correspond with extreme ENSO events, notably in 1877, 1888, and 1982, and a 586 year cycle in the frequency of these eclipses corresponds with known stadial events in the past 4 thousand years. Contrast in the 586 year cycle increases with Earth eccentricity because it is the result of shorter synodic months at aphelion. Longer timescale forcing is by orbital control of the east-central Pacific ITCZ position, yielding a 10 thousand year fast ice sheet melt interval between March and September perihelion. But default ESLN is only interrupted when perihelion in March coincides with rising obliquity. A change in the phase relation between obliquity and precession from 1:2 to 3:5 or 2:5 may therefore explain skipped obliquity cycles after the mid-Pleistocene transition. A secular improvement in eclipse commensurability that parallels Cenozoic cooling is noted.


My research into Orientalism came about through pioneering work on the British potter Bernard Leach. I was awarded a two year Daiwa-Anglo Japanese Scholarship to learn Japanese in order to research at the Mingei-kan the Japanese Folkcraft Museum,in the archives of Soetsu Yanagi, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. This archive held crucial correspondence and journals hitherto unanalysed. My research allowed for a new interpretation of Leach's construction of his authority, revealing both how scant his knowledge of Japan was and how much of his thinking was based on the British Arts and Crafts Movement. This research led to a number of conference papers in Britain, America and Australia and to a monograph Bernard Leach (Tate Publishing 1998). This had a considerable impact as the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach. It was widely reviewed internationally and has had two further editions, continuing to be a source of some controversy.

 In 2006 a new edition of this book was published in Japan with four new additional essays on the Leach tradition, and an introduction by Kenjki Kaneko, Director of the National Museum of Craft in Tokyo. The additional chapters focus on the critical reputation of Leach in Britain and America since 1970, and on the growth of alternative canons of historical ceramics. This book is the first contextual academic study of Leach to be published in Japan, and has already caused considerable interest.

Further research into the projection of 'authentic' lifestyle has led to the publication of two extensive chapters in major books: 'Art without Finish': Japanese Arts in the West' in Timeless Beauty Japanese Art from the Montogmory Collection (Skira 2002) and 'The Cultures of Collecting and Display' in International Arts and Crafts ed by Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry (V&A Publications 2005.)

Aspects of this research have been given in keynote lectures at conferences at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Harvard University, the Peabody Museum, Salem, Masssachusets and at Cambridge University.


Smartwatches are expected to replace smartphones in some applications with better user experience because of a greater range of features and new innovations such as audio recording, activity recognition, and data transmission. In this paper, we develop a system called AudioKey, aiming to pair two smartwatches by generating a unique secret key between them. Compared with existing works, our system does not need extra infrastructure to synchronise devices and trigger the key generation process, and only uses the existing sensors (gyroscope and microphone) that are deployed on most smartwatches. AudioKey triggers the key generation process on two devices at the same time by detecting the handshake between two normal users. A secret key is extracted from both the frequency domain and the time domain of audio signals and used to authenticate each other or encrypt the sensitive data. Evaluation results collected on nine volunteers in three different scenarios show that our system can achieve a bit generation rate of 13.4 bits/s with the mean key agreement rate of 96.7% for a 128-bit secret key, while a strong attacker can only achieve a mean key agreement of 10.8%.


A counter-intuitive enhancement of quantum fluctuation with larger spins, together with a few novel physical phenomena, is discovered in studying the recently observed emergent magnetism in high-temperature superconductor FeSe under pressure. Starting with experimental crystalline structure from our high-pressure X-ray refinement, we analyze theoretically the stability of the magnetically ordered state with a realistic spin-fermion model. We find surprisingly that in comparison with the magnetically ordered Fe-pnictides, the larger spins in FeSe suffer even stronger long-range quantum fluctuation that diminishes their ordering at ambient pressure. This "fail-to-order" quantum spin liquid state then develops into an ordered state above 1GPa due to weakened fluctuation accompanying the reduction of anion height and carrier density. The ordering further benefits from the ferro-orbital order and shows the observed enhancement around 1GPa. We further clarify the controversial nature of magnetism and its interplay with nematicity in FeSe in the same unified picture for all Fe-based superconductors. In addition, the versatile itinerant carriers produce interesting correlated metal behavior in a large region of phase space. Our study establishes a generic exceptional paradigm of stronger quantum fluctuation with larger spins that complements the standard knowledge of insulating magnetism.


Enabling applications to execute various tasks in parallel is difficult if those tasks exhibit read and write conflicts. In recent work, we developed a programming model based on concurrent revisions that addresses this challenge: each forked task gets a conceptual copy of all locations that are declared to be shared. Each such location has a specific isolation type; on joins, state changes to each location are merged deterministically based on its isolation type. In this paper, we study how to specify isolation types abstractly using operation-based compensation functions rather than statebased merge functions. Using several examples including a list with insert, delete and modify operations, we propose compensation tables as a concise, general and intuitively accessible mechanism for determining how to merge arbitrary operation sequences. Finally, we provide sufficient conditions to verify that a state-based merge function correctly implements a compensation table.


This dissertation is about the work of melancholy in the Victorian realist novel, particularly those texts written in the late 1840s. The representation of melancholy affords an examination of a wide scope of issues that relate to the family, generally, and to the role of the middle-class women in the family in this particular historical moment, specifically. Because of the close association between the strategies of psychiatric treatment in the period and ideologies of the "proper" organization of the bourgeois family, writing or thinking about mental illness or theories of the mind necessarily calls up theories of the domestic and vice versa. Because early Victorian psychiatrists or alienists, as they were called, predicated sound mental health on the ability of an individual to maintain selfcontrol, exhibit "proper" gendered behavior, and in a sense, cooperate with his or her male guardians within a pseudo-domestic structure, notions of the "ideal" family scene invariably arise in all discussions of the treatment of the mentally ill. The three texts discussed in this thesis reveal a female protagonist who is more or less melancholic but importantly, each text attributes the arrival of its protagonist's melancholic suffering and the exacerbation of this suffering to debilitating domestic circumstances. Each of these melancholic female characters becomes acutely aware of her failures and her missteps through a protracted engagement with melancholic introspection. Importantly, her desire to conform and, in some sense, re-commit herself to the cult of the domestic arises in the moment of her most intense melancholic suffering. In the isolation and solitude that melancholy affords, each of these protagonists connects to a mode of selfreflection and introspection that allows them to see not only the ways they have diverged from the "ideal" of "proper" womanhood, but importantly, to recognize that the mitigation of this divergence necessitates submission to forms of social and familial control that will only further their suffering. Thus, melancholy, in my estimation and in these novels, is very rarely a means by which the female melancholic protagonist rebels or reforms domestic structure. Rather, it is most often the means by which she, and the novel itself, reaffirm the centrality of the "home" within middle-class social structure at mid-century.


