The absurdity and scrivener's error doctrines are often considered inconsistent with textualist thinking to the extent they allow courts to evade a clear statutory command. This article draws on ideas developed in the philosophy of language to suggest that, contrary to recent commentary, the absurdity and scrivener's error doctrines can be reconciled with a textualist method of statutory interpretation. The absurdity doctrine permits courts to reject applications of a statute which would produce grossly absurd results, while the scrivener's error doctrine permits courts to avoid obvious drafting errors. Both doctrines play an important role in statutory interpretation. However, textualist courts are generally concerned with applying the objective meaning of statutory language, as it would be understood in context by a competent reader. Revising statutory language to avoid absurdities or drafting errors is arguably in tension with this concern. This article will suggest that sufficiently absurd results, or sufficiently clear errors, would be taken into account by competent readers - gross absurdities and evident mistakes are relevant to a statutory text's objective meaning. Accordingly, a narrow form of both doctrines should be acceptable to textualist judges.


Preserving the cultural, historical, and scientific heritage of civilization is very important for human culture. Every generation is aimed at keeping their cultural artifacts so that they could be used, revised, and studied by the next generations. The contemporary Information Communication Technologies have been made possible the availability of digital content on a global platform. These materials can be accessed from anywhere around the world. This article aims to propose a model for cultural object repository using modern technological tools for the preservation of Banarasi saree designs and their cultural heritage. The work has attempted to propose a model for creating a cultural object repository for preserving Banarasi saree designs. The theoretical aspect has been discussed to understand the concept and the model. The model will enable the preservation and access of these designs. This paper tried to review the possibility to develop a model for the preservation of traditional Banarasi saree designs. A repository has been created for uploading raw designs and final designs woven over sarees. The repository is also enriched with metadata and keywords.


Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe examines the purposes for which specific forms of violence and particular emotional states functioned, how they operated in relation to each other, or indeed how one provoked, sustained or diminished the other.

These twelve original essays demonstrate the complexities of violence and emotions and the myriad possibilities of their inter-relationships. They emphasize the great efforts that were made by early modern societies to control modes of violence and emotional regimes to achieve positive as well as negative effects, such as creating order, healing, and bringing individuals and communities together around productive identities.

Authors consider legal documents, news reports, memoirs, letters, confraternity statutes, and medical consultations to investigate the bodily and textual practices in which violent and emotional acts were created, supported and disseminated to investigate the power, aims, effect and outcomes of relationships between violence and emotions. The chapters look at a range of topics and countries including Renaissance Italy and sixteenth-century Germany, France in the grip of the religious wars, and England's Civil Wars as well as a wide range of topics including murder, punishment, community healing, insults, threats, prophecy and medical and devotional practices.

This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions or violence.


This article will discuss the contribution of Rod Rhodes to the research on networks. I will focus on networks as a typology of state/society relations and as a particular form of governance. It is not only here that Rhodes has left his deepest mark; most research on networks still falls in one of the two sub-fields. The typology of policy networks, which he developed with David Marsh more than 15 years ago, has become a classic and still forms a major reference point for studies on public policy-making. Rhodes also pioneered the concept of network governance in the study of British politics to capture the profound changes in the Westminister model since the late 1970s. Regarding more recent developments, Rhodes has been among the first to discuss the reflexivity of networks, introducing some postmodernist thinking into public administration research. Finally, Rhodes has helped advance the 'ethnographic turn' in network studies.


In this paper we present Thawing Colours, a tactile, visual and
sonic installation, which uses suspended spheres of melting ice
to paint on surfaces, woollen strings to provide a means of
interaction, and concatenative synthesis–the stitching together
of many small fragments of sound–to provide a digitally
mediated response to motion and vibration by resynthesizing
the input sound using a corpus of pre-prepared sounds. In one
sense, it is an evolving, site-specific physical installation, a
painter or designer that produces images over the course of
several days. With some intellectual license, it can be taken as a
naturalistic interface for querying a database of sounds, or as a
particularly large and unwieldy musical instrument. It is
literally a fuzzy interface, with boundaries extending out
through the fibres of the woollen strands used to attach
coloured balls of ice, and through the supporting cables into the
foundations of the building, and through the fingers, palms, and
bodies of the participants. We argue that there is a niche for
interfaces that are whimsical, ludic and exploratory, and that as
part of exploring this niche, we can take an ecosystemic view
on interfaces: embracing their physical properties, their
situation in an environment, and the byproducts and feedbacks
therein.


The objective of this study is to investigate the potential of different durum wheat varieties that could be adapted for organic farming. In this context, four experimental years studies (2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004) were carried out in order to assess fourteen durum wheat varieties including nine old and five improved varieties conducted under organic and conventional cultivation methods and in two cereal growing locations : Kef "Boulifa" : low semi-arid and Bousalem "El Kodia" : higher semi-arid. Studied parameters included (i) grain yield, (ii) yield stability using coefficient of variation, linear regression coefficient, deviations from regression, ecovalence of Wricke, ecovalence of Shukla, ecovalence of Plaisted and Peterson and superiority index of Lin and Binns, (iii) technological and nutritional quality of the whole grain, dry matter, specific weight, proteins, amino acids, mineral content, gluten, amylasic activity and baking strength.
Results of the agronomic traits indicated that grain yield is on the average lower under organic cultivation compared to conventional methods (23.2 and 29.8 qx/ha SEM=0.18 qx/ha respectively). However, varieties performance under this environment changed in dry year as was the case in 2001. Data analysis indicated high production potential of some varieties such as Khiar, Ben Bechir and INRAT69 (24.7, 24.6 and 24.4 qx/ha respectively) under organic farming method. INRAT69 was found stable for grain yield under organic farming with low coefficient of variation (33 %) and a linear regression coefficient close to one (bi=0.94). Khiar and Ben Bechir varieties, identified for organic cultivation, were unstable.
Results of the technological and nutritional quality were influenced by the cultivation method. The organic method affected positively specific grain weight (80.3 vs 78.3 kg/hl, SEM=0.03 kg/hl), proline contents (1.154 vs 1.146 g/100g of FM) and cysteine (0.216 vs 0.186 g/100g of FM), gluten index which is responsible for the rheological properties of dough (64.73 vs 61.46 %) and amylasic activity (406.7 vs 442.6 s, SEM=1.78 s). Contrary to the organic method, grain protein content is better in the conventional method (13.9 vs 13.5 %/MF, ESM=0.008 %/MF).
Organic cultivation of INRAT69 variety was found to be associated with high nutritional and technological quality parameters such us grain weight, dry matter, total amino acids content, gluten index and amylasic activity.
Regardless of the cultivation method, results showed that old varieties Badri, Jnah Khortifa and Hamira have high protein and total amino acids content (> 16 %/FM and > 14.5 g/100g FM, respectively). These varieties should be considered by breeders in selection and breeding programs of durum wheat for organic farming.
Based on these results, only INRAT69 variety could be potentially used in organic agriculture not only because its stable yield, but also because of its higher technological and nutritional quality. This variety could also be adapted for manufacturing organic pasta and couscous.


