In this paper, we forecast the reading of an air quality monitoring station over the next 48 hours, using a data-driven method that considers current meteorological data, weather forecasts, and air quality data of the station and that of other stations within a few hundred kilometers. Our predictive model is comprised of four major components: 1) a linear regression-based temporal predictor to model the local factors of air quality, 2) a neural network-based spatial predictor to model global factors, 3) a dynamic aggregator combining the predictions of the spatial and temporal predictors according to meteorological data, and 4) an inflection predictor to capture sudden changes in air quality. We evaluate our model with data from 43 cities in China, surpassing the results of multiple baseline methods. We have deployed a system with the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, providing 48-hour fine-grained air quality forecasts for four major Chinese cities every hour. The forecast function is also enabled on Microsoft Bing Map and MS cloud platform Azure. Our technology is general and can be applied globally for other cities.


The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows – and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown – how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated, the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the western world, the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be, and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat. Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date.


How to accurately detect and estimate the significance level of trends in hydroclimate time series is a challenge. Building on correlation analysis, we propose an approach for evaluating and grading the significance level of trend in a series, and apply it to evaluate the changes in annual precipitation in China. The approach involved first formulating the relationship between the correlation coefficient and trend's slope. Four correlation coefficient thresholds are then determined by considering the influence of significance levels and data length, and the significance of trends is graded as five levels: no, weak, moderate, strong and dramatic. A larger correlation coefficient reflects a larger slope of trend and its higher significance level. Results of Monte-Carlo experiments indicated that the correlation coefficient-based approach not only reflects the magnitude of a trend, but also considers the influence of dispersion degree and mean value of the original series. Compared with the Mann–Kendall test used commonly, the proposed approach gave more accurate and specific gradation of the significance level of trends in annual precipitation over China. We find that the precipitation trends over China are not uniform, and the effects of global climate change on precipitation are not strong and limited to some regions.


There are many established health care practices and an everincreasing number of advances that unequivocally represent value for money. However, we hear daily about unacceptable delays for public patients in access to both established and new high-value interventions. As quality improvement (QI) activities consume resources and do not provide direct clinical care, it has been suggested that resources be diverted from QI to fund more clinical care. There would be a powerful argument for this if clinical care was appropriate and properly delivered, and if all QI activities were futile and did not improve care or outcomes. However, neither is the case. Much clinical care is neither appropriate nor properly delivered. For common conditions for which evidence is available, patients receive appropriate care only about half the time, with enormous regional variations. In the United tates, the quintile of the population that consumes 50% more health care resources per person than the lowest quintile does not have better outcomes or better perceptions of their care. On top of this, at least 10% of admissions to acute care hospitals are associated with health-careassociated harm, as are over a million general practice consultations each year in Australia. This is not a "good look" for a health care system that costs over $100 billion per year (nearly 10% of gross domestic product), and which is on a trajectory to becoming unaffordable. Diverting funds to "more of the same" will produce more of the same. With an ageing population and ever-increasing possibilities and expectations, there is an urgent need to provide rational care and redirect funding from ineffective or non-costeffective practices. Continuing to fund inappropriate care and substandard practices automatically while denying high-value appropriate care to many of those in need represents institutionalised unethical practice. Well designed QI activities do not fail to deliver on improved care or outcomes; indeed, many represent remarkable value for money. Proper implementation of a "central venous line" care bundle can sustainably virtually eliminate deaths from catheter-related bloodstream infections. The effective use of surgical checklists can reduce perioperative morbidity by a third and mortality by nearly half — potentially saving thousands of lives each year in Australia. What is really remarkable is that uptake of these fairly straightforward interventions has been slow and patchy in Australia, opposed with the usual mantras about recipe-book medicine, erosion of clinical autonomy, and patients, contexts and practices somehow being different. There is no doubt that much QI activity has failed to use rigorous methods and has resulted in a plethora of poorly designed, underpowered local projects which lack credibility and have little impact on clinical practice. However, this should not lead to the reflex dismissal of all QI activities. The real problem is that current practices in both clinical care and QI are often deeply flawed. There are inherent difficulties in QI and health services research that underlie the general lack of progress. These have been summarised recently, and a carefully argued case made for the use of process as well as outcome measures, ideally incorporated into randomised cluster or stepped-wedge research designs. Another well argued approach is to develop national clinical registries to "target conditions or procedures . . . associated with large variations in processes or outcomes of care . . . that impact significantly on healthcare costs and patient morbidity". Whether the approach taken is population-based, conditionbased or both, national level research involving both public and private patients across all health care settings is needed. We need to be able to determine, on an ongoing basis, who is getting what care from whom and why, to decide what constitutes appropriate care and to develop clinical standards and tools to apply them. Like the examples cited above for central lines and surgery, the tools need to reflect clinical standards (either implicitly or explicitly), to constitute the mechanism by which compliance is documented, and allow easy audit (preferably electronic) that should form the basis for credentialling of individual clinicians and accreditation of health care services. Much needs to be done in retiring inappropriate care and ineffective QI; we simply cannot afford more of the same. The need for national clinical standards — for the meshing of QI and clinical care in our nationally funded system — is urgent. Inappropriate care and ineffective QI should not be funded. The money currently wasted would be better spent on creating a new amalgam of evidence-based care with built-in QI. The need for health care to be based on sound doctor–patient relationships will remain, but should be built on a foundation of both getting the basics right and being seen to do so.


Abstract Words in Semitic texts often consist of a concatenation of word segments, each corresponding to a part-of-speech (POS) category. Semitic words may be ambiguous with regard to their segmentation as well as to the POS tags assigned to each segment. When designing POS taggers for Semitic languages, a major architectural decision concerns the choice of the atomic input tokens (terminal symbols). If the tokenization is at the word level, the output tags must be complex, and represent both the segmentation of the word and the POS tag assigned to each word segment. If the tokenization is at the segment level, the input itself must encode the different alternative segmentations of the words, while the output consists of standard POS tags. Comparing these two alternatives is not trivial, as the choice between them may have global effects on the grammatical model. Moreover, intermediate levels of tokenization between these two extremes are conceivable, and, as we aim to show, beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of tokenization for POS tagging of Semitic languages has not been addressed before in full generality. In this paper, we study this problem for the purpose of POS tagging of Modern Hebrew texts. After extensive error analysis of the two simple tokenization models, we propose a novel, linguistically motivated, intermediate tokenization model that gives better performance for Hebrew over the two initial architectures. Our study is based on the well-known hidden Markov models (HMMs). We start out from a manually devised morphological analyzer and a very small annotated corpus, and describe how to adapt an HMM-based POS tagger for both tokenization architectures. We present an effective technique for smoothing the lexical probabilities using an untagged corpus, and a novel transformation for casting the segment-level tagger in terms of a standard, word-level HMM implementation. The results obtained using our model are on par with the best published results on Modern Standard Arabic, despite the much smaller annotated corpus available for Modern Hebrew.


Stenomylus tubutamensis was reported as the smallest species of the genus by Ferrusquia-Villafranca (1990). Eight diagnostic characters, or groups of characters were listed as autapomorphies for S. tubutamensis . Three additional characters were shared with other species of Stenomylus . A re-analysis of S. tubutamensis was made by comparing its diagnostic characters to the same characters based on larger samples of other species of Stenomylus . The re-analysis shows that S. tubutamensis possesses one autapomorphy based on the original diagnostic characters. Nor does the S. tubutamensis possess a unique combination of characters. The study shows that many characters, especially raw dental metric characters, of the Stenomylinae are quite variable in their expression and can only be assessed by examination of means and ranges of variation based on large samples. The diagnosis of S. tubutamensis is revised. Relative to the other species of Stenomylus , S. tubutamensis is now diagnosed by the possession of the smallest upper canine, smallest P1, shortest average p1–p2 diastema, shortest average C–P1 diastema, shortest average p2–p3 diastema, and narrow, slit-like fossettids on the lower molars. The abandonment of the subgenera Stenomylus and Pegomylus is proposed.


The rapid growth of digital learning resources has brought forward a number of issues concerning availability, distribution and use. Altogether, the issues are a mix of interplaited technological and pedagogical considerations. Some of those issues, mainly related to repositories and the distribution of digital learning resources, are examined and described in this article. A particular focus is put on how resources can be described and indexed using metadata, and on how access to digital learning resources can be improved and facilitated through federation and/or harvesting of metadata in order to tie several repositories together to provide a service that offers one single access point. The study also examined how this single point of access can be moved closer to the user (i.e. to the environment where digital learning resources are used) through simple federation of the service, enabling access to the network of repositories from any virtual learning environment. The study was carried out by experiments connected to a real-life case. The study concludes in several suggestions for how access to digital learning resources can be enhanced, as well as in the identifications of a couple of new issues that need to be addressed by future research.