Contemporary Supreme Court interpretations suggest that the religion clauses are primarily rooted in the value of equality. In interpreting the Free Exercise clause the United States Supreme Court has argued that in the absence of discrimination against religion or in the presence of other constitutional values, there is no violation of the Constitution when a statute inadvertently burdens religion. Similarly, equality values have played a strong role in the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Many distinguished commentators have pointed to the equality focus and have argued that it gives insufficient attention to the value of religious liberty. Professor Shiffrin argues that these commentators are right in contending that an equality emphasis misses much of importance in religion clause jurisprudence, but their emphasis on liberty or equal liberty is too narrow. Instead, he suggests an understanding of the proper place of equality in religion clause jurisprudence requires an appreciation of a wider range of values. Professor Shiffrin recognizes that the equality value is important, but shows that many deviations from religious equality are deeply embedded in the framework of government operations. It will not work to maintain that our Constitution regards religion and non-religion as equal. Indeed, the religion clauses are best interpreted to protect religion not just because of values like autonomy, equality, community, and religious peace, but because religion is regarded as important. This, he suggests, is a regrettable interpretation. It obviously is a bitter pill for religious skeptics to swallow, and it should even be a source of regret for most religious believers. Nonetheless, it is the best reading of our evolving Constitution. The foundational view that religion is important, however, does not flirt with theocracy. Far from it. The Constitution forbids coercion and, with exceptions, the favoring of one religion over another. Even more important, with some exceptions, the Constitution is best interpreted to curb government intervention to favor religion, not because religion is a constitutional stepchild, but because the seductions of governmental dependence are great and because government is not to be trusted. In applying his analysis, Professor Shiffrin explores many examples including (1) the ingestion of peyote; (2) animal sacrifice; (3) the government's use of religious symbols; (4) government's involvement with monotheistic prayer, including the Pledge of Allegiance; (5) the teaching of evolution in the public schools; (6) government protection of conscientious objectors and those who refuse to work on the Sabbath; and (7) voucher programs together with government support for religion within the public schools. Given the pluralistic character of the values underlying the religion clauses and the variety of contexts in which questions about the legal status of religion arise, he concludes, that equality can best be seen as one important value in a rich and evolving tradition. This tradition, he argues, is misunderstood by both the secular left and the religious right. The secular left does not understand the importance of religion in our constitutional tradition, and the religious right does not understand that government harms religion when it tries to help. Neither the secular left, nor the religious right understands the complex dimensions of religious equality.


Title of Dissertation: DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF INSTITUTIONAL SOCIALIZATION ON VALUE ORIENTATIONS IN NAVAL ACADEMY MIDSHIPMEN Stephen C. Trainor, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor David R. Segal Department of Sociology Organizations are thought to influence the values, attitudes, and behaviors of members through processes of indoctrination and socialization. Military organizations also are believed to influence members by essentially "transforming" individuals from civilian life into part of an effective fighting machine. However, the process by which that occurs and the relative outcomes have not been fully understood. This problem is important because of the role the military plays as a professional, work, and social context for millions of people. The problem is addressed by analyzing the professional socialization to military service of midshipmen attending the United States Naval Academy. This research occurs at the nexus of organizational and professional socialization, the effects of college, identity theory, and the occupational or work orientations of youth. A model of organizational socialization and value congruence predicted the orientations of incoming midshipmen and compared them to groups of civilian high school seniors as well as to groups of midshipmen with greater time in the organization. Significant differences in the orientations of incoming midshipmen and civilian peers were observed, indicative of the self-selection and anticipatory socialization effects associated with organizational entry. In addition, incoming midshipmen differed significantly from midshipmen with greater tenure in the organization, highlighting a trend from newcomer idealism toward more realistic occupational orientations in seniors about to graduate and begin military work. The findings are important because greater congruence or "fit" in organizational and individual orientations produced the most positive outcomes, including the most certain military career plans. Longitudinal evidence of greater congruence or "fit" occurred in midshipmen who possessed a strong personal identity associated with work and military service. The most significant predictors of this identity or "professional military career orientation" were strong work beliefs, high officer role identity, and the belief that military service is important. Midshipmen with better organizational "fit" expressed the most positive attitudes about the military, were more likely to see themselves working in the military at age 30, expected greater satisfaction with military work, and expressed greater certainty in their plans for a military career. Recommendations to foster a "professional military career orientation" in midshipmen are provided. DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF INSTITUTIONAL SOCIALIZATION ON VALUE ORIENTATIONS IN NAVAL ACADEMY MIDSHIPMEN


Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix learning methods have become popular in many image and video processing tasks, thanks to their ability to learn appropriate statistical representations while respecting Riemannian geometry of underlying SPD manifolds. In this paper we build a Riemannian network architecture to open up a new direction of SPD matrix non-linear learning in a deep model. In particular, we devise bilinear mapping layers to transform input SPD matrices to more desirable SPD matrices, exploit eigenvalue rectification layers to apply a non-linear activation function to the new SPD matrices, and design an eigenvalue logarithm layer to perform Riemannian computing on the resulting SPD matrices for regular output layers. For training the proposed deep network, we exploit a new backpropagation with a variant of stochastic gradient descent on Stiefel manifolds to update the structured connection weights and the involved SPD matrix data. We show through experiments that the proposed SPD matrix network can be simply trained and outperform existing SPD matrix learning and state-of-the-art methods in three typical visual classification tasks.