Concerns about the sacred--common in everyday moral thinking--have crept into bioethics in various forms. Further, given a certain view of the metaphysics of morals that is now widely endorsed in Western philosophy, there is in principle no reason that judgments about the sacred cannot be part of careful and reasoned moral deliberation. In philosophically trained circles, it is a bit gauche to describe something as sacred. To speak seriously of the sanctity of life; of humans, nature, or the natural order as being sacred or of why we ought not to "play God," is to risk appearing muddleheaded and deeply conservative. Also, one will likely be viewed as doing uniquely religious ethics, and so as offering only a sidelight that must somehow be translated into another language if it is to have any general impact. The risk is perhaps even worse in bioethics, which at least until recently has favored moral requirements whose enforcement is as straightforward and uncontestable as possible. To respect a person's wishes, maximize happiness, or ensure some kind of equality among people, we can often look to what a person has actually said about his or her wishes, what people are in general known to like, what goods others have, and so on. Of course we still run into various troubles, but we have an easier time of it than we would if we were arguing about how to respect autonomy in the way Kant had in mind. And we fare much better than we would if we were maundering on about the "sacred." The usual philosophical attitude to the sacred comes out nicely in the President's Commission's patient but ultimately dismissive analysis of the belief that genetic engineering might amount to "playing God." In the 1982 report Splicing Life, the commission asked what the objection really means, identified a handful of interpretations, and easily dispensed with each. If the objection is simply to interfering with nature, for example, we are quickly caught in a dilemma. In one sense, all human activity interferes with nature, indeed medicine is nothing but organized interference in nature. In another sense, though, no human activity can interfere with nature; medicine adheres to the laws of physics, after all. Plainly, then, the objection must seek to make distinctions among interventions--some are laudable, some worrisome. The commission considered making a distinction by appealing to God's plan or purposes as revealed in nature, but found the appeal too raw: "some reason must be given for this judgment."[1] Finding no reason at hand, the commission set the objection aside. Years later the commission's executive director, Alexander M. Capron, wrote that one of the work's signal achievements was its ability to debunk the "playing God" objection: "By carefully dissecting the complaint that gene therapy amounted to `playing God,' the report was able to differentiate important concerns about means and consequences from rhetorical claims."[2] The idea that genetic engineering threatens the sacred still resonates in less philosophically astute crowds, however. When President Clinton asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to comment on the creation of a part-cow, part-human embryo, he wrote that he was "deeply troubled" by the development, not that he was worried somebody might get hurt. There was a lurking anxiety about the very idea of chimerical embryos. Thus he asked the commission to consider "the implications of such research," not just its possible consequences, although he went on to note implicitly that truly wonderful consequences might legitimately encourage us to create and study cow-human embryos anyway. Worries about how humans relate to their world are also involved in Jeremy Rifkin's broad assault on biotechnology. Rifkin's explicit objections underline possible horrific outcomes, but his description of biotechnology as "algeny," as an effort to change the essence of living things analogous to the alchemists' attempt to change the essence of physical things, needs no mention of consequences to work as an objection. …


Preparations for the LISA Pathfinder mission have reached an exciting stage. Tests of the engineering model (EM) of the optical metrology system have recently been completed at the Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, and flight model tests are now underway. Significantly, they represent the first complete integration and testing of the space-qualified hardware and are the first tests on an optical system level. The results and test procedures of these campaigns will be utilized directly in the ground-based flight hardware tests, and subsequently during in-flight operations. In addition, they allow valuable testing of the data analysis methods using the MATLAB-based LTP data analysis toolbox. This paper presents an overview of the results from the EM test campaign that was successfully completed in December 2009.


Proof of concept for a continuous environmental sampling methodology that employs common terrestrial arthropods as environmental samplers was tested by analyzing pitfall, malaise and black light captures over a six month period over a replicated urban-suburbanrural gradient in Central Virginia. All arthropods captured at the nine sites were identified and assigned to aquatic, vegetation, or soil groups based on their association with these microhabitats. To offset variability in arthropod life history patterns and species abundance within habitat types, arthropod categories based on presence/absence data over the six month period were constructed to provide for sampling reliability within each microhabitat type. Arthropod categories ranged from single abundant species and families to synthetic groupings based on microhabitat associations (e.g., "soil beetles"), all of which could be easily identified. Mean weekly captures of individuals in each resulting category were compared within and among the nine sites using GLM or ranks analyses. Overall and weekly mean capture rates in the aquatic (two categories), soil (seven categories) and vegetation (11 categories) microhabitats were similar within each habitat type. With the exception of the two aquatic category members (midges and caddisflies), overall, monthly and weekly mean capture rates of all arthropod categories were highest in suburban and lowest in urban habitats. Results demonstrate reliability of the arthropod categories constructed and provide ground truthing for a continuously deployable and user-friendly arthropod-based system for monitoring environmental agents.