Numerous genetic polymorphisms have been identified as associated with disease or treatment outcome, but the routine implementation of genotyping into actionable medical care remains limited. Point-of-care (PoC) technologies enable rapid and real-time treatment decisions, with great potential for extending molecular diagnostic approaches to settings with limited medical infrastructure (e.g., CLIA certified diagnostic laboratories). With respect to resource-limited settings, there is a need for simple devices to implement biomarker guided treatment strategies. One relevant example is chronic hepatitis C infection, for which several treatment options are now approved. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the IL-28B / IFNL3 locus have been well described to predict both spontaneous clearance and response to interferon based therapies. We utilized the Genedrive® platform to develop an assay for the SNP rs12979860 variants (CC, CT and TT). The assay utilizes a hybrid thermal engine, permitting rapid heating and cooling, enabling an amplification based assay with genetic variants reported using endpoint differential melting cure analysis in less than 60 minutes. We validated this assay using non-invasive buccal swab sampling in a prospective study of 246 chronic HCV patients, achieving 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity (95% exact CI: 98.8–100%)) in 50 minutes as compared to conventional lab based PCR testing. Our results provide proof of concept that precision medicine is feasible in resource-limited settings, offering the first CE-IVD (in vitro diagnostics) validated PoC SNP test. We propose that IL-28B genotyping may be useful for directing patients towards lower cost therapies, and rationing use of costly direct antivirals for use in those individuals showing genetic risk.


Abstract There has been growing academic interest in "drinking cultures" as targets of investigation and intervention, driven often by policy discourse about "changing the drinking culture". In this article, we conduct a critical review of the alcohol research literature to examine how the concept of drinking culture has been understood and employed, particularly in work that views alcohol through a problem lens. Much of the alcohol research discussion on drinking culture has focussed on national drinking cultures in which the cultural entity of concern is the nation or society as a whole (macro-level). In this respect, there has been a comparative tradition concerned with categorising drinking cultures into typologies (e.g. "wet" and "dry" cultures). Although overtly focused on patterns of drinking and problems at the macro-level, this tradition also points to a multifaceted understanding of drinking cultures. Even though norms about drinking are not uniform within and across countries there has been relatively less focus in the alcohol research literature on cultural entities below the level of the culture as a whole (micro-level). We conclude by offering a working definition, which underscores the multidimensional and interactive nature of the drinking culture concept.


The main objective of the study is to evaluate the impact of the moral-recovery program done by different religious organizations in cooperation with the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) of the Philippines, Philippine National Police, Local Governments Units, and Non-Government Agencies and various business sectors.  A total of 131 drug surenderees from Cavite, Philippines were purposively selected to participate in the study. One hundred fourteen (87%) respondents are male and 17 (13%) are female. Survey questionnaires and interviews were used to gather the data to find out how the program made an impact to the morality of the surrenderees. Frequency and percentages were used for statistical analysis. Results showed that after attending the 3-month moral recovery program, 111 (85%) of the drug surenderees resolved to stop using drugs, 64 (49%) committed to attend church regularly, 98 (75%) have a better relationship with God, and 23 (18%) have a healthier perspective in life and became more responsible members of their own families. The respondents, who were influenced by their friends to use drugs, after attending the 12-session moral recovery program that lasted for three months, changed their lives dramatically from turning to drugs to turning to God in solving their problems. This proved that the program helped the drug surenderees to improve their lives and relationship with God and with other people. Since this program is mandated by the government, it is recommended that further studies on the impact of the moral recovery program in other areas in the Philippines be done.


A large number of studies show that high visibility in traffic is important in the struggle of getting the attention from other road users and thus an important safety factor. Cyclists have a much higher risk of being killed or injured in a traffic accident than car drivers so for them high visibility is particularly important. A number of studies have examined the effect of high visibility, such as reflective clothing, but most studies have been primitive, the data limited and the results very uncertain. In this paper we describe the safety impact of increased visibility of cyclists through two randomised controlled trials: permanent running lights on bicycles and a yellow bike jacket, respectively. The effect of running lights was studied through a trial where the lights were mounted to 1,845 bicycles and 2,000 others comprised a control group. The bicycle accidents were recorded every two month in a year through self-reporting on the Internet.


We review four types of results combining or relating the theories of discrete-time stochastic processes and of one-dimensional specifications. First we list some general properties of stochastic processes which are extremal among those consistent with a given set of transition probabilities. They include: triviality on the tail field, short-range correlations, realization via infinite-volume limits and ergodicity. Second we detail two new uniqueness criteria for stochastic processes and discuss corresponding mixing bounds. These criteria are analogous to those obtained by Dobrushin and Georgii for Gibbs measures. Third, we discuss conditions for a stochastic process to define a Gibbs measure and vice versa, that generalize well known equivalence results between ergodic Markov chains and fields. Finally we state a (re)construction theorem for specifications starting from single-site conditioning, which applies in a rather general setting.


The present study surveyed 373 Vietnamese subjects (15–47 years) to find whether they use medical mask properly and find the determinants of this correct behavior. Vietnam is one of the countries that has enforced compulsory medical mask policies in public areas. This study offers insights on citizens' behaviors and recommends reasonable policies. The study found that only 22.25% of respondents demonstrate proper use of a medical mask based on the World Health Organization recommendations. Moreover, people with higher risk perception are likely to misuse a medical mask, which implies that the panic might lead to a higher risk of transmission when wearing a surgical mask. Older respondents are cautious about proper use of masks, while, those who are cautious about the mask's characteristics use them fairly properly. This study also suggests policies of public communication and instruction in proper use of a medical mask to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.


Abstract Objectives: The mitochondrial cascade hypothesis of dementia assumes mitochondrial dysfunction as an important common pathomechanism for the whole spectrum of age-associated memory disorders from cognitive symptoms in the elderly over mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's dementia. Thus, a drug such as the Ginkgo special extract EGb 761® which improves mitochondrial function should be able to ameliorate cognitive deficits over the whole aging spectrum. Methods: We review the most relevant publications about effects of EGb 761® on cognition and synaptic deficits in preclinical studies as well as on cognitive deficits in man from aging to dementia. Results: EGb 761® improves mitochondrial dysfunction and cognitive impairment over the whole spectrum of age-associated cognitive disorders in relevant animal models and in vitro experiments, and also shows clinical efficacy in improving cognition over the whole range from aging to Alzheimer's or even vascular dementia. Conclusions: EGb 761® shows clinical efficacy in the treatment of cognitive deficits over the whole spectrum of age-associated memory disorders. Thus, EGb 761® can serve as an important pharmacological argument for the mitochondrial cascade hypothesis of dementia.


OBJECTIVES
Transfusions are a common medical intervention. Discussion of the benefits, risks and alternatives with the patient is mandated by many legislations prior to planned transfusions. At the Sultan Qaboos University Hospital (SQUH), Muscat, Oman, a written transfusion consent policy was introduced in March 2014. This was the first time such a policy was implemented in Oman. This study therefore aimed to assess adherence to this policy among different specialties within SQUH.

METHODS
The medical records of patients who underwent elective transfusions between June and August 2014 were reviewed to assess the presence of transfusion consent forms. If present, the consent forms were examined for completeness of patient, physician and witness information.

RESULTS
In total, the records of 446 transfused patients (299 adult and 147 paediatric patients) were assessed. Haematology patients accounted for 50% of adult patients and 71% of paediatric patients. Consent was obtained for 75% of adult and 91% of paediatric patients. The highest adherence rate was observed among adult and paediatric haematology specialists (95% and 97%, respectively). Consent forms were correctly filled out with all details provided for 51% and 52% of adult and paediatric patients, respectively. Among inadequately completed forms, the most common error was a lack of witness details (20-25%).

CONCLUSION
In most cases, the pre-transfusion consent policy was successfully adhered to at SQUH. However, further work is required to ensure full compliance with the consent procedure within different specialties. Implementation of transfusion consent in other hospitals in the country is recommended.


QUESTION
I recently delivered a healthy, full-term baby and am now breastfeeding exclusively. I abstained from drinking alcohol during my entire pregnancy and am wondering if drinking alcohol now would harm my nursing baby.

ANSWER
Nursing mothers who choose to drink alcohol during the postpartum period should carefully plan a breastfeeding schedule by storing milk before drinking and waiting for complete elimination of alcohol from their breast milk after drinking. Motherisk has created an algorithm to estimate how long it takes to eliminate alcohol from breast milk.


ABSTRACT Poly(A) binding proteins (PABPs) specifically bind the polyadenosine tail of mRNA and have been shown to be important for RNA polyadenylation, translation initiation, and mRNA stability. Using a modified L1 retrotransposition vector, we examined the effects of two PABPs (encoded by PABPN1 and PABPC1) on the retrotransposition activity of the L1 non-long-terminal-repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposon in both HeLa and HEK293T cells. We demonstrated that knockdown of these two genes by RNA interference (RNAi) effectively reduced L1 retrotransposition by 70 to 80% without significantly changing L1 transcription or translation or the status of the poly(A) tail. We identified that both poly(A) binding proteins were associated with the L1 ribonucleoprotein complex, presumably through L1 mRNA. Depletion of PABPC1 caused a defect in L1 RNP formation. Knockdown of the PABPC1 inhibitor PAIP2 increased L1 retrotransposition up to 2-fold. Low levels of exogenous overexpression of PABPN1 and PABPC1 increased L1 retrotransposition, whereas unregulated overexpression of these two proteins caused pleiotropic effects, such as hypersensitivity to puromycin and decreased L1 activity. Our data suggest that PABPC1 is essential for the formation of L1 RNA-protein complexes and may play a role in L1 RNP translocation in the host cell.