We present first data on circadian long call distribution of wild orangutans in Northwest Borneo. Data were collected during two months in Batang Ai National Park. A total of 151 male long calls were heard, exhibiting a bimodal distribution pattern with peaks at 05:00-06:00 hours and 18:00-19:00 hours. An earlier study found pronounced differences between the calling rates of Bornean orangutans, which showed an almost unimodal call distribution with its peak at mid-morning, and those of Sumatran orangutans, which showed a bimodal call distribution with a distinct calling peak at predawn and a more moderate peak near dusk (MacKinnon 1974). Our findings from Batang Ai resemble more closely the pattern reported for Sumatra than those reported for other Bornean localities and, therefore, contradict earlier reports suggesting a Sumatra-Borneo dichotomy in orangutan call distribution. In addition, orangutans in Batang Ai were heard to regularly emit long calls throughout the night. This behaviour is unusual for a diurnal species.


In an early sixteenth-century treatise, Martín de Figuerola, who had been preaching to the Muslims of Aragón, reports a story he claims to have heard from the Muslim judge of Cocentaina (València). The latter had told him that, in marriage contracts between local Muslims, it was customary for women to demand that their husbands take them to the capital city of València for the springtime festivities of Corpus Christi and those of the Virgin Mary in August. Simply put, the purpose of this project is to unravel the complex interplay of all the ingredients that this apparently trivial yet fascinating anecdote encapsulates. It will bring under close analysis the existence in sixteenth-century Iberia of cross-currents common to different religious groups, areas of local religiosity in which different religions overlapped, and vague or hybrid sorts of religiosity which indicate the blurring of clear ascriptions, categories, and borders. At the same time, it will also scrutinize the efforts made by different social actors (and generations of scholars after them) to establish clear, essential differentiations, to define neat categories and ascriptions, and thus to separate, reject, and stigmatize individuals and groups. Many of those nevertheless were involved in high levels of local accommodation, adaptation and negotiation. The project will study adversarial relationships, reconceived as dependencies, against a complex backdrop of dramatic religious change: shortly before Martín de Figuerola wrote his text, Iberia's Jews had been expelled, and a few years later, its Muslims would be forced to convert to Christianity, only to be expelled in their turn a century later. The multi-faceted analysis of these phenomena will involve unearthing new archival material, most notably Inquisition trials, as well as numerous sixteenthand seventeenth-century texts (both manuscripts and early modern editions) ranging from new translations of the Qur'ān and other Jewish and Islamic classics, to a rich polemical literature (disputes,


Background There is recognition that effective interventions are available to prevent neonatal and maternal deaths but providing reliable and valid coverage estimates remains a challenge. Household surveys rely on recall of self-reported events that may span up to 5 years, raising concerns of recall bias. Objective This study assessed the reliability of maternal recall of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum events over a six-month period and identified relevant individual characteristics associated with inconsistent reporting. Methodology A longitudinal household survey was conducted with 321 pregnant women in 44 enumeration areas in Southern Nationals, Nationalities and People's Region in Ethiopia. Women who were six or more months pregnant were enrolled and interviewed at seven days, six weeks, and six months post-partum using an identical set of questions regarding maternal and neonatal health and receipt of select neonatal care interventions. We compared responses given at 7 days to those reported at 6 weeks and 6 months and conducted sensitivity, specificity, area under receiving operative curve, and Kappa analyses of selected indicators. Results We find that reporting complications is higher at the first interview after birth than at either the six-week or six-month interview. The specificity of the majority of complications is high, however sensitivity is generally much lower. The sensitivity of reporting any complication during pregnancy, delivery, or post-partum ranged from 54.5% to 67.6% at the 6-week interview and from 39.2% to 63.2% at the 6-month interview. Though sensitivity of receipt of neonatal interventions was high, specificity and kappa demonstrate low consistency. Conclusion As with childbirth, it may be that during the first seven days women note symptoms with higher scrutiny, but if these do not later develop into serious health issues, they may be forgotten over time. Maternal complications and care are likely to be under-reported by women if interviewed for distant events.


The paper attempts to describe some focussed initiative of a government agency, the Local Government Engineering
Department (LGED) to enhance and improve the quality of life of slum women in its urban development projects. The concept described herein has been developed
following a study entitled "The Urban Poor in Bangladesh" by Centre for Urban Studies, University of Dhaka in 1979. Following this, the government in four
major cities undertook a project named Urban Community Development Project (1982-85) with UNICEF assistance. This concept of community based activities for the urban poor included organising the communities in groups, provision of income generation loans for women,
installation of tubewells and sanitary latrines, and construction of drains. This was further expanded and developed in Slum Improvement Project (SIP) implemented during 1989-1996. Initially Ministry of Social Welfare and later LGED from 1987 became the implementing
agency for the SIP covering 85 slum settlements in 4 city corporations and 16 district towns. The project was a success as it provided basic physical
infrastructure to the most neglected part of the city and made provision of economic activities by organising and
training the urban dwellers especially women. Encouraged by the sustainability of its components, LGED now included this concept of slum activities in all of its urban projects covering 419 slums and over 65,000 families in 40 municipalities and 4 city corporations.
The authors being intimately involved in the urban sector projects try to describe the activities concerning
the slum women for their economic and social emancipation.


The terrestrial cyanobacterium Nostoc commune Vaucher ex Bornet et Flahault occurs worldwide, including in Japan and on the Antarctic continent. The terrestrial green alga Prasiola crispa (Lightf.) Kütz. is also distributed in Antarctica. These two species need to acclimate to the severe Antarctic climate including low ambient temperature and desiccation under strong light conditions. To clarify this acclimation process, the physiological characteristics of the photosynthetic systems of these two Antarctic terrestrial organisms were assessed. The relative rate of photosynthetic electron flow in N. commune collected in Japan and in Antarctica reached maxima at 900 and 1,100 μmol photons · m−2 · s−1, respectively. The difference seemed to reflect the presence of high amounts of UV‐absorbing substances within the Antarctic cyanobacterium. On the other hand, the optimal temperatures for photosynthesis at the two locations were 30°C–35°C and 20°C–25°C, respectively. This finding suggested a decreased photosynthetic thermotolerance in the Antarctic strain. P. crispa exhibited desiccation tolerance and dehydration‐induced quenching of PSII fluorescence. Re‐reduction of the photooxidized PSI reaction center, P700, was also inhibited at fully dry states. Photosynthetic electron flow in P. crispa reached a maximum at 20°C–25°C and at a light intensity of 700 μmol photons ḃ m−2 ḃ s−1. Interestingly, the osmolarity of P. crispa cells suggested that photosynthesis is performed using water absorbed in a liquid form rather than water absorbed from the air. Overall, these data suggest that these two species have acclimated to optimally photosynthesize under conditions of the highest light intensity and the highest temperature for their habitat in Antarctica.


