This thesis presents experimental studies of low-temperature atmospheric pressure plasma sources with generic ability to effectively treat large-scale three-dimensional (3D) objects. The reported large-scale plasma sources are developed through parallelisation of single plasma jets. This strategy outshines the other reported strategies for treatment of uneven surfaces by being able to produce spatially extended plasma directly onto the surface of heavily three-dimensional objects. Comparable studies of the design of elemental plasma jets bring out a hybrid electrode configuration, the capillary-ring jet, as the best elemental jet to be used in the parallelisation. It is found that the introduction of a ballast resistor to the individual jet circuit or built-in capacitance is important to assure the jet-to-jet synchronism, stability and uniformity. Electrical and optical analyses of one-dimensional (1D) array of atmospheric pressure plasma jets demonstrate robust temporal and spatial jet-to-jet uniformity both for flat and sloped surfaces. Hexagonally-arranged two-dimensional (2D) arrays of atmospheric pressure plasma jets show good level of insusceptibility to variations of the downstream samples in their physical dimensions as well as structural and material properties. The reaction chemistry impact area of a 2D 37-jet array is estimated to be 18.6 cm2. These confirm the plasma jet arrays as a viable option as large-scale atmospheric plasma sources, well suited for many processing applications including plasma medicine. The spatially separated dual-frequency excitation further benefits the plasma jet in that separate control of different important plasma parameters is possible. Enhanced plasma properties achieved by the dual-frequency offer greater potential to the jet arrays.


The battery cells are an important part of electric and hybrid vehicles, and their deterioration due to aging or malfunction directly affects the life cycle and performance of the whole battery system. Therefore, an early detection of deviation in performance of the battery cells is an important task and its correct solution could significantly improve the whole vehicle performance. This paper presents a computational strategy for the detection of deviation of battery cells, due to aging or malfunction. The detection is based on periodically processing a predetermined number of data collected in data blocks that are obtained during the real operation of the vehicle. The first step is data compression, when the original large amount of data is reduced to smaller number of cluster centers. This is done by a newly proposed sequential clustering algorithm that arranges the clusters in decreasing order of their volumes. The next step is using a fuzzy inference procedure for weighted approximation of the cluster centers to create one‐dimensional models for each battery cell that represents the voltage–current relationship. This creates an equal basis for the further comparison of the battery cells. Finally, the detection of the deviated battery cells is treated as a similarity‐analysis problem, in which the pair distances between all battery cells are estimated by analyzing the estimations for voltage from the respective fuzzy models. All these three steps of the computational procedure are explained in the paper and applied to real experimental data for the detection of deviation of five battery cells. Discussions and suggestions are made for a practical application aimed at designing a monitoring system for the detection of deviations.


Other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) are sites outside protected areas that deliver effective and long-term in situ conservation of biodiversity. Biodiversity conservation may be the primary objective of the site, a secondary objective of a site that is managed for other purposes, or it may be an unintended consequence of the way the site is managed. OECMs may be governed and managed by governments, private entities or Indigenous peoples and local communities, or a combination of these. This tool guides an assessor through three steps to apply eight criteria which determine if a site qualifies as an OECM as set out under the Convention on Biological Diversity. For sites which do not currently meet all the criteria, the tool serves to highlight areas where further information or improvements in governance and management are required.


This project constitutes a critical enquiry into the Independent Learning Pathway (ILP) approach to acquiring degrees offered by Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. The ILP approach is for professionally experienced adults who are often poorly served by traditional taught approaches to achieving degree qualifications. These learners already have considerable degree-relevant knowledge and skill, yet this usually does not count as part of a taught degree, and these learners usually do not enrol in such degree programmes because they do not have the time to study within the typical delivery framework. The ILP approach provides equity of access for this group but is a significantly different learning process which challenges traditional conceptions of degree level learning and in turn is challenged as a valid approach by academics and regulatory agencies.

Hence this study aims both to illuminate and validate the degree level learning which occurs in the ILP and to develop a model of practice for facilitators to assure the quality of this degree level learning. In pursuit of these aims I undertook, as a participant researcher, a work-based enquiry using an interpretive approach, drawing on the principles of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967), (Strauss and Corbin 2015).

The project research phase commenced with an extensive survey sent to all (423) learners who studied with Capable NZ from 2006-2014, followed up with ten in-depth interviews with current learners, and eight interviews with facilitators of the ILP model. I captured the themes emerging from the feedback and analysis to identify clear signposts for both effective learning and effective facilitation in an independent learning context.

This study has resulted in a (grounded) model of practice for the teachers, referred to in Capable NZ as facilitators, who guide ILP learners. This model of practice includes a competency framework, successful practice guidelines and practical learning tools. The study has also resulted in guidelines and learning tools for learners, and for both facilitators and learners the 'SPRINGBOARD' tool has been developed as a reflective framework for effective facilitation and learning respectively. Another key outcome of the study is the illumination and validation of the degree level learning which occurs through the ILP process.


Although bibliometrics and library science are older, bibliometric tools were really born about 50 years ago and were only made available to a large audience with the widespread use of the Internet. Although their concrete forms have been largely modified, they are still based today on epistemic and computer foundations decided at the time. Three important characteristics of these tools can be identified: first, they are proprietary, i.e. users not only have to pay for access to the data but it is also difficult to manipulate and verify; second, in the name of a principle of scarcity or quality, tool creators assume to rely only on a selection of accessible scientific documents; thirdly, this choice of a small sample is, moreover, very marked by a historical irreversibility that makes invisible in particular some types of documents (books, conferences, preprints) and written documents in the vast majority of languages other than English. However, over the last twenty years, there has been a progressive liberation of scientific texts through the existence of different disciplinary (ArXiv, PubMedCentral, REPEC) and institutional (HAL, universities archive...) open archival systems, and publication models allowing the harvesting of texts and/or metadata - including the references cited. It is in the continuation of this movement that the construction of a real tool, Matilda, is taking into account all available sources and user personalization, in order to serve as an elementary brick for bibliographic and bibliometric research in the age of open science.


In this definitive study of one of popular culture's favorite genres Robert C. Harvey, a cartoonist and comics critic, traces the evolution of the comic book as a potent form of narrative art. He takes it from its beginnings in the 1930s through the most contemporary of productions in the mid-1990s. In defining comic book aesthetics Harvey establishes both a critical perspective and a vocabulary for evaluating the art. Because he is an able practitioner himself, his insights are especially valuable. As he demonstrates how words and pictures function together to tell stories in ways unique to the medium, he explains the processes of narrative breakdown, page layout, and panel composition, and shows how these aspects of the art form can be manipulated for dramatic effects. Enhanced by many illustrations, this detailed examination of comic book art includes work from both the mainstream and the counterculture, both veteran and newcomer. Whether traditional or iconoclastic, their cartoon art continues to uphold the aesthetic that Harvey finds to be the basis of cartooning.


Small cell carcinoma of the urinary bladder is an uncommon tumor. The authors report the clinicopathologic findings in a series of 22 cases. Fifteen men and 7 women M were studied; their ages ranged from 51 to 87 years (mean, 62.4 years). The most frequent presentation was hematuria (94.4%). At diagnosis, three patients had Stage B disease, six had Stage C, and ten had Stage D (unknown stage in three). Histologically, 6 were oat cell type tumors, 11 were of intermediate cell type, and 5 were of combined cell type. Immunohistochemical studies demonstrated positivity for neuron‐specific enolase in ten of ten cases, cytokeratin in seven of ten cases, chromogranin in eight of nine cases, serotonin in seven of nine cases, and S‐100 protein in four of ten cases. Neuroendocrine differentiation was seen in five of seven cases examined by electron microscopy. Treatment and follow‐up data were available for 19 patients: 10 (52.6%) were dead of disease, 5 (26.3%) were alive and well, 3 (15.8%) were alive with disease, and 1 (5.3%) died of an unrelated cause. The 2‐year survival rate was 50% for patients with Stage B, 25% for patients with Stage C, and 33% for patients with Stage D disease. Although overall survival was poor, some cases responded well to therapy. Based on the authors' experience, radical cystectomy with adjuvant chemotherapy appears to be the treatment of choice.


A differential pulse voltammetric study of complexes of Cd(II) and Pb(II) with crown ethers is reported. Measured log K(1) values for Cd(II) with 18-crown-6 (1,4,7,10,13,16-hexaoxacyclooctadecane), 15-crown-5 (1,4,7,10,13-pentaoxacyclopentadecane), and 12-crown-4 (1,4,7,10-tetraoxacyclododecane) are respectively 2.53 (+/-0.06), 1.97 (+/-0.07), and 1.72 (+/-0.08) and for Pb(II) with 18-crown-6 is 4.17 (+/-0.03), all at 25 degrees C in 0.1 M LiNO(3). Cd(II) is smaller than is usually associated with strong bonding with crown ethers. The high log K(1) values for Cd(2+) with crown ethers found here are discussed in terms of distortion of Cd(II) by relativistic effects. The resulting plasticity of the coordination geometry of the Cd(II) ion allows it to meet the metal ion size requirements of all the crown ethers, allowing high log K(1) values to occur. Crystal structures for [Cd(bz-18-crown-6)(SCN)(2)] (1) (bz-18-crown-6 = benzo-1,4,7,10,13,16-hexaoxacyclooctadecane) and [K(18-crown-6)][Cd(SCN)(3)] (2) are reported. 1 was triclinic, space group P1, a = 8.5413(2), b = 10.0389(2), and c = 13.4644(2) A, alpha = 94.424(1), beta = 102.286(1), and gamma = 93.236(1) degrees, Z = 2, and final R = 0.023. 2 was orthorhombic, space group Cmc2(1), a = 14.7309(3), b = 15.1647(3), and c = 10.6154(2) A, Z = 4, and final R = 0.020. In 1, the Cd occupies the cavity of the bz-18-crown-6 with long average Cd-O bond lengths of 2.65 A and is N-bonded to the thiocyanates with short average Cd-N bonds of 2.12 A. In [Cd(bz-18-crown-6)(SCN)(2)], the linear coordination involving the Cd and the two N-bonded thiocyanate groups in 1 is discussed in terms of the role of relativistic effects in the tendency to linear coordination geometry in group 12 metal ions. In 2 Cd forms a polymeric structure involving thiocyanate bridges between Cd atoms and K(+) occupies the cavity of the crown ether. 2 highlights the fact that cadmium is almost never S-bonded to thiocyanate except in bridging thiocyanates.