Entity Resolution (ER) identifies semantically equivalent entities, e.g. describing the same product or customer. It is a crucial and challenging step when integrating heterogeneous (big) data sources. ER approaches typically compute a similarity graph where vertices represent entities and edges (links) connect similar entities. Different clustering algorithms can be applied on such similarity graphs to finally determine groups of matching entities. In this demonstration paper, we introduce a new interactive tool to visualize and thus help to analyze large similarity graphs and large sets of ER clusters. Users can intuitively investigate the link and cluster structure to identify potential problems such as overly large clusters, cluster overlaps or singletons that might indicate the need for repair activities on the ER result. To support large graphs, computation-intensive tasks like layouting and sampling are executed on the server side as parallel or serial processes. The demo walks through different matching and clustering tasks and allows users to interactively explore the results.


Abstract. Contour lines are a key features of topographic maps as they make the comprehension of terrain more easy. But they are no longer drawn by cartographers, they are mostly automatically derived from digital terrain models. Despite real progress in this automated derivation, some specific terrain landscapes remain incorrectly depicted with such techniques, and this is the case for karstic plateaus full of sinkholes. This paper proposes a specific automated method to derive better contour lines in plateaus, particularly around sinkholes. The process first detects karstic plateaus with many sinkholes, as well as the individual sinkholes. Then, the DTM is smoothed to better reflect the terrain in the plateau and in its surroundings. As a third step, the contour lines around sinkholes are enhanced to draw legible round features that better reflect the real terrain. The process was implemented in a QGIS plugin and tested on a small area with a karstic plateau in the Jura mountain in France, and the cartographers of IGN, the French national mapping agency assessed the results as a great improvement compared to the generic automated process to derive contour lines.


—This paper presents an optimization method based on genetic algorithm for the energy management inside buildings developed in the frame of the project Smart Living Lab (SLL) in Fribourg (Switzerland). This algorithm optimizes the interaction between renewable energy production, storage systems and energy consumers. In comparison with standard algorithms, the innovative aspect of this project is the extension of the smart regulation over three simultaneous criteria: the energy self-consumption, the decrease of greenhouse gas emissions and operating costs. The genetic algorithm approach was chosen due to the large quantity of optimization variables and the non-linearity of the optimization function. The optimization process includes also real time data of the building as well as weather forecast and users habits. This information is used by a physical model of the building energy resources to predict the future energy production and needs, to select the best energetic strategy, to combine production or storage of energy in order to guarantee the demand of electrical and thermal energy. The principle of operation of the algorithm as well as typical output example of the algorithm is presented.


In this paper, we present a smart video surveillance system based on standard technologies and wired or wireless IP networking. The key novelty of the system is that it protects the privacy of people under surveillance. More specifically, a video analysis module detects regions of interest in the scene by change detection or face detection techniques. It is assumed that these regions contain private and sensitive information. Scrambling is then applied only to the corresponding regions. Furthermore, the amount of distortion can be controlled by restricting scrambling to some resolution levels. As a result, the scene remains visible, but privacy-sensitive information is unidentifiable. The scrambling is controlled by a private encryption key which is kept under control of legal authorities. The latter are therefore the only ones who can grant authorization to unlock the protection and view the whole scene. Therefore, this system successfully addresses the loss of privacy issue associated with video surveillance.


We present partial results of a research project in which we use boolean circuits as a parallel computation model for the expression of queries to relational databases. For that purpose, we use the well-known equivalence between First Order Logic (FO) and a class of restricted families of boolean circuits. First, we translate a given query, expressed through a FO formula, into a uniform family of boolean circuits. Then we analyse the depth of the boolean circuits, in order to optimize parallel time. For this sake, we work on the expression tree of the formula, looking for its transformation into an equivalent family of boolean circuits of minimum depth.


DoS attacks have least impact when detected and mitigated close to the attacks' source. This is more important for Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks since they are difficult to mitigate at the victim without affecting service to legitimate flows. This is a challenging task since DDoS attack traffic may have relatively low flow rates and attack packets are indistinguishable from legitimate packets. Current source-end detection schemes such as MULTOPS and D-WARD are centralized and hence, are not easily deployable in multi-gateway stub networks with asymmetric traffic. Moreover, these systems require modifications to current routers for successful deployment.
We present a scalable, distributed DDoS detection system that can be deployed in single- as well as multi-homed stub networks to detect DDoS attacks using TCP packets. The detection system can detect attacks with very low flow rates and in multi-gateway networks, even with significant asymmetric TCP flows. We evaluate the performance of our detection system using extensive packet level simulations under different attack scenarios. Our results show that with relatively less node state and processing, in networks with symmetric flows, our system can accurately detect attack flows that are one-third the intensity of an average flow in the network. In the case of multi-gateway networks, the detection system can detect all attacks for all rates of asymmetry when the attack rate is at least five times the average flow rate in the network.
We extend the system to detect attacks aimed at multiple hosts in a subnet instead of a single host. Subnet attacks seem more diffused for detection schemes designed to detect host attacks. Hence, it is harder for these schemes to detect these attacks. Our subnet attack detection scheme can detect attacks that target hosts in large subnets (/21) and in the presence of non-attack traffic to other hosts in the subnet. Our packet level simulations show that, in single gateway networks, our scheme can detect attacks with an aggregate flow intensity equal to an average flow in the network in less than a minute. Using these simulations, we also show that our scheme detects attacks in networks with up to four gateways and when up to 50% of the flows are asymmetric.


We develop a novel sampling theorem on the sphere and corresponding fast algorithms by associating the sphere with the torus through a periodic extension. The fundamental property of any sampling theorem is the number of samples required to represent a band-limited signal. To represent exactly a signal on the sphere band-limited at L, all sampling theorems on the sphere require O(L2) samples. However, our sampling theorem requires less than half the number of samples of other equiangular sampling theorems on the sphere and an asymptotically identical, but smaller, number of samples than the Gauss-Legendre sampling theorem. The complexity of our algorithms scale as O(L3), however, the continual use of fast Fourier transforms reduces the constant prefactor associated with the asymptotic scaling considerably, resulting in algorithms that are fast. Furthermore, we do not require any precomputation and our algorithms apply to both scalar and spin functions on the sphere without any change in computational complexity or computation time. We make our implementation of these algorithms available publicly and perform numerical experiments demonstrating their speed and accuracy up to very high band-limits. Finally, we highlight the advantages of our sampling theorem in the context of potential applications, notably in the field of compressive sampling.


Desiccation of the vadose zone has the potential to reduce the flux of contaminants to underlying groundwater by removing moisture and decreasing the water relative permeability of the desiccated zone. However, data to evaluate implementation of desiccation are needed before desiccation can be considered as a potential remedy. Implementation of desiccation was field tested by injecting dry nitrogen gas to a target treatment zone and monitoring the spatial and temporal progress of the drying process. Aqueous waste discharges to disposal cribs approximately 50 yr ago distributed water and contaminants, primarily technetium‐99 and nitrate, within the 100‐m deep vadose zone at the test site. The test was conducted adjacent to one of the former disposal cribs in a contaminated portion of the vadose zone dominated by fine sands with lenses of loamy sand. Desiccation removed over 18,000 kg of water from the test zone within the 151‐d active desiccation period and reduced volumetric moisture content over 1300 m3 of soil with values lower than 0.01 (m3 m−3) in 68 m3. The lateral and vertical distribution of drying from the injection well was influenced by the subsurface heterogeneity with initial drying in higher permeability zones. However, over time, desiccation also occurred in the initially wetter, lower permeability lenses.


This work was originally undertaken to determine the effective conditions of essential oils against Trichophyton mentagrophytes in vitro for the treatment of tinea pedis in a foot bath. Agar blocks implanted with T. mentagrophytes were immersed in 0.1% aqueous agar containing two-fold dilutions of essential oils with or without sodium chloride at 27 degrees C, 37 degrees C and 42 degrees C for 10 and 20 min. The number of surviving mycelia on the agar blocks was determined from the standard curves of the colony diameter and original inocula of the conidia. At the same time, the thermal effect on the cellular morphology was examined using SEM. Most fungal mycelia (99.7%) were killed after treatment at 42 degrees C for 20 min without essential oil. The fungicidal activity of essential oils was markedly enhanced by treating at 42 degrees C for 20 min as compared with that at 27 degrees C, showing 1/4 - 1/32-fold reduction of minimum fungicidal concentration (MFC to kill 99.99%). The order of the fungicidal activity of 11 essential oils was oregano, thyme thymol, cinnamon bark > lemongrass > clove, palmarose, peppermint, lavender > geranium Bourbon, tea tree > thyme geraniol oils. MFCs were further reduced to 1/2 - 1/8 by the addition of 10% sodium chloride. The salt effect was explained, at least partly, by an increase in mycelial adsorption of antifungal constituents in the presence of sodium chloride. Considerable hyphal damage was done at 27 degrees C by the essential oils, but no further alteration in morphology of the hyphae treated at 42 degrees C with or without oil was observed by SEM. The inhibitory effect of heat and oils was also observed against mycelia of T. rubrum and conidia of T. mentagrophytes. Thermotherapy combined with essential oils and salt would be promising to treat tinea pedis in a foot bath.


