Abstract Olfactory research in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have often examined the addition of scent as part of the environment or atmosphere that act as experimental stimuli. There appears to be a lack of research on the influence of virtual foods in IVEs on human satiation. Studies based on situational cues or self-perception theory provide support for the hypothesis that touching and smelling a virtual food item may lead to increased consumption as a result of modeling expected behavior. On the other hand, studies grounded in embodied cognition suggest that satiation may take place as a result of mental simulation that resembles actual consumption behavior. In this preliminary study, we sought to explore the effects of haptic and olfactory cues through virtual food on human satiation and eating behavior. In our study, 101 participants took part in a 2 (touch: present vs absent) × 2 (scent: present vs absent) experiment where they interacted with a donut in an IVE. Findings showed that participants in the touch and scent present conditions ate significantly fewer donuts than those who were not exposed to these cues, and reported higher satiation as compared to their counterparts. However, findings were less clear with respect to participants who received both haptic and olfactory cues. As a whole, results provide preliminary support for satiation effects as a result of sensory simulation.


HE SECOND World War is often regarded as a watershed in world history. Observers have pointed to a number of changes in the global system that occurred after its conclusion: the emergence of bipolar system structure, along with new contenders for international leadership; the invention (and subsequent proliferation) of weapons of extreme power; and the explosion of new nation-states that has created a truly global system. But have these changes been accompanied by changes in behavior between nation states? This paper will investigate one aspect of interstate behaviormilitary conflict involving the major powers-and ascertain whether the time period 1946-1976 was marked by a sharp change in the amount of this conflict, as compared to the period 1816-1945.


In 1778, Vicesimus Knox declared his time the "Age of Information," suggesting, in a fashion recognizable today, that the period had severed connections with prior ages. This paper examines Knox's claim by exploring changes in conceptions of information across the eighteenth century. It notes in particular shifts in the concept's personal and political implications, reflected in the different ways information is used from Locke at the beginning of the century to Godwin at the end, and manifest to some degree in Knox's own political radicalisation.


Obtaining quantitative information from 4D seismic data about changes in the saturation and pressure in a reservoir due to production is very important for improved hydrocarbon recovery and management of the field. However, in heterogeneous reservoirs where the dynamic behavior varies spatially below the seismic resolution, conventional 4D interpretation methods fail to track quantitative changes in individual lithologies. The lack of information about the particular lithology to which a given 4D effect is connected can be detrimental to a general understanding of the reservoir and the forecast.


Mechanical reclamation process of spent moulding sands generate large amounts dusts containing mainly rubbed spent binding agents and quartz dust. The amounts of post-reclamation dusts, depending of the reclamation system efficiency and reclaim dedusting system, can reach 5 -10% in relation to the total reclaimed moulding sand. This dust due to the high content of the organic substances is a threat to the environment and therefore requires the storage on landfills specially adapted for this type of waste. On the other hand, the presence of organic substances causes that these dusts have relatively high energy values that could be used. However, at present there is no coherent, environmentally friendly concept for the management of this type of dust. The paper presents the results of tests of thermal utilization the dusts (as a source of energy) were carried out at AGH University of Science and Technology. Thermal utilization of dusts was carried out in the co-burning with carbon carriers process or in individual burning (Patent PL 227878 B1 and patent application PL 411 902).


The author analyzes the mechanism of suicidal constructions in adolescence. This conduct is an avatar of the initiatory fantasy of the return of the originary in adolescence: self-engenderment in the presence of at least one other person and its opposite, selfdestruction in the presence of at least one other person. He shows how the adolescent summons the intruder into his psychical dynamic of scenality/obscenality by confronting at least one other person with the terror of death. If the other or others who are terrified remain present, the adolescent can think that despite the intrusive terror that fills him he remains human. In the case of the contrary, suicidal or murderous conduct can result. The entry into adulthood requires that the adolescent confront a necessary death, one which inscribes him as mortal, part of humankind; and a death that is sufficient for him to go beyond eternal objects of infantile loves and be able to invest in bonds of desire with perishable love objects.


Cross-modal retrieval aims to build correspondence between multiple modalities by learning a common representation space. Typically, an image can match multiple texts semantically and vice versa, which significantly increases the difficulty of this task. To address this problem, probabilistic embedding is proposed to quantify these many-to-many relationships. However, existing datasets ( e . g ., MS-COCO) and metrics ( e . g ., Recall@K) cannot fully represent these diversity correspondences due to non-exhaustive annotations. Based on this observation, we utilize semantic correlation computed by CIDEr to find the potential correspondences. Then we present an effective metric, named Average Semantic Precision (ASP), which can measure the ranking precision of semantic correlation for retrieval sets. Additionally, we introduce a novel and concise objective, coined Differentiable ASP Approximation (DAA). Concretely, DAA can optimize ASP directly by making the ranking function of ASP differentiable through a sigmoid function. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO, CUB Captions, and Flickr30K, which are commonly used in cross-modal retrieval. The results show that our approach obtains superior performance over the state-of-the-art approaches on all metrics. The code and trained models are released at https://github.com/leolee99/2022-NeurIPS-DAA .


Several regions of the posterior-lateral-temporal cortex (PLTC) are reliably recruited when participants read or listen to action verbs, relative to other word and nonword types. This PLTC activation is generally interpreted as reflecting the retrieval of visual-motion features of actions. This interpretation supports the broader theory, that concepts are comprised of sensory–motor features. We investigated an alternative interpretation of the same activations: PLTC activity for action verbs reflects the retrieval of modality-independent representations of event concepts, or the grammatical types associated with them, i.e., verbs. During a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, participants made semantic-relatedness judgments on word pairs varying in amount of visual-motion information. Replicating previous results, several PLTC regions showed higher responses to words that describe actions versus objects. However, we found that these PLTC regions did not overlap with visual-motion regions. Moreover, their response was higher for verbs than nouns, regardless of visual-motion features. For example, the response of the PLTC is equally high to action verbs (e.g., to run) and mental verbs (e.g., to think), and equally low to animal nouns (e.g., the cat) and inanimate natural kind nouns (e.g., the rock). Thus, PLTC activity for action verbs might reflect the retrieval of event concepts, or the grammatical information associated with verbs. We conclude that concepts are abstracted away from sensory–motor experience and organized according to conceptual properties.


This work consists of four self-containedly presented parts. In the first part we prove equivariant spectral asymptotics for h-pseudodifferential operators for compact orthogonal group actions generalizing results of El-Houakmi and Helffer (1991) and Cassanas (2006). Using recent results for certain oscillatory integrals with singular critical sets (Ramacher 2010) we can deduce a weak equivariant Weyl law. Furthermore, we can prove a complete asymptotic expansion for the Gutzwiller trace formula without any additional condition on the group action by a suitable generalization of the dynamical assumptions on the Hamilton flow. In the second and third part we study resonance chains which have been observed in many different physical and mathematical scattering problems. In the second part we present a mathematical rigorous study of the resonance chains on three funneled Schottky surfaces. We prove the analyticity of the generalized zeta function which provide the central mathematical tool for understanding the resonance chains. Furthermore we prove for a fixed ratio between the funnel lengths and in the limit of large lengths that after a suitable rescaling the resonances in a bounded domain align equidistantly along certain lines. The position of these lines is given by the zeros of an explicit polynomial which only depends on the ratio of the funnel lengths. In the third part we provide a unifying approach to these resonance chains by generalizing dynamical zeta functions. By means of a detailed numerical study we show that these generalized zeta functions explain the mechanism that creates the chains of quantum resonance and classical Ruelle resonances for 3-disk systems as well as geometric resonances on Schottky surfaces. We also present a direct system-intrinsic definition of the continuous lines on which the resonances are strung together as a projection of an analytic variety. Additionally, this approach shows that the existence of resonance chains is directly related to a clustering of the classical length spectrum on multiples of a base length. Finally, this link is used to construct new examples where several different structures of resonance chains coexist. The fourth part deals with a symmetry factorization of dynamical zeta functions for holomorphic iterated function schemes. We introduce the notion of a finite symmetry group for these iterated function schemes and prove that the dynamical zeta function factorizes into entire symmetry reduced zeta functions that are parametrized by the irreducible characters of the symmetry group. Under an assumption on the group action on the symbols of the symbolic dynamics, we are able to simplify the formulas for the symmetry


A red-green-blue camera-based imaging method is proposed for estimating spatial maps of concentrations of oxyhemoglobin (CHbO), deoxyhemoglobin (CHbR), total hemoglobin (CHbT), tissue oxygen saturation (StO2), and scattering power (b) in liver tissue. Hemodynamic responses to hepatic ischemia-reperfusion of in vivo rat liver tissues induced by portal triad occlusion were evaluated. Upon portal triad occlusion, this method yielded images of decreased CHbO, CHbT, StO2, and b, and increased CHbR followed by a progressive increase in CHbO and StO2 during reperfusion. Time courses of the changes in CHbO, CHbR, CHbT, and StO2 over different regions of interest (ROIs) revealed that ischemia results in an abrupt significant (P<0.05) reduction in CHbO, CHbT, and StO2 with a simultaneous increase in CHbR compared to the baseline level, indicative of the hemodynamic responses during hepatic ischemia-reperfusion. Upon reperfusion, there was a gradual increase in CHbO and StO2, and decrease in CHbR. The change in average scattering power b implies the presence of morphological alterations in the cellular and subcellular structures induced by ischemia or anoxia. This study shows the potential of monitoring spatiotemporal changes in hemodynamic parameters and morphological changes in studies of hepatic pathophysiology.