This article estimates the non-first-order economic loss in Japan due to a future increase in tropical cyclones. One possible effect of global warming could be the increase in intensity of tropical cyclones. Using historical storm tracks between the years 1978 and 2007 and altering their intensities due to this potential increase in their intensity, this paper calculates the future potential regional GDP loss in a certain area that is affected by tropical cyclones. Most of the literature is concerned with physical damage and the loss of lives due to tropical cyclones. However, there are additional economic costs when sustained wind speeds are higher than 30 knots (55.56 km/h), a level that generally will lead to a precautionary cessation of many human activities. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, the paper calculates the potential economic costs for the year 2085 under a climate change scenario with a linear one-per cent yearly increase in CO2. Using a spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan, it is possible to forecast which parts of the country are likely to experience the highest loss risk.


Prologue This paper discusses certain themes in the social and cultural anthropology of the indigenous peoples of South America. Although I refer to the historical record in tracing and situating the emergence of these themes, the essay cannot and does not deal comprehensively with the history of lowland South American ethnography, nor does it attempt to survey all the work done there as the century draws to a close. I focus mainly, though not exclusively, on Brazil and discuss the developments in the study of cosmology, social theory, and social organization that have taken place there. I have therefore had to omit discussion of another major theme in the anthropology of Brazil, namely of the work done in the tradition pioneered by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira on inter-ethnic friction. I also regret that space prevents me from discussing the interesting and more recent developments of studies in the psychology of indigenous peoples, carried out by scholars such as Waud Kracke, Thomas Gregor, and William Crocker. In this paper, I discuss how anthropologists have modified old paradigms and developed new ones in order to understand the cultures of the indigenous peoples of lowland South America. Early Beginnings The Spanish invaders of the Americas established themselves in the Caribbean but their attention was soon focused on Mexico and Peru, where they were drawn to the wealth of the Aztec and Inca empires. By comparison, the Atlantic seaboard of South America was disappointing. The Portuguese and others who penetrated the tropical forests along the coast found no El Dorado. They had to contend instead with warlike tribes of sometimes cannibal Indians. The most famous of these were the Tupinamba, who are best known from the account of Hans Staden, a ship's gunner from Hesse, whom they held prisoner for nine months. Staden described his captivity in a book published in 1557 whose title-A True History and Description of a Land of Wild, Naked, Savage, Maneating People as it Happened in the New World of America-gives a graphic indication of how Europeans viewed the native peoples of South America at that time. Staden's description was, however, much more sober than his title. Considering that he expected to be killed and eaten at any time, the relatively detached objectivity of his account of Tupinamba life and their cannibal feasts was quite remarkable. Nor was he the only one to write of cannibalism with detachment. Jean de Lery, in his History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578), described Tupinamba cannibal feasts in detail, confirming Hans Staden's account and adding further nuances to it, such as the voracious greed of the old women. Both these writers stressed the ritual aspects of Tupinamba cannibalism, recounting how a captured warrior was held for months or even years. He was provided with a wife who might bear him children before the day on which he was led out to his final confrontation. He would then exchange insults with his executioner before they engaged in mock combat, which the executioner invariably won since the prisoner was tethered. Only then would the slain warrior be cooked and eaten, as an act of revenge, and so that the villagers could ingest his heroic essence. Jean de Lery nevertheless concluded that the Tupinamba, in what he took to be their obedience of the laws of nature, produced conditions of life for the average person much better than those obtaining at that time in France. The great French essayist Montaigne reached a similar conclusion in his famous reflection on cannibalism, where he wrote: "We may call them barbarous in respect of reason's rules, but not in respect of us that exceed them in all kinds of barbarism." Such rational and relativistic attitudes were, however, the exception rather than the rule. Europeans were on the whole horrified by anthropophagy, which they erroneously imputed to most, if not all, of the "naked savages" of the New World. …


Programming education is a widely researched and intensely discussed topic. The literature proposes a broad variety of pedagogical viewpoints, practical approaches, learning theories, motivational vehicles, and other elements of the learning situation. However, little effort has been put on understanding cultural and contextual differences in pedagogy of programming. Pedagogical literature shows that educational design should account for differences in the ways of learning and teaching between industrialized and developing countries. However, the nature and implications of those differences are hitherto unclear. Using group interviews and quantitative surveys, we identified several crucial elements for contextualizing programming education. Our results reveal that students are facing many similar challenges to students in the west: they often lack deep level learning skills and problem-solving skills, which are required for learning computer programming, and, secondly, that from the students' viewpoint the standard learning environment does not offer enough support for gaining the requisite development. With inadequate support students may resort to surface learning and may adopt extrinsic sources of motivation. Learning is also hindered by many contextually unique factors, such as unfamiliar pedagogical approaches, language problems, and cultural differences. Our analysis suggests that challenges can be minimized by increasing the number of practical exercises, by carefully selecting between guided and minimally guided environments, by rigorously monitoring student progress, and by providing students timely help, repetitive exercises, clear guidelines, and emotional support.


A significant proportion of the mortality of rainforest trees occurs during early life stages (seeds and seedlings), but mortality agents are often elusive. Our study investigated the role of herbivorous insects and pathogens in the early regeneration dynamics of Guazumaulmifolia (Malvaceae), an important tree species in agroforestry in Central America. We reared pre-dispersal insect seed predators from G.ulmifolia seeds in Panama. We also carried out an experiment, controlling insects and pathogens using insecticide and/or fungicide treatments, as well as seed density, and compared survivorship of G.ulmifolia seeds and seedlings among treatments and relative to untreated control plots. We observed (1) high pre-dispersal attack (92%) of the fruits of G.ulmifolia, mostly by anobiine and bruchine beetles; (2) negligible post-dispersal attack of isolated seeds by insects and pathogens; (3) slow growth and high mortality (> 95%) of seedlings after 14 weeks; (4) low insect damage on seedlings; and (5) a strong positive correlation between seedling mortality and rainfall. We conclude that for G.ulmifolia at our study site the pre-dispersal seed stage is by far the most sensitive stage to insects and that their influence on seedling mortality appears to be slight as compared to that of inclement weather. Thus, the regeneration of this important tree species may depend on effective primary dispersal of seeds by vertebrates (before most of the seed crop is lost to insects), conditioned by suitable conditions in which the seedlings can grow.


Recent food safety events have raised concerns about food traceability in both developed and developing countries. In this paper we study the decision to adopt a traceability system in a supply chain with repeated upstream and downstream moral hazard and imperfect consumer monitoring. In deciding whether to maintain information regarding product origin, firms face a trade-off. On one hand, the downstream firm's threat to punish upstream shirking is more credible when products are traceable to their firm of origin. On the other hand, the downstream firm has less incentive to collude with a subset of upstream firms to shirk in the provision of quality when it cannot tell whether a product originates from a shirking or non-shirking firm. We show that firms achieve higher joint profits when products are not traceable to upstream suppliers if the cost savings from upstream shirking and the discounted cost savings from downstream shirking are sufficiently similar or the consumer experience is a sufficiently noisy signal of quality.


In this work, we propose a novel Bayesian-inspired model-based policy search algorithm for data efficient control. In contrast to other model-based approaches, our algorithm makes use of approximate Gaussian processes in the form of random Fourier features for fast online systems identification and computationally efficient posterior updates via rank one Cholesky updates. Furthermore, fast and tractable posterior updates permits policy optimization to leverage knowledge from posterior evolution tracking for a directed Bayesian approach to the exploration-exploitation dilemma. To address the optimization formulation involving belief monitoring as well as the potentiality of a loss surface with zero gradients everywhere, we leverage a blackbox optimizer in the form of covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). We test our algorithm on four challenging control tasks and report the superior data efficiency as well as the exploration capabilities of our model.


Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) has gained popularity over the last years for its promise to train localization models with only image-level labels. Since the seminal WSOL work of class activation mapping (CAM), the field has focused on how to expand the attention regions to cover objects more broadly and localize them better. However, these strategies rely on full localization supervision to validate hyperparameters and for model selection, which is in principle prohibited under the WSOL setup. In this paper, we argue that WSOL task is ill-posed with only image-level labels, and propose a new evaluation protocol where full supervision is limited to only a small held-out set not overlapping with the test set. We observe that, under our protocol, the five most recent WSOL methods have not made a major improvement over the CAM baseline. Moreover, we report that existing WSOL methods have not reached the few-shot learning baseline, where the full-supervision at validation time is used for model training instead. Based on our findings, we discuss some future directions for WSOL.