This article compares the campus environmental perceptions of African-American and White students enrolled in an equal opportunity program on predominantly White campuses. These are students who are trying to overcome socioeconomic and academic challenges in their quest to become college graduates. The survey instrument measured marginality and mattering perceptions of these students. The results indicated that African-American students did feel marginalized. Conversely, White students were not aware of the different challenges that African-American students were experiencing on campus. It is evident that African-American students within these programs have three major barriers to overcome in this environment including: racial, socioeconomic, and academic issues. ********** According to the National Education Association Higher Education Research Center the graduation rate of African-American students within a six-year period at four-year institutions is 45.7 percent in comparison to White students 66.8 percent (Henderickson et al., 2004). This graduation gap further illustrates the fact that the promise of the Brown vs. The Board of Education has a way to go. It has been 50 years since that decision changed the racial landscape of American's education system. While this defining decision worked to dispel the fallacy of the "separate but equal" premise, it created other challenges for many universities. One of theses challenges is to create an environment on predominantly White campus that is inviting to students of color. It is known that African-American students do not faire as well at historically White institutions (Astin, 1982; Davis, Fleming, 1984). In fact, African-American students have developed social systems and cultural connections to survive on these campuses (Allen, 1992). Students of color experience feelings of loneliness because of the lack of connection within these environments (Loo, & Rolison, 1986). Further, Chavous (2000) suggests African-American students are more apt to reporting a gap when it comes to feeling a connection with their culture and the social and academic areas on a predominantly White campus. In a similar study, Schwitzer, Griffin, Ancis, and Thomas (1999) found that African-American students openly admitted not feeling welcome on their predominantly White campus. Research shows that students need to make a connection to feel that they matter in this new environment. Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) found tour domains in which a person feels that he or she matters: attention, importance, ego-extension, and dependence. Attention--"one commands the interest or notice of another person" (Rosenberg and McCullough, 1981, p. 164). Importance--"to believe that other person cares about what we want, think, and do, or is concerned with our fate" (Rosenberg and McCullough, 1981, p.164). Ego-extension--"the feeling that other people will be proud of our accomplishments or saddened by our failures" (Rosenberg and McCullough, 1981, p. 164). "Dependence--our behavior is influenced by our dependence on other people ... What is ... more mysterious is why our actions are equally governed by their dependence on us"(Rosenberg and McCullough, 1981, p. 164). Scholessberg (1989) added a fifth to the domain: appreciation, the feeling that an individual's efforts are valued. In essence, expanding the depth of research as it pertains to African-American students' perspectives of the campus environment, especially with equal opportunity programs on predominantly White campuses may help to bridge the gap between the hope and reality of Brown v. the Board of Education. Procedures This quantitative compared the perspectives of African-American and White students who participated in an equal opportunity at two state predominantly White four-year public institutions. The researcher's survey instrument examined six areas in the undergraduate environment such as academic advising relationship, administrative climate, classroom climate, faculty interaction, peer interaction, and student services. …


Abstract. Their economic and social importance emphasized by the survey of Department of Disaster Relief, Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic of China, two different typical patterns of precipitation anomaly in the southern part of China during the 1982/1983 and 2009/2010 cold seasons coincided with the canonical El Nino and positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and with the El Nino Modoki and negative NAO, respectively. A better understanding of how a particular type of El Nino and a specific phase of NAO worked together to cause the relevant anomalous atmospheric circulation over the East Asia in the two high impact weather and climate cases was an interesting issue and could improve the prediction skill of natural hazards to a certain extent. In conclusion, superimposing on the remote and local Rossby wave responses in the atmosphere induced by the El Nino Modoki-related condensational heat sink over the South China Sea, the downstream extension of the negative NAO was well established by a NAO-induced stationary Rossby wave train along the Asian subtropical jet and played a major role in the persistent dry conditions in the Southwest China for the 2009/2010 boreal winter. On the contrary, for the 1982/1983 boreal winter, the canonical El Nino weakened the downstream extension of the positive NAO, and induced by the canonical El Nino-related condensational heat sink over the western equatorial Pacific Ocean, the remote and local Rossby wave responses in the atmosphere played a leading role in the sustained wet conditions in the South China.


This article revolves around the educational policy introduced in Swedish schools that has extended national testing to younger pupils. The policy is intended to support equal assessment and grading. With the exception of short-term preparations for the tests focused on here, the testing routines are regulated by the state. The paper aims to examine how the policy of national testing in grade six is enacted in different school contexts from a pupil's point of view, and how this affects equivalence in school. A narrative analysis was conducted of pupils' (n = 150) stories about preparing for national tests in 11 schools. Three forms of enactments were distinguished according to how responsibility for test preparations was allocated in each school. In some schools, teachers invited the pupils systematically to the translation process. In other schools, pupils were given most of the responsibility for preparation and were left alone as actors vis-a-vis the policy. Finally, in schools that applied ad hoc preparations, the pupils' position as actors became less secure and more multifaceted. This variety regarding the pupils' test preparations in school stress that the different enactments of this policy of national testing have implications for the interpretation of equivalence in school.


In Heidelberg 1985 the historian Reinhart Koselleck gave a lecture with the title "Hermeneutik und Historik"to the occasion of the birthday of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In response to this Gadamer answered with a lecture entitledHistorik und Sprache – eine Antwort". The purpose of this paper is to analyse these two lectures, compare them to each other, and discuss the importance of their historical context. In Koselleck's lecture he develops his own notion of a "Historik", that is, a form of historiology or meta-history. With his Historik he does not aim to study empirical history itself, but instead the conditions of possible histories. He locates what he considers the most central of these conditions in a number of historically transcendental categories that together make up five oppositional pairs. The five pairs are the following: 1: the possibility of killing and the inevitability of dying; 2: friend and enemy; 3: inner and outer; 4: parent and child; 5: Master and subordinate. He does not view these as the only factors that generate history, but he does see them as categories that have always been very present in the histories that we know and also always must be taken into account when studying the conditions for future histories.