We studied how nickel doping affects water adsorption at the Fe3O4(001) surface to understand the enhanced performance of spinel ferrites for the water-gas shift and oxygen evolution reactions. Two different configurations were prepared: 2-fold-coordinated Ni adatoms on top of the surface and Ni atoms incorporated into the octahedral sites of the support. Using temperature-programmed desorption, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, and scanning tunneling microscopy, we show that water is adsorbed and dissociated on the nickel adatoms at room temperature, resulting in Ni–OH species and surface hydroxyl groups. Nickel atoms incorporated into the support do not directly adsorb water but modify the electronic properties of the surface Fe, and water adsorbed on these sites has similar characteristics as that of water adsorbed on intrinsic surface defects. In both cases, the presence of Ni significantly alters the growth of the first water monolayer on Fe3O4(001).


Because estimates of small mammal species richness and diversity are strongly influenced by sampling methodology, 2 or more trap types are often used in studies of small mammal communities. However, in most cases, all traps are placed at ground level. In contrast, we used Sherman live traps placed at 1.5 m in trees in addition to Sherman live traps and Mosby box traps placed on the ground to sample small mam- mals in pine stands in the Upper Coastal Plain of South Carolina. To determine the im- portance of placing traps in trees, we compared estimates of small mammal (primarily rodent) species richness and diversity based on data from all traps (ground and tree) with estimates based on data from ground traps only. Estimates of species richness based on data from ground traps only did not differ from estimates based on data from all traps. However, 4 other diversity indices (Simpson Index, Shannon-Wiener Index, Shannon Evenness Index, and Brillouin Index) based on data from both tree and ground traps were significantly greater than indices based on data from ground traps only. The increase in the diversity estimates when data from all traps were used was primarily due to the large number of southern flying squirrels (Glaucomys volans) captured in tree traps. When data from ground traps only were considered, the community was highly dominated by cotton mice (Peromyscus gossypinus), but, when data from all traps were considered, cotton mice and southern flying squirrels were co-dominant (567 and 580 individuals, respectively). Our data suggest that studies of forest small mammal com- munities which do not include tree traps are biased because one of the most common and potentially important species, the southern flying squirrel, is highly under- represented. We recommend that future studies of forest mammal communities, partic- ularly those designed to test the effects of forest management practices on small mam- mal communities, include arboreal traps.


White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) is the largest overland test range, operated by the Department of Defense, in the United States. It encompasses approximately 4000 square miles of south-central New Mexico. WSMR supports various missile, weapons system, and instrumentation development tests of the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and other agencies, and controls the airspace and electromagnetic (EM) radiation on and around WSMR. Due to the large number of users at WSMR, the EM spectrum has become increasingly crowded and EM radiation control has become extremely important. For this reason, WSMR Regulation 105-10 (Telemetry Radio Frequency (RF) Spectrum Utilization) was adopted and states that all TM transmitters proposed for use at WSMR must be approved. These transmitters are approved upon determination that they meet the requirements set forth in the current Range Commander's Council (RCC) InterRange Instrumentation Group (IRIG) Document titled "Telemetry Standards". (NOTE: This document will hereafter be referred to as RCC Document 106). This determination is performed by the White Sands Missile Range Director of Information Management (WSMR-IM) in the form of acceptance testing and analysis. This acceptance testing consists of the verification and analysis of the transmitter's frequency stability, output power, and spurious and harmonic emission levels, in order to prevent EM interference between the many range users. The current test methodology will be explored in sufficient detail so that potential range users will know the procedures used to qualify TM transmitters for use at WSMR. Past methods and future testing considerations will also be briefly examined.


Abstract. Vertical and horizontal transport mechanisms for marine oil spills
are investigated using numerical model simulations. To realistically resolve
the 3-D development of a spill on the ocean surface and in the water column,
recently published parameterizations for the vertical mixing of oil spills
are implemented in the open-source trajectory framework OpenDrift
(https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1300358, last access: 7 April 2018). The parameterizations include the
wave entrainment of oil, two alternative formulations for the droplet size
spectra, and turbulent mixing. The performance of the integrated oil spill
model is evaluated by comparing model simulations with airborne observations
of an oil slick. The results show that an accurate description of a chain of
physical processes, in particular vertical mixing and oil weathering, is
needed to represent the horizontal spreading of the oil spill. Using
ensembles of simulations of hypothetic oil spills, the general drift behavior
of an oil spill during the first 10 days after initial spillage is evaluated
in relation to how vertical processes control the horizontal transport.
Transport of oil between the surface slick and the water column is identified
as a crucial component affecting the horizontal transport of oil spills. The
vertical processes are shown to control differences in the drift of various
types of oil and in various weather conditions.


The energy efficiency of separate sensible and latent cooling (SSLC) airconditioning system is higher than traditional one, since SSLC system uses separate cycles which can raise the evaporating temperature of sensible cycle. Separate cycles often include two separate compressors, which makes the initial investment of SSLC cycle too expensive to use in room air conditioning. A novel structure rotary compressor for SSLC system is proposed in this paper. Using just one novel compressor, SSLC system can realize separate cycles. This paper introduces the schematic of new compressor, shows how the compressor works and the good performance of system. Furthermore, the advantage of this novel compressor is used in two evaporating temperature system.


Abstract. The Tibetan Plateau is a critical region in the research of biosphere-atmosphere interactions on both regional and global scales due to its relation to Asian summer monsoon and El Nino. The unique environment on the Plateau provides valuable information for the evaluation of the models' surface energy partitioning associated with the summer monsoon. In this study, we investigated the surface energy partitioning on this important area through comparative analysis of two biosphere models constrained by the in-situ observation data. Indeed, the characteristics of the Plateau provide a unique opportunity to clarify the structural deficiencies of biosphere models as well as new insight into the surface energy partitioning on the Plateau. Our analysis showed that the observed inconsistency between the two biosphere models was mainly related to: 1) the parameterization for soil evaporation; 2) the way to deal with roughness lengths of momentum and scalars; and 3) the parameterization of subgrid velocity scale for aerodynamic conductance. Our study demonstrates that one should carefully interpret the modeling results on the Plateau especially during the pre-monsoon period.


Extracted from text ... Know what they are talking about
T he article by Simone Appleton ('Partnering for Success', March/April 2005) refers. At flippin' last someone has come out to speak about this. I know of a recent incident where an agency was dealing with a client that does not have marketing/communications staff. The agency has had to report directly to the CEO and a host of people who know nothing about what an agency does and how it is supposed to be done. Needless to say this has caused so much stress because, as Simone rightly puts it, there is no ..


The paper describes Tempest, a collection of mechanisms for communication and synchronization in parallel programs. With these mechanisms, authors of compilers, libraries, and application programs can exploit-across a wide range of hardware platforms-the best of shared memory, message passing, and hybrid combinations of the two. Because Tempest provides mechanisms, not policies, programmers can tailor communication to a program's sharing pattern and semantics, rather than restructuring the program to run with the limited communication options offered by existing parallel machines. And since the mechanisms are easily supported on different machines. Tempest provides a portable interface across platforms. The paper describes the Tempest mechanisms, briefly explains how they are used, outlines several implementations on both custom and stock hardware, and presents preliminary performance results that demonstrate the benefits of this approach.


Like participation in heavy metal music culture, the tabloid metal magazine has a predominantly male audience. Yet readership data indicates that such magazines also have regular female readers. Drawing on a comparative sample of six best selling UK and US magazines this chapter explores how female readers engage with and negotiate a metal female identity through their reception and interaction with metal magazine culture. Moving beyond textual ideology approaches to a more complex account of how the circuit of production and consumption of magazine culture offers a range of reader invitations to subjectivity, from the relatively consensual to the more problematic, this chapter explores female reader responses to challenging areas of metal culture, including overt sexism and the less obvious but more widespread 'symbolic annihilation' of female musicians and non-musicians as fans and participants in metal culture.