Purpose The purpose of the present study is to describe the portrayal of alcohol content in popular YouTube music videos. Method We used inductive thematic analysis to explore the lyrics and visual imagery in 49 UK Top 40 songs and music videos previously found to contain alcohol content and watched by many British adolescents aged between 11 and 18 years and to examine if branded content contravened alcohol industry advertising codes of practice. Results The analysis generated three themes. First, alcohol content was associated with sexualised imagery or lyrics and the objectification of women. Second, alcohol was associated with image, lifestyle and sociability. Finally, some videos showed alcohol overtly encouraging excessive drinking and drunkenness, including those containing branding, with no negative consequences to the drinker. Conclusion Our results suggest that YouTube music videos promote positive associations with alcohol use. Further, several alcohol companies adopt marketing strategies in the video medium that are entirely inconsistent with their own or others agreed advertising codes of practice. We conclude that, as a harm reduction measure, policies should change to prevent adolescent exposure to the positive promotion of alcohol and alcohol branding in music videos.


The subject of The Anti-Communist Manifestos is four influential books that informed the great political struggle known as the Cold War: Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian journalist and polymath intellectual; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtin, a German sailor and labor agitator; I Chose Freedom (1946), by Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer; and Witness (1952), by Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist. The authors were ex-Communist Party members whose bitter disillusionment led them to turn on their former allegiance in literary fury.Koestler was a rapist, Valtin a thug. Kravchenko, though not a spy, was forced to live like one in America. Chambers was a prophet without honor in his own land. Three of the four had been underground espionage agents of the Comintern. All contemplated suicide, and two of them achieved it. John V. Fleming's humane and ironic narrative of these grim lives reveals that words were the true driving force behind the Cold War.


The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in wastewater and the wider environment is of growing concern. This thesis focuses on anticancer drugs - a group of biologicallypotent and often recalcitrant set of chemicals whose fate and impact on the wider freshwater environment is poorly studied. The aims of this thesis were to prioritise a group of anticancer drugs for environmental monitoring programmes (from the many drugs in use), based on their consumption and fate during wastewater treatment; to undertake a national and regional survey of two commonly used anticancer drugs, cyclophosphamide (CP) and ifosfamide (IF) in wastewater and river water; to assess the performance of a river-based chemical fate model through comparisons with field observations; and to conduct a mass balance for CP in wastewater treatment plants to assess chemical fate during the different stages of wastewater treatment. Given the large number of anticancer drugs currently in use (>70) a decision support process was developed to ascertain a short list of drugs which are most likely to persist and be released with treated effluent to environmental waters. To do this, accurate consumption data were compiled from a hospital survey in NW England and combined with urinary excretion rates derived from clinical studies. Physical– chemical property data were then compiled along with likely chemical fate and persistence during and after wastewater treatment. A shortlist of 15 chemicals (from 65), including CP and IF, was prioritised based on their consumption, persistency and likelihood of occurrence in surface waters and supported by observational studies where possible. The ecological impact of these 'prioritised' chemicals however is uncertain as the measured concentrations in surface waters generally fall below standard toxicity thresholds, although there is evidence that exposure of aquatic organisms to some of these chemicals may induce low-dose genotoxic effects. This prioritised sub-list of anticancer drugs should prove useful for developing environmental screening programmes and targeted toxicity assays. To assess the occurrence of anticancer drugs in wasterwaters both CP and IF were measured in raw influent and final effluent waters from fourteen STPs located across England using a sensitive analytical method. CP was detected in both wastewater influent and effluent with mean (SD) concentration of 4.1 ng/L (4.8) and 6.6 ng/L (6.5), respectively, in agreement to measured ranges from a limited number of studies conducted in Europe and elsewhere. IF was only detected in four wastewater samples with the highest concentration being observed in wastewater effluent at 0.77 ng/L (cv = 24.3% (n=3)) and possibly reflecting the relatively lower consumption of this drug relative to CP. Additional monitoring was conducted in the rivers Calder, Darwen and Ribble (North West UK) with CP present at 5 of the 6 river locations with concentrations ranging from 0.41 to 3.71 ng/L. All these rivers receive treated wastewater effluent from sewage treatment works serving different population sizes, with CP measured in river water some ~20 miles downstream of the nearest STP, indicating the widespread dispersal and persistence of this chemical. CP and IF were measured systematically down the Rivers Aire and Calder in NE England and the results compared to a GIS-based water quality model (LF2000- WQX) used to predict CP and IF distributions in the two rivers, using regional consumption data and subsequent release quantities from STPs. CP was detected in 90% of river samples, apart from rural/uplands sites located at the source of the River Aire and Calder, respectively. CP presented the highest concentration, ranging from 0.17 to 4.53 ng/L (average 1.14 ng/L). IF was seldom detected in the sampled sites and concentrations ranged from < LOD to 1.82 ng/L (average 0.51 ng/L). Model results showed a fair agreement to the measured data for CP in the River Aire, discrepancies arise as the river progressed further downstream where the modelled data was lower than the measured data. A significant input of CP from Leeds STP at A7 (STP-1) saw the continuing rise in CP despite the increase in river flow. At the lower end of the Calder (pre-confluence with the River Aire) a spike in CP is detected far beyond the modelled value. A risk assessment was carried out to establish the potential adverse effects of anticancer drugs in the river catchment. All calculated risk quotients were below 1, showing no significant risk to aquatic organisms. However, long term toxicity studies for these chemicals are needed to define the environmental stress produced by their continuous exposure and induction. The fate and removal efficiency of cyclophosphamide (CP) and ifosfamide (IF) were investigated in two conventional sewage treatment plants (STP-S and STP-C) during different stages of waste water treatment. Overall average concentrations of CP were 1.17±1 ng/L in the two plants, which is lower than recent measurements conducted elsewhere. Grab-samples were coordinated with the hydraulic residence time of wastewater in each of the treatment stages in order to monitor changes in CP concentrations in the same parcel of water as it passed through the STP. Interestingly, concentrations of CP were observed to increase from raw influent to final tertiarytreated effluent and this is likely to be attributable to the degradation of a CPmetabolite and subsequent 'liberation' of the parent CP as the metabolite passes through the various sewage treatment processes. This observation, apparent in both studied STPs, has implications for chemical fate modelling of anti-cancer drugs, especially if STP influent loads are used to predict subsequent fluxes to receiving waters rather than final effluent values. Moreover, this increase in concentrations made a mass balance difficult to achieve, but highlighted that elimination/removal of CP in wastewater during primary to tertiary processing is very low (<20%). The calculated fluxes of CP with final effluent discharge were 3.16- 6.48 g/year for STP-S and 4.56 -51.57 g/year for STP-C and highlight that STPs are a continuing source of highly water-soluble, recalcitrant anticancer drugs to the environment.


Recent years have witnessed increased interests in measuring authority and modelling influence in social networks. For a long time, PageRank has been widely used for authority computation and has also been adopted as a solid baseline for evaluating social influence related applications. However, the connection between authority measurement and influence modelling is not clearly established. To this end, in this paper, we provide a focused study on understanding of PageRank as well as the relationship between PageRank and social influence analysis. Along this line, we first propose a linear social influence model and reveal that this model is essentially PageRank with prior. Also, we show that the authority computation by PageRank can be enhanced with more generalized priors. Moreover, to deal with the computational challenge of PageRank with general priors, we provide an upper bound for top authoritative nodes identification. Finally, the experimental results on the scientific collaboration network validate the effectiveness of the proposed social influence model.


Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is a powerful technique for the analysis of endogenous compounds. The introduction of electrospray ionization (ESI) as an interface between LC and MS has contributed strongly to a trend towards miniaturization of LC, due to the possibility to perform ESI at low flow rates. In this thesis, several aspects regarding the design of miniaturized LC systems and electrospray emitters were investigated. In addition miniaturized LC-ESI-MS have been used for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of endogenous polar compounds, peptides and protein digests.The performance of miniaturized LC-MS was compared using different electrospray emitter configurations. The results indicated that the efficiency of the LC system is rather independent of the configuration of the emitter.The lifetime of gold-coated fused silica electrospray emitters based on vapor deposited adhesion layers of titanium were investigated. The long lifetime of the emitter facilitates the use in LC-MS experiments, exemplified LC-MS by analysis of neuropeptides.The ESI voltage is shown to interfere with liquid chromatographic separations performed in packed porous graphitic carbon capillary column. This interference is ascribed to the presence of an electric field over the conductive column in absence of a ground point between the column and the ESI emitter.The solid supported enhanced microdialysis for analysis of neuropeptides were compared with conventional microdialysis. The difference between the two methodologies were evaluated by LC-MS analysis of the microdialysates. The solid supported method gave in general higher relative recoveries.Finally, a method of standard addition was developed to determine total level of tryptophan and two of its metabolites in human plasma by capillary LC-ESI tandem mass spectrometry. The method was applied in a clinical study of multiple scleroses patients treated with cytokines (IFN Beta 1a, 1b). The results show that the intervention effects the tryptophan metabolism.


The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is described. The detector operates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It was conceived to study proton-proton (and lead-lead) collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV (5.5 TeV nucleon-nucleon) and at luminosities up to 1034 cm−2 s−1 (1027 cm−2 s−1). At the core of the CMS detector sits a high-magnetic-field and large-bore superconducting solenoid surrounding an all-silicon pixel and strip tracker, a lead-tungstate scintillating-crystals electromagnetic calorimeter, and a brass-scintillator sampling hadron calorimeter. The iron yoke of the flux-return is instrumented with four stations of muon detectors covering most of the 4π solid angle. Forward sampling calorimeters extend the pseudorapidity coverage to high values (|η| ⩽ 5) assuring very good hermeticity. The overall dimensions of the CMS detector are a length of 21.6 m, a diameter of 14.6 m and a total weight of 12500 t.