Background: This study investigated diabetes and heart disease family health history (FHH) knowledge and changes after providing personalized disease risk feedback. Methods: A total of 497 adults from 162 families of Mexican origin were randomized by household to conditions based on feedback recipient and content. Each provided personal and relatives' diabetes and heart disease diagnoses and received feedback materials following baseline assessment. Multivariate models were fitted to identify factors associated with the rate of 'don't know' FHH responses. Results: At baseline, US nativity was associated with a higher 'don't know' response rate (p = 0.002). Though confounded by country of birth, younger age showed a trend toward higher 'don't know' response rates. Overall, average 'don't know' response rates dropped from 20 to 15% following receipt of feedback (p < 0.001). An intervention effect was noted, as 'don't know' response rates decreased more in households where one family member (vs. all) received supplementary risk assessments (without behavioral recommendations; p = 0.011). Conclusions: Limited FHH knowledge was noted among those born in the US and younger participants, representing a key population to reach with intervention efforts. The intervention effect suggests that 'less is more', indicating the potential for too much information to limit health education program effectiveness.


The in vitro developmental potential of mouse blastocyst-derived embryonic stem cell lines has been investigated. From 3 to 8 days of suspension culture the cells form complex embryoid bodies with endoderm, basal lamina, mesoderm and ectoderm. Many are morphologically similar to embryos of the 6- to 8-day egg-cylinder stage. From 8 to 10 days of culture about half of the embryoid bodies expand into large cystic structures containing alphafoetoprotein and transferrin, thus being analagous to the visceral yolk sac of the postimplantation embryo. Approximately one third of the cystic embryoid bodies develop myocardium and when cultured in the presence of human cord serum, 30% develop blood islands, thereby exhibiting a high level of organized development at a very high frequency. Furthermore, most embryonic stem cell lines observed exhibit similar characteristics. The in vitro developmental potential of embryonic stem cell lines and the consistency with which the cells express this potential are presented as aspects which open up new approaches to the investigation of embryogenesis.


The difficulties students face when writing academically in an L2 have been widely acknowledged (Dudley-Evans 2002 et al., Paltridge 2001 and Swales 1990). While many higher education institutions in English-speaking countries have started to offer modules that support non-native (and native) students in their academic writing, very little is being done in this respect in developing countries, for example in Latin America (Carlino 2007 and Vargas 2007). In this paper, a project will be presented that aimed at fostering academic literacy in an M.A. course on research methods in a Mexican public university. Different pedagogic strategies, such as a needs analysis, explicit instruction on the target genre (the literature review ), collaborative writing, a research journal, peer-reviews and group discussions were combined in order to achieve rapid improvement in this resource-poor environment. Through constant mutual feedback from, and communication with, peers, this transitional discourse community (Bruffee 1999) of twenty-four students moved towards the norms and conventions associated with the respective genre. The strategies employed might be of interest to instructors in academic writing who work under similar difficult conditions and/or time constraints.


The reformed Hindu organisations play a major role in the provision of religious and cultural support within the local Hindu community. This study examines the role played by the reformed Hindu organisations in the provision of religious and cultural information within the greater Ethekwini region. The research methodology includes triangulation, where qualitative and quantitative research is employed. Interviews, historical research, observation as well as document and content analysis assists in the collation of information. This exploratory study seeks to determine the kinds of information formats and methods of dissemination that are used by the organisations. Religious and cultural information offered through other services such as the languages classes are discussed. The Indian languages used by the religious leaders are explored. The level of library services offered, the contents and authorship of the published material are investigated. Non-print media and problems associated with the use of the non-print media are discussed. Also discussed are interpersonal means of information dissemination and preservation, like the oral tradition of singing and delivering talks. Essential details of classification in ancient Indian libraries are included in the study since libraries have been a part of Hindu temples and universities from ancient times. Brief historical information regarding the arrival of the Indians in South Africa and the subsequent establishment of the Hindu religion within KwaZulu-Natal is provided. Reasons for the development and support given to the establishment of the reformed Hindu organisations are outlined. An analysis of the interviews conducted covering all the objectives of the study is also included. The collections held by the different libraries/library services are analysed. The significant role played by the reformed Hindu organisations in the preservation and dissemination of religious and cultural information presented in a variety of formats is discussed in the concluding remarks. The researcher has included recommendations that would benefit the participating organisations in their efforts as preservers and disseminators of religious and cultural information.


Prior diagnoses in unification-based type reconstruction systems have either missed information that is relevant, presented irrelevant details, or both. We use a framework based on the Unification Logics of Le Chenadec to define, derive and simplify proof-based source-tracking for term unification. The objects of sourcetracking are proofs in this deduction system, and correspond to path expressions over a unification graph whose labels form a semi-Dyck language of balanced parentheses. Simplification of source-tracking information is implemented as proof normalization in the rewrite system for free groups. Subject-reduction properties guarantee that normalization preserves the semantics of deductions. The presentation of the logic facilitates proof construction by a simple extension to standard unification algorithms. We apply unification source-tracking to type inference in the Curry-Hindley type system. Programs are represented as systems of syntax equations. Program slices correspond vii to weakenings of syntax and type equations. A constraint generation function maps weakenings of type equations to weakenings of syntax equations. Source-tracking information is defined in terms of the inverse of this generating function. Unification is central to many applications of symbolic computation and artificial intelligence, including computer algebra, automated theorem proving, expert systems, and programming language type systems. Source-tracking is a debugging technique based on tracing the execution of a program to identify those subparts that contribute to the result of the execution.


An accessible, modern guide to the hugely popular art of tracing your family tree, "Grow Your Own Family Tree" offers a concise and comprehensive summary of how to locate and use a range of records and information to track down your own family history. There is information on everything from where to find census information or order a birth certificate, to finding out whether your great-great-uncle committed a disciplinary offence whilst in the army. And unlike other books on the subject, the scope of "Grow Your Own Family Tree" extends far beyond Britain, to track your migrating relatives.In twenty-nine clear and helpful chapters, Alan Stewart takes you through every aspect of researching your family history and tells stories about the memorable discoveries that ordinary people have made in their own searches. As an expert on the internet, he also offers a detailed exploration of the very best websites and current Internet resources along the way. With this book to hand, it has never been easier to find out more about our ancestors.