The research investigates responsibilities of community college faculty and the rewards they may expect to receive for their efforts. Researchers surveyed community colleges in one Southern state. Survey results present disparities, and the authors make suggestions for bridging the gap between expectations and rewards. Background Recent national attention examines faculty rewards and incentives in higher education; however, little of the attention has focused on the community college. The notion exists that faculty members deserve reward based on activities they regularly engage in, particularly the kinds of activities that institutions value and wish to encourage. However, traditional reward structures such as grants and travel funds often favor research and scholarly activities, a circumstance with profound implications for the community college, which is often described as the teaching college. In Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate (1990), Boyer encourages educators to broaden the notion of scholarship from discovery to include integration, application, and teaching, thus fostering teaching as a serious scholarly activity. The phrase "scholarship of teaching" has received frequent use since the publication of Boyer's work. It offers a new way of thinking about the work that faculty does, and it suggests that, like traditional research-based activities, teaching should be rewarded as a scholarly activity. Boyer makes the observation, however, that "today, on campuses across the nation, there is a recognition that the faculty reward system does not match the full range of academic functions and that professors are often caught between competing obligations" (p. 1). Boyer's work marks the beginning of an ongoing scholarly discussion about faculty roles and rewards. The question arises whether the disjunction between rewards and functions also exists in community colleges. The focus of the following research was to determine what community college faculty responsibilities entail and what the current reward structures look like in the Alabama Community College System. As context for the study, a consideration of faculty workloads and faculty rewards at a national level becomes important. Review of the literature Faculty workloads Cohen and Brawer (1989) address the issue of faculty workloads in the community college. For community college faculty, they conclude that "the number of hours taught (13-15) seems high when placed against the university faculty's 5-9 hours" (p. 74). However, the authors find that "both do spend the same amount of time on the job" (p. 74). Although community college instructors may spend as much time working as their peers, the nature of the work they perform is different; they spend little time conducting research and more time teaching students. Cohen and Brawer suggest that " many community college instructors would willingly spend more time in scholarly pursuits, as the university professors do, if they had fewer classes to meet" (p. 75). The expectation that community college faculty focuses primarily on teaching is evident in the workload. Rifkin (1999) concurs with Cohen and Brawer that teaching consumes at least 15 hours per week of the instructors' time, compared to fewer hours for instructors from traditional four-year institutions and research universities. These faculty members also accumulate more hours of student contact through activities such as advising and tutoring than do their counterparts (Rifkin, 1999; A changing, 1998). Not only do they spend more time teaching students, but the students they teach are often unprepared academically for the demands of college (Rifkin, 1999). Therefore, community college faculty members must spend more time outside of their disciplines learning how to teach basic skills (Bundy, 2000). Huber's extensive investigation into community college education has led to significant findings and recommendations. …


One important issue at the cross section of antitrust and patent law is the patent holdup problem, which arises when one party makes relationship-specific investments ex ante that incentivizes the other party to engage in opportunistic behavior ex post. Firms facing the potential for holdup can be expected to make investments aimed at minimizing this potential. Merger is an important, but thus far little-discussed, method by which firms can attempt to solve potential holdup problems. Merger internalizes the externalities that allow for patent holdup. By merging, two firms with relatively undeveloped patent portfolios may gain meaningfully increased bargaining power in licensing negotiations, which they may use to facilitate cross-licensing agreements — thereby decreasing transactions costs and reducing the risk of opportunistism. For purposes of antitrust analysis, courts, agencies, and economists have long recognized that significant efficiencies often derive from cross licensing, including increases in output arising from the diminished marginal costs of production. As the Google-Motorola acquisition exemplifies, merger may provide an important alternative solution to holdup problems, despite being largely overlooked in the contemporary patent holdup debate. This acquisition potentially provides Google with leverage and ownership rights to protect the entire Android ecosystem that cannot be accomplished by alternative contractual structures. Such a merger — which increases output that cannot be achieved by alternative structures — appears to satisfy the basic definition of a merger efficiency. Whether these benefits — which presumably would increase output — are cognizable efficiencies in merger analysis is thus an important question. Part I of this Article discusses the economics of patent portfolios and cross licensing, addressing both their procompetitive tendencies and their anticompetitive possibilities. Part II demonstrates that merging to build a patent portfolio, and thereby to induce cross licenses, is consistent with traditional economic rationales underlying the ownership-contract tradeoff. Part III examines the treatment of efficiencies within antitrust law, articulating and analyzing the Guidelines' framework for evaluating proffered efficiencies. Part IV then investigates whether building patent portfolios in order to facilitate cross-licensing agreements — and accordingly to increase output — satisfies the requirements of this framework. Part V concludes.


Offshore financial centres are coming under increasing pressure from both the OECD and the European Union. They are seen by many bureaucrats and politicians in OECD countries as facilitating criminal activities such as laundering drug money as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by residents of high‐tax welfare states. While there are good reasons for nation states to cooperate to suppress criminal activity, this is not true in relation to tax competition. The notion that by engaging in 'harmful' tax competition, offshore financial centres are damaging the legitimate interests of OECD nations has no sound foundation in economic theory. Competition in tax matters is beneficial and world welfare enhancing. Governments of offshore financial centres serve their own and the world's interests by providing zero or low tax environments for global business and investment and they are right to insist that treaties on criminal matters should not be used to enforce other countries' tax claims.


The Ogallala Formation of Tertiary (Pliocene) age is the principal aquifer in the Southern High Plains of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. This heavily pumped aquifer supplies practically all the water used for irrigation, municipal, industrial (except oil-field repressuring), and domestic purposes. Although the ground water in the Ogallala Formation in the Southern High Plains is common to both Texas and New Mexico, the State laws concerning ownership of the water are different. The New Mexico statutes provide that all underground waters of the State belong to the public and are subject to appropriation for beneficial use (Reynolds, 1961, p. 79). Under conditions specified in the law, the State Engineer may declare certain areas as underground water basins in which the State Engineer has jurisdiction over the drilling of wells. The approximate boundaries of two such basins in New Mexico are shown on the maps. In Texas, the landowner owns the underground water. Under a law passed by the Texas State Legislature in 1949, underground water conservation districts may be formed with the authority to make rules and regulations for the conservation of ground waters, such as rules governing the minimum spacing of wells, and rules for the prevention of waste and contamination of fresh water, and other practices for the conservation of ground water. The approximate boundaries of two underground water conservation districts in Texas are shown on the maps.


This article interprets the historiography of two modern Chinese historians, Fu Sinian and Chen Yinke, who both have been labeled the Chinese Ranke. Both historians have in recent years attracted a lot of attention in China, due to their prominent and very different concepts of national history. In this article Axel Schneider brings out the characteristics of their approaches to history by, first, situating modern historiography within the context of the philosophical crisis of modernity. By "modernity" he refers to the process of historicization and, hence, relativization of norms and values once conceived as timeless and universal. In Europe, this process has been characterized by a decline of metaphysical and theological assumptions on the structure of the world and a concomitant decline of traditional assertions of ontological and epistemological coherence. In China, this process challenged the inherited, very prominent status of traditional historiography as a core field for political and philosophical debates. Second, he interprets Chen Yinke's and Fu Sinian's writings against the background of an understanding of Ranke's historiography that acknowledges the dual nature of Ranke's approach as consisting of both, the widely known text-critical, objectivist methodology and a less known, hermeneutic methodology of empathetic understanding that is based on Ranke's belief in divine providence underlying the particular manifestations of history. Axel Schneider comes to the conclusion that neither Fu nor Chen can be labeled the Chinese Ranke. Fu was mainly oriented towards the positivist sciences. He advocated a view of history as determined by factors comparable to laws in the sciences. He envisions history as characterized by universal progress towards a rational, scientific mode of thought. He argues against any kind of interpretation, and formulates the task of the historian as consisting of the verification and organization of the material, allowing the bare facts contained in the material to speak for themselves. He thus subordinates China's history to universal laws and tries to establish a Chinese identity by fitting China into world history as determined by characteristics that are universal, but in fact are of Western origin. Given this methodology, it is not unlikely that in spite of the fact that Fu only referred once to Ranke, he equated his approach with that of Ranke. However, his Ranke clearly was the empiricist Ranke. Chen Yinke, in contrast to Fu, stressed cultural particularity assuming that all cultures are of equal status, thus implying a universalist perspective. His research was based on the assumption that Chinese history is characterized by the gradual development of its particular "national spirit". What guarded him against relativism was the notion of "the universality of abstract ideals". He recovers the lost universal by assuming the formal universality of human attachment to "abstract ideals" that do vary from culture to culture, but have to be protected in order to safeguard the identity of the respective cultures. The ideals and their corresponding cultures can not be integrated into world history by general schemes of evolution or by means of universal norms. It is Chinese history that speaks to Chen who thereby wants to establish an identity that can only be integrated into the larger world through respect for each culture's commitment to its specific ideals. Accordingly, the historian has to adopt a historicist, hermeneutic methodology. His research should aim at the "empathetic understanding" of the historical manifestations of the national spirit. Although Chen never referred to Ranke, later historians claimed to know of such an influence. Chen's position surely was closer to the hermeneutic Ranke who struggled with the problem of the relationship between the individual and the universal and who opposed any notion of teleological progress. However, while Ranke had lived in a Christian world still comparatively at peace with its theological assumption of a divine providence, Chen could not fall back on a Christian God for solace. He was - far more than Ranke - confronted with far-reaching changes, bringing about the rapid decline of his Confucian world.