Abstract. The distribution and evolution of reactive species in a boundary layer characterized by the presence of shallow cumulus over land is studied by means of two large-eddy simulation models: the NCAR and WUR codes. The study focuses on two physical processes that can influence the chemistry: the enhancement of the vertical transport by the buoyant convection associated with cloud formation and the perturbation of the photolysis rates below, in and above the clouds. It is shown that the dilution of the reactant mixing ratio caused by the deepening of the atmospheric boundary layer is an important process and that it can decrease reactant mixing ratios by 10 to 50 percent compared to very similar conditions but with no cloud formation. Additionally, clouds transport chemical species to higher elevations in the boundary layer compared to the case with no clouds which influences the reactant mixing ratios of the nocturnal residual layers following the collapse of the daytime boundary layer. Estimates of the rate of reactant transport based on the calculation of the integrated flux divergence range from to −0.2 ppb hr-1 to −1 ppb hr-1, indicating a net loss of sub-cloud layer air transported into the cloud layer. A comparison of this flux to a parameterized mass flux shows good agreement in mid-cloud, but at cloud base the parameterization underestimates the mass flux. Scattering of radiation by cloud drops perturbs photolysis rates. It is found that these perturbed photolysis rates substantially (10–40%) affect mixing ratios locally (spatially and temporally), but have little effect on mixing ratios averaged over space and time. We find that the ultraviolet radiance perturbation becomes more important for chemical transformations that react with a similar order time scale as the turbulent transport in clouds. Finally, the detailed intercomparison of the LES results shows very good agreement between the two codes when considering the evolution of the reactant mean, flux and (co-)variance vertical profiles.


Deliberative mechanisms surrounding climate change politics in advanced democracies have, for some time, been at the mercy of ideological and political economic commitments. One need only to look at the banning of protests and marches during the 2015 COP21 international climate talks in Paris, or the historical risk assessments of violent international conflict linked to climate concerns by Germany and the US to see that the political institutionalization of climate change is pervasive. On the other hand, the discursive demarcation by climate science has consistently taken up two arguments in opposition to climate politics: (a) the view that political discourses on climate variability should rest on climatological models and the research of climate experts, and (b) that the climatological data itself serves as the impartial intermediary through which we can provide an empirical refutation to ideological rhetoric and economic influences on climate change politics. I contend that in the attempt to bridge the political and scientific camps we transpose a central feature in democratic climate deliberation—namely, the ontology of the citizen; who in the discursive bridge is relegated to a medium of exchange for both camps, rather than a commensurate party in the climatological discussion.


Critics and supporters alike have framed the Affordable Care Act as an effort primarily aimed at expanding access to healthcare insurance. As the refrain goes, the legislation placed much less emphasis on pursuing ways to make healthcare delivery more affordable. This analysis belies significant measures that the legislation pursues, in the name of cost control, which will fundamentally transform the delivery of medical care. These provisions are based on a primary belief that there is a lot of waste in the delivery of medical care. Moreover, the President and his advisers believed that this waste owes largely to the inefficient and sometimes-inappropriate decisions made by providers. The legislation sets out, through a collection of policy measures, to restructure the organization and delivery of medical care. Among other things, it consolidates providers around hospitals where they will become salaried employees that are easier to regulate and supposedly less likely to overprescribe services. History shows, such measures do not produce the promised savings. Moreover, this re-organization comes at a significant cost, not only in terms of the quality of medical care, but its affordability. Provider productivity will inevitably decline. Continuity of care will suffer. Entrepreneurship in medical practice will be squelched. Obamacare will dramatically change the practice of medicine. This will perhaps be its most enduring legacy, and its most significant human cost.


Nonlinear transient analysis of rotor-bearing systems is becoming increasingly important in the analysis of modern-day rotating machinery to model such phenomena as oil film whirl. This paper develops an analysis technique incorporating modal analysis and fast Fourier transform techniques to analyze rotors with residual shaft bow and realistic nonlinear bearings. The technique is demonstrated on single-mass and three-mass rotor examples. Comparisons of the theoretical results with experimental data give excellent agreement.


In recent years, the collection of genomic data has skyrocketed and databases of genomic data are growing at a faster rate than ever before. Although many computational methods have been developed to interpret these data, they tend to struggle to process the ever increasing file sizes that are being produced and fail to take advantage of the advances in multi-core processors by using parallel processing. In some instances, loss of accuracy has been a necessary trade off to allow faster computation of the data. This thesis discusses one such algorithm that has been developed and how changes were made to allow larger input file sizes and reduce the time required to achieve a result without sacrificing accuracy. An information entropy based algorithm was used as a basis to demonstrate these techniques. The algorithm dissects the distinctive patterns underlying genomic data efficiently requiring no a priori knowledge, and thus is applicable in a variety of biological research applications. This research describes how parallel processing and object-oriented programming techniques were used to process larger files in less time and achieve a more accurate result from the algorithm. Through object oriented techniques, the maximum allowable input file size was significantly increased from 200 mb to 2000 mb. Using parallel processing techniques allowed the program to finish processing data in less than half the time of the sequential version. The accuracy of the algorithm was improved by reducing data loss throughout the algorithm. Finally, adding user-friendly options enabled the program to use requests more effectively and further customize the logic used within the algorithm.


Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) is the most common cause of community-acquired pneumonia, meningitis, and bacteremia in children and adults, including the elderly, and is responsible for high rates of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Aim of this paper to review published articles on incidence of pneumococcal meningitis in children less than 5 years of age in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and compare the incidence of pneumococcal meningitis among the children in the three courtiers. Literature searches were conducted using google scholar, PubMed, the World Health Organization (WHO) website of the Weekly Epidemiological Record, and the countries' Ministry of Health (MOH) website, and were limited to articles written in English. All relevant publications/abstracts published/presented during the period December 2000 through March 2014. Searches were conducted from April 1, 2014, till July 11, 2014 using various combinations of the following search terms " Pneumococcal diseases" OR "meningococcal" OR "pneumococcal meningitis" OR "meningococcus". A total of five articles and abstracts described the incidence of pneumococcal meningitis among children 5 years old. These five documents include two conference abstracts from Malaysia, one published paper from Singapore and two published papers from Thailand. The Malaysian, Singaporean and Thai pneumococcal meningitis incidence rate was 3.8-8.6, 2.3 and 0.10-1.8 per 100,000 children respectively. Our review confirmed that the incidence rate of pneumococcal meningitis was vary among the countries. The highest incidence rate of pneumococcal meningitis was found in Malaysia followed by Singapore and Thailand.


A data-assimilated Taiwan Ocean Prediction (ATOP) system is being developed at the National Central University, Taiwan. The model simulates sea-surface height, three-dimensional currents, temperature and salinity and turbulent mixing. The model has options for tracer and particle-tracking algorithms, as well as for wave-induced Stokes drift and wave-enhanced mixing and bottom drag. Two different forecast domains have been tested: a large-grid domain that encompasses the entire North Pacific Ocean at 0.1° × 0.1° horizontal resolution and 41 vertical sigma levels, and a smaller western North Pacific domain which at present also has the same horizontal resolution. In both domains, 25-year spin-up runs from 1988 - 2011 were first conducted, forced by six-hourly Cross-Calibrated Multi-Platform (CCMP) and NCEP reanalysis Global Forecast System (GSF) winds. The results are then used as initial conditions to conduct ocean analyses from January 2012 through February 2012, when updated hindcasts and real-time forecasts begin using the GFS winds. This paper describes the ATOP system and compares the forecast results against satellite altimetry data for assessing model skills. The model results are also shown to compare well with observations of (i) the Kuroshio intrusion in the northern South China Sea, and (ii) subtropical counter current. Review and comparison with other models in the literature of "(i)" are also given.


Bats respond to the calls of conspecifics as well as to calls of other species; however, few studies have attempted to quantify these responses or understand the functions of these calls. We tested the response of Rafinesque's big-eared bats (Corynorhinus rafinesquii) to social calls as a possible method to increase capture success and to understand the function of social calls. We also tested if calls of bats within the range of the previously designated subspecies differed, if the responses of Rafinesque's big-eared bats varied with geographic origin of the calls, and if other species responded to the calls of C. rafinesquii. We recorded calls of Rafinesque's big-eared bats at two colony roost sites in South Carolina, USA. Calls were recorded while bats were in the roosts and as they exited. Playback sequences for each site were created by copying typical pulses into the playback file. Two mist nets were placed approximately 50–500 m from known roost sites; the net with the playback equipment served as the Experimental net and the one without the equipment served as the Control net. Call structures differed significantly between the Mountain and Coastal Plains populations with calls from the Mountains being of higher frequency and longer duration. Ten of 11 Rafinesque's big-eared bats were caught in the Control nets and, 13 of 19 bats of other species were captured at Experimental nets even though overall bat activity did not differ significantly between Control and Experimental nets. Our results suggest that Rafinesque's big-eared bats are not attracted to conspecifics' calls and that these calls may act as an intraspecific spacing mechanism during foraging.