This study discussed the culpability and liturgical indifference of the church towards the challenge of climate change in Nigeria. This was done with a view to creating a niche for the church in the process of climate change mitigation and adaptation in the country. Using a phenomenological method, the study revealed the following: Firstly, many rural agro-based communities along the Coastal, Savanna and Sahel ecological zones of the country are already suffering the severity of climate change impacts. Secondly, the church in Nigeria has shown little or no commitment towards the mitigation and adaptation to climate change in the country. The study therefore, challenged the church to rise to the ecological need of the time by practically intervening in the process of mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of climate change in Nigeria. The study suggested, among other things, two-fold intervention praxes for the church.  These included Awareness Creation (AC) and Care for Climate Change Victims (CCCVs).


The relevance of the Communist Manifesto in the era of global capitalism was questioned following the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism and the failure of socialism elsewhere. The masterwork of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels foresaw the divergent paths which capitalism will take economies as well as the resulting inequality and poverty amid plenty. In the past 150 years, the correctness of the Manifesto's analysis of the capitalist system and its flaws, the periodic crises of overproduction, its tendencies towards concetration of capital and towards alienation of labor, its devaluation and destruction of every social nexus, and the revolutionary role of the proletarian class has been proven and refuted. Despite its imperfections, the Manifesto is the standard by which all alternative paradigms are measured. If the socialists and socialismcan keep up, the Manifesto may yet liberate humankind from capitalism, perhaps within the next 150 years.


Genomic plasticity enables adaptation to changing environments, which is especially relevant for pathogens that engage in "arms races" with their hosts. In many pathogens, genes mediating virulence cluster in highly variable, transposon-rich, physically distinct genomic compartments. However, understanding of the evolution of these compartments, and the role of transposons therein, remains limited. Here, we show that transposons are the major driving force for adaptive genome evolution in the fungal plant pathogen Verticillium dahliae. We show that highly variable lineage-specific (LS) regions evolved by genomic rearrangements that are mediated by erroneous double-strand repair, often utilizing transposons. We furthermore show that recent genetic duplications are enhanced in LS regions, against an older episode of duplication events. Finally, LS regions are enriched in active transposons, which contribute to local genome plasticity. Thus, we provide evidence for genome shaping by transposons, both in an active and passive manner, which impacts the evolution of pathogen virulence.


1. BUILDING DREAMS, SETTING GOALS. FOCUS Challenge Case: Gloria Gonzales. Who Are You? And What Do You Want? Spending Time in the "System". How Motivated Are You and How Are You Motivated? Give Yourself an Attitude Adjustment. Ability versus Effort: What's More Important? What Drives You? Values, Dreams, and Goals. College Success: You Make the Call. 2: LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING. FOCUS Challenge Case: Tammy Ko. Go to the HEAD of the Class: Learning and the Brain. Multiple Intelligences: How Are You Smart? How Do You Perceive and Process Information? What Role Does Your Personality Play? 3. MANAGING YOUR TIME AND ENERGY. FOCUS Challenge Case: Derek Johnson. Time Management Isn't Enough. Energy, Our Most Precious Resource. "I'll Study in My Free Time" ... And When Is That? Schedule Your Way to Success. To Do or Not to Do? There Is No Question. How Time Flies. The P Word: Read Now ... or Maybe Tomorrow ... or the Next Day ... or... Beyond Juggling: Realistically Manage Work, School, and Personal Life. 4. THINKING CRITICALLY AND CREATIVELY. FOCUS Challenge Case: Annie Miller. Rethinking Thinking. What is Critical Thinking? Four-Part Model of Critical Thinking. Becoming a Better Critical Thinker. Unleash Your Creativity! Creativity: "Thinking Outside the ... Book." 5. DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, RESEARCH, AND INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS. FOCUS Challenge Case: Dario Jones. Technology Skills: Wireless, Windowed, Webbed, and Wikied. The Internet: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Use Technology to Your Academic Advantage. Netiquette: Online Manners Matter. Taking Online Classes: E-Learning versus C-Learning. Research Skills and Your College Success. Information Literacy and Your College Success. Downloading Your Workload: The Easy Way Out? Writing as a Process: Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan. Build a Better Paper: The Seven C's. In a Manner of Speaking... Craft a Winning Presentation: The Seven P's. 6. ENGAGING, LISTENING, AND TAKING NOTES IN CLASS. FOCUS Challenge Case: Lindsey Collier. Get Engaged in Class. Listening with Focus. Ask and You Shall Receive. How Do You Know What's Important? Taking Lecture Notes: Different Strokes for Different Folks. Using Lecture Notes. 7. DEVELOPING YOUR MEMORY. FOCUS Challenge Case Study: Darnell Williams. Memory: The Long and the Short of It. The Three R's of Remembering: Record, Retain, Retrieve. 20 Ways to Master Your Memory. How Our Memories (uh ... hmmm ...) Fail Us. This Is Your Memory on Drugs. Deepen Your Memory. 8. READING AND STUDYING. FOCUS Challenge Case: Katie Alexander. Who Needs to Read? Read Right! Meta-what? Metacognition, Reading, and Studying. Becoming an Intentional Learner: Make a Master Study Plan. Sprinting to the Finish Line: When to Take Short Cuts. Integrated Learning: Learning Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts. A Final Word about Reading and Studying. 9. TAKING TESTS. FOCUS Challenge Case: Joe Cloud. Testing 1, 2, 3 ... Show What You Know. Before the Test: Calm Your Nerves by Preparing Carefully. During the Test: Focus and Work Hard. Taking Objective Tests. Taking Subjective Essay Tests. Don't Cheat Yourself! After the Test: Continue to Learn. 10. BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS, VALUING DIVERSITY. FOCUS Challenge Case: Kia Washington. The Heart of College Success. What Is Emotional Intelligence? What Is This Thing Called Love? Communicating in Relationships. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do. Diversity Makes a Difference. Appreciate the American Mosaic. Think Globally Act Locally. 11. CHOOSING A COLLEGE MAJOR AND CAREER. FOCUS Challenge Case: Ethan Cole. What's the Connection? How to Choose a Major and Career. How to Launch a Career. 12. WORKING TOWARD WELLNESS. FOCUS Challenge Case: Anthony Lopez. Health, Education, and Welfare. Physical Health: In Sickness and in Health. Mental Health: Up or Down. Spiritual Health: Department of the Interior. You Take the Wheel!