i Abstract 3D environment reconstruction has received great interest in recent years in areas such as city planning, virtual tourism and flood hazard warning. With the rapid development of computer technologies, it has become possible and necessary to develop new methodologies and techniques for real time simulation for virtual environments applications. This thesis proposes a novel dynamic simulation scheme for flood hazard warning. The work consists of three main parts: digital terrain modelling; 3D environmental reconstruction and system development; flood simulation models. The digital terrain model is constructed using real world measurement data of GIS, in terms of digital elevation data and satellite image data. An NTSP algorithm is proposed for very large data assessing, terrain modelling and visualisation. A pyramidal data arrangement structure is used for dealing with the requirements of terrain details with different resolutions. The 3D environmental reconstruction system is made up of environmental image segmentation for object identification, a new shape match method and an intelligent reconstruction system. The active contours-based multi-resolution vector-valued framework and the multi-seed region growing method are both used for extracting necessary objects from images. The shape match method is used with a template in the spatial domain for a 3D detailed small scale urban environment reconstruction. The intelligent reconstruction system is designed to recreate the whole model based on specific features of objects for large scale environment reconstruction. This study then proposes a new flood simulation scheme which is an important application of the 3D environmental reconstruction system. Two new flooding models have been developed. The first one is flood spreading model which is useful for large scale flood simulation. It consists of flooding image spatial segmentation, a water level calculation process, a standard gradient descent method for energy minimization, a flood region search and a merge process. The finite volume hydrodynamic model is built from shallow water equations which is useful for urban area flood simulation. The proposed 3D urban environment reconstruction system was tested on our simulation platform. The experiment results indicate that this method is capable of dealing with complicated and high resolution region reconstruction which is useful for many applications. When testing the 3D flood simulation system, the simulation results are very close to the real flood situation, and this method has faster speed and greater accuracy of simulating the inundation area in comparison to the conventional flood simulation models.3D environment reconstruction has received great interest in recent years in areas such as city planning, virtual tourism and flood hazard warning. With the rapid development of computer technologies, it has become possible and necessary to develop new methodologies and techniques for real time simulation for virtual environments applications. This thesis proposes a novel dynamic simulation scheme for flood hazard warning. The work consists of three main parts: digital terrain modelling; 3D environmental reconstruction and system development; flood simulation models. The digital terrain model is constructed using real world measurement data of GIS, in terms of digital elevation data and satellite image data. An NTSP algorithm is proposed for very large data assessing, terrain modelling and visualisation. A pyramidal data arrangement structure is used for dealing with the requirements of terrain details with different resolutions. The 3D environmental reconstruction system is made up of environmental image segmentation for object identification, a new shape match method and an intelligent reconstruction system. The active contours-based multi-resolution vector-valued framework and the multi-seed region growing method are both used for extracting necessary objects from images. The shape match method is used with a template in the spatial domain for a 3D detailed small scale urban environment reconstruction. The intelligent reconstruction system is designed to recreate the whole model based on specific features of objects for large scale environment reconstruction. This study then proposes a new flood simulation scheme which is an important application of the 3D environmental reconstruction system. Two new flooding models have been developed. The first one is flood spreading model which is useful for large scale flood simulation. It consists of flooding image spatial segmentation, a water level calculation process, a standard gradient descent method for energy minimization, a flood region search and a merge process. The finite volume hydrodynamic model is built from shallow water equations which is useful for urban area flood simulation. The proposed 3D urban environment reconstruction system was tested on our simulation platform. The experiment results indicate that this method is capable of dealing with complicated and high resolution region reconstruction which is useful for many applications. When testing the 3D flood simulation system, the simulation results are very close to the real flood situation, and this method has faster speed and greater accuracy of simulating the inundation area in comparison to the conventional flood simulation models.


An experimental study with (2x2) factorial design was conducted to examine, "the effect of cooperative learning on the academic achievement of secondary school students in mathematics". Mathematics, being a leading logical science, is considered inevitable for social life as well as exploration of the universe. Hence mathematics has been regarded as an essential part of curricula upto secondary level allover the world. Mathematics, on the learning aspect, involves typical logic and argumentation which require specific teaching-learning methodologies. The quest of more favourable teaching-learning technique is equally important for learners as well as for the teachers, education planners, managers and administrators. Objective of this study included: (1) To determine whether the cooperative learning is more effective than traditional methods of teaching with respect to academic achievements of students in mathematics; (2) To examine the effects of cooperative learning on the academic achievement of high-achievers; (3) To examine the effects of cooperative learning on the academic achievement of low-achievers; (4) To examine the effects of cooperative learning on the retention of the students in mathematics; (5) To recommend for the improvement and promotion of suitable method of teaching mathematics to secondary school students.

This study was conducted in Government High School DA V College Road, Rawalpindi. The students of 10th class section B and C served as the sample of study. Students were divided into two sections on the basis of pretest (appendix -1). Section B served as the control group and section C served as the experimental group. Two mathematics teachers having equal qualification, equal teaching experience and considerably equal teaching potential, were selected to teach the control and the experimental groups. Same lesson plans and worksheets were used along with the direct teaching strategy for the both the control and the experimental groups. The control group -was kept under control condition by providing traditional competitive situation in the class while the experimental group was provided with cooperative learning method STAD as treatment. This experimental lasted for a period of 10 weeks (4th September 2003 to 20th November 2003). After the provision of instruction and practice on 18 lesson plans covering five chapters, the academic achievement of the control group and the experimental group was examined through a posttest (Appendix-2). The students and teachers continued working on next chapters. Six weeks after the first evaluation, the same posttest was administered surprisingly, to test the retention of the students of the both experimental and the control group.

Pretest (appendix -1) and posttest (appendix-2) were used as measuring tools in the experiment. The pretest was for the equal distribution of students in the control and the experimental groups. The purpose of posttest was to measure the achievement as well as retention of the students after treatment. Actually posttest was a test parallel to pretest. The equality and similarity of the two tests was ensured on the basis of judgmental evaluation by the experts. Reliability of this test was determined by using Spearman- Brown's prophecy formula. Reliability of the posttest was found to be 0.75. Significance of difference between the mean scores of the experimental and the control groups on the variables of pretest; posttest and retention test was tested by applying t-test. To test the treatment effects for high and low achievers of both the experimental and control groups on posttest and retention tests, the factorial design (2x2) analysis of variance, was applied. The interaction effect was explained on the basis of graphs.


Background We aimed to determine if recognised histological features seen in specimens taken during rotator cuff repair could predict which tendon repairs were at risk of re-rupture. Methods Forty rotator cuff tendon edge specimens from 40 patients were analysed histologically following routine mini-open rotator cuff repair. Thirty-two patients returned at a mean follow up of 35 months for an ultrasound examination to determine repair integrity. Results Overall there were 8 small tears, 13 medium tears, 15 large tears and 4 massive tears. Of the 32 patients followed up with ultrasound scan (USS) the overall re-rupture rate was 46%. Small and medium tears had a re-rupture rate of 35% while 60% of the large and massive tears suffered a re-rupture. Comparison of histological features and repair integrity revealed that the rotator cuff repairs which remained intact demonstrated a greater reparative response, in terms of increased fibroblast cellularity, cell proliferation and a thickened synovial membrane, than those repairs that re-ruptured. The larger tears that did remain intact also showed a higher degree of vascularity and a significant inflammatory component than the larger tears that re-ruptured. Conclusion These results indicate the importance of good tissue quality at the time of surgery but that larger tears can heal if the tissue quality is favourable. Post-operative histological analysis of tendon tear edge can aid prognosis and has the potential to guide post-operative immobilization and subsequent physiotherapy.


Aminoglycosides are efficient antimicrobials commonly used in clinical practice. Their effects on the cells of the organ of Corti and the spiral ganglion neurons have been extensively studied. However, there are only a few reports concerning aminoglycoside-induced morphological changes on the stria vascularis. The purpose of this study was to describe morphological and morphometrical changes on the rat stria vascularis after a profound sensorineural hearing loss induced by three aminoglycosides (kanamycin, gentamicin and amikacin) followed by furosemide. To analyze the stria vascularis area and the number of blood capillaries per stria vascularis, cochleae from fourteen rats sampled at eight weeks after deafness and from four control animals were processed. Serial semi thin cochlear sections from the apical, upper middle, lower middle and basal turns were examined under a light microscope. The cochlear damage degree depended on the aminoglycoside. Mean stria vascularis areas for both kanamycin and gentamicin groups were lower than controls. The mean number of blood capillaries per stria vascularis was reduced for the three aminoglycoside-deafened groups as compared to control animals. For both variables, the most severe damage was observed for gentamicin-deafened animals, followed by kanamycin and amikacin.