In this paper we present a solution to one of the location-based query problems. This problem is defined as follows: (i) a user wants to query a database of location data, known as Points Of Interest (POIs), and does not want to reveal his/her location to the server due to privacy concerns; (ii) the owner of the location data, that is, the location server, does not want to simply distribute its data to all users. The location server desires to have some control over its data, since the data is its asset. We propose a major enhancement upon previous solutions by introducing a two stage approach, where the first step is based on Oblivious Transfer and the second step is based on Private Information Retrieval, to achieve a secure solution for both parties. The solution we present is efficient and practical in many scenarios. We implement our solution on a desktop machine and a mobile device to assess the efficiency of our protocol. We also introduce a security model and analyse the security in the context of our protocol. Finally, we highlight a security weakness of our previous work and present a solution to overcome it. Index Terms -


A search is presented for the pair production of heavy vector-like quarks, $T\bar T$ or $B\bar B$, that decay into final states with jets and no reconstructed leptons. Jets in the final state are classified using a deep neural network as arising from hadronically decaying $W/Z$ bosons, Higgs bosons, top quarks, or background. The analysis uses data from the ATLAS experiment corresponding to 36.1 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV delivered by the Large Hadron Collider in 2015 and 2016. No significant deviation from the Standard Model expectation is observed. Results are interpreted assuming the vector-like quarks decay into a Standard Model boson and a third-generation-quark, $T\rightarrow Wb,Ht,Zt$ or $B\rightarrow Wt,Hb,Zb$, for a variety of branching ratios. At 95% confidence level, the observed (expected) lower limit on the vector-like $B$-quark mass for a weak-isospin doublet ($B, Y$) is 950 (890) GeV, and the lower limits on the masses for the pure decays $B\rightarrow Hb$ and $T\rightarrow Ht$, where these results are strongest, are 1010 (970) GeV and 1010 (1010) GeV, respectively.


We present an end-to-end deep learning approach to denoising speech signals by processing the raw waveform directly. Given input audio containing speech corrupted by an additive background signal, the system aims to produce a processed signal that contains only the speech content. Recent approaches have shown promising results using various deep network architectures. In this paper, we propose to train a fully-convolutional context aggregation network using a deep feature loss. That loss is based on comparing the internal feature activations in a different network, trained for acoustic environment detection and domestic audio tagging. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in objective speech quality metrics and in large-scale perceptual experiments with human listeners. It also outperforms an identical network trained using traditional regression losses. The advantage of the new approach is particularly pronounced for the hardest data with the most intrusive background noise, for which denoising is most needed and most challenging.


A two‐step method to simulate the spatially resolved temperature of a partially shaded cell in a crystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) module is presented and tested. First, an efficient module electronic simulation tool computes the operating conditions of a module's constituent cells. Second, a two‐dimensional finite‐element analysis simulation, utilizing forward‐, and revers‐bias electroluminescence measurements, is performed to spatially resolved cell temperature. With an outdoor experiment, un‐encapsulated cell temperatures are directly measured under controlled heat transfer conditions. A peak local cell temperature of 144 °C is observed on a multi crystalline silicon cell dissipating 54 W heat in the experiment, 57 °C higher than the result from a non‐spatially resolved simulation. Experimental results indicate cells without significant Ohmic shunts are suitable for temperature simulation with the aid of reverse bias electroluminescence imaging, which yields a maximum temperature prediction error of less than 15 °C. However, simulation for cells with significant Ohmic shunts is prone to underestimate the cell temperature by up to 45 °C. Multiple shading fractions from 12 to 80% lead to severe heating scenarios in such case.


A seminal objective of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to ensure a fair standard of living in agriculture. Since 1992, the CAP has moved most of its policy towards direct payments (DPs) that have been decoupled from production under the Mid-Term Review (MTR) in 2003. The shift towards decoupled payments highlights the asymmetry of the support among farmers and countries and the need such a payment to be connected with specific commitments towards European citizens. In the final stages of institutional negotiation for the new CAP Post-2013, agriculture is facing a new challenge within a general economic context of uncertainty. This article discusses the expected impact of the EC legal proposal for the CAP post-2013 with a specific focus on specialist beef fatteners in Italy.


InfoSec Career Hacking starts out by describing the many, different InfoSec careers available including Security Engineer, Security Analyst, Penetration Tester, Auditor, Security Administrator, Programmer, and Security Program Manager. The particular skills required by each of these jobs will be described in detail, allowing the reader to identify the most appropriate career choice for them. Next, the book describes how the reader can build his own test laboratory to further enhance his existing skills and begin to learn new skills and techniques. The authors also provide keen insight on how to develop the requisite soft skills to migrate form the hacker to corporate world. * The InfoSec job market will experience explosive growth over the next five years, and many candidates for these positions will come from thriving, hacker communities * Teaches these hackers how to build their own test networks to develop their skills to appeal to corporations and government agencies * Provides specific instructions for developing time, management, and personal skills to build a successful InfoSec career


Shmuel HaNagid. Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid. Translated by Peter Cole. Princeton University Press 1996. 236 pp. $39.95 $14.95 (paper) Raymond R Scheindlin. Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the GoodLife. Jewish Publication Society 1986. 224 pp. $16.95 (paper) Samuel Ibn Nagrela. Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Nagrela. Translated by Leon J. Weinberger. University of Alabama Press 1973. [Out of print] News flash: The Vatican has announced that the Pope and other ranking church clergy have begun writing secular poetry in Latin, warping the ancient phrases of Vulgate and Mass into stylish, sophisticated odes to wine, women, and song... Impossible, surely. But at the onset of the last millennium, this is what happened, albeit among rabbis rather than cardinals, in Hebrew rather than Latin, and in Muslim-controlled Andalusiathen the cultural and religious center of the Jewish world-rather than the Holy See. In the mid-tenth century, one Dunash ben Labrat brashly set the Hebrew tongue, for centuries reserved for prayer and sacred study, to the quantitative meters and distinctly secular themes of classical Arabic verse, then the sine qua non of literature. Dunash touched off a literary wildfire that blazed several hundred years and became known, in retrospect, as the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry. The cream of the Jewish community-courtierrabbis who shuttled between Muslim palaces and Jewish yeshivasstarted writing poems about brimming crystal goblets, the luscious girls and boys who filled them, and a host of other distinctly nonspiritual subjects that hadn't been hymned in Hebrew since before the fall of Rome: These lines by Shmuel HaNagid, considered the first great Golden Age poet and one of the greatest Hebrew poets of any era, echo the Biblical books of Genesis, Samuel, Ezekiel, Psalms, and, faintly, Job, all in the course of riffing on one of the wine-song themes of Arabic meistersinger Abu Nuwas. The tongue is the tongue of the Torah, but the images are pure pleasure-palace. Medieval Hebrew poetry steered a course between piety and blasphemy that probably cannot be mapped on modern charts-imagine, if you can, a Papal sonnet starting "Hail Marian full of grapes," and the Catholic world treating it not as a case of demonic possession, but as a glorification of their holy tongue. The Arabic poets whom the Golden Agers adopted as models made a great point of demonstrating, through virtuousic versifying, the purity and potency of the language of the Koran. The courtier-rabbis, with the over-achieving minority's chauvinistic pride, were determined to trump their Muslim counterparts and prove the Torah's Hebrew a poetic medium as fit or fitter than scriptural Arabic. If only contemporary ArabJewish conflicts could be so bloodlessly and ravishingly resolved. As we dip our toes into our own new millennium, it is fitting that interest among English-speaking readers in this poetic treasure-trove from the last seems to be growing, to judge by the recent publication of Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, and the upcoming appearance of a new translation of HaNagid's sometime protege and fellow Golden Age luminary, Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Medieval Hebrew poetry is what we would now call a triumph of multiculturalism. Admitted to and tolerated (if not welcomed) in the upper echelons of Muslim society, ambitious Andalusian Jews steeped themselves in Arabic language, literature, philosophy, and science. But rather than assimilating, the Jews of the Golden Age-and this is what made it a Golden Age-took the siren song of non-Jewish culture as a wake-up call. The result was a renaissance that included unparalleled achievements in philosophy, philology, and, of course, literature, as Hebrew leapt the margins of prayerbooks and scrolls and reentered the alleys, palaces, and boudoirs beyond them. The variety and vividness of this verse may startle those who think of learned, devout Jews as pallid, angst-ridden yeshiva bochers bowed, like the soul of Cynthia Ozick's hapless "Pagan Rabbi," beneath towers of musty tomes. …


Text style transfer pursues altering the style of a sentence while remaining its main content unchanged. Due to the lack of parallel corpora, most recent work focuses on unsupervised methods and has achieved noticeable progress. Nonetheless, the intractability of completely disentangling content from style for text leads to a contradiction of content preservation and style transfer accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a style instance supported method, StyIns. Instead of representing styles with embeddings or latent variables learned from single sentences, our model leverages the generative flow technique to extract underlying stylistic properties from multiple instances of each style, which form a more discriminative and expressive latent style space. By combining such a space with the attention-based structure, our model can better maintain the content and simultaneously achieve high transfer accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed method can be flexibly extended to semi-supervised learning so as to utilize available limited paired data. Experiments on three transfer tasks, sentiment modification, formality rephrasing, and poeticness generation, show that StyIns obtains a better balance between content and style, outperforming several recent baselines.


This book covers everything investors who skipped accounting class need to know to spot - and steer clear of - companies whose numbers don't add up. Individual investors today are painfully aware that accounting fraud is more widespread than ever, yet often they aren't sure what this fraud looks like or even where to look. "What Every Investor Needs to Know About Accounting Fraud" explains common accounting maneuvers, distortions, and outright deceptions that savvy investors must be able to recognize and steer clear of, all in a concise, easy-to-understand format. Professor Jeff Madura has created a book that is both accessible and informative, and doesn't talk down to the reader. Concise yet complete, it provides investors with: methods for uncovering scams that distort revenues, hide expenses, and more; studies of infamous accounting frauds and how they could have been avoided; a zero-tolerance investing code, and useful for protecting portfolios.