This paper illustrates the design process and the load testing of a steel-reinforced laminated glass beam built for a 6 m span glass footbridge. This specific glass footbridge has been designed and tested to join two existing floors of the main room of a refurbished masonry building of the 19 th century public slaughterhouse of Pisa. To meet the needs for transparency asked by the Municipality of Pisa the beams, the running surface and the balustrades, were made of laminated glass. The project started with a design of a 5790 mm length beam which has been designed and checked using analytical and numerical modelling. Previously a series of 4-point bending experimental tests had been performed on 6 specimens of 2000 mm steel-reinforced glass beams at the University of Pisa in order to validate the accuracy of both the numerical and the analytical modelling. A final load testing has been done on the footbridge and the results have been compared with the numerical findings.


The indoor air climate of an underground train station was investigated during two days in January 2008. The underground platform was accessed from ticket halls on each side with air volumes of 1 000 m3 and 1 430 m3, respectively. The station platform air volume was approximately 14 300 m3. Air from the outside could enter either via the ticket halls or via the train tunnels from ventilation towers situated on each side of the platform area. The local mean age of air was determined in several locations at different heights using pumped sampling and homogeneous emission of PFTs. In addition, the temperature and relative humidity was measured at selected locations. The average air exchange rate per hour (ACH) was found to be 3.62 h-1, ranging from 4 h-1 at rush hours to slightly more than 3 h-1 at night and in the middle of the day. The largest ACH (4.5 h-1) was found at rush hour in one of the ticket halls, corresponding to a flow rate of 75 000 m3/h. The lowest ACH (2.8 h-1) was found in the other ticket hall at night, corresponding to a flow rate of 47 000 m3/h. In the middle of the station platform the ACH was lower than the ACH at the platform ends.


The Bragança coastal plain is a large back-barrier, macrotidal flat located in Northern Brazil. The plain is part of the largest mangrove system in the world, with approximately 8,900 km2. Data derived from surface sediment samples, vibraand percussion-cores, radiocarbon dating, and pollen analysis, allowed for a detailed stratigraphic interpretation along a 25 km long cross-normal profile and the reconstruction of paleo-environmental changes in the mangrove plain. On the basis of lithology, sedimentary structures, texture, color, elevation and bounding surfaces, ten sedimentary facies were identified. Coastal evolution during the last 5100 14C yr B.P. has been apparently modulated by small scale subsidence events, with the onset of three phases of barrier development. Old mangrove deposits have apparently been deposited around the barriers with ages from 5115 14C yr BP to 3412 14C yr BP. After 2100 14C yr B.P., with the development of the last barrier island, about 20 km of mangrove progradation occurred inside the


Globally, developing human resources in an organization is a priority. Human resources development offers the employees the ability to handle a variety of assignments in the workplace. Apart from the individual benefits, human resources development enhances the ability of an organization to compete and adapt to a changing competitive environment. In other to meet the goal of sustained competitive advantage, organizations over the years have designed a human resources development technique in which managers play the role of mentors to less experienced employees in the workplace.


This essay examines the continuing struggle that centers around whether this country will allow public elementary and secondary school officials to use race-conscious, and sometimes aggressive, tools to eliminate the continuing presence of predominantly single race schools in most of our urban centers. Despite the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, the efforts to desegregate schools in some areas of America appear to have eliminated only the legal barriers to truly integrated schools. Many school systems have simply resegregated through demographic shifts prompted by urban decay and "white flight." In Missouri v. Jenkins, the Supreme Court struck down certain district court-ordered remedies designed to attract non-minority students to the Kansas City, Missouri School District ("KCMSD"). In this decision, a sharply divided Court once again confronted the problem of what local school districts can be compelled to do to eliminate the problem of past discrimination. By weakening the power of the federal courts to order aggressive remedies, the Supreme Court has clearly indicated that it intends to abandon its commitment to desegregating public schools, seemingly joining the political opposition to busing, magnet school programs, and other educational reforms that have already compromised the promise that schools should be desegregated with "all deliberate speed." The real tragedy of the Supreme Court's decision in Jenkins is that it is likely to have a chilling effect on school officials trying to achieve desegregation, and federal judges and litigants attempting to draft plans that are designed to facilitate that goal.The struggles encountered in achieving legal recognition of the impropriety of de jure segregation suggest that the high cost that has already been paid by so many should encourage our nation to continue to push aggressively toward the goal of integration. My view is that we must pursue integration even while acknowledging recent failures that have led some to call for the abandonment of techniques designed to integrate public schools. It is my hope that those decision makers who are attempting to continue efforts to desegregate will not be discouraged by the Supreme Court's most recent reduction of the power of the federal courts to advance efforts to achieve desegregated education. This nation should press forward with good faith efforts to integrate the public schools despite the challenges that might lead some educational policy makers to abandon that goal. Failure to do so will result in the erosion of public education for all. Such a consequence we can hardly afford.Before I offer my thoughts on integration and the Supreme Court's decision in Jenkins, it seems appropriate that I should disclose something of my background and experience. I am of African-American and Filipino heritage and am the product of the integrated schools of a majority white public school district. I would characterize my public educational experience as good, but certainly not perfect. My elementary and secondary education occurred while the schools I attended were trying to adjust to the challenges of desegregation. I encountered some parents, teachers, and students who were uncomfortable with the mixed-race classroom, but there were also many people of good faith who worked toward making an unfamiliar setting comfortable for all. Consequently, my integrated education was more beneficial than it was harmful. My experience cannot, of course, stand alone as reason to endorse aggressive plans to integrate public school systems; but my experience does tell me that to abandon all such efforts would be premature. It is with such a view and, if you will, with such a bias that I approach the concept of integration and challenge the Supreme Court's opinion in Jenkins.


From 2012 English universities and colleges will be operating in a more demanding market environment. There will be competition on tuition fees for undergraduate (Baccalaureate) programs for the first time. New private, including "for profit", providers will be entering the market. There will be much more information about what institutions will be offering to existing and potential students. The Government believes that this will raise quality as well as providing a sustainable basis for the future. However there is little evidence to support these beliefs and considerable grounds for supposing that these policies will create a more stratified, and potentially more wasteful, system.


Millets and rice were important for the demographic history of China. This review draws on current archaeobotanical evidence for rice and millets across China, Korea, eastern Russia, Taiwan, Mainland southeast Asia, and Japan, taking a critical approach to dating evidence, evidence for cultivation, and morphological domestication. There is no evidence to suggest that millets and rice were domesticated simultaneously within a single region. Instead, 5 regions of north China are candidates for independent early cultivation of millets that led to domestication, and 3 regions of the Yangtze basin are candidates for separate rice domestication trajectories. The integration of rice and millet into a single agricultural system took place ca. 4000  BC , and after this the spread of agricultural systems and population growth are in evidence. The most striking evidence for agricultural dispersal and population growth took place between 3000 and 2500  BC , which has implications for major language dispersals.


Abstract This paper draws on personal reflection of coaching experiences and learning as a coach to consider the relevance of these approaches in a management context with a group of four healthcare staff who participated in a pilot coaching project. It explores their understanding of coaching techniques applied in management settings via their reflections on using coaching approaches and coaching applications as healthcare managers. Coaching approaches can enhance a manager's skill portfolio and offer the potential benefits in terms of successful goal achievement, growth, mutual learning and development for both themselves and staff they work with in task focused scenarios.


The divalent zinc cation is found in multiple guises in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Lu and Fu (see the Perspective by Nies) present the 3.8 angstrom structure of YiiP, a bacterial membrane protein that imports Zn2+ by exchanging it for H+. The structure of YiiP is a Y-shaped homodimer, through which a presumptive pathway for Zn2+/H+ exchange can be discerned. YiiP is a member of the cation diffusion facilitator family of transport proteins. Another family member, ZnT-8, is expressed solely in pancreatic β cells and has recently been associated with risk for type 2 diabetes. M. Lu, D. Fu, Structure of the zinc transporter YiiP. Science 317, 1746-1748 (2007). [Abstract] [Full Text] D. H. Nies, How cells control zinc homeostasis. Science 317, 1695-1696 (2007). [Summary] [Full Text]


Privatization has been traditionally perceived as a threat to social justice from the perspective of progressive lawyers. The concept has been understood as an inherently conservative project that must be resisted. However, recent developments in both theory and practice illuminate the ways in which privatization processes can and should be pluralized conceptually and pragmatically. Progressive scholars must seize the opportunity to explore the question of privatization in terms of participatory citizenship and democratic governance. Privatization has incorporated under its conceptual umbrella a vast range of processes including selling government assets, leasing, outsourcing, contracting-out, deregulating, franchising, vouchering, and shifts from direct public action to grants, loans, loan guarantees, and subsidies of private action. As a result of the disengagement of progressive reformers with privatization, the social and democratic aspects of privatization alternatives have been underdeveloped. The article introduces a nascent progressive intervention in the discourse of privatization. It discusses a variety of domains where recent experimentation with public-private partnerships reveal the potential to enrich our concepts of democracy and progressive law and lawyering. Three central strategies of the new progressive engagement are discussed. The first strategy is the pluralization of the projects of privatization, revealing how the term privatization is already employed to signify a myriad of governance mechanisms, processes, and structures. Second, the inclusion of recent initiatives of public/private partnerships within the range of privatization possibilities enables a more robust concept of progressive participatory privatization. The emerging vision is brought to bear on three areas - workfare, school reform, and budgeting restructuring - in which aspiration and practices of alternative privatization processes are unfolding. The final step is therefore to recognize the implications of innovative governance architecture for the on-going roles of government and the legal system in the new political economy.