The Aztecs had their representation of the land of the dead—Mictlan--with their respective god and goddess, Mictlanetecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl. The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought their own medieval imagery of death as a caped skeleton with a scythe. Nowadays in Mexico, some of the most widely known images are those associated with the Day of The Dead. Notwithstanding, a new representation, that of an unofficial saint called Santa Muerte, which started in mid-twentieth century as a private devotion among the marginal population of Mexico City, is spreading rapidly, both in geographical and sociological terms. It expanded to Central America and the United States, and it is practiced mainly among parts of the population that deal with transitions and danger. I examine representations of death focusing on this ambiguous figure that is becoming popular among different segments of Mexican society.


Given the choice between winning the lottery and being left permanently disabled by injury, everyone would take the money. Yet a year after either of these events, people apparently return to their previous levels of happiness.1 Such are the complexities of the state described by Aristotle as "the best, the finest, the most pleasurable thing of all." 2

As everyone since Midas knows, acquiring riches is a poor long term bet in the happiness stakes. A recent review concluded that "money can buy you happiness, but not much, and above a modest threshold, more money does not mean more happiness."3 Individuals usually get richer during their lifetimes—but not happier.

As for individuals, so for countries. Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States all share similar life satisfaction scores despite per capita income varying 10-fold between the richest and poorest country.2 Per capita incomes have quadrupled in most advanced economies over the past 50 years, but levels of subjective wellbeing have hardly budged.3

Researchers believe that it's relative income, rather than absolute income, that matters to people. However well we're doing, there's always someone else doing better. The pleasure of paying off the mortgage on one's modest abode is neutralised by news that a 19 year old footballer is erecting a neo-Georgian mansion, complete with indoor swimming pool, three car garage, and cinema. As we realise one set of aspirations, it seems we immediately trade up to a more expensive set, to which we transfer our hopes for happiness. As Samuel Johnson noted: "Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

If money doesn't buy happiness, what does? In all 44 countries surveyed in 2002 by the Pew Research Center, family life provided the greatest source of satisfaction. Married people live on average three years longer and enjoy greater physical and psychological health than the unmarried. Having a family enhances wellbeing, and spending more time with one's family helps even more—as many British politicians can attest.3,4 Economists define "social capital" as the ties that bind families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, communities, and religious groups together and find that it correlates strongly with subjective wellbeing. In fact, the breadth and depth of individuals' social connections are the best predictors of their happiness.3

Work is central to wellbeing, and certain features correlate highly with happiness. These include autonomy over how, where, and at what pace work is done; trust between employer and employee; procedural fairness; and participation in decision making.5 (These features won't surprise unhappy doctors.) Nationally, the more that governments recognise individual preferences, the happier their citizens will be. Choice, and citizens' belief that they can affect the political process, increase subjective wellbeing.6

What's so great about being happy, other than, well, being happy? At the country level, evidence exists for an association between unhappiness and poor health: people from the former Soviet Union are among the unhappiest in the world,2 and their life expectancy has been falling.7 But how good is the evidence for the opposite—that happiness contributes to good health, or a longer life? An intriguing longitudinal study of nuns, spanning seven decades, supports this hypothesis. Auto-biographies written by the nuns in their early 20s were scored for positive and negative emotions. Nuns expressing the most positive emotions lived on average 10 years longer than those expressing the least positive emotions.8 Summarising this work, Barbara Fredrickson cites three more studies that, after the usual confounders had been accounted for, "found the same solid link between feeling good and living longer."9 Happiness therefore seems to add years to life, as well as life to years.

What must I do to be happy? Allow the brief moment of introspection precipitated by this editorial to pass, then stop thinking about yourself. Armed with psychologist Oliver James's injunction to "be happy with what you've got,"10 look outwards—not to compare yourself unfavourably with others, but to develop your relationships with them. It's a surer route to happiness than the pursuit of wealth.

Happy lives

The pleasant life—where you experience a succession of pleasures that lose their effect with repetition

The good life—where you play to your strengths and are "engaged"

The meaningful life—where you put your strengths at the service of something higher than yourself

Embark on a loving relationship with another adult, and work hard to sustain it. Plan frequent interactions with friends, family, and neighbours (in that order). 3 Make sure you're not working so hard that you've no time left for personal relationships and leisure. If you are, leave your job voluntarily to become self employed, but don't get sacked—that's more damaging to wellbeing than the loss of a spouse, and its effects last longer. In your spare time, join a club, volunteer for community service, or take up religion.

Urge the government to follow the lead of the King of Bhutan, who announced that his nation's objective would be the gross national happiness. Cite in support Richard Layard's Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, which argues that happiness should become the goal of public policy and that the progress of national happiness should be measured and analysed as closely as the growth of gross national product. "It is self evident that the best society is the happiest," wrote economist Layard, echoing Jeremy Bentham 200 years ago. "This means that public policy should be judged by how it increases human happiness and reduces human misery."11

Once embarked on this life enhancing activism, be reassured by Martin Seligman's delineation of the three sorts of happy lives (box).12 The leader of the positive psychology movement reports that life satisfaction correlates with engagement and meaningfulness but not with pleasure. And remember whenever you're wished a Happy New Year that much of the responsibility for it rests with you.


The use of ionic liquids (ILs) in the field of cellulose chemistry opens up a broad variety of new opportunities. Besides the regeneration of the biopolymer to fibers, films, and beads, this new class of cellulose solvents is particularly useful for the homogeneous chemical modification of the polysaccharide. In this review, the potential of ILs as a reaction medium for the homogeneous cellulose functionalization is discussed. It is shown that numerous conversions proceed very efficiently and the ILs may be recycled. But it is also demonstrated that some side reactions have to be considered.