Decision support systems form the core of business IT infrastructures because they let companies translate business information into tangible and lucrative results. Collecting, maintaining, and analyzing large amounts of data, however, involves expensive technical challenges that require organizational commitment. Many commercial tools are available for each of the three major data warehousing tasks: populating the data warehouse from independent operational databases, storing and managing the data, and analyzing the data to make intelligent business decisions. Data cleaning relates to heterogeneous data integration, a problem studied for many years. More work must be done to develop domain-independent tools that solve the data cleaning problems associated with data warehouse development. Most data mining research has focused on developing algorithms for building more accurate models or building models faster. However, data preparation and mining model deployment present several engaging problems that relate specifically to achieving better synergy between database systems and data mining technology.


Acrosin, an endoprotease with trypsin-like substrate specificity, is localized in the acrosomal matrix as an enzymatically inactive zymogen, proacrosin, that is then converted into the active form as a consequence of the acrosome reaction. The physiological role of acrosin in fertilization has long been believed to be the limited proteolysis of the zona pellucida. Using homologous recombination, we have previously successfully produced male mice carrying a disruptive mutation in the acrosin gene and found that the mouse sperm lacking acrosin protease activity still penetrate zona pellucida and normally fertilize the egg .These Results provide evidence, that acrosin is not essential for sperm penetration of the zona pellucida. However, mouse sperm lacking acrosin showed a delay in penetration of the zona pellucida solely at the early stage after insemination .To elucidate the role of acrosin in fertilization, we have examined the involvement of acrosin in fertilization of zona pellucida after hardening and agining. We used DMSO for the hardening of zona pellucida. We observed that sperm lacking acrosin showed a reduced fertilitzation of eggs after zona pellucida hardening and aging. These data suggest the role of acrosin in combined infertility, which male and female factors are involved


The 1966 Report of the Royal Commission on Taxation,' established with a sweeping mandate to examine the federal tax laws of Canada and to make recommendations for their improvement, has few peers among modern proposals for income tax reform. Its only rivals in this country are the two collections of tax reform proposals assembled in 1955 and 1959 by the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, which could range more speculatively over the tax landscape because they consisted of separate papers submitted by a medley of experts, but which for the same reason lacked the cohesiveness that marks the Canadian Commission's program. The 1953-1955 reports of the British Royal Commission on the Taxation of Profits and Income are of comparable interest and quality, but they lack the boldness of the Canadian report, and at points require such a familiarity with the details of the United Kingdom's existing income tax law as to discourage the outsider. The only other comparable projects with which I am familiar are the 1949 recommendations of the Shoup Mission for the reform of the Japanese tax system and Nicholas Kaldor's 1954 prescription for India; neither has received the attention it deserves, the former having been discounted because of its military sponsorship and the latter because of an assumption that a plan devised for India would inevitably be destined for exhibition rather than use and hence would not have to be anchored in reality. The talent contributing to the American Law Institute's Federal Income Tax Project of the early 1950's could have produced a landmark of analysis and innovation, but its objective was "an improvement of the technical provisions of the present income tax statute" and it was faithful to this limited commitment.2


Abstract New δ13Ccarb and microfacies data from Hereford–Worcestershire and the West Midlands allow for a detailed examination of variations in the Homerian carbon isotope excursion (Silurian) and depositional environment within the Much Wenlock Limestone Formation of the Midland Platform (Avalonia), UK. These comparisons have been aided by a detailed sequence-stratigraphic and bentonite correlation framework. Microfacies analysis has identified regional differences in relative sea-level change and indicates an overall shallowing of the carbonate platform interior from Hereford–Worcestershire to the West Midlands. Based upon the maximum δ13Ccarb values for the lower and upper peaks of the Homerian carbon isotope excursion (CIE), the shallower depositional setting of the West Midlands is associated with values that are 0.7 ‰ and 0.8 ‰ higher than in Hereford–Worcestershire. At the scale of parasequences the effect of depositional environment upon δ13Ccarb values can also be observed, with a conspicuous offset in the position of the trough in δ13Ccarb values between the peaks of the Homerian CIE. This offset can be accounted for by differences in relative sea-level change and carbonate production rates. While such differences complicate the use of CIEs as a means of high-resolution correlation, and caution against correlations based purely upon the isotopic signature, it is clear that a careful analysis of the depositional environment can account for such differences and thereby improve the use of carbon isotopic curves as a means of correlation.


The Indian Ocean was the first venue of global trade, connecting the Mediterranean and South China Sea. Inspired by the insights of Fernand Braudel, and by Michael Mollat, who saw it as 'a zone of encounters and contacts ...a privileged crossroads of culture,' this volume explores two inter-related themes. The first, on oceanic linkages, presents the diversity of the peoples who have traversed it and their relationships by tracing their tangible movements and connections. The second, on the creation of new societies, revisits better-known socio-historical phenomena - - such as slavery, indentured labour, the Swahili language and Muslim charity - - which tie the genesis of these social formations to the seascape of an interconnected, transcultural ocean. The chapters offer a broad and diverse view of the mobile, transregional communities that comprise Indian Ocean society, while in-depth case studies allow students and specialists to see how individual research projects may contribute to developing a view of the Indian Ocean as a transcultural arena, one in which individual societies were and are shaped by their interactions with others from across the waters. This volume will be suitable for courses in the burgeoning fields of world history, transcultural anthropology and the Indian Ocean.


Abstract. In this paper, a new calculation procedure to improve the accuracy of the
Jensen wake model for operating wind farms is proposed. In this procedure, the
wake decay constant is updated locally at each wind turbine based on the
turbulence intensity measurement provided by the nacelle anemometer. This
procedure was tested against experimental data at the Sole
du Moulin Vieux (SMV) onshore wind farm in France and the Horns Rev-I offshore wind farm in
Denmark. Results indicate that the wake deficit at each wind turbine is
described more accurately than when using the original model, reducing the
error from 15 % to 20 % to approximately 5 %. Furthermore, this
new model properly calibrated for the SMV wind farm is then used for
coordinated control purposes. Assuming an axial induction control strategy,
and following a model predictive approach, new power settings leading to an
increased overall power production of the farm are derived. Power gains found
are on the order of 2.5 % for a two-wind-turbine case with close spacing
and 1 % to 1.5 % for a row of five wind turbines with a larger
spacing. Finally, the uncertainty of the updated Jensen model is quantified
considering the model inputs. When checked against the predicted power gain,
the uncertainty of the model estimations is seen to be excessive, reaching
approximately 4 %, which indicates the difficulty of field observations
for such a gain. Nevertheless, the optimized settings are to be implemented
during a field test campaign at SMV wind farm in the scope of the national
project SMARTEOLE.


Since globular clusters (GCs) are old, low-N systems their dynamics is widely believed to be fully dominated by collisional two-body processes and their surface brightness profiles are fitted by King models. However, for many GCs, especially those with Hubble Space Telescope-resolved central regions and 'extratidal' features, King models provide poor fits. We suggest that this is partly because collisionless dynamics is also important and contributes to shaping the cluster properties. We show using time-scale and length-scale arguments that except for the very centres of clusters, collisionless dynamics should be more important than collisional. We then fit 38 GCs analysed by Noyola & Gebhardt with (collisional) King and (collisionless) DARKexp models over the full available radial range, and find that the latter provide a better fit to 29 GCs; for six of these the fit is at least approximately five times better in terms of rms. DARKexp models are theoretically derived maximum entropy equilibrium states of self-gravitating collisionless systems and have already been shown to fit the results of dark matter N-body simulations. (We do not attempt fits with ad hoc fitting functions.)


OCCT 5005. The Role of Occupational Therapy in Low Vision Rehabilitation. 2 Credit Hours. An introductory Web-based course in the field of low vision rehabilitation designed to help occupational therapy practitioners develop a comprehensive understanding of how low vision can impact an individual's occupational performance and the therapy process. Evaluation and treatment interventions utilizing a multidisciplinary approach are presented. A one-day practicum (8 hours) at the Lions Low Vision Center of Texas is required.


Abstract : Requirements elicitation is the first of the four steps in software requirements engineering (the others being analysis, specification, and validation). Software engineers use several elicitation techniques. To facilitate teaching these techniques, materials are provided to support an introductory lecture and four lectures on specific techniques: joint application design, brainstorming, interviewing, and the PIECES framework. A role-playing exercise is provided that allows students to experience each of the techniques. Information for instructors includes educational objectives, pedagogical considerations, additional exercises, and a bibliography. Joint application design, Software engineering education, Requirements, Requirements elicitation, Software requirements.


In the European Union, Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Derby is the most abundant serotype isolated from pork. ABSTRACT In the European Union, Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Derby is the most abundant serotype isolated from pork. Recent studies have shown that this serotype is polyphyletic. However, one main genomic lineage, characterized by sequence type 40 (ST40), the presence of the Salmonella pathogenicity island 23, and showing resistance to streptomycin, sulphonamides, and tetracycline (STR-SSS-TET), is pork associated. Here, we describe the complete genome sequence of a strain from this lineage isolated in France.


The Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814 remains unique in Napoleonic History. On
canvas, Francisco Goya painted its brutality. Napoleon blamed it for his defeat.
Historians assent to both assessments with passing references to the guerrilla conflict's
terrible nature and its negative effect upon the French. Commonly, these brief references
turn on such points as the harassing effect of guerrillas upon strung out forces in Spain,
the difficulty of foraging for the French, the allied intelligence advantage and finally the
notoriously low morale of the French army of occupation. These brief comments on the
guerrilla war are, however, buried in the traditional histories of campaigns and generals,
of Bailens and Salamancas, of Wellingtons and Soults. Peninsular historiography is
almost totally devoid of any information about how French soldiers themselves regarded
the guerrilla conflict. By and large, this human element is ignored. This oversight leaves
important questions unanswered: How did the French and imperial troops experience the
guerrilla war? What exactly did poor morale mean for a soldier who suffered from its
effects? Many memoirs of imperial veterans specifically center on the Spanish conflict
and provide excellent material with which to illustrate the experience of guerrilla war.
By looking into the accounts left by soldiers of all ranks, this work will show how for the
troops charged with the conquest and occupation of Spain and Portugal, poor morale
created a complex weave of isolation, frustration, and exhaustion that affected their
ability to perform their duties.


The blue swimming crab, Portunus pelagicus, is becoming a commercially important species in the Philippines. The expanding export market for crabs has led to intensified collection and has threatened the wild stocks. This decline has prompted the need for proper management of the remaining resources, and interest in the establishment of hatchery facilities to produce crablets for reseeding and aquaculture. This paper presents the production method for P. pelagicus seedstock at the Guiuan Marine Fisheries Development Center. Experiments to improve larval rearing were conducted as well. For seed production, larvae at the zoeal stage were taken from wild-caught berried crabs hatched in 100-L circular drums filled with sand-filtered seawater (32-34 ppt, 28-30°C). Zoeae were stocked at 100 zoea L-1 in rectangular tanks and fed rotifers at 30 ind ml-1 for the first 4 days. Newlyhatched Artemia were given at 1-2 ind ml-1 at zoea 3, and increased to 5 ind ml-1 at zoea 4 to the megalopa stage. Chlorella sp. was maintained in the rearing tanks at 50,000 cells ml-1 as food for rotifers and for water conditioning. Water exchange was done daily at 30-50%, except for the first 5 days of rearing. The development from zoea 1 to megalopa and megalopa to the first crab instar took 10-12 and 4-6 days, respectively. Longer larval development was observed at lower temperature (<26°C). Cannibalism and deteriorating water quality were identified as major causes of mortality. Survival of zoea 1 to megalopa was higher in chlorinated seawater (7.5+2.58%) compared to UV-treated (6.5+1.73%) and sand-filtered (4.0+2.58%) seawater. Trials involving the use of different tank background colors showed that the survival of larvae was highest in black tanks (9.0+1.00%) as compared to those white tanks (1.5+0.58%). In nursery rearing, megalopae were stocked at 1-2 ind ml-1 in wide tanks or concrete pond. Strategies to reduce cannibalism were done by providing shelters and sand substrate (>10 cm). As soon as the megalopa molted to crab instars, they were given minced fish, shell meat, Acetes and formulated crab feeds twice daily, ad libitum. After 21 days, crablets were collected manually after partially draining the water in concrete pond. The crablets produced were released in identified fish sanctuaries and marine protected areas region-wide for resource enhancement and for aquaculture research purposes.


Interferon is a cellular response to infection, paraneoplastic event, and other biological entities. They are proteinous entities consisting of about 144-166 amino acids transcribed from 20-30 genes. They participate in autophagy and immune response to biological entities when stimulated. Biological or clinical states that affect the proper transcription of interferon genes to either downregulate or upregulate it, usually result in susceptibilities to infections, autoimmune diseases, as well as systemic inflammatory diseases. This review aims to briefly describe the stimulator of the interferon genes (a 379-amino acid protein), how it elicits its cellular homeostatic functions with the sole purpose of enhancing cell survival and reducing morbidities.


We investigate whether tests taken during a high stakes grade by German primary and secondary students produce higher math scores than in lower stakes grades. We identify a high stakes grade with the final grade of primary or secondary school, because good performance in that grade can affect future opportunities. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that high stakes increase math scores on average by 0.17 to 0.23 standard deviations, a sizeable effect.


ANN ARBOR - Researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a panel of small molecules, or metabolites, that appear to indicate aggressive prostate cancer. The finding could lead to a simple test that would help doctors determine which prostate cancers are slow-growing and which require immediate, aggressive treatment. Results of the study appeared in the Feb. 12, 2009 issue of Nature. "One of the biggest challenges we face in prostate cancer is determining if the cancer is aggressive. We end up overtreating our patients because physicians don't know which tumors will be slow-growing. With this research, we have identified a potential marker for the aggressive tumors," says senior study author Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and S.P. . The researchers looked at 1,126 metabolites across 262 samples of tissue, blood or urine associated with benign prostate tissue, early stage prostate cancer and advanced, or metastatic, prostate cancer. They mapped the alterations in metabolites and identified about 10 that were present more often in prostate cancer than in the benign cells and were present most often in the advanced cancer samples. "When we're looking at metabolites, we're looking several steps beyond genes and proteins. It allows us to look very deeply at some of the functions of the cells and the biochemistry that occurs during cancer development," says Chinnaiyan, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. One metabolite in particular, sarcosine, appeared to be one of the strongest indicators of advanced disease. Levels of sarcosine, an amino acid, were elevated in 79 percent of the metastatic prostate cancer samples and in 42 percent of the early stage cancer samples. None of the cancer-free samples had detectable levels of sarcosine. In the study, sarcosine was a better indicator of advancing disease than the traditional prostate specific antigen, or PSA, test that is currently used to monitor or screen for prostate cancer. Sarcosine was detected in the urine, which has researchers hopeful that a simple urine test could be used. In addition, the researchers found that sarcosine is involved in the same pathways that are linked to cancer invasiveness. This suggests sarcosine as a potential target for future drug development. "This research gets at characterizing the chemical complexity of a sample of cancer progression. In the future, this science will drive how doctors make treatment recommendations for their patients," says study author Christopher Beecher, Ph.D., professor of pathology at the U-M Medical School. Results are preliminary at this point and will need years of further testing and development before this technology would be available for patients. Prostate cancer statistics: 186,320 Americans will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year and 28,660 will die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. Additional authors: From the University of Michigan: Arun Sreekumar, Laila M. Poisson, Thekkelnaycke M. Rajendiran, Amjad P. Khan, Qi Cao, Jindan Yu, Bharathi Laxman, Rohit Mehra, Robert J. Lonigro, Yong Li, Mukesh K. Nyati, Aarif Ahsan, Shanker Kalyana- Sundaram, Bo Han, Xuhong Cao, Jaemun Byun, Gilbert S. Omenn, Subramaniam Pennathur, John T. Wei and Sooryanarayana Varambally. From Metabolon Inc.: Danny C. Alexander, Alvin Berger and Jeffrey R. Shuster. From Penn State University: Debashis Ghosh. Funding: National Cancer Institute Early Detection Research Network, National Institutes of Health, an MTTC grant, the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Disclosure: The University of Michigan has exclusively licensed all pending patents covering this technology to Metabolon, a company with expertise in discovering biomarkers using metabolomics. Beecher, Alexander, Shuster and Chinnaiyan own equity in Metabolon and Chinnaiyan serves on its Scientific Advisory Board. Beecher is a previous employee of Metabolon.


The benefits of Markov-based predictive prefetching have been largely overshadowed by the overhead required to produce high-quality predictions. While both theoretical and simulation results for prediction algorithms appear promising, substantial limitations exist in practice. This outcome can be partially attributed to the fact that practical implementations ultimately make compromises in order to reduce overhead. These compromises limit the level of algorithm complexity, the variety of access patterns and the granularity of trace data that the implementation supports. This paper describes the design and implementation of GMS-3P (Global Memory System with Parallel Predictive Prefetching), an operating system kernel extension that offloads prediction overhead to idle network nodes. GMS-3P builds on the GMS global memory system, which pages to and from remote workstation memory. In GMS-3P, the target node sends an online trace of an application's page faults to an idle node that is running a Markov-based prediction algorithm. The prediction node then uses GMS to prefetch pages to the target node from the memory of other workstations in the network. Our preliminary results show that predictive prefetching can reduce the remote-memory page fault time by 60% or more and that, by offloading prediction overhead to an idle node, GMS-3P can reduce this improved latency by between 24% and 44%, depending on the Markov model order.


Compartmental modeling has been used to model infectious diseases for roughly 100 years. Since 2009, several papers have modeled zombie outbreak using this method with various results. This paper will develop a unique model for the spread of the The Walking Dead zombie virus throughout the contiguous United States. Frequency dependent and density dependent transmission will be discussed, and density dependent transmission will be shown to be the appropriate choice for this model. Constant parameters, such as birth rate, bite rate, death rate, and turning rate will be determined using real-world and fictional data. After developing a basic model, modifications will be made to include the airborne pathogen and latency. A system of autonomous differential equations can then be derived, followed by a dynamical system of difference equations. The system of differential equations will be used to determine equilibria, if any exist, stability will be investigated, and numerical solutions will be calculated. Pithing, a practice usually reserved for slaughtering livestock, will be considered for human use and shown to help control the zombie population. Numerical solutions will show that pithing alone will not save the human race, but used in conjunction with zombie removal by a well-organized force, a successful zombie removal rate can be established. Finally, the model will then be modified to include zombie removal calculations and vaccination. The goal of this paper is to develop a zombie model that represents AMC's The Walking Dead outbreak and develop numerical methods by which mankind can calculate appropriate actions.