Objectives To estimate undiagnosed diabetes prevalence from general practitioner (GP) practice data and identify areas with high levels of undiagnosed and diagnosed diabetes. Design Data from the North-West Adelaide Health Survey (NWAHS) were used to develop a model which predicts total diabetes at a small area. This model was then applied to cross-sectional data from general practices to predict the total level of expected diabetes. The difference between total expected and already diagnosed diabetes was defined as undiagnosed diabetes prevalence and was estimated for each small area. The patterns of diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes were mapped to highlight the areas of high prevalence. Setting North-West Adelaide, Australia. Participants This study used two population samples—one from the de-identified GP practice data (n=9327 active patients, aged 18 years and over) and another from NWAHS (n=4056, aged 18 years and over). Main outcome measures Total diabetes prevalence, diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes prevalence at GP practice and Statistical Area Level 1. Results Overall, it was estimated that there was one case of undiagnosed diabetes for every 3–4 diagnosed cases among the 9327 active patients analysed. The highest prevalence of diagnosed diabetes was seen in areas of lower socioeconomic status. However, the prevalence of undiagnosed diabetes was substantially higher in the least disadvantaged areas. Conclusions The method can be used to estimate population prevalence of diabetes from general practices wherever these data are available. This approach both flags the possibility that undiagnosed diabetes may be a problem of less disadvantaged social groups, and provides a tool to identify areas with high levels of unmet need for diabetes care which would enable policy makers to apply geographic targeting of effective interventions.


Spyware is software which monitors user actions, gathers personal data, and/or displays advertisements to users. While some spyware is installed surreptitiously, a surprising amount is installed on users' computers with their active participation. In some cases, users agree to accept spyware as part of a software bundle as a cost associated with gaining functionality they desire. In many other cases, however, users are unaware that they installed spyware, or of the consequences of that installation. This lack of awareness occurs even when the functioning of the spyware is explicitly declared in the end user license agreement (EULA). We argue and demonstrate that poor interface design contributes to the difficulty end users experience when trying to manage their computing environment. This paper reviews the legal, technical, and design issues related to the installation of spyware bundled with other software. It reports on results of an experiment in which thirty-one users were asked to configure computers, deciding which software to install from a set of software that included disclosed spyware. The results suggest that current EULA interfaces do little to encourage informed decision-making and that simpler interfaces with key terms highlighted have potential to improve informed decision-making.


Summary
A laboratory method for the evaluation of residual effectiveness, based on 15- and 30-minute exposures of 3-day-old adult flies to DDT residues, is described, and the following results were obtained:
(1)
Although house flies were more susceptible than mosquitoes to fresh applications of DDT, the residual effectiveness of the deposits was lost more rapidly in tests using flies than in comparable tests with mosquitoes. This phenomenon was coupled with the presence of the insects themselves, but mechanical removal of the DDT deposits by the insects was apparently not a significant factor. The adult male house flies were more susceptible than the adult females to DDT residual toxicity.
(2)
Laboratory evaluations showed deposits of 50 mg. DDT per sq. ft. to be markedly less effective than deposits of 100 and 200 mg. of DDT per sq. ft. Further field studies on the application rates of 100 and 200 mg. DDT per sq. ft. are being made to determine the most practical dosage for operational use.
(3)
Experimental evidence indicated that in applications of DDT emulsions containing 2½, 5, and 10 per cent DDT to obtain theoretically equal deposits on paper, plywood, and rough wood surfaces, the type of surface treated was a more important factor than the concentration of the DDT in the emulsion spray in influencing residual effectiveness.
(4)
Residues from 2½ per cent DDT as water-wettable suspensions showed more marked loss of residual effectiveness than residues from 2½ per cent DDT as an emulsion in a series of comparable tests particularly under conditions of rain exposure.


When institutional repositories were introduced, many libraries embraced them as a means to support and further the cause of open access and the dissemination of scholarly communication. As has been widely reported, however, faculty did not embrace the concept, and repositories generally have not filled up as envisioned. We pose the question: is it possible to design an institutional repository that faculty and graduate students find useful and attractive enough to change their ingrained habits and incorporate into their work routines? The University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries is engaged in finding out. Based on two major user research studies, the team at Rochester determined that a number of crucial features were needed to attract end user interest: the system must become part of the workflow during the research and writing phase, it must support collaboration with users outside the institution, it must provide quantifiable evidence of use, and it needs to allow the users to control and showcase their work. Based on their research, the River Campus Libraries developed a new open source institutional repository software system called IR+. With IR+, Rochester is testing the findings from their research, to see if a repository that goes beyond the collection of finished scholarly works and engages academics in the creation stages of their research will prove to be a more successful model.


Increasing evidence suggests that persistence of Listeria monocytogenes in food processing plants has been the underlying cause of a number of human listeriosis outbreaks. The first part of this research study extracts criteria used by food safety experts in determining bacterial persistence in the environment, using retail delicatessen operations as a model. Using the Delphi Method, we conducted an expert elicitation with 10 food safety experts from academia, industry, and government to classify L. monocytogenes persistence based on environmental sampling results collected over six months for 30 retail delicatessen stores. The results were modeled using variations of random forest, support vector machine, logistic regression, and linear regression; variable importance values of random forest and support vector machine models were consolidated to rank important variables in the experts' classifications. The duration of subtype isolation ranked most important across all expert categories. Sampling site category also ranked high in importance and validation errors doubled when this covariate was removed. Support vector machine and random forest models successfully classified the data with average validation errors of 3.8% and 2.8% (n=144), respectively. Our findings indicate that (i) the frequency of isolations over time and sampling site information are critical factors for experts determining subtype persistence, (ii) food safety experts from different sectors may not use the same criteria in determining persistence, and (iii) machine learning models have potential for future use in environmental surveillance and risk management programs. Further work involving larger data sets is necessary to validate the accuracy of expert and machine classification against biological measurement of L. monocytogenes persistence. To address this need for access to larger biological datasets, we developed Food Microbe Tracker, a public web-based database that allows for archiving and exchange of a variety of molecular subtype data that can be cross-referenced with isolate source data, genetic data, and phenotypic characteristics. Data can be queried with a variety of search criteria, including DNA sequences and banding pattern data (e.g., ribotype, PFGE type). Food Microbe Tracker allows for the deposition of data on any bacterial genus and species, as well as bacteriophages and other viruses. The bacterial genera and species that currently have the most entries in this database include Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, Streptococcus spp., Pseudomonas spp., Bacillus spp., and Paenibacillus spp. with over 40,000 isolates present in total. The combination of pathogen and spoilage microorganism data in the database will facilitate source tracking and outbreak detection, improved discovery of emerging subtypes, and an increased understanding of transmission and ecology of these microbes. Continued addition of subtyping, genetic or phenotypic data for a variety of microbial species will broaden the database and facilitate largescale studies on the diversity of food-associated microbes, with much potential to be extended towards the control of any organism of interest in any environment.


In "Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage," author Dayna Oscherwitz focuses on the world of French films with a new lens. Drawing upon a wealth of research and the examination of popular French movies, Oscherwitz offers fresh perspectives not only on the unique importance of motion pictures and their indelible influence on French character, but on current debates regarding individual and collective memory." Past Forward" traces the development and ascension of the French heritage film those historical and costume dramas focusing on prestigious French subjects, events, and settings. These motion pictures, preeminent during a period of globalization and fear over the affects of immigration in 1980s France, quickly came to embody a specific version of French national and collective identity: one that idealized the past, condemned the present, and created an institutional form of memory. Oscherwitz presents the intriguing notion that French heritage films are not exclusively expressions of nationalism and nostalgia as has commonlybeen asserted. On the contrary, although these movies were born out of a perceived loss of French culture, their ambivalence toward traditional hallmarks of nationalism opens them up to new interpretation. Also in contrast to typical conceptions, the author suggests that these heritage films are far from cinematic bastions of multicultural backlash; instead, she argues, popular culture has in its own fashion reinserted the history of colonialism and immigration into the national past, thus reimagining heritage itself. Against this backdrop, Oscherwitz goes on to investigate the multicultural worlds of "beur" and "banlieue" movies cinema seemingly in direct contrast with the heritage film offering the theory that these films serve as a countermemory to an institutionalized one and provide alternative models of collective memory and identity. Through careful analysis of several examples, Oscherwitz demonstrates how these two seemingly different realms heritage and multicultural cinema are far from mutually exclusive in the construction of French identity. Throughout the volume, numerous well-known French movies are reexamined, inviting new interpretations of and challenging old views through investigations of familiar cinematic works. "Past Forward "is a""revolutionary volume that boldly reimagines our ideas about French film and its role in communicating history and memory."


We developed a survey to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics concepts at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 graduate students in physics enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven different universities at the beginning of the first semester. We also conducted one-on-one interviews with fifteen graduate students or advanced undergraduate students who had just finished a course in which all the content on the survey was covered. We find that students share universal difficulties about fundamental quantum mechanics concepts. The difficulties are often due to over-generalization of concepts learned in one context to other contexts where they are not directly applicable and difficulty in making sense of the abstract quantitative formalism of quantum mechanics. Instructional strategies that focus on improving student understanding of these concepts should take into account these difficulties. The results from this study can sensitize instructors of first-year graduate quantum physics to the conceptual difficulties students are likely to face.