Similarity search on time series from large temporal text corpora is interesting in many settings. Our use case is the Google Books Ngram corpus and historians interested in the changes of word frequencies over time. More specifically, users are interested in similarity search in a specific period of time, aka. interval-focused similarity search. Related work formalizes interval-focused similarity search, but the sparsely existing approaches are limited to metric distance measures, like the Euclidean distance. Most other approaches in this area, that address the usage of warping distance measures, focus on whole matching similarity search. In this work, we present a novel search tree that uses so-called time series envelopes to group objects. To speed up the tree traversal, our search tree approximates the envelopes based on the node height, i. e., envelopes are tighter further down in the tree. We combine this with various time series pruning techniques, mainly to reduce the number of expensive distance computations. Our experimental evaluation shows that this combination is worthwhile and indeed decisive for a significant speedup, compared to less sophisticated adaptations of known approaches. We, first, show that a combination of both pruning groups of time series and single time series outperforms the usage of a single pruning technique. Secondly, we compare the wall-clock run times of our data structure to existing approaches and determine a significant speed up for focused-interval similarity search queries on large temporal data sets, like the Google Books Ngram corpus.


The appearance of being scientific can increase persuasiveness. Even trivial cues can create such an appearance of a scientific basis. In our studies, including simple elements, such as graphs (Studies 1–2) or a chemical formula (Study 3), increased belief in a medication's efficacy. This appears to be due to the association of such elements with science, rather than increased comprehensibility, use of visuals, or recall. Belief in science moderates the persuasive effect of graphs, such that people who have a greater belief in science are more affected by the presence of graphs (Study 2). Overall, the studies contribute to past research by demonstrating that even trivial elements can increase public persuasion despite their not truly indicating scientific expertise or objective support.


Abstract An introduction is given to the geography of Russian forests and to the specific conditions of the study sites located along the 60° latitude east of Moscow (Fyedorovskoe) near the Ural Mountains (Syktivkar) and in Central Siberia near the Yennisei river (Zotino). The climatic conditions were similar at all three sites. The main ecological parameter that changes between European Russia and Siberia is the length of the growing season (230 d above 0 °C NE Moscow to 170 d above 0 °C in Central Siberia) and to a lesser extent precipitation (580 mm NE Moscow to 530 mm in Central Siberia). The experimental sites were generally similar to the regional conditions, although the Tver region has less forest and more grassland than the central forest reserve, and the Komi region has slightly less wetland than the study area. The Krasnoyarsk region reaches from the arctic ocean to arid central Asia and contains a significant proportion of non-forest land. The boreal forest of west and east Yennisei differs mainly with respect to wetlands, which cover almost half of the land area on the west bank. All sites are prone to disturbance. Heavy winds and drought or surplus water are the main disturbance factors in European Russia (a 15–20 yr cycle), and fire is the dominating disturbance factor in Siberia (220–375 yr for stand replacing fires).


Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Documenting whether significant changes in the extreme precipitation regimes have already happened is consequently one of the challenging topics in climatic research. The high natural variability of extreme precipitation often prevents from obtaining significant results when testing changes in the empirical distribution of extreme rainfall at regional scale. A regional integrated approach is proposed here as one possible answer to this complex methodological problem. Three methods are combined in order to detect regionally significant trends and/or breakpoints in series of annual maximum daily rainfall: (1) individual stationarity tests applied to the raw point series of maxima, (2) a maximum likelihood testing of time‐dependent generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions fitted to these series, and (3) a heuristic testing of a regional time‐dependent GEV distribution. This approach is applied to a set of 126 daily rain gauges covering the Sahel over the period 1950–1990. It is found that only a few stations are tested as nonstationary when applying classical tests on the raw series, while the two GEV‐based models converge to show that the extreme rainfall series indeed underwent a negative breakpoint around 1970. The study evidences the limits of the widely used classical stationarity tests to detect trends in noisy series affected by sampling uncertainties, while using a parametric space and time‐dependent GEV efficiently reduces this effect. Showing that the great Sahelian drought was accompanied by a significant decrease of extreme rainfall events is the other main result of this study.


This thesis is concerned with the generation of Continuous Wave Terahertz signals from
photomixing sources based on the InP material system. Continuous Wave systems are
expected to dominate future Terahertz technology where agile, high resolution systems are
required. Photomixing offers a low cost and compact solution for broadband Terahertz
systems. Driven by the established Telecommunications industry, the InP material system
has numerous devices to offer operating at 1550 nm. In this thesis the Travelling-Wave Uni-
Travelling Carrier Photodiode (TW-UTC-PD) is proposed as a novel photomixing element
that combines the advantages of other previously demonstrated devices.
The theory of ultra-fast photodetectors is studied thoroughly and theoretical
considerations towards advanced InP-based photodetectors are given. A figure of merit for
the Photonic-to-Terahertz conversion efficiency is defined here. In order to maximise this
efficiency different input optical waveguides and output planar antennas are studied. A
semi-analytical model that predicts the frequency response and the efficiency is developed
as an essential tool for the design of these devices.
TW-UTC-PDs integrating a mode converting optical waveguide and two types of
output configurations were fabricated. Devices with a Coplanar Waveguide output were
tested at DC and in the millimetre-wave range. DC responsivities of up to 0.53 A/W at 1550
nm were achieved together with a 3-dB bandwidth of 105 GHz. The same devices
demonstrated an output power of 1 mW at 200 GHz. Antenna integrated devices achieved
40 μW at 510 GHz, 5 μW at 1.02 THz and 0.5 μW at 1.53 THz at a photocurrent of 13 mA
when pumped with less than 40 mW of optical power. Packaged devices showed broadband
response up to 1 THz.
The achievements described in this thesis are anticipated to play an important role
towards Continuous Wave photomixing Terahertz systems based on InP-based components.
In combination with recent demonstrations of detection of millimetre-wave signals with the
same device, efficient and compact spectroscopic and communication systems based on the
TW-UTC-PD that are also capable of a high degree of photonic integration should be
feasible.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate the feasibility of using SNOMED CT as an entry point for coding adverse drug reactions and map them automatically to MedDRA for reporting purposes and interoperability with legacy repositories.

METHODS
On the one hand, we attempt to map SNOMED CT concepts to MedDRA concepts through the UMLS, using synonymy and explicit mapping relations. On the other, we compute the set of all fine-grained concepts that can be reached from concepts having a mapping to MedDRA.

RESULTS
58% of the Preferred Terms in MedDRA have a mapping to SNOMED CT. Through the descendants in SNOMED CT, 108,305 additional SNOMED CT concepts can be linked to MedDRA.

CONCLUSIONS
Fine-grained SNOMED CT concepts can be mapped automatically to MedDRA. This approach has the potential to enable the collection of adverse events related to drugs directly from clinical repositories. The quality of the mapping needs to be evaluated.