What are the constitutional norms for self-interpretation – that is, the constitutional rules governing whether and when a government body has the power to issue controlling interpretations of legal texts that it drafted? The answer to this question could determine the fate of Seminole Rock deference, the nearly seventy-year-old doctrine enabling agencies to issue controlling interpretations of their own regulations. Jurists and scholars have argued that the doctrine runs afoul of a constitutional norm against self-interpretation, and last term Chief Justice Roberts asked future litigants to brief whether the court should overturn the doctrine on this basis. This Article is the first to comprehensively examine constitutional self-interpretation norms by looking at the conditions under which the heads of the three branches of government exercise self-interpretation powers. It shows that self-interpretation is pervasive and that the Supreme Court would be wrong to overturn Seminole Rock on self-interpretation grounds. Moreover, by examining self-interpretation practices, this Article brings new insight to the many areas of law that involve self-interpretation, including presidential oversight of agencies and judicial stare decisis.


Environmental sound classification systems often do not perform robustly across different sound classification tasks and audio signals of varying temporal structures. We introduce a multi-stream convolutional neural network with temporal attention that addresses these problems. The network relies on three input streams consisting of raw audio and spectral features and utilizes a temporal attention function computed from energy changes over time. Training and classification utilizes decision fusion and data augmentation techniques that incorporate uncertainty. We evaluate this network on three commonly used data sets for environmental sound and audio scene classification and achieve new state-of-the-art performance without any changes in network architecture or front-end preprocessing, thus demonstrating better generalizability.


Qualitative Simulation (QS) is a common reasoning technique that represents the system performance based on qualitative reasoning. Reasoning is made to determine qualitative values with changing directions of the system variables. The QS approaches can be implemented with minimal knowledge of system parameters and even when the system model is incomplete, which are common scenarios for most machine users. Bond graph modelling simulates the dynamic systems based on cause and effect reasoning with the help of energy flow. Therefore this paper plans to use bond graph modelling for the purpose of fault detection based on the energy flow without the need for the specific information of machine's parameters. The bond graph based QS was examined on an AC induction motor (ACIM) which had confirmed the high efficiency of QS based approach in achieving diagnostic results for broken rotor bar. The QS approach uses the temporal causal graph (TCG) and qualitative equations of the system. The applied qualitative analysis predicts the effects of parameter changes (increased-decreased) on the whole system behavior. The results indicate that the proposed QS technique is an effective method for extracting diagnostic information, leading to an accurate diagnosis by combining TCG and qualitative equations with qualitative reasoning.


Adaptive flexibility under temperature stress was studied in a boreal and a subpolar population of A. marina from the North and White Seas. Temperature stress leads to the onset of anaerobic metabolism and the ability to acclimate is interpreted to be associated with a reversal of this initial transition to anaerobiosis, restoring total aerobic conditions. Thus, end products of anaerobic metabolism as well as adenylate and ammonium concentrations were measured as indicators of temperature stress. The results reveal that the populations differ in their ability to acclimate to temperatures 4 °C above their respective high critical temperature. Lugworms from the North Sea survived for only slightly longer than 1 day, while concentrations of alanopine and strombine were significantly elevated. However, adenylate and ammonium levels remained close to control values. In contrast, White Sea specimens showed drastic changes in the concentrations of anaerobic end products and ammonium, and ATP pools were depleted to levels below detection limits during the first 24 h at high temperatures. A higher metabolic proton production in White Sea animals, together with a lower intracellular non-bicarbonate buffer capacity led to a drastic drop in intracellular pH, whereas acidosis was only moderate in North Sea animals. Unexpectedly, the subpolar lugworms not only survived heat exposure, but even exhibited an adaptive reversal of anaerobic metabolic changes.Whereas heat exposure was compensated in White Sea animals only, the short term ability to survive cold stress (-1.7 °C) is limited in summer animals from both populations. Therefore, after an initial reversal of anaerobic metabolism, concentrations of volatile fatty acids and succinate increased again after 3 days. Since White Sea animals can acclimatise to temperatures below -2 °C during winter, our data suggest, that in contrast to warm acclimation, cold acclimation requires a moderate and protracted decline in temperature.


The Workshop on Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods (PSMs), held in conjunction with the Thirteenth Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-98), was held on 24 to 25 August 1998. Twenty-six people participated, and 16 papers were presented. Participants included scientists and practitioners from both the ontology and PSM communities. The first day was devoted to paper presentations and discussions. The second (half) day, a joint session was held with two other workshops: (1) Building, Maintaining, and Using Organizational Memories and (2) Intelligent Information Integration. The reason for the joint session was that in all three workshops, ontologies play a prominent role, and the goal was to bring together researchers working on related issues in different communities. The workshop ended with a discussion about the added value of a combined ontologies-PSM workshop compared to separate workshops.


Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism's meliorist commitment and will block the road of inquiry. I defend the compatibility of a version of value pluralism (the strong epistemic pluralism of John Rawls) with pragmatism, and offer counterarguments to all of these claims.


Digital communication is the foundation of the contemporary social information system. One of the functions of social information systems is the preservation of information and guaranteeing its existence and usability. Preservation could hereby be defined as a function that provides continuance to the information system. On the one hand, preservation of digitally presented information is related to technological developments, however, on the other hand, it also relates to social and cultural processes. Whereas the technical aspect of preservation has been widely dealt with, then its relation to wider social processes has been neglected. Also, parallels can be drawn between digital preservations and preservation of other objects. First, the focus was on objects carrying digital information and their preservability. Initially there were also doubts regarding the preservation of information presented in a new way. Many preservation specialists were convinced up to the mid-1970s that electronic information was suitable for preservation only if its content had been saved in paper or microfilm. Information establishments are always quite conservatively-minded about new mediums and proceed from previously established practices when preserving them. The situation was different in the establishments which dealt with computer-readable information carriers, i.e. in data archives As data archives only focused on collecting, processing and preserving computerreadable information, then it was there where corresponding information systems and the practices for using them developed. It is a good example of how a new technology is implemented faster and without any Principel contradictions in the systems where it is founded from the scratch. The knowledge and experience gathered in data archives did not start to Spreed until the 1990s. At the beginning of the 1980s, it became clear that the physical life span of data carriers is a rather insignificant factor from the point of view of preserving digital information. What was perceived as the main problem, however, was ensuring the availability of devices needed to use the data carriers. In addition to the aging of technical devices, the existenceof different data search formats and their relatively fast alteration were emphasised. It was understood that information system should be teated as a whole and it needed to be made sure from which parts of the system digital data should be collected from and preserved. In this context, it was even discussed as "liberation from the tyranny of the medium"; i.e. in preservation, what becomes the focus is the information itself, not its different physical carriers. It is a very significant conceptual shift in the entire field of preservation. It is recognised that information is related to the functioning of all information systems, it can be found in all systems, and digital information is considerably less connected to its specific physical carrier, in comparison with the so-called classical information carriers, such as books, documents, photos, etc. In case of digital information objects, the relation between the carrier (medium) and information itself is notably more ephemeral. Information presented in digital format is dependent on an entire chain of encoding and decoding stages and the information presented to a person is recreated at the moment of its presentation. Digital computing and communication technologies have developed rapidly and for the time being, problems related to preserving information have not played an important role in this development. There are several institutions in the society engaged in creating, managing and using digital information: libraries, archives, museums, hardware and software manufacturers, research institutions, government institutions etc. All these establishments have very different specific interests and fields of specialty, which makes it very difficult to match and coordinate them. At the same time, the preservation of digital information relevant for the society is dependent on the information system which is formed in the course of cooperation between different institutions and individuals.

KEYWORDS: information systems, digital information, digital preservation, history of digital preservation.


It has recently been shown that many of the existing quasi-Newton algorithms can be formulated as learning algorithms, capable of learning local models of the cost functions. Importantly, this understanding allows us to safely start assembling probabilistic Newton-type algorithms, applicable in situations where we only have access to noisy observations of the cost function and its derivatives. This is where our interest lies. We make contributions to the use of the non-parametric and probabilistic Gaussian process models in solving these stochastic optimisation problems. Specifically, we present a new algorithm that unites these approximations together with recent probabilistic line search routines to deliver a probabilistic quasi-Newton approach. We also show that the probabilistic optimisation algorithms deliver promising results on challenging nonlinear system identification problems where the very nature of the problem is such that we can only access the cost function and its derivative via noisy observations, since there are no closed-form expressions available.