To study the role of the amino-terminal domain of the desmin subunit in intermediate filament (IF) formation, several deletions in the sequence encoding this domain were made. The deleted hamster desmin genes were fused to the RSV promoter. Expression of such constructs in vimentin- free MCF-7 cells as well as in vimentin-containing HeLa cells, resulted in the synthesis of mutant proteins of the expected size. Single- and double-label immunofluorescence assays of transfected cells showed that in the absence of vimentin, desmin subunits missing amino acids 4-13 are still capable of filament formation, although in addition to filaments large numbers of desmin dots are present. Mutant desmin subunits missing larger portions of their amino terminus cannot form filaments on their own. It may be concluded that the amino-terminal region comprising amino acids 7-17 contains residues indispensable for desmin filament formation in vivo. Furthermore it was shown that the endogenous vimentin IF network in HeLa cells masks the effects of mutant desmin on IF assembly. Intact and mutant desmin colocalized completely with endogenous vimentin in HeLa cells. Surprisingly, in these cells endogenous keratin also seemed to colocalize with endogenous vimentin, even if the endogenous vimentin filaments were disturbed after expression of some of the mutant desmin proteins. In MCF-7 cells some overlap between endogenous keratin and intact exogenous desmin filaments was also observed, but mutant desmin proteins did not affect the keratin IF structures. In the absence of vimentin networks (MCF-7 cells), the initiation of desmin filament formation seems to start on the preexisting keratin filaments. However, in the presence of vimentin (HeLa cells) a gradual integration of desmin in the preexisting vimentin filaments apparently takes place.


During the last two decades, data generated by Next Generation Sequencing Technologies have revolutionized our understanding of human biology and improved the study on how changes (variations) in the DNA are involved in the risk of suffering a certain disease. A huge amount of genomic data is publicly available and frequently used by the research community in order to extract meaningful and reliable gene-disease relationships. However, management of this exponential growth of data has become a challenge for biologists; under such a big data problem perspective, they are forced to delve into a lake of complex data spread in over thousand heterogeneous repositories, represented in multiple formats and with different levels of quality; but when data are used to solve a concrete problem only a small part of that "data lake" is really significant; this is what we call the "smart" data perspective. Using conceptual models and the principles of data quality management, adapted to the genomic domain, we propose a systematic approach to move from a big data to a smart data perspective. The aim of this approach is to populate an Information System with genomic data which must be accessible, informative and actionable enough to extract valuable knowledge.


The present work deals with the examination of gender differences in lexical error production in foreign language writing. Differences were explored both from a quantitative perspective and also from a qualitative one. Existing literature on gender differences in the processes of foreign language acquisition has focused on differences in reading comprehension, learning strategies, or vocabulary use, but the field of lexical errors has only been addressed scarcely, especially in primary education contexts. Moreover, these studies throw inconclusive and contradictory results. We found that male and female students commit similar percentages of lexical errors in their writings, so that their compositions had similar degrees of lexical accuracy ratio. Likewise, from a qualitative point of view, our results show lack of significant differences in the type of lexical errors produced by girls and boys. From our results we can conclude that male and female foreign language learners follow similar paths of vocabulary acquisition, at least at the early stages of this process are concerned.


Background: To compare male bodybuilders to men with eating disorders and control men regarding body image, psychopathology and sexual history. Method: We compared 28 male bodybuilders, 30 men with eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia or binge eating disorder defined by DSM-IV), and 30 controls, using a battery of questionnaires covering weight history, eating behavior, body image, lifetime history of psychiatric disorders, and sexuality. Eating-disordered and control men were recruited from a college student population and studied during the course of an earlier investigation. Results: Bodybuilders exhibited a pattern of eating and exercising as obsessive as that of subjects with eating disorders, but with a 'reverse' focus of gaining muscle as opposed to losing fat. Bodybuilders displayed rates of psychiatric disorders intermediate between men with eating disorders and control men. In measures of body image, the bodybuilders closely resembled the men with eating disorders, but significantly differed from the control men, with the former two groups consistently displaying greater dissatisfaction than the latter. Sexual functioning did not distinguish the three groups except for the item 'lack of sexual desire' which was reported significantly more often by both bodybuilders and men with eating disorders. Conclusion: On measures of body image and eating behavior, bodybuilders share many features of individuals with eating disorders.


Extracted from text ... Theatre Reviews
TWELFTH NIGHT : The Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival. Mannville Open Air
Theatre, 18 February 2004.
LAURENCE WRIGHT
Twelfth Night is one of the theatrical world's favourite Shakespeares. It is an ensemble piece
with a plethora of rich, telling roles. Only eccentrics fail to respond. One of the most famous of
these was Samuel Pepys, who saw the play at least three times and called it 'one of the weakest
plays I ever saw on the stage'. He was wrong, and the Shakespeare Festival production at
Mannville proves it once again.
This year Mannville sported one of those balmy ..


With increase in demand for computers, iPods and mobile phones, there is surge of electronic gadgets around the world leading to production of huge quantity of waste termed as E-Waste. We have proposed an innovative solution for reduction of dumping and recovery of precious metals by harmful means from e-waste in developing countries. Manufacturing of laptops and computers using bioplastic which is partially biodegradable material and have life span of four to five years. By varying the composition of different bio-plastics, their thermal insulation, structural strength and conductivity can be improved. It would make them suitable material to replace acrylonitrile butadiene styrene based common plastic that are currently being used in manufacturing of different kind of laptops. The segregation of these bioplastic into its constituent's materials would be much simpler and easier. This can be done by segregation of electronic components made from bioplastic at home or industry. Further, these bioplastic can be used as a feed for small community based pyrolitic units which will act as a source of syngas and bio-oil. The syngas produced can be used as fuel for cooking and also for supplying fuel to electricity generators. The biochar left in chamber when mixed with organic fertilizers can be act as source of manure to the soil. As a result with production of zero toxic constituents, these bioplastics can meet the ever increasing demands of laptops in developing countries like India.


Formability of two magnesium alloys, namely, AZ80 and ZE10, has been investigated. Both alloys were supplied with a thickness of 0.8 mm. The grain structure of the as-received AZ80 alloy showed dislocations, twins and second-phase particles and-/or precipitates distributed uniformly within grains. These were not obvious on the ZE10 alloy. The investigations were carried out at room temperature for both alloys in the as-received and heat treated conditions (410oC for 1 hour followed by water quench). The heat treatment significantly changed the grain structure of the AZ80 alloy, but did not affect the ZE10 alloy apart from grain enlargement. The formability was studied on the basis of plastic strain ratio (r) and strain hardening coefficient (n) by means of tensile testing. In the as-received condition, the ZE10 alloy had a slightly better formability () than AZ80 alloy. Following heat treatment, however, the formability of the AZ80 alloy was improved significantly (by about 26%), while the ZE10 alloy did not show any significant change.


Nearly all our buildings and workspaces are protected against fire breaks, which may occur due to some fault in the electric circuitries and power sources. The immediate alarming and aid to extinguish the fire in such situations of fire breaks are provided using embedded systems installed in the buildings. But as the area being monitored against such fire threats becomes vast, these systems do not provide a centralized solution. For the protection of such a huge area, like a college campus or an industrial park, a centralized wireless fire control system using Wireless sensor network technology is developed. The system developed connects the five dangers prone zones of the campus with a central control room through a ZigBee communication interface such that in case of any fire break in any of the building, a direct communication channel is developed that will send an immediate signal to the control room. In case if any of the emergency zone lies out of reach of the central node, multi hoping technique is adopted for the effective transmitting of the signal. The five nodes maintains a wireless interlink among themselves as well as with the central node for this purpose. Moreover a hooter is attached along with these nodes to notify the occurrence of any fire break such that the persons can leave the building immediately and with the help of the signal received in the control room, the exact building where the fire break occurred is identified and fire extinguishing is done. The real time system developed is implemented in Atmega32 with temperature, fire and humidity sensors and ZigBee module.


Do people think about time the way they talk about it? This chapter examinesdissociations between temporal language and temporal thinking in speakers ofEnglish and of Darija, a dialect of Moroccan Arabic. In both languages, conventionalmetaphors suggest that the future is ahead of the speaker and the pastis behind. Yet, English speakers typically conceptualize the future as rightwardand the past as leftward – a spatial mapping that is not conventionalized in anyknown spoken language. Darija speakers typically conceptualize the past asahead and the future a behind them – a spatial mapping that directly contradictstheir verbal metaphors. Darija speakers' "backward" mapping of time does notappear to arise from any feature of their language, or from their physical experiencewith the natural world, but rather from their cultural bias to focus on thepast (i.e., to value their ancestry and practice ancient traditions). Analyses ofverbal space-time metaphors reveal that humans' temporal thinking depends,in part, on spatial mappings. Yet, essential features of these mappings, includingtheir spatial orientation and direction, may be absent from language andcan only be discovered using extra-linguistic methods. Beyond the influences oflanguage and of physical experience, cultural values and non-linguistic culturalpractices can play important roles in shaping our mental representations oftime. As a result, at any moment people may be thinking about time differentlyfrom the way they are talking about it, using different spatial schemas.


Photograph of the front of a 1 ½-story Tudor Revival-style house located at 616 S. Sycamore in Palestine, Texas. Distinctive characteristics on this house include the cross-gabled roof, decorative half-timbered woodwork in gable ends, and windows with small diamond-shaped panes of glass.