At least 50% of the world's seal population is distributed in the pack-ice region surrounding Antarctica. Among the Antarctic seals, Lobodon carcinophaga (commonly known as "crabeater seals") are the most abundant. This is a krill-feeding species, subsisting primarily on Euphausia superba. The occurrence of mummified seals has been documented since 1900 in several Antarctic regions, and different hypotheses about age and what happened to them have been proposed. Taking into account the depletion of 14C concentration in marine waters, we dated a recently deceased and a mummified L. carcinophaga along with a mollusk (Nacella concinna) collected alive from different locations around Antarctica. We discuss their relationship in light of the 14C reservoir. The age obtained for the recently deceased crabeater seals suggests a reservoir age of around 1300 yr for these waters, which is in agreement with the correction value for reservoir age obtained for the same species in the area. We applied this reservoir correction value to the conventional age of 1180 14C yr BP obtained for the mummified seal. The results indicate that the death event probably occurred within the last 100 yr. The age obtained for the mollusk specimen confirms that the correction values of the reservoir effect for the Antarctic continent vary according to geographical location and to the type of sample dated.


Trends in oil pollution in the southernmost (Belgian) part of the North Sea were analysed using a dataset of 37 years (1962-99) of annual national beached bird surveys conducted in February each year. The most abundant seabird groups represented in the beached birds were auks (31%), gulls (28%), scoters (17%) and Kittiwake (9%). Oil rates of most bird species/taxa indicate a decline in oil pollution, though only Larus -gulls, Common Guillemot and Razorbill show significant reductions. The slope in the linear decreasing trend is steeper in inshore and midshore species, than in pelagic species. A power analysis of the results demonstrated that statistically significant trends in annual indices would be expected within 17 years for Razorbill, 29 years for Larus-gulls and 31 years for Common Guillemot. For other species/taxa, at least 50 years of surveying would be required. Long-term oil pollution monitoring in Belgium should be continued with a major focus on a set of abundant bird taxa, sensitive to oil-pollution and occurring in various marine habitats. Most appropriate for this purpose are grebes (inshore), Larus-gulls, Common Guillemot and Razorbill (midshore) and Kittiwake and Fulmar (offshore).


Information Literacy (IL) instruction embedded into the engineering design curriculum can provide a framework for the development of critical thinking skills which are essential for students to master to solve open-ended engineering problems. At Wayne State University, a lecturer in biomedical engineering (BME) and a science librarian are collaborating in an ongoing effort to integrate IL instruction into the BME undergraduate design curriculum. The paper will provide a vision and rationale for integrating IL instruction into the engineering design curriculum, and discuss aspects of the Wayne State effort to effect this integration. A review of the place of critical thinking skills in learning theory will be presented, and student critical thinking skills will be discussed in the context of the engineering design process. The differences between a structured approach and the traditional (unstructured searching) approach to information gathering will be presented. We envision that an IL-integrated program will require the redevelopment of coursework to take advantage of the structured approach, and will also require methods of student assessment that are more appropriate to the evaluation of critical thinking skills. Examples of course activities and modules which force students to think critically about information sources, reliability and authority will be outlined. Finally, the challenges and barriers to the implementation of such a program will be discussed; these include developing library infrastructure to support the approach, and creating student assessment methods suitable for evaluating creative thinking skills.


GNU MP is a portable library written in C for arbitrary precision arithmetic on integers, rational numbers, and floating-point numbers. It aims to provide the fastest possible arithmetic for all applications that need higher precision than is directly supported by the basic C types.


Thermal and quantum phase transitions of some rare earth compounds (LiErF4, LiYbF4, LiGdF4 and LiTmF4) are established using the mean field theory. These preliminary calculations allowed evidencing the existence of a novel high-field antiferromagnetic phase in LiErF4, and a still unexplained symmetry breaking in LiGdF4. But the discrepancies with experimental results impel a more sophisticated method. We then present analytical and numerical evidence for the validity of an effective approach to the description of the dipolar coupled antiferromagnet LiErF4. We show that the approach, when implemented in mean field calculations, is able to capture both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the physics of LiErF4 at small external field and low temperature, yielding results that agree with those obtained in the full Hilbert space using mean field theory. This model nevertheless still fails to describe the LiHoF4 system and needs to be improved. We finally use this toy model as a basis for classical Monte Carlo simulations of LiErF4, which allows the calculation of thermodynamical quantities of the system, as well as the evolution of the order parameters as a function of field H and temperature T. These calculations yield results that are much closer to the experiments than those based on the mean field approximation. Although the theoretical critical temperature is still overestimated by 34%, the critical exponents computed from this effective model correspond to those found experimentally.


All possible Drinfel'd double structures for the anti-de Sitter Lie algebra so(2, 2) and de Sitter Lie algebra so(3, 1) in (2+1)-dimensions are explicitly constructed and analysed in terms of a kinematical basis adapted to (2+1)-gravity. Each of these structures provides in a canonical way a pairing among the (anti-)de Sitter generators, as well as a specific classical r-matrix, and the cosmological constant is included in them as a deformation parameter. It is shown that four of these structures give rise to a Drinfel'd double structure for the Poincaré algebra iso(2, 1) in the limit when the cosmological constant tends to zero. We explain how these Drinfel'd double structures are adapted to (2+1)-gravity, and we show that the associated quantum groups are natural candidates for the quantum group symmetries of quantized (2+1)-gravity models and their associated non-commutative spacetimes.


This study analyzed the spatiotemporal pattern of settlement expansion in Abuja, Nigeria, one of West Africa's fastest developing cities, using geoinformation and ancillary datasets. Three epochs of Land-use Land-cover (LULC) maps for 1986, 2001 and 2014 were derived from Landsat images using support vector machines (SVM). Accuracy assessment (AA) of the LULC maps based on the pixel count resulted in overall accuracy of 82%, 92% and 92%, while the AA derived from the error adjusted area (EAA) method stood at 69%, 91% and 91% for 1986, 2001 and 2014, respectively. Two major techniques for detecting changes in the LULC epochs involved the use of binary maps as well as a post-classification comparison approach. Quantitative spatiotemporal analysis was conducted to detect LULC changes with specific focus on the settlement development pattern of Abuja, the federal capital city (FCC) of Nigeria. Logical transitions to the urban category were modelled for predicting future scenarios for the year 2050 using the embedded land change modeler (LCM) in the IDRISI package. Based on the EAA, the result showed that urban areas increased by more than 11% between 1986 and 2001. In contrast, this value rose to 17% between 2001 and 2014. The LCM model projected LULC changes that showed a growing trend in settlement expansion, which might take over allotted spaces for green areas and agricultural land if stringent development policies and enforcement measures are not implemented. In conclusion, integrating geospatial technologies with ancillary datasets offered improved understanding of how urbanization processes such as increased imperviousness of such a magnitude could influence the urban microclimate through the alteration of natural land surface temperature. Urban expansion could also lead to increased surface runoff as well as changes in drainage geography leading to urban floods.