In this research, our aim is to construct an effective quality of service (QoS) routing scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) that provides the service to satisfy required quality by absorbing dynamic changes of network resources. In this paper, we propose an application-level QoS routing scheme for MANETs (ALRS) as a novel QoS routing, that includes following three significant features: (1) estimation of consumed bandwidth on each node using 2-hop neighbors' traffic information, (2) route construction combined with admission control on each application session using (1), and (3) route maintenance based on (1) and (2). ALRS realizes control of generated traffic in MANET effectively and enables to provide the service to satisfy required quality for dynamic changes of network resources. By using our proposed scheme, it is expected that the availability of bandwidth would greatly improve for high-load communication, such as multimedia application on MANET. From our simulation results, it has shown, that our proposed scheme, by effective suppression of traffic, increased delivery ratio up to 40%, without any deterioration of throughput compared to traditional method. Results show that our proposed scheme enables to provide the service to satisfy the required quality


We read with interest the article by Kim et al.1 in which the authors provided the efficacy and safety data of radotinib (IY5511HCL), an oral BCR-ABL1-specific 2nd generation tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), in 77 patients with chronic phase-chronic myeloid leukemia (CP-CML) in a multinational phase II trial. After a median duration of radotinib exposure of approximately 12 months and a median follow up of 23.4 months, the complete cytogenetic response (CCyR) rate was 47% by 12 months, and the overall and progression-free survival rates at 12 months were 96.1% and 86.3%, respectively. Thrombocytopenia, hepatotoxicity, hyperbilirubinemia and hyperglycemia were the most common hematologic and non-hematologic adverse events (AEs). The authors implied that radotinib was effective and relatively well tolerated in patients with CP-CML, and CCyR rates were higher in patients without BCR-ABL1 mutations.1

Although most of the CP-CML patients do well under imatinib, some of them develop resistance, and BCR-ABL1 kinase domain mutations are detected in approximately 50% of patients with treatment failure and progression.2 Second generation TKIs (dasatinib and nilotinib) are used in patients who have intolerance and resistance to imatinib.3,4 In the study cohort, CCyR rate at 12 months was 47%, and the authors compared their results with dasatinib and nilotinib. They concluded that the efficacy of the study drug was comparable, and even favorable, to those observed with dasatinib3 and nilotinib.4 But these 2 studies which the authors mentioned have shorter followup durations than the present study, and when the other TKIs were used as a second-line treatment at longer followup periods the CCyR rates were similar to those of the present study: dasatinib 45%,5 nilotinib 44%,6 and bosutinib 41%7. As expected, the response rates were higher in imatinib intolerant cases than in those who were resistant,1 which has already been shown in the second-line dasatinib and nilotinib trials.5,6 The authors concluded that in 5 patients with a BCR-ABL1 mutation which was less sensitive to nilotinib or dasatinib, 2 had gained major CyR. But there seems to be a problem in terms of efficacy of radotinib in patients with a mutated clone (n=14) because only 3 of these patients have responded to the study drug. Moreover, during follow up, 6 additional patients were found to harbor new mutations, including T315I. This is a major challenge for clinicians given that nearly half the patients with imatinib resistance have BCR-ABL1 mutations.

Dasatinib and nilotinib are generally well tolerated but they do have AEs that appear in the short term or after a longer follow up.8 Their familiarity with these AEs allows physicians caring for CML patients to recognize and manage them.9 Radotinib was used at an initial dose of 2×400 mg/daily in the present study, and the most common grade 3–4 hematologic AE was thrombocytopenia, which was observed in 25% of the patients.1 Grade 1–2 hepatotoxicity was present in more than 70% of the patients, and the percentages of grade 3–4 hyperbilirubinemia and hyperglycemia were 23.4% and 19.5%, respectively. During follow up, 71.4% of the patients had a dose interruption, and a dose reduction was needed in 53 (68.8%). These numbers are quite high, which might suggest that the starting dose of radotinib should be lower. Furthermore, 42.9% of the patients discontinued treatment before 12 months, of which 18 patients (23.4%) stopped therapy due to AEs and abnormal laboratory results. This is also a high number after a relatively short duration of follow up, and although the authors concluded that the AEs were generally transient and manageable, nearly one-fourth of the patients stopped treatment with the study drug due to AEs within 12 months of treatment.

In conclusion, although radotinib seems to be a promising alternative treatment, more data should be collected regarding its efficacy and safety, and prospective randomized trials with longer follow-up periods are needed to strengthen the efficacy and safety data of this 2nd generation TKI.


LIMK1 inhibitors might provide protection from β-amyloid in patients at high risk for Alzheimer's disease. Halting the onset of amyloid-induced dementia The appearance of β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques in the brain is strongly correlated with advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD) and directly implicated in the neuronal degeneration that underlies cognitive decline in patients. Henderson et al. used a transgenic mouse that expresses a genetic cause of inherited (familial) AD and spontaneously develops Aβ plaques and the neurodegeneration seen in patients. Treating these mice with inhibitors of either the kinase ROCK2 or its downstream target LIMK1 before Aβ plaques were detectable prevented the neuronal morphology alterations subsequently caused by Aβ accumulation. Thus, these inhibitors, which are already in preclinical or clinical trials for patients with cancer, may be prophylactic in individuals at high risk for developing AD. Alzheimer's disease (AD) therapies predominantly focus on β-amyloid (Aβ), but Aβ effects may be maximal before clinical symptoms appear. Downstream of Aβ, dendritic spine loss correlates most strongly with cognitive decline in AD. Rho-associated kinases (ROCK1 and ROCK2) regulate the actin cytoskeleton, and ROCK1 and ROCK2 protein abundances are increased in early AD. Here, we found that the increased abundance of ROCK1 in cultured primary rat hippocampal neurons reduced dendritic spine length through a myosin-based pathway, whereas the increased abundance of ROCK2 induced spine loss through the serine and threonine kinase LIMK1. Aβ42 oligomers can activate ROCKs. Here, using static imaging studies combined with multielectrode array analyses, we found that the ROCK2-LIMK1 pathway mediated Aβ42-induced spine degeneration and neuronal hyperexcitability. Live-cell microscopy revealed that pharmacologic inhibition of LIMK1 rendered dendritic spines resilient to Aβ42 oligomers. Treatment of hAPP mice with a LIMK1 inhibitor rescued Aβ-induced hippocampal spine loss and morphologic aberrations. Our data suggest that therapeutically targeting LIMK1 may provide dendritic spine resilience to Aβ and therefore may benefit cognitively normal patients that are at high risk for developing dementia.


The three studies included in the current report examine the transition from an infrastructure-based rural intersection crossing assist system to one located inside a vehicle. The primary goals of the first study, conducted in a simulator, were to examine the effect of potentially confounding factors, such as the drivers' familiarity with the assist system and the impact of cognitive load on the drivers' performance. Next, the authors examined the efficacy of several different designs of such system to determine the optimal interface design to be used for the in-vehicle system. Finally, the optimal design of the system was examined in the third study, as a field test. The results showed that the use of the system under cognitively demanding conditions did not result in any adverse consequences, which suggested that the processing of the system required minimal cognitive resources. Additionally, the results showed that the benefits of the assist system, such as reduced probability of accepting a critical gap were exhibited under the limited visibility conditions when the perceptual task of determining an appropriate crossing gap became overly demanding. The results from the field study showed that the use of the assist system resulted in improved intersection crossing performance exhibited in increased likelihood of making a complete stop at the stop sign and showed a strong trend toward a decreased probability of accepting critical gaps. Additionally, the impact of the in-vehicle CICAS-SSA was equivalent for older and younger drivers; that is, both age groups benefited from the use of the system.


The increasing diversity of stakeholders, who often hold differing and conflicting land-use perceptions and strategies, underlines the growing need for innovative methods and tools to support a negotiation process aimed at an enhanced and more decentralised land-use management policy. Land-use management is a complex issue and thus presents an irreducible uncertainty that entails a variety of legitimate perspectives. Due to this complexity, the decision-making process should be incremental, iterative and continuous. This means that the acts of decision making will always be imperfect but will move progressively closer towards a shared satisfactory resolution. However, which tools will best fit such a theoretical starting point? Our team is seeking to develop an innovative form of participatory modelling fitting these hypotheses. As regards regional planning, a novel way to put these assumptions into practice has been under way since 1997 in the Senegal River Valley. This experiment, called "SelfCormas", is being conducted to test a directed self-designing of modelling tools, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) by stakeholders and principals. From the initial stages, as little prior design work as possible is executed by the modellers. The process has been organised in the form of participatory workshops, including role-playing games, to support a local decentralisation policy at an operational level (2,500 km2). This sort of accompaniment leads to discussions, appraisals and decisions concerning the planning of land-use management. Just a few months after the first workshops, this process has already culminated in autonomous applications, from local to regional levels.


Introduction: Dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) inhibitors are widely used in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients but the data available in existing clinical trial programmes on DPP4 inhibitors include limited number of patients from India. Hence, this study attempted to understand usage, efficacy and safety of saxagliptin as first add-on after metformin in Indians with T2DM. Methodology: It was a multicenter, prospective, non-interventional and observational study planned to enrol T2DM patients who were inadequately controlled with metformin alone and had been recently (i.e., within past 15 days) prescribed saxagliptin as an add-on to metformin. Type 1 diabetes mellitus, use of glucose lowering drugs apart from metformin or saxagliptin, pregnancy, lactation, and medical condition, which could interfere with safe completion of the study were excluded. Results: A total of 1109 participants (658 men and 451 women) with mean ± SD age of 51.17 ± 11.85 years were enrolled from 50 centres throughout India. Significant reduction was observed in mean ± SD change of HbA1c as − 0.86% ± 1.76 from baseline to after 3 months of therapy (P < 0.0001). The quality of life assessed by World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire was reported to be "good" or "neither good nor bad" by majority of the participants at baseline and after 3 months of treatment. A total of 15 adverse events (AEs) were reported in the study, however, no serious adverse event (SAE) occurred during the study. All AEs were of mild intensity and did not require any intervention. Conclusion: Overall, saxagliptin in combination with metformin was generally well-tolerated in Indian T2DM patients and new or unexpected safety events were not identified. This study is also registered on Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02588859).