One of the most significant drawbacks of modelling complex machine structures and drives using numerical models (discreet or hybrid Finite Element Analysis (FEAs)) is the difficulty of obtaining accurate modal parameters, such as stiffness and damping values of the mechanical parts as well as the accuracy of the models. Although the FEA is one of the numerical methods that are used to speed up the simulation/calculations, the dynamics of the machine tool/drives are expected to change under machining conditions, which makes numerical models inconvenient. Using Operational Modal Analysis (OMA), on-line parameters identification, can overcome the static state deviations and give more accurate results to represent the mechanical system. Thus, the project will introduce a new systematic procedure to carry out OMA on ball-screw drives. Firstly, the identification techniques are evaluated by means of simulated models and applied to identify the dynamics of the ball-screw drive using two different modelling approaches.

Furthermore, this project tends to investigate the dynamics of the ball-screw driver using a novel measurement procedure to conduct OMA. The ball-screw driver of the machine is excited using Idle running to reform impulsive inertial sequences. The vibration measurements of the system were measured using a Laser Interferometer using displacement travels of the ball-screw drive. Also, the identified modal parameters of the system were compared to those captured by mounting accelerometers on the top level of the table structure using random, impulsive and cutting force excitations.

The modal parameters identification was carried out by means of the improved subspace identification, which uses the auto and cross correlation of the segmented vibration signals as an input to the classical covariance subspace identification. The proposed methodology presented the ability to perform under high-sampling rates and noise suppressions. The identified results of the feed-drive system using Laser Interferometer were obtained using different feed-rates and mass weight loads to highlight the most sensitive vibration modes due to the machining process.


Invertible local transformations of a multipartite system are used to define equivalence classes in the set of entangled states. This classification concerns the entanglement properties of a single copy of the state. Accordingly, we say that two states have the same kind of entanglement if both of them can be obtained from the other by means of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) with nonzero probability. When applied to pure states of a three-qubit system, this approach reveals the existence of two inequivalent kinds of genuine tripartite entanglement, for which the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state and a W state appear as remarkable representatives. In particular, we show that the W state retains maximally bipartite entanglement when any one of the three qubits is traced out. We generalize our results both to the case of higher-dimensional subsystems and also to more than three subsystems, for all of which we show that, typically, two randomly chosen pure states cannot be converted into each other by means of LOCC, not even with a small probability of success.


Abstract Aim: To examine the effectiveness of the implementation of a clinical practice guideline on nurses screening patients for alcohol and other substance use, providing brief interventions, and referring patients at risk for treatment. Method: Medical record audits were conducted in selected medical and surgical wards of two metropolitan hospitals in Sydney prior to and three months following the guideline implementation. Result: Seventy-nine (pre) and 84 (post) patient records were audited. There were no differences in screening rates for alcohol (28% and 29%), tobacco (29% and 23%) and illicit drug use (16% and 8%) before and after implementation of the guideline. Practice implication: Factors which may have limited the effectiveness of the clinical practice guideline dissemination included design of the education program, existing level of nurses' knowledge and competence, and strategies in place to ensure sustainability of the program. We also provided suggestions for improvement of screening for alcohol and other substance use.


The objective of the present study is to provide an overview of the effects of selected Advanced Driver Assistance systems (ADAS), namely intelligent speed adaptation, collision warning and alcolock on driving behaviour and road safety. The methodology, developed within the SafetyCube project, was implemented in that purpose. International published studies and reports were selected and then analyzed. For each specific ADAS, the applied methodology included a rigorous and detailed literature search, qualitative analysis of studies in terms of design, methods and limitations and synthesis of findings and meta-analyses, when feasible. The findings of the present study are based on 18 high quality published studies, reports and relevant meta-analyses. Results indicate that in-vehicle technologies and related systems have the potential of playing a very important role on improving road safety. A second remark is that indirect road safety indicators are usually examined, whilst crashes and injuries are rarely considered, due to lack of relevant data. For instance, the effect of alcolock is mainly measurable through the percentage of engine size stops, the reduction in alcohol-related fines and DUI recidivism. Similarly, the effectiveness of collision warning systems is usually examined on the basis of surveys of driving performance, whilst at the same time the costs must be overcome as existing costbenefit analyses indicate. Overall, there is lack of both quantitative reviews in the form of meta-analyses and qualitative reviews, because relevant research is relatively limited.


Many technical communities are vigorously pursuing research topics that contribute to the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, as sensing, actuation, communication, and control become even more sophisticated and ubiquitous, there is a significant overlap in these communities, sometimes from slightly different perspectives. More cooperation between communities is encouraged. To provide a basis for discussing open research problems in IoT, a vision for how IoT could change the world in the distant future is first presented. Then, seven key research topics are enumerated and research problems within these topics are discussed.


This article is based on the key argument, praised by national and international agencies, that social participation has become, in the 1990s, one of the main organizational tenets in policy-making and democratic deliberation at the local level. Stimulating the participation of different political actors and creating a political network that informs, elaborates, implements, and evaluates public policies currently constitute an essential part in discourses of self-proclaimed progressive policy-makers. The nineties have been characterized by the institutionalization of consulting "organized civil society" in the processes of defining local public policy. Participation has become a criterium of good local government. Nonetheless, participatory mechanisms must respond to at least two main critical challenges: first, who participates and what inequalities remain within participation? Second, how is collective interest built within participatory mechanisms? This article analyzes, based on research undertaken in 10 experiments in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic) and Europe (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), how they represent innovations in the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of local public policies.


This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship and documents two key findings. First, the impact of extreme heat on mortality is notably smaller in states that more frequently experience extreme heat. Second, the difference in the heat-mortality relationship between hot and cold states declined over 1900-2004, though it persisted through 2004. Continuing differences in the mortality consequences of hot days suggests that health motivated adaptation to climate change may be slow and costly around the world.


Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot any wireless LAN ... home or business WLAN technology for non-experts: clear, accurate, easy Proven quick-start configurations for Windows®, and Linux®, and MacOS® No-hassle wireless security solutions Covers IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11i/WPA Contrasts IEEE 802.11 WLAN technology with IEEE 802.16 WMAN and IEEE 802.15 WPAN technologyExpert knowledge and insight for deploying and managing any wireless LAN.In this book, best-selling networking author Thomas Maufer explains how wireless LANs work, and how to make them work for you-reliably and securely. Maufer takes you under the hood with today's latest WLAN technologies, offering practical insight and context for deploying, managing, and troubleshooting WLANs in any environment, from the enterprise to the home. Covers all leading IEEE 802.11 wireless standards: 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11i/WPA Shows how to deploy small, mid-sized, large, public, business, and home networks Provides sample Windows®, Linux®, and MacOS® configurations that help you get started quickly Demystifies WLAN security so you can understand how to protect your data Illuminates the 802.11 protocol so you can troubleshoot more effectively Previews tomorrow's WLAN standards and applications for business and home (IEEE 802.11j and 802.11n)Whether you're a network/system administrator or a power user, Thomas Maufer demystifies wireless LAN technology... so you can maximize the benefits while minimizing the hassles.


The aim of the thesis was to investigate which physical, chemical or oxidative characteristics of ambient PM have the most consistent associations with acute cardio-respiratory effects in human volunteers. During the first phase of the RAPTES project ("Risk of Airborne Particles: a Toxicological-Epidemiological hybrid Study") eight sites in the Netherlands that differed in local PM emission sources were chosen for extensive air pollution characterization. The measured air pollutants included PM10, PM2.5, PM2.5-10, particle number concentrations (PNC, a proxy for ultrafine particles), PM absorbance, elemental (EC) and organic carbon (OC), trace metals (Fe, Cu, Ni, V), secondary inorganic components (nitrate and sulfate), endotoxin content, OP, and the gaseous air pollutants – ozone and nitrogen oxides (O3, NO2, NOX). The selected sites were: an underground train station, three different road traffic sites, a livestock farm, a sea harbor, a site located in the vicinity of a large steelworks, and an urban background site. Chapter 2 presents a detailed characterization of air pollution at these sites. The underground train station had substantially higher concentrations of nearly every PM characteristic, especially Fe, Cu and OP. PNC showed the highest concentrations at the continuous traffic site. Substantially increased levels of endotoxin were measured at the farm. These results showed that it was possible to identify real-world locations where several PM characteristics had high contrast and correlations sufficiently low to investigate their independent health effects. In the second, semi-experimental phase, healthy, non-smoking, young adults were repeatedly exposed for five hours at each of the sites. Measurements took place on 30 days between March and October 2009, resulting in 170 observations in 31 volunteers. Markers of respiratory and cardiovascular health were measured prior to exposure, directly after, two hours after and in the following morning. Two-pollutant linear regression models were used to investigate which air pollution component(s) were most consistently associated with health effects. Chapter 3 investigated which ambient air pollutants had the most consistent associations with acute respiratory effects. An increase in PNC was associated with acute airway inflammation (FENO). The association was robust and insensitive to adjustment for other pollutants. Similarly consistent associations were seen between impaired lung function (FVC and FEV1) and PNC and NO2. PM mass concentration and OP were not predictive of the observed acute responses, neither were other measured PM characteristics. Associations with acute cardiovascular effects were studied in chapter 4. OC, sulfate and nitrate were most consistently associated with different blood biomarkers predictive of the risk of cardiovascular events – C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, platelet counts and von Willebrand Factor. Associations for PM mass concentrations and OP were less consistent, whereas PNC, EC, trace metals and NO2, were not associated with the biomarkers after adjustment for other pollutants. In chapter 5 thrombin generation ex vivo was measured using blood samples collected during the study. Increases in thrombin generation in the intrinsic (FXII-dependent) blood coagulation pathway were associated with exposure to NO2, nitrate and sulfate, but not PM mass, OP or other measured air pollutants.


Researchers have recently showed an increasing interest in understanding entrepreneurship as an experiential learning process. In this article, we investigate the role of prior career experience for the development of entrepreneurial knowledge, i.e., knowledge that facilitates for individuals to recognize and act on opportunities as well as to organize and manage new ventures. Based on an analysis of 291 Swedish entrepreneurs we find links between various career experiences and the development of entrepreneurial knowledge. In addition we also find evidence that the entrepreneurs' preference for exploring new possibilities vs. exploiting pre-existing knowledge are important to consider to explain this process. The study ends with a discussion of the findings, together with suggestions for future research.


Identification of named entity(NE) class (semantic class) is crucial for NLP problems like coreference resolution where semantic compatibility between the entity mentions is imperative to coreference decision. Short and noisy text containing the entity makes it challenging to extract the NE class of the entity through the context. We introduce a framework for named entity class identification for a given entity, using the web when the entity boundaries are known. The proposed framework will be beneficial for specialized domains where data and class label challenges exist. We demonstrate the benefit of our framework through a case study of Indian classical music forums. Apart from person and location included in standard semantic classes, here we also consider raga 1 , song, instrument and music concept. Our baseline approach follows a heuristic based method making use of Freebase, a structured web repository. The search engine based approaches acquire context from the web for an entity and perform named entity class identification. This approach shows improvement compared to baseline performance and it is further improved with the hierarchical classification introduced. In summary, our framework is a first-of-its-kind validation of viability of the web for NE class identification.


Model-agnostic meta-learners aim to acquire meta-learned parameters from similar tasks to adapt to novel tasks from the same distribution with few gradient updates. With the flexibility in the choice of models, those frameworks demonstrate appealing performance on a variety of domains such as few-shot image classification and reinforcement learning. However, one important limitation of such frameworks is that they seek a common initialization shared across the entire task distribution, substantially limiting the diversity of the task distributions that they are able to learn from. In this paper, we augment MAML with the capability to identify the mode of tasks sampled from a multimodal task distribution and adapt quickly through gradient updates. Specifically, we propose a multimodal MAML (MMAML) framework, which is able to modulate its meta-learned prior parameters according to the identified mode, allowing more efficient fast adaptation. We evaluate the proposed model on a diverse set of few-shot learning tasks, including regression, image classification, and reinforcement learning. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in modulating the meta-learned prior in response to the characteristics of tasks but also show that training on a multimodal distribution can produce an improvement over unimodal training. The code for this project is publicly available at https://vuoristo.github.io/MMAML.