The capital structure and regulation of financial intermediaries is an important topic for practitioners, regulators and academic researchers. In general, theory predicts that firms choose their capital structures by balancing the benefits of debt (e.g., tax and agency benefits) against its costs (e.g., bankruptcy costs). However, when traditional corporate finance models have been applied to insured financial institutions, the results have generally predicted corner solutions (all equity or all debt) to the capital structure problem. This paper studies the impact and interaction of deposit insurance, capital requirements and tax benefits on a bank's choice of optimal capital structure. Using a contingent claims model to value the firm and its associated claims, we find that there exists an interior optimal capital ratio in the presence of deposit insurance, taxes and a minimum fixed capital standard. Banks voluntarily choose to maintain capital in excess of the minimum required in order to balance the risks of insolvency (especially the loss of future tax benefits) against the benefits of additional debt. Because we derive a closed- form solution, our model provides useful insights on several current policy debates including revisions to the regulatory framework for GSEs, tax policy in general and the tax exemption for credit unions.


This is a book about the ever more complex legal networks of transnational economic governance structures and their legitimacy problems. It takes up the challenge of the editors' earlier pioneering works which have called for more cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary analyses by scholars of international law, European and international economic law, private international law, international relations theory and social philosophy to examine the interdependences of multilevel governance in transnational economic, social, environmental and legal relations. Two complementary strands of theorising are expounded. One argues that globalisation and the universal recognition of human rights are transforming the intergovernmental "society of states" into a cosmopolitan community of citizens which requires more effective constitutional safeguards for protecting human rights and consumer welfare in the national and international governance and legal regulation of international trade. The second emphasises the dependence of the functioning of international markets and liberal trade on governance arrangements which respond credibly to safety and environmental concerns of consumers, traders, political and non-governmental actors. Enquiries into the generation of international standards and empirical analyses of legalization and judizialisation practices form part of this agenda. The perspectives and conclusions of the more than 20 contributors from Europe and North-America cannot be uniform. But they converge in their search for a constitutional architecture which limits, empowers and legitimises multilevel trade governance, as well as in their common premise that respect for human rights, private and democratic self-government and social justice require more transparent, participatory and deliberative forms of transnational "cosmopolitan democracy".


This article presents the specifics of branding of products for children based on the description of parents' associations. The key words are 'child', 'children', parents' values, brands of products for children, etc. The article studies the frequency and rank of children's brands awareness, identifying key buyers of children's products, studying parents' attitudes to pocket money of children, sizes and methods of their formation. At the same time the article identifies criteria for the selection of baby products, their important properties for parents and qualities, preferred places of purchase, sources of obtaining information on brands of products for children.


I. INTRODUCTION Is Chile a secular state? An examination of the emergence of secularism in Chile leads to the conclusion that Chile is a country of paradoxes - paradoxes that are the result of a paradigm of churchstate relations in flux.1 For example, in 2005, President Ricardo Lagos, having received a mandate to proclaim a remerged text of the Constitution, through administrative channels eliminated the words "invocation of God Almighty," which had been included in die preamble to every Chilean constitutional text since 1810.2 But in contrast with this gesture, which we may characterize as laicism in the French style, on December 27, 2006, President Michelle Bachelet Jeria signed into law a statute declaring that the sixteenth of July would be recognized as the feast of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, and would be a national holiday in die tradition of a regime in which Church and State are united.3 Actuated by a similar attitude, President Ricardo Lagos Escobar issued a presidential decree that created a National Day of all the Evangelical Christian and protestant churches in Chile - this decree was then ratified by Congress.4 These actions do not coincide with the paradigm of a purely secular state, and we have not even spoken about the chaplains attached to the Presidential Palace.5 II. A Brief History of Constitutional Laicism in Chile Just like all Latin-American nations, Chile's constitutional development was greatly influenced by liberal tendencies.6 For example, as early as 1884, the law making civil marriage compulsory was proclaimed.7 It is a curious law, we might say, as it defines marriage in canonical terms and does not allow for divorce, though it is also true that after die law's passage, religious marriage ceremonies no longer had civil effects.8 That same year there was an aborted attempt to separate Church from State.9 Though constitutional reform was approved by one legislative body, it had to be ratified by the succeeding one, and die succeeding legislative body never did so.10 Not until 1925 was there a reformation of the 1833 constitution - which was, in essence, an entirely new constitution. This Constitution came to light as part of a friendly agreement reached with the Holy See, and promulgated a separation of church and state that was clearly advantageous for the Catholic Church. There was an end to jurisdictionalism,11 but also to a budget for worship.12 While the Roman Catholic Church kept its status as a legal entity within public law, the non- Catholic churches were reduced to the status of legal entities within private law,13 not recognized but "conceded" by an administrative act, and therefore always at risk of being dissolved by decree.14 While the Catholic Church kept an ample "ius statuendi," the same privilege right was denied to die other confessions.15 While the Catholic Church was exempted from any kind of registration, the non- Catholic churches could not operate unless they inscribed in the Ministry of Justice.16 By means of another agreement, 1911 saw the creation of the Armed Forces Vicariate - only the Catholic Church had the right of worship and spiritual aid for die armed forces and the police.17 The access of non- Catholic pastors to jails and hospitals depended solely on the benevolence of the current government.18 The same happens today within the Armed Forces and the police.19 Not until the passage of the law of religious freedom on October 14, 1999, did some of the aforementioned problems begin to diminish.20 The text of the 1925 Constitution declared the liberty of conscience and worship, but not necessarily religious equality.21 Neither was this last matter broached in the 1999 law, which oudawed many forms of religious discrimination, but allowed the Catholic Church to retain a privileged place in Chile's constitutional order and compelled the evangelical leaders seeking equal treatment under the law to appeal to the spirit of the law, because the letter does not favor them. …


This thesis addresses the problem of creating computer vision systems that will facilitate high-level, user-friendly interpretation of an observed scene, and which will be readily adaptable to a wide range of computer vision tasks. Hence, the notion of injecting cognitive capabilities to traditional computer vision systems is central to this work. Initially, the requirements of creating a cognitive vision system will be examined. This will lead us to the conclusion that the two main enabling components for such systems are the following: a unified framework for reasoning in the context of the observed scene; and a multi-layered memory architecture that will aid the reasoning framework in recalling and storing all relevant information about the observed scene. Regarding the apparatus used for reasoning in video sequences, it will be argued that it must