A to Zanthoxylum is a set of pencils made of 26 timber species arranged alphabetically by scientific name.

Timber has been the material of choice for writing and printing words and letters for centuries, consolidating the relationship between abstract thoughts and their physical manifestation.

The pencils are based on the work of George Loddiges, who, in 1840, planted an alphabetical arboretum along the perimeter of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, a last place of rest for non-conformists and dissenters. Through replanting, propagation, diseases and other disturbances, the arboretum has now turned into scattered letters and accidental words, resembling chance poetry.


A mechnism of transfer learning is analysed, where samples drawn from different learning tasks of an environment are used to improve the learners performance on a new task. We give a general method to prove generalisation error bounds for such meta-algorithms. The method can be applied to the bias learning model of J. Baxter and to derive novel generalisation bounds for meta-algorithms searching spaces of uniformly stable algorithms. We also present an application to regularized least squares regression.


In traditional pathways to degree, high-impact educational practices coupled with experiential learning requires a collaborative, multi-perspective approach to assessment. Assessing experiences for both intended outcomes and embedded learning – those outcomes likely present, but otherwise not assessed – gives learners and programmers direct access to a broad array of learning evidence. This study aimed to match high-impact , experiential learning with equally powerful assessment practices. This paper describes an underutilized assessment process of analyzing individual video reflection to identify multiple learning outcomes across domains. Important outcomes of this effort were cognitive, affective, social and emotional learning made visible through a multi-perspective assessment processes. We also discuss how learners in both co-curricular and credit-bearing environments can benefit from these assessments. Embedded learning outcomes, data and feedback were surfaced for student, program, career and institutional purposes. Keywords: Authentic assessment, multiple outcomes, experiential, reflection


Our built heritage plays an important role in the ongoing story of our city. Modern cities such as Brisbane embraced Art Deco style in its architecture as it swept the world during the interwar period. From inner city landmarks such as the striking McWhirters department store to lesser-known gems further afield like the streamlined Archerfield Airport administration building, Brisbane has a significant range of intriguing and beautiful Art Deco buildings.

This publication documents and celebrates a selection of our favourite residential and commercial examples. Written contributions from a range of authors are complemented by stunning modern photography and historic archive imagery, taking readers on a journey through this fascinating era. The articles not only describe the aesthetic and architectural features, but also delve into the associated social history.

Brisbane Art Deco: Stories of our Built Heritage is a charming and informative reference, and offers a colourful insight into Brisbane's built heritage and the life and times of this dynamic city.


Currently, flushing large volumes of Gram stain reagents into sanitary sewage systems is no longer acceptable. These chemical wastes are highly regulated and must be collected, labeled, and disposed of in a responsible manner, usually by paying a commercial service to remove them to an authorized off-site facility. Such services are costly and, as expected, costs are proportional to volume of collected waste. This "old" method of Gram staining, even if effluent is collected, generates a high volume of liquid waste which is unnecessarily diluted with additional large volumes of water from the rinsing steps. The purpose of using this scaled-down and eco-friendly protocol is to dramatically reduce the amount of liquid waste produced without sacrificing quality of results. This protocol is flexible, practical, and easy to implement. It does not require students to work at a bench sink, reduces user cost, and lowers environmental impact overall.


The character vocabulary can be very large in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which makes neural network models huge to process such languages. We explored a model for sentiment classification that takes the embeddings of the radicals of the Chinese characters, i.e, hanzi of Chinese and kanji of Japanese. Our model is composed of a CNN word feature encoder and a bi-directional RNN document feature encoder. The results achieved are on par with the character embedding-based models, and close to the state-of-the-art word embedding-based models, with 90% smaller vocabulary, and at least 13% and 80% fewer parameters than the character embedding-based models and word embedding-based models respectively. The results suggest that the radical embedding-based approach is cost-effective for machine learning on Chinese and Japanese.


Wetland ecosystems provide society with a range of valuable ecosystem services. However, wetlands worldwide are experiencing increasing pressure from a number of sources, caused by an interrelated combination of market failure and policy intervention failure. Whatever the cause, the result is massive degradation and loss of these ecosystems and ultimately, loss of their services. To better manage wetlands the availability of sufficient relevant and reliable scientific information is required together with an assessment tool capable of providing meaningful evaluations of the consequences of management. Current assessments of wetlands are often biased towards either economic or scientific issues, with limited attempts at integration. Evaluations that neglect integration overlook the complexity of wetland ecosystems and have failed to sufficiently protect these areas. This paper reviews the literature to propose an evaluation framework which combines a scientific assessment of wetland function with cost utility analysis (CUA) to develop a meaningful trade-off matrix. A dynamic approach to wetland assessment such as the hydro geomorphologic method (HGM), developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, offers the opportunity to consider interrelationships between ecosystem process and functions and the resulting ecosystem services. CUA facilitates the evaluation of projects where the consequences of investment or no investment are complex and difficult to value in monetary terms. The evaluation framework described in this paper has the potential to deliver an integrated wetland management tool. However, for this potential to be realised, targeted interdisciplinary research by scientists and economists is required.


The criminal justice system is not infallible. This unfortunate but unavoidable fact has been known for some time. For many reasons, in spite of advocacy raised as early as 1913 by Borchard to offer compensation to those wrongfully convicted and later exonerated, currently in the United States only 15 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government have laws for such compensation. Further, the compensation is fairly meager, and compensation is usually not granted if the alleged criminal pleaded guilty in cases involving confessions. Outside the United States, a different era seems to be on the horizon. In recent years, the scope of state liability has been expanding through membership in international organizations and through international treaties. In particular, the Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms encourages compensation for anyone punished as a result of a wrongful conviction. Article 3 of Protocol 7, Compensation for Wrongful Conviction, states that: When a person has by a final decision been convicted of a criminal offence and when subsequently his conviction has been reversed, or he has been pardoned, on the ground that a new or newly discovered fact shows conclusively that there has been a miscarriage of justice, the person who has suffered punishment as a result of such conviction shall be compensated according to the law or the practice of the State concerned, unless it is proved that the non-disclosure of the unknown fact in time is wholly or partly attributable to him. Although this article lacks specifics, it clearly endorses compensation for the wrongfully convicted. People who are wrongfully convicted and later exonerated should be compensated for many reasons. The wrongfully accused typically incur huge legal expenses for defense. They lose their earning opportunities and their reputations while in prison, and they suffer psychological harm. It is just to compensate these victims - society is responsible for rectifying its errors by helping these victims regain normal lives when they are released from prison. Following Borchard, scholars also raised the possibility of applying eminent domain principles to compensate those wrongfully convicted, making the case that takings are involved when these victims are incarcerated. Against this backdrop, our paper attempts to study the compensation problem in a different direction. We ask whether expanding the scope of state liability would improve the well-being of citizens after public wrongs occur. In particular, we propose that compensating the wrongfully convicted after exoneration could affect the aggregate level of crime. A model will be developed in which we first point out that the possibility of wrongful conviction, although it cannot be avoided, in fact increases the amount of crime committed as compared to the idealistic case of no erroneous conviction. Then the simple model is extended to show why state liability for wrongful conviction changes criminal behavior. We conclude that the net impact of the expansion of state liability is that the aggregate level of crime decreases.


Energy usage and data rate of differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) are both inefficient since half of the symbol duration is used to transmit reference. To improve the energy efficiency and data rate, we propose a new chaos modulation scheme which combines DCSK with code index modulation (CIM) referred to as CIM-DCSK. In the proposed scheme, a short reference signal is transmitted first. Then  $P$  repeated reference signals, which serve as information-bearing signals, are simultaneously modulated by an information bit and a Walsh code with a specific index which is determined by an extra information symbol. The analytical bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is derived and verified by simulations. Further, we improve the performance of the proposed system by applying noise-reduction and optimizing power coefficients on the reference and the information-bearing signals of CIM-DCSK. Simulation and analytical results show that these optimization methods significantly boost the BER performances of the proposed schemes. Finally, the BER performances of the proposed systems are compared with that of the conventional DCSK system and the short reference DCSK (SR-DCSK) system. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes outperform both DCSK and SR-DCSK.