Likely death and sickness rates caused by a toxic contaminant release with a resistance to sickness that is age dependent are explored. As many as 10 different sicknesses can be allowed for each released contaminant. Transport of portions of released contaminant by airborne or waterborne methods leads to different contaminant levels and therefore, different death and sickness rates. Gender-specific sicknesses (e.g., prostate cancer or ovarian cancer) can also be included, allowing broad usage of the quantitative procedure described. The influence of uncertainty in parameters relating to either the age dependence model for sickness or death rates, the age distribution model of the population, or the spill and transport of toxic contaminant can easily be handled using a risking program such as Crystal Ball, in conjunction with the basic death and sickness rate program. Several numerical illustrations show how to assess likely death and sickness rates under these influences.


Background Working in the intensive care unit can be traumatic for nursing personnel. Critical care nurses are faced with repeated exposure to death and dying as they are involved in caring for patients who are actively dying or who have been told that they have a terminal illness and are faced with the possibility of impending death. Critical care nurses relate in different ways to the phenomena of death and dying within their nursing profession and their scope of practice. These nurses often have a difficult time coping with the stress that comes with caring for those who are dying or relating to loved ones of those that are dying. Aim of the study The aim of the study was to explore the critical care nurse's experiences of death and dying. Methodology A qualitative, descriptive phenomenological approach was used to guide the study. Four nurses were recruited and rich descriptions of their experiences were gained through individual face-to-face interviews. One broad question was asked: 'What are your experiences regarding death and dying of your patients in ICU?' iii Results The findings of this study revealed that issues such as communication, multicultural diversity, education and coping mechanisms relating to caring for the critically ill and dying patient are essential in nursing education and practice. Critical care nurses need to have support networks in place, not only to assist in providing care, but also for their own emotional support


Adversarial machines, where a learner competes against an adversary, have regained much recent interest in machine learning. They are naturally in the form of saddle-point optimization, often with separable structure but sometimes also with unmanageably large dimension. In this work we show that adversarial prediction under multivariate losses can be solved much faster than they used to be. We first reduce the problem size exponentially by using appropriate sufficient statistics, and then we adapt the new stochastic variance-reduced algorithm of Balamurugan & Bach (2016) to allow any Bregman divergence. We prove that the same linear rate of convergence is retained and we show that for adversarial prediction using KL-divergence we can further achieve a speedup of #example times compared with the Euclidean alternative. We verify the theoretical findings through extensive experiments on two example applications: adversarial prediction and LPboosting.


We study the prospects for discriminating between the dark matter (DM) and pulsar origin of the PAMELA positron excess with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02. We simulate the response of AMS-02 to positrons (and electrons) originating from DM annihilations, and determine the pulsar parameters (spin-down luminosity, distance and characteristic age) that produce a satisfactory fit to the mock AMS-02 data. It turns out that it is always possible to mimic a DM signal with pulsars. Although the fit in some cases requires values of spin-down luminosity and characteristic age different from those of known pulsars in the ATNF and Fermi-LAT catalogues, these catalogues are known to be incomplete, and therefore the pulsar interpretation can hardly be ruled out. We also show that if the positron excess is due to a single pulsar, it is always possible to find a DM candidate that provides a good fit to the mock AMS-02 data. The discrimination between the two scenarios will thus require a better knowledge of the underlying sources, or complementary data.


Title: Comparison of the effectiveness of three different disinfectant solutions in disinfection of gutta-percha cones in one minute Authors: Hasheminya SM. Assistant Professor*, Bahreini B. Dentist Address: *Department of Endodontics, Faculty of Dentistry, Esfahan University of Medical Sciences Background and Aim: Care must be taken during root canal therapy to prevent contamination of filling materials and avoid root canal contamination. Gutta-percha cones are now widely used to fill root canals. However they are not resistant to conventional sterilization processes in moist or dry heat. To keep the aseptic chain, gutta-percha cones require rapid chair side decontamination before use. Considering different methods for rapid decontamination of gutta-percha cones, use of chemical agents is the best. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of three different disinfectant solutions in rapid decontamination of gutta-percha cones in one minute Materials and Methods: In this experimental study, 360 gutta-percha cones were placed in bacterial suspensions of Staphylococcus aurous, Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis spore for 30 minutes, and then immersed in disinfectant solutions (Micro-10, Deconex 53 Plus, 5.25% sodium hypocholorite) for 1 minute. After that, the cones were aseptically transferred to the test tubes containing sterile saline. This solution was diluted 10-fold and then cultured on in brain-heart-infusion agar and the number of colonies was estimated after 24 h incubation at 37 C. A series of 5 previously sterilized cones was used as negative control to check the sterility of gutta-percha cones directly from the manufacturer's box. Another series of gutta-percha cones were considered as positive control group. Results: No bacterial growth was seen in different test groups and negative control group. Conclusion: Analysis of disinfectant effects of sodium hypochlorite, Micro10 and Deconex 53 plus showed that all of these solutions have bactericidal and sporocidal effect and are very efficient in surface disinfection of gutta– percha cones in one minute. Because of irritative effects and unpleasant odor of sodium hypochlorite, Deconex 53 plus and Micro10 can be used for rapid decontamination of gutta-percha cones.


The market for high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission systems has increased dramatically the last few decades. This is mainly due to the economic, electrical, and environmental advantages for bulk power transmission over long distances. Also, in some cases, such as for long subsea cable links, HVDC is the only option. HVDC cables have traditionally used oil-paper for insulation, with the most common type being the mass-impregnated, nondraining cable. The oil or mass-impregnated cables have for a century shown to have a very high reliability and are currently used for voltages and power ratings up to 525 kV and about 1 GW. Today, it is still the preferred technology for the highest voltage levels [1]. However, in the last two decades, extruded polymeric insulation has become more popular, and the highest voltage level currently installed is +320 kV used for grid interconnections and for offshore wind farms. HVDC cable systems using cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) are available for voltages up to +600 kV and 3 GW and polypropylene based for +600 kV and 3.5 GW.