Background: Smartphones and similar mobile devices have changed the way individuals interact with technology and with each other. The app preferences of smartphone users are vitally important to those seeking to understand the motivation behind app downloads and usage. Objective: The research problem of this article is centred on the preferences for smartphone apps by the growing market of smartphone users in South Africa. The study includes a demographic profile of the users to establish what attracts this market into downloading smartphone apps. Methodology: The study employed a mono-method, quantitative methodological framework with an online survey as the data collection instrument. The survey was conducted amongst undergraduate university students in 2013 and repeated again in 2014. Results: It was found that the 'young adult' demographic, of which the sample of undergraduate university students formed a part, was discerning about which apps they downloaded and that the frequency of downloads occurred less than once a month in most cases. Information and entertainment needs were amongst the top reasons users indicated as motivations for downloading apps. Conclusion: The study's findings confirmed that the sample had definite preferences regarding which apps the users were downloading, and these preferences depended on the needs that they wished to fulfil. The study also revealed that, even though users were aware of security threats associated with downloading apps, this knowledge did not deter them from continuing to download apps. Future research recommendations also arose from the study, giving direction to prospective studies.


History is replete with politically and ideologically motivated resistance to change in teaching mathematics. In 415 AD, St. Cyril, Christian Patriarch of Alexandria ordered the assassination of the Greco-Egyptian mathematician Hypatia. She was taken by a Christian mob, dragged into a church, stripped of her clothes and hacked to death with sharpened oyster shells (Osborne, 1992; Gibbon, 1975). It appears that her crime was teaching about the roundness of the earth at a time when Christian leaders wanted to revive the notion of a flat earth centered in a tabernacle shaped universe (Alic, 1998). In 1299, the city of Florence banned the use of Hindu-Arabic numerals. It was thought that the new system facilitated dishonest dealings because it was easy to modify a zero to a nine or a six. It was also thought that the place value system allowed deceitful merchants to inflate values by adding a new number to the end of a row (Flegg, 1989). During the late Middle Ages many Europeans rejected the very notion of a zero, regarding it as a creation of Satan (Menninger, 1969). We can also find more recent examples of resistance to changes in mathematics education. In Colonial America, reading and writing were seen as the chief purposes of education, and mathematics was often not part of the school curriculum. In 1900 parents in New York City complained "that their children were using methods that were different from those they themselves employed." (Kilpatrick, 1992, p. 17) The mathematical knowledge needed by any particular culture is not static. If we assume that mathematics and mathematics education that met the needs of our parents are appropriate for the new century, we are deeply mistaken. As Steen (1990) states: To develop effective new mathematics curricula, one must attempt to foresee the mathematical needs of tomorrow's students. It is the present and future practice of mathematics-at work, in science, in research-that should shape education in mathematics. To prepare effective mathematics curricular for the future, we must look for patterns in the mathematics of today to project, as best we can, just what is and what is not truly fundamental. (p. 2-3) Many Americans are convinced that they can never learn mathematics. This persuasive attitude is an example of what psychologists call learned helplessness. McLeod & Ortega (1993) define learned helplessness in the mathematics education context as "a pattern of behavior whereby students attribute failure to lack of ability" (p. 28). These authors contrast learned helplessness with mastery orientation. In mastery orientation students have confidence in their ability to solve challenging problems. Learned helplessness is negatively related with persistence, while mastery orientation is positively connected with persistence. McLeod & Ortega (1993) found a student's self-concept could be modified by social context. They describe how classroom conversation, such as a teacher's characterization of a problem as "easy" can profoundly demoralize students. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM] Assessment Standards for School Mathematics (1995) defines mathematical disposition as "interest in, and appreciation for, mathematics; a tendency to think and act in positive ways; includes confidence, curiosity, perseverance, flexibility, inventiveness, and reflectivity in doing mathematics (p. 88). The critics of the Standards dismiss this notion of disposition as nonsense and advocate a back-to-basics approach. In the words of Jennings (1996), "get a math book, make students practice problems, have them do simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication in their heads, give them standardized tests, and drop the group work." This back-to-basics orientation seems more rooted in nostalgia than actual research. McLeod and Ortega (1993) give us reason to hope that if we address the affective components of mathematics education, as suggested in the NCTM Standards, we can improve students' achievements. …


In this rare personal investigation, His Holiness the Dalai Lama discusses his vision of science and faith working hand in hand to alleviate human suffering. Drawing on a lifetime of scientific study and religious practice, he explores the great debates and makes astonishing connections between seemingly disparate topics - such as evolution and karma - that will change the way we look at the world. While he sees science and faith as 'complementary but different investigative approaches with the same goal of seeking the truth,' the fact is that the two have often been at the root of human conflict for centuries. The Dalai Lama challenges us to see that the benefits of opening our hearts and minds to the connections between science and faith are far preferable to perpetuating the divisive rhetoric that often surrounds them. Now, as we face such troubled and uncertain times, the need has never been greater for this extraordinary man's compassion and wisdom.


Background Chronic exposure to heavily polluted air affects the respiratory status. Objectives: To observe the effects of air pollution on pulmonary functions of adolescent male living in urban areas of Bangladesh. Methods: This cross-sectional study was done in the department of Physiology, BSMMU. For this purpose, 60 apparently healthy adolescent male of age 13 to 18 were selected from different slum areas of Dhaka city. Sex and age matched 55 subjects were taken as control from rural area of Bangladesh. All subjects were of low socio-economic status and living in the corresponding areas since birth. In the study, Forced vital capacity (FVC), Forced expiratory volume in first second (FEV 1 ), FEV 1 /FVC % and Peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) were estimated by VMI ventilometer on standing position. Statistical analysis was done by using "Z" test. Result: The mean measured values of FVC, FEV 1 , FEV 1 / FVC% and PEFR were lower in the experimental group than in the control group. FVC and FEV 1 were lowered significantly (p<0.05) but FEV 1 /FVC % and PEFR in experimental group though lowered , the result were not statistically significant. Conclusion: The results of the study reveals that pulmonary functions were lowered in urban adolescent and it was of restricted lung function type. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/jdnmch.v18i2.16025 J. Dhaka National Med. Coll. Hos. 2012; 18 (02): 58-60


In the United States, there are over 20 million companies (about 90% of small businesses) with less than 20 employees, and the majority are owned by "owner-managers." More than half of small business owners are over age 50, and so the next 20 years will bring a wave of owners who will age out of business ownership. In surveys, many business owners answer "never" to the question of when they will retire, an honest but worrisome response. Using employee retirement preparation as a benchmark, the author asks: Is retirement preparation different for the self-employed business owner? Intuitively, a different retirement landscape emerges from the issues of exiting the business in order to retire. This likely will cause a business owner's retirement preparation and timing to differ from that of an employee. The article focuses on the self-employed owners of smaller companies, whose association with the business is about 20 years on average and for whom retirement likely will be their one and only business exit. Most of what is written and discussed about retirement preparation is focused on employees. Using data from the Federal Reserve's 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, the author makes comparisons with the generally accepted "three-legged stool" model of U.S. employee retirement preparation, which broadly drives employee retirement age and preparations. It does not, however, account for key differences between the retirement preparation of the employee and the small-business owner. These differences range from the lack of a socially defined retirement age for business owners to the need for disengagement from, and disposition of, the business and a frank assessment of whether or not the business can even be considered an asset for retirement.


The purpose of this article is to draw upon the condemnation of bribery, corruption and miscarriage of justice to be found in the book of Amos for the sake of a public theology. The occasion for such is a bribery scandal that hit the Ghanaian judiciary. An investigative journalist presented evidence to substantiate the hitherto unsubstantiated perception that some judges in Ghana take bribes to skew judgement. The scandal is deepened through many of the judges being Christian. They attracted widespread criticism from religious leaders, both Christian and others, as well as from the wider society. The public sphere of a fair and independent judiciary was thus compromised. The argument draws upon an assessment of Amos 5:7; 10, 12 and 6:12. These texts are examined in the light of this judicial bribery and corruption scandal and thus provide an example of how the Bible can play a part in a public theology and nurture of social justice.


This research has been undertaken to improve our understanding of stakeholders' knowledge and perception about ecosystem services (ES), which provides a valuable means of gaining insight into the opportunities and constraints that face ES management in a multiuser landscape. Land use preferences are influenced by a variety of motives, attitudes, and values intrinsic to every individual's decisionmaking. Knowledge can affect attitudes and behavioral intentions, and a positive attitude toward the environment has been found to predict conservation practices. Using primary data collected from a village survey of 102 villages in Nigeria between November 2012 and February 2013, this study assesses local communities' awareness, perceptions, and knowledge of a broad range of ES and examines the key factors that explain the variations in the level of awareness across communities, with a special focus on land uses within landscapes. We found that exposure to forest and lowland floodplains was positively correlated with people's level of awareness of ES, highlighting the importance of direct experience and local context in shaping people's perceptions toward ES. Such considerations should be taken into account when designing policies aimed at addressing natural resources and environmental management issues. While provisioning services were generally well recognized, consistent with findings of previous studies, a majority of the sampled villages also appreciated spiritual values as a cultural service. Communities' awareness and knowledge about regulating and supporting ES were generally very low, including those services that are important for maintaining the stability and productivity of agroecosystems (for example, pollination and biological pest control), warranting a greater role for agricultural extension to play in influencing community levels of awareness of ES in Nigeria. Furthermore, incorporating new concepts and topics about ES into the primary school curriculum will better educate people about the importance of ES. Finally, our assessment of communities' attitudes toward payments for environmental services suggests a need to respect local communities' preferences, norms, and traditions when designing policies that encourage natural resources management.