Electron recombination is one of the major loss factors in dye‐sensitized solar cells (DSC), especially, with single electron outer sphere redox shuttle electrolyte. Insulating sub‐nanometer oxide tunneling layers deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD) are known to block the electron recombination, thereby leading to an increase in the open‐circuit potential and the collection efficiency of the solar cell. A general perception in the DSC community is that any insulating oxide layer can block the recombination. However, in this work, it is unraveled that the insulating property of oxides alone is not sufficient. In addition, the properties such as the conduction band position and the oxidation state of the insulating oxide, the electronic structural modification induced to the underlying TiO2 mesoporous film, modification of surface charges (isoelectric point) and charge of the electrolyte species have to be considered. A complete photovoltaic study is done by depositing different cycles (by ALD) of four different insulating oxides (Ga2O3, ZrO2, Nb2O5, and Ta2O5) and their recombination characteristics, surface electronic properties, transport rate, and injection dynamics are investigated with a standard organic dye and Co2+/Co3+ redox mediator. A comparison is made with the conventional iodide/triiodide electrolyte.


Abstract Studies have reported a negative association between dairy product consumption and weight status. However, not as much research has focused on cheese; therefore, the aim of this study was to study the association between cheese intake and overweight and obesity in a representative Basque adult population. A food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was obtained from a random sample of 1081 adults (530 males and 551 females, 17–96 years old). Cheese consumption data were expressed as g/1000 kcal/day. The prevalence of overweight/obesity was higher in men (55.1%) than in women (35.4%) (p < 0.001). Participants with low or moderate intake of fresh and processed cheese demonstrated a higher prevalence of excess weight, compared with those with higher consumption. The confounding variables selected in multivariate analysis were: occupational status and age in both genders; and place of residence in men. In conclusion, negative associations were found between consumption of some types of cheese and overweight and obesity in this population.


Homo economicus reliably makes an appearance in regulatory debates concerning information privacy. Under the still-dominant U.S. "notice and choice" approach to consumer information privacy, the rational consumer is expected to negotiate for privacy protection by reading privacy policies and selecting services consistent with her preferences. A longstanding model for predicting these preferences is Professor Alan Westin's well-known segmentation of consumers into "privacy pragmatists," "privacy fundamentalists," and "privacy unconcerned." To be tenable as a protection for consumer interest, "notice and choice" requires homo economicus to be broadly reliable as a model. Consumers behaving according to the model will know what they want and how to get it in the marketplace, limiting regulatory approaches to information privacy. While notice and choice is undergoing strong theoretical, empirical, and political critique, U.S. Internet privacy law largely reflects these assumptions. This Article contributes to the ongoing debate about notice and choice in two main ways. First, we consider the legacy Westin's privacy segmentation model itself, which as greatly influenced the development of the notice-and-choice regime. Second, we report on original survey research, collected over four years, exploring Americans' knowledge, preferences, and attitudes about a wide variety of data practices in online and mobile markets. Using these methods, we engage in considered textual analysis, empirical testing, and critique of Westin's segmentation model. Our work both calls into question longstanding assumptions used by Westin and lends new insight into consumers' privacy knowledge and preferences. A close textual look at factual and theoretical assumptions embedded in the segmentation model shows foundational flaws. With testing, we find that the segmentation model lacks validity in important dimensions. In analyzing data from nationwide, telephonic surveys of Internet and mobile phone users, we find an apparent knowledge gap among consumers concerning business practices and legal protections for privacy, calling into question Westin's conclusion that a majority of consumers act pragmatically. We further find that those categorized as "privacy pragmatists" act differently from Westin's model when directly presented with the value exchange — and thus the privacy tradeoff — offered with these services. These findings reframe the privacy pragmatist and call her influential status in U.S. research, industry practice, and policy into serious question. Under the new view, she cannot be seen as "pragmatic" at all, but rather as a consumer making choices in the marketplace with substantial deficits in her understanding of business practices. This likewise calls into question policy decisions based on the segmentation model and its assumptions. We conclude that updated research and a policy approach that addresses both rationality and knowledge gaps are key.


This paper focuses on case acquisition strategies in the context of Case-based Learning from Observation (CBLfO). In Learning from Observation (LfO), a system learns behaviors by observing an expert rather than being explicitly programmed. Specifically, we focus on the problem of learning behaviors from experts that reason using internal state information, that is, information that can not be directly observed. The unobservability of this state information means that the behaviors can not be represented by a simple perception-to-action mapping. We propose a new case acquisition strategy called Similarity-based Chunking, and compare it with existing strategies to address this problem. Additionally, since standard classification accuracy in predicting the expert's actions is known to be a poor measure for evaluating LfO systems, we propose a new evaluation procedure based on two complementary metrics: behavior performance and similarity with the expert.


Wireless stimulation of neural tissue could enable many emerging neural prosthesis designs, and eliminate problems associated with percutaneous wires and connectors. Our laboratory has developed a 16-channel wireless floating microelectrode array (WFMA) for chronic implantation. Here, we report on its first use within in-vivo experiments, using a rat sciatic nerve model. Stimulus currents and associated muscular movements were determined for electrodes of two WFMA devices implanted into four animal subjects.


Abstract The Logar Ophiolite Complex (LOC) is located 30 km south of Kabul, Afghanistan, and extends over approximately 2000 km2. It comprises a lower lherzolitic-dunitic-harzburgitic-gabbro ultramafic-mafic unit that passes upwards into a dolerite dyke complex, basaltic pillow lavas and an uppermost sequence of volcaniclastic- and terrigenous-dominated sedimentary units. The ophiolite represents an obducted remnant of intra-Tethyan basin oceanic crust, thrust onto a platform-style cover component of the Kabul Terrane during the Himalayan orogeny. Platinum-group minerals have been detected for the first time in chromitites and ultramafic units from the LOC. Two distinct types of chromitites and ultramafic lithologies with different origins have also been identified in this study. The first type is a low Cr, PGE-poor chromitite interpreted to have been produced in a mid ocean ridge (MOR) environment. The second type is a high Cr, relatively PGE-rich dunite and peridotite from a boninitic magma produced in a supra-subduction zone (SSZ) setting. Platinum group element (PGE) abundances in these chromitites average 12 ppb and 26 ppb for Pt+Pd+Rh for the dunite and peridotite. Chondrite-normalised PGE patterns have two distinct trends: (a) the MOR rocks have a positive Ru anomaly with a negative Pt anomaly and a generally negative slope; and (b) the SSZ rocks show weak positive Ru and Pt anomalies and a positive slope. It is concluded that the negative sloping pattern is typical of PGE in most ophiolites elsewhere. In contrast, the positively sloping pattern is more unusual and may indicate PGE remobilisation and enrichment.


This chapter examines the role of communication in Northern Ireland (NI), a society deeply divided by terrorism. It reviews definitions of terrorism and then presents a model that studies the phenomenon from five inter-related perspectives: the context within which terrorism occurs, the terrorists, the public, the media and the government. Our analysis is informed by involvement in a major pan-European project (SafeComms, 2011), which charted the ways in which public authorities can communicate most effectively in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. It also draws upon our previous research into the NI Conflict (e.g. Hargie, Dickson and Rainey, 1999; Dickson, Hargie and Nelson, 2002; Hargie, Dickson and O'Donnell, 2006; Dickson, Hargie, O'Donnell and McMullan, 2008; Hargie, Somerville and Mitchell, 2015). The overarching conceptual framework that underpins our analysis is that of 'sensemaking'. The importance of sensemaking in PR has been highlighted by Berger and Meng (2014). One reason for this is that it is particularly pertinent to understanding "circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity" (Colville, Pye and Carter, 2013, p. 2010) such as terrorism. We argue that in divided societies there is a sensemaking schism, and so a major task for all those involved is that of using communication to attempt to bring the two sides more closely together so that a shared sensemaking frame may begin to emerge.See: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cFTUDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT6&dq=9781138860131&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=9781138860131&f=false


Abstract In this article I suggest that historically lyric and narrative are not mutually exclusive categories. Focusing on the case of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence, "Astrophil and Stella", I argue that the fundamentally lyric form of the sonnet functions rhetorically and contextually in such a way as to invite narrative construal. I suggest that this is the norm in pre-Enlightenment poetic practice and theory, something which was perhaps occluded by the decline of interest in rhetoric. Opsomming Die artikel gaan van die standpunt uit dat, histories gesien, liriek en narratief nie wederkerig-uitsluitende kategoriee is nie Met die klem op Sir Philip Sidney se sonnetreeks "Astrophil and Stella", argumenteer ek dat die hoofsaaklik liriese vorm van die sonnet retories sowel as kontekstueel so funksioneer dat dit die moontlikheid van 'n narratiewe rekonstuksie en interpretasie aanmoedig. Ek argumenteer verder dat dit die norm in die poetiese praktyk en teorie voor die Verligting was--aspekte wat miskien uit die oog verloor is vanwee die kwynende belangstelling in die retoriek. I. Sidney and early modern theories of poetry Sir Philip Sidney, like any other poet of the English Renaissance, would not have understood our distinction between the modes of lyric and narrative, and I am not sure that we understand it either. If we did, we would not now be exploring the relationship between them. Early modern poets were brought up on a diet of Plato and Aristotle within a rhetorical tradition which had its origins in classical antiquity, and which continued to flourish through the mediaeval period, and experienced an efflorescence with the spread of the humanist learning of what we readily refer to as the Renaissance. The complex and minute, not to say acute, distinctions they could make between genres rivalled those of any scholastic philosopher debating about the number of angels that could dance upon the point of a needle. For them, however, narrative and lyric did not constitute the binary polarity which we post-everythingists are sometimes tempted to think in terms of. We tend to think of narrative as prose, and lyric as poetic forms, but for Sidney the term poetry- or more correctly, poesy- covered the whole range of imaginative literature (as opposed to philosophy or history), and so prose romance, epic and sonnet were all forms of poesy. Epic and ballad were recognised poetic genres, but they were not held to be in opposition to non-narrative forms such as song, sonnet and epigram; and prose narratives such as Sidney's own The countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (written between 1577 and 1585; first published 1590 and 1593) straddled epic (heroic poem), romance and pastoral which included songs, sonnets, epigrams, and satirical and didactic poems. This does not mean that Sidney and his contemporaries had an explicit, coherent, systematic theoretical understanding of what they were doing as poets. Far from it. Sidney's Defence of poesy (written probably 1580; first published 1591), for all its glamour, insightfulness and deeply moving moments, is also a bewildered and bewildering attempt to defend poetry against Plato's indictment of poets as misleaders of the youth by using an Aristotelian notion of mimesis (but with a late mannerist nuance) coupled with Horace's amiable edification. This syncretic approach constituted a summation of past thought in an invigorating amalgam with the innovative idealism and individualistic self-confidence we now think of as characteristic of the English Renaissance. The purpose of poetry was to teach through the delightful representation of virtue and nobility, ant, the delightful yet cautionary representation of their opposites. Such ideas easily accommodate representational forms such as drama, epic and fictional prose, but run into trouble with the forms we often think of as lyrical in the broadest possible sense: religious poetry, hymns and above all love poetry. …


This article talks about the origin of Montenegrins in Vojvodina, their identity, development of their number and then about the age - gender structure. It gives the insight how old the Montenegrins population is and if it is in general older than population in Vojvodina. Particular attention was given to the period from the second half of 20th and at the beginning of 21st century. The main task of the paper was the identification of tendencies in the age structure of Montenegrins. Statis- tical methods and mathematics proceedings are used to compare different parameters of the age structure. The interview was carried with the aim to find out the reply on question where the one third of Montenegrins had disappeared during the last decade. The results of the study will enhance the knowledge about demographic characteristics of Montenegrins in Vojvodina and therefore might be useful for further research in the field.


The past 25 years have seen a dramatic transformation in Europe's former communist countries, resulting in their reintegration with the global economy, and, in most cases, major improvements in living standards. But the task of building full market economies has been difficult and protracted. Liberalisation of trade and prices came quickly, but institutional reforms - such as governance reform, competition policy, privatisation and enterprise restructuring - often faced opposition from vested interests. The results of the first years of transition were uneven. All countries suffered high inflation and major recessions as prices were freed and old economic linkages broke down. But the scale of output losses and the time taken for growth to return and inflation to be brought under control varied widely. Initial conditions and external factors played a role, but policies were critical too. Countries that undertook more front-loaded and bold reforms were rewarded with faster recovery and income convergence. Others were more vulnerable to the crises that swept the region in the wake of the 1997 Asia crisis.


Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country's census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural disasters, and to studying any aspect of human life in these communities. Satellite imagery can provide sufficient information to build a population map without the cost and time of a government census. We present two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures which efficiently and effectively combine satellite imagery inputs from multiple sources to accurately predict the population density of a region. In this paper, we use satellite imagery from rural villages in India and population labels from the 2011 SECC census. Our best model achieves better performance than previous papers as well as LandScan, a community standard for global population distribution.


1. "LAUDATO SI', mi' Signore" – "Praise be to you, my Lord". In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. "Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs".[1]


Genetic parameters for Brahman (BRAH) and Tropical Composite (TCOMP) cattle were estimated for steer production traits recorded at weaning (WEAN), 80 days post-weaning (POSTW), feedlot entry (ENTRY) and after ∼120 days feedlot finishing (EXIT). The TCOMP was 50% Bos indicus, African Sanga or other tropically adapted Bos taurus, and 50% non-tropically adapted Bos taurus. Data involved 2216 steers, comprising 1007 BRAH by 53 sires and 1209 TCOMP by 50 sires. Individual daily feed intake (DFI) and residual feed intake (RFI) were assessed on 680 BRAH and 783 TCOMP steers over an ~70-day feedlot test. Other traits were liveweight (LWT), average daily gain (ADG), ultrasonically scanned rump (SP8) fat depth, rib (SRIB) fat depth, M. longissimus area (SEMA) and intra-muscular fat % (SIMF), body condition score (CS), hip height (HH), flight time (FT) and serum insulin-like growth factor-I concentration (IGF-I). BRAH were significantly (P < 0.05) lighter at ENTRY and EXIT, and had lower DFI (10.8 v. 13.2 kg/day) and RFI (–0.30 v. 0.17 kg/day), greater SP8 (5.8 v. 5.1 mm) but similar SRIB at ENTRY, lower SRIB (8.2 v. 8.9 mm) but similar SP8 at EXIT, and greater HH than TCOMP. Heritabilities for DFI, RFI, LWT, ADG, scanned body composition, HH and IGF-I measures, across measurement times, were generally in the 20 to 60% range for both genotypes. Genetic variance for RFI was 0.19 (kg/day)2 in BRAH and 0.41 (kg/day)2 in TCOMP, suggesting a clear potential to genetically change RFI in both genotypes. Trait variances and genetic correlations often differed between the genotypes, supporting the use of genotype-specific parameters in genetic evaluation. The genotype differences may be associated with evolutionary changes that have occurred in B. indicus as a part of their adaptation to tropical environments. Measures with potential to be used as genetic indicators of DFI were LWT measures in BRAH and TCOMP, ADG at ENTRY in TCOMP, and SP8 and SIMF at ENTRY in BRAH. Measures with potential to be genetic indicators of RFI were HH and ADG at ENTRY in BRAH, and IGF-I in both genotypes. Taller and faster-growing BRAH steers at ENTRY had genetically lower RFI. IGF-I was negatively genetically correlated with RFI whether IGF-I was measured at POSTW, ENTRY or EXIT. SRIB fatness at EXIT was strongly positively genetically correlated with RFI in TCOMP but only lowly correlated in BRAH. Fatness at ENTRY was lowly and negatively genetically correlated with RFI. The results emphasise the need for a population-specific understanding of trait relationships and of trait differences between measurement times if genetic indicator traits are to be utilised in genetic evaluation of RFI.


Han, Qian. Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, 2013. Mining Diversified Decision Trees Across Multiple Datasets to Capture Similarities and Alignable Differences. This dissertation studies the problem of mining shared and alignable difference knowledge structures across multiple datasets/applications. Shared and alignable difference knowledge structures are important for identifying analogies between application domains and for forming new hypothesis in challenging research applications, and for assessing the degree and types of knowledge-level similarities and differences between application domains for use in learning transfer. Generally speaking, shared knowledge structures characterize underlying datasets and highlight conceptual-level structural similarities among the datasets. This dissertation studies the mining of shared decision trees, which are a special type of shared knowledge structures. We first consider building one shared decision tree with high classification accuracy and high data distribution similarity for two given datasets. Moreover, it is observed that one shared decision tree may only present a limited view of shared behaviors between two given datasets. In order to help users to select from multiple diversified perspectives on shared knowledge structures, we propose the diversified decision tree set mining problem, whose goal is to mine a small set of k (≥ 1) diversified high quality shared decision trees. Besides requiring each tree in the set to have high classification accuracy and highly similar data distributions in the given datasets, different trees in the set are also required to be highly different from each other. Algorithms are developed to solve both problems. Experimental results on microarray datasets for medicine are reported to evaluate the algorithms, together with the mined shared decision trees. This dissertation also introduces and studies the mining of alignable differences. Roughly speaking, alignable difference knowledge structures indicate significant differences in the context of a large amount of similarities among two given datasets. This dissertation con-


Social media and digital technology offer immense potential for citizens, policymakers and practitioners to raise awareness of, monitor, and respond to violence. With Kenya's elections approaching, technology can help to raise awareness of insecurity, support early warning, combat incitement of violence and promote accountability. However, digital technology also carries a number of risks. To maximise effectiveness and inclusivity, 1) greater support must be given to locally legitimate peace messaging and counter-speech; 2) government, media and civil society should collaborate to improve transparency and accountability in the regulation of online activity; and 3) social media monitoring of violence should be undertaken in conjunction with other reporting systems that seek to overcome inequalities in digital access and use. Using Digital and Social Media to Monitor and Reduce Violence in Kenya's Elections


In this research, we examine whether and why temporal distance influences evaluations of two different types of brand extensions: concept-based extensions, defined as extensions primarily based on the importance or relevance of brand concepts to extension products; and similarity-based extensions, defined as extensions primarily based on the amount of feature similarity at the product-category level. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that concept-based extensions are evaluated more favorably when they are framed to launch in the distant rather than in the near future, whereas similaritybased extensions are evaluated more favorably when they are framed to launch in the near rather than in the distant future. In Study 2, we confirm that this time-dependent differential evaluation is driven by the difference in construal level between the bases of the two types of extensions ? i.e., brand-concept consistency and product-category feature similarity. As such, we find that conceptbased extensions are evaluated more favorably under the abstract than concrete mindset, whereas similarity-based extensions are evaluated more favorably under the concrete than abstract mindset. In Study 3, we extend to the case for a broad brand (i.e., brands that market products across multiple categories), finding that making accessible a specific product category of a broad parent brand influences evaluations of near-future, but not distant-future, brand extensions. Combined together, our findings suggest that temporal distance influences brand extension evaluation through its effect on the importance placed on brand concepts and feature similarity. That is, consumers rely on different bases to evaluate brand extensions, depending on their perception of when the extensions take place and on under what mindset they are placed. This research makes theoretical contributions to the brand extension research by identifying one important determinant to brand extension evaluation and also uncovering its underlying dynamics. It also contributes to expanding the scope of the construal level theory by putting forth a novel interpretation of two bases of perceived fit in terms of construal level. Marketers who are about to launch and advertise brand extensions may benefit by considering temporal-distance information in determining what content to deliver about extensions in their communication efforts. Conceptual relation of a parent brand to extensions needs to be emphasized in the distant future, whereas feature similarity should be highlighted in the near future.