Prompted by the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, journalists from different countries interviewed Hong Kong scholars about their views on the project. The first question that all these journalists asked was, what is the cultural impact of Disneyland on Hong Kong? The author uses this case to explore the role of consumption within cultural research.


Context: The persistent low female participation in male-dominated trades is not attracting a high level of public attention and policy action.  There are determined, yet adhoc actions by advocates in response to evidence that economic benefits will be derived for industry and women through increased female participation in the male-dominated trades. Occupational segregation of the trades remains resistant to change.
Methods: To better understand the barriers limiting female participation in the male-dominated trades from the perspective of young women, this PhD study features interviews with female secondary students, complemented by interviews with industry stakeholders and a quantitative analysis of VET and trade participation data. The three primary research questions are: 1) What is the extent of gender segregation in vocational education and training (VET) and typically male-dominated trades in Australia, and how does this compare internationally? 2) Why do very few female students choose male-dominated trades as their job pathway? 3) What can be done, particularly in the education and training sectors, to increase female interest in, and take-up of, the male-dominated trades?
Findings:  The results of this research showed that the composition of trade-qualified females in male-dominated trades is persistently low at 2-3%. The views of young women affirmed the evidence showing system-wide barriers limit female interest in these trades. Most influential is that gender stereotypes of work are set by Year 10 and that female enrolment in Maths (a pre-requisite for male-dominated careers) is low; these trades are seen as "jobs for the boys who don't do academic," and the fear of intimidation and harassment deters young women.  Low enrolment of female students in male-dominated trade courses indicates that this entrenched occupational segregation of the trades will remain resistant to change for some time to come.
Conclusion: The findings indicate that ad hoc responses to overcome gender segregation of the trades is not effective. Influenced by systems theory and a social ecological model (SEM) of change, the researchers promote the need for sustained, nation-wide awareness and action involving VET and school sectors, industry, government and trade unions to attract more women into male-dominated trades.


This project aimed to design and construct a completely novel type of self-powering electrochemical biosensor, called ElectrEcoBlu. The novelty lies in the fact that the output signal is an electrochemical mediator which enables electrical current to be generated in a microbial fuel cell. ElectrEcoBlu functions as a biosensor for a range of important and widespread environmental organic pollutants which stimulate the biosensor to produce its own electrical power output. The system has the potential to be used for self-powered long term in situ and online monitoring with an electrical readout. Our approach exploited a range of state-of-the art modelling techniques to support the design and construction of this novel synthetic biological system. This was facilitated by the entire team - biologists and modellers - working in an integrated laboratory environment.


This paper will propose a new method to monitor the bouncing trajectory of a steel ball in order to determine the mechanical gain of a Langevin vibrator under electromechanical coupling. Rather than use a measurement of ultrasonic levitation force, this paper proposes an alternative. Using a steel ball, an elastic-bouncing tester is built to estimate the mechanical power of a Langevin vibrator operating near a resonant frequency. This will easily improve our understanding of the levitation phenomenon. The steel ball's bouncing height variation is measured by the proposed experiment system. It is much more apparent than the vibration amplitude of the vibrator. The characteristics of the electromechanical conversion between the flying trajectory of the steel ball and the mechanical output gain of the vibrator are modeled with a coefficient of elastic-bouncing, edyn, by integrating the impact theory with the restitution coefficient. The measurement instrument, including the matrix photo-interrupters and a mixed signal oscilloscope, is developed to record the bouncing trajectory of the steel ball. This proposed measurement approach and related equations could be used as a practical and theoretical model to develop ultrasonic actuating transmission devices, or a new application in the future.


Substantially reduce the largely hidden cost of fraud, and rea a new competitive advantage. As the title suggests, Countering Fraud for Competitive Advantage presents a compelling business case for investing in anti-fraud measures to counter financial crime. It looks at the ways of reaping a new competitive advantage by substantially reducing the hidden cost of fraud. Aimed at a wide business community and based on solid research, it is the only book to put forward an evidence-based model for combating corporate fraud and financial crime. Despite its increase and capture of the news headlines, corporate fraud is largely ignored by most organizations. Fraud is responsible for losses of up to nine percent of revenues--sometimes more. Yet, most organizations don't believe they have a problem and don't always measure fraud losses. This highlights an area for capturing a competitive advantage--with the right counter-fraud strategy, massive losses due to the cost of fraud can be reduced for a fraction of the return. Advocates a new model for tackling fraud and illustrates theories with best practice examples from around the world The authors have close links with the Counter Fraud Professional Accreditation Board: Jim Gee is a world-renowned expert in the field, with a high profile in professional bodies such as the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Mark Button is Director of the leading Centre for Counter Fraud Studies, Portsmouth University, U.K. Organizations are losing millions of dollars to fraud. This book outlines a comprehensive approach to reducing financial crime and helping return some of the revenue lost to the cost of fraud.


The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, is a large-format treasury of the cartoons from Yukon Ho! and Weirdos from Another Planet! (including full-color Sunday cartoons) plus a full-color original story unique to this collection. Millions of readers have enjoyed the tremendous talent of Bill Watterson. His skill as both artist and writer brings to life a boy, his tiger, and the imagination and memories of his ardent readers. The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes picks up where The Essential Calvin and Hobbes left off. Bill Watterson"s Calvin and Hobbes remains the authority on humor.


The Serbo-Albanian Bank was founded at Cetinje in 1922, at the time Yugoslav-Albanian diplomatic relations were established, with the purpose of opening its branch offices in Albania in order to contribute to closer economic relations between the two neighboring countries. The Bank was unable to achieve its goal in the first two years of operation, as it had not obtained the necessary licenses from the Albanian authorities. The branch office in Scutari was opened only in early 1925. Another topical issue at the time was the creation of the Albanian National Bank as the central monetary institution that would function as a regulator of the entire economic life of Albania. Supported by the Yugoslav state, the Serbo-Albanian Bank planned its transformation into an Albanian central bank, but without success. Namely, it was Italian capital that assumed a leading role in the Albanian National Bank founded in September 1925. In spite of this failure, the branch office of the Serbo-Albanian Bank commenced its operations in Albania. Under its roof, it set up the Privileged Trading Agency, and expressed interest in obtaining exploration and excavation concessions for the copper mine in the region of Puka in northern Albania. It was granted the concession by the Albanian government, but failed to set up a copper exploitation company. Facing numerous difficulties, the major of which was lack of the necessary cash for operation and significant business losses in Albania, the branch office was closed in 1927, pursuant to the decision of the Cetinje headquarters.


Recently, a great deal of progress has been made using nonmonotonic temporal logics to formalize reasoning about action and change. In particular, much focus has been placed on the proper representation of non-deterministic actions and the indirect effects of actions. For the latter the use of causal or fluent dependency rule approaches has been dominant. Although much recent effort has also been spent applying the belief revision/update (BR/U) approach to the action and change domain, there has been less progress in dealing with nondeterministic update and indirect effects represented as integrity constraints. We demonstrate that much is to be gained by cross-fertilization between the two paradigms and we show this in the following manner. We first propose a generalization of the PMA, called the modified MPMA which uses intuitions from the TL paradigm to permit representation of nondeterministic update and the use of integrity constraints interpreted as causal or fluent dependency rules. We provide several syntactic characterizations of MPMA, one of which is in terms of a simple temporal logic and provide a representation theorem showing equivalence between the two. In constructing the MPMA, we discovered a syntactic anomaly which we call the {\em redundant atom anomaly} that many TL approaches suffer from. We provide a method for avoiding the problem which is equally applicable across paradigms. We also describe a syntactic characterization of MPMA in terms of Dijkstra semantics. We set up a framework for future generalization of the BR/U approach and conclude with a formal comparison of related approaches.


Integrated assessment models (IAMs) form a prime tool in informing about climate mitigation strategies. Diagnostic indicators that allow comparison across these models can help describe and explain differences in model projections. This increases transparency and comparability. Earlier, the IAM community has developed an approach to diagnose models (Kriegler (2015 Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change 90 45–61)). Here we build on this, by proposing a selected set of well-defined indicators as a community standard, to systematically and routinely assess IAM behaviour, similar to metrics used for other modeling communities such as climate models. These indicators are the relative abatement index, emission reduction type index, inertia timescale, fossil fuel reduction, transformation index and cost per abatement value. We apply the approach to 17 IAMs, assessing both older as well as their latest versions, as applied in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report. The study shows that the approach can be easily applied and used to indentify key differences between models and model versions. Moreover, we demonstrate that this comparison helps to link model behavior to model characteristics and assumptions. We show that together, the set of six indicators can provide useful indication of the main traits of the model and can roughly indicate the general model behavior. The results also show that there is often a considerable spread across the models. Interestingly, the diagnostic values often change for different model versions, but there does not seem to be a distinct trend.