On May 20, 2012, at 02:03 UTC, a Ml 5.9 reverse-fault earthquake occurred in the Emilia-Romagna region, northern Italy, at a hypocentral depth of 6.3 km (http://iside.rm.ingv.it/), close to the cities of Modena and Ferrara in the plain of the Po River. The epicenter was near the village of Finale Emilia where macroseismic intensity was assessed at 7 EMS98 [Tertulliani et al. 2012, this issue], while the closest accelerometric station, MRN, located less than 20 km west-ward at Mirandola (Figure 1) recorded peaks of ground accelerations of about 300 cm/s2 (www.protezionecivile.gov.it/resources/cms/documents/Report_DPC_1_Emilia_EQSd.pdf). The mainshock triggered liquefaction phenomena a few kilometers eastwards of the epicenter, around the village of San Carlo. On the same day, two other shocks of Ml 5.1 followed (02:07, 13:18 GMT; http://iside.rm.ingv.it/). On May 29, 2012, at 07:00 UTC another Ml 5.8 earthquake hit the region (http://iside.rm.ingv.it/), with the epicenter close to the village of Mirandola (Figure 1). Three other strong aftershocks occurred afterwards, of Ml 5.3 (May 29, at 10:55), Ml 5.2 (May 29, at 11:00) and Ml 5.1 (June 3, at 19:20). For a detailed description of the seismic sequence, see Moretti et al. [2012], Scognamiglio et al. [2012], and Massa et al. [2012], in this issue. The Emilia seismic sequence resulted in 25 casualties, several of whom were among the workers in the many factories that collapsed during working hours, and there was extensive damage to monuments, public buildings, industrial sites, and private homes. […]


A diesel particulate filter (DPF) is designed to physically remove diesel particulate matter or soot from the exhaust gas of a diesel engine. Frequently replacing DPF is a waste of resource and waiting for full utilization is risky and very costly, so, what is the optimal time/milage to change DPF? Answering this question is very difficult without knowing when the DPF is changed in a vehicle. We are finding the answer with supervised machine learning algorithms for detecting anomalies in vehicles off-board sensor data (operational data of vehicles). Filter change is considered an anomaly because it is rare as compared to normal data. Non-sequential machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection like oneclass support vector machine (OC-SVM), k-nearest neighbor (K-NN), and random forest (RF) are applied for the first time on DPF dataset. The dataset is unbalanced, and accuracy is found misleading as a performance measure for the algorithms. Precision, recall, and F1-score are found good measure for the performance of the machine learning algorithms when the data is unbalanced. RF gave highest F1-score of 0.55 than K-NN (0.52) and OCSVM (0.51). It means that RF perform better than K-NN and OC-SVM but after further investigation it is concluded that the results are not satisfactory. However, a sequential approach should have been tried which could yield better result.


Access to effective and efficient healthcare services without any difficulty is one of the essential parameters to consider for a country's sustainable development. Though developing countries put much emphasis on improving their healthcare services, the disparity between service consumption of rural communities compared to their urban counterpart is still very visible. The effect is merely due to the disparity in service penetration levels between the urban and rural regions. Sri Lanka is also struggling to improve this scenario with various policy and tactical level approaches, yet there is lot to achieve. Improving healthcare and utility services through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is a prime research area among the scholars today. Like many other developing countries, Sri Lanka also initiated some projects to improve the healthcare sector infrastructure through ICT. This paper describes the need of a novel approach to provide better healthcare service to rural communities in Sri Lanka and details about such project which is at its final stages of development.


Pine wood samples were used as model feedstock to study the properties of catalytic fast pyrolysis oils. The influence of two commercial zeolite catalysts (BASF and SudChem) and pretreatment of the pine wood with sodium hydroxide on pyrolysis products were investigated. The pyrolysis oils were first fractionated using column chromatography and characterized using GC-MS. Long chain aliphatic hydrocarbons, levoglucosan, aldehydes and ketones, guaiacols/syringols, and benzenediols were the major compounds identified in the pyrolysis oils. The catalytic pyrolysis increased the polycyclic hydrocarbons fraction. Significant decreases in phthalate derivatives using SudChem and long chain aliphatics using BASF catalyst were observed. Significant amounts of aromatic heterocyclic hydrocarbons and benzene derivatives were formed, respectively, using BASF and SudChem catalysts. Guaiacyl/syringyl and benzenediols derivatives were partly suppressed by the zeolite catalysts, while the sodium hydroxide treatment enriched phenolic derivatives. Zeolite catalyst and sodium hydroxide were employed together; they showed different results for each catalyst.


This paper considers linkages between contemporary marketing theory and practice, and emerging conceptualizations of identity, to discuss implications for public health concerns over alcohol use among young people. Particular attention is paid to the theorizing of consumption as a component of youth identities and the ways in which developments of marketing praxis orients to such schemata. The authors' analyses of exemplars of marketing materials in use in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawn from their research archive, emphasize the sophistication and power of such forms of marketing. They argue that public health policy and practice must respond to the interweaving of marketing and the self-making practices of young people to counter this complex threat to the health and well-being of young people.


A strong European Union is needed today more than ever: to act as a reliable partner to the United States, Great Britain and the other great democracies; to deal with the growing threats on her southern and eastern periphery; and most pressingly of all, to deal with the euro sovereign debt crisis. In order to do so, Europeans will have to abandon the gradualist fallacy that union will be achieved in small incremental steps and learn the lesson of history that all successful mergers, such as the British and the American, have been carried out in one fell swoop at a time of extreme crisis. They will have to recognize that the road to unity took a fatal turn when the failure of the European Defence Community caused a bifurcation between politico-military and economic integration. Today, as we face potential fiscal and economic meltdown and as the external threats to Europe mount, we have another opportunity. We can only seize it, however, if we realize that full European union, if there is to be one, will be an event, not a process. It must follow more or less the American example with a directly elected presidency, a house of representatives elected by population and a senate, which represents the former nation-states and regions. There is no need for the United Kingdom to be part of this project, but it is essential that both unions work together for the common good. Because the existing political elites are incapable of rising to the occasion—and in many cases are actually antipathetic to it—the task must fall to a new pan-European party: the Party of Democratic Union.


It is widely acknowledged that ecosystems often cannot be considered as separated from social systems, but that they should rather be seen as interacting, cross-scaled, coupled systems operating on multiple temporal and spatial scales. Humans have an increasing impact on ecosystems worldwide, while at the same time ecosystems are of critical importance for the functioning of human systems through ecosystems services. Often the term "social ecological systems" is used in approaches that consider ecological and social systems as integrated systems. This paper aims to contribute to clarification of the different relationships between social and ecological systems. The focus is on the social side of ecological restoration and conservation, in particular on participation, indigenous knowledge, governance, and ethics. It is concluded that in restoration and conservation of social ecological systems more attention should be paid to the role of social systems and conditions on which ecosystems depend. It implies awareness of the importance of engaging stakeholders and fostering public debate and deliberation.


We examine whether workload has an impact on a direct measure of the health status of patients discharged from Intensive Care Units (ICUs). We use data collected from the medical ICU and the surgical ICU of a major teaching hospital and a relatively new measure of patient acuity called the Rothman Index (RI). The RI is frequently updated during a patient's hospital stay, which enables us to track patients health status very close to the time of their ICU discharge. Leveraging the RI, we measure ICU workload in a novel way that takes into account not only the census but also patient acuity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that more acutely ill patients are discharged from an ICU when the severity-adjusted workload is high rather than low. Further, we find that higher severity-adjusted workload is associated with ICU discharge times that start earlier and end later, a shorter ICU length-of-stay (LOS), and an increased likelihood of discharge to a step-down unit. We also find that downstream unit census influences the effect of workload on health status at ICU discharge.


This paper deals with automatic dialog acts (DAs) recognition in Czech. The dialog acts are sentence-level labels that represent different states of a dialogue, depending on the application. Our work focuses on two applications: a multimodal reservation system and an animated talking head for hearing-impaired people. In that context, we consider the following DAs: statements, orders, yes/no questions and other questions. We propose to use both lexical and prosodic information for DAs recognition. The main goal of this paper is to compare different methods to combine the results of both classifiers. On a Czech corpus simulating a reservation of train tickets, the lexical information only gives about 92 % of classification accuracy, while prosody gives only about 45 % of accuracy. When both classifiers are combined with a multilayer perceptron, the lowest (lexical) word error rate further decreases by 26 %. We show that this improvement is close to the optimal one, given the correlation of the lexical and prosodic features. The other combination schemes do not outperform the lexical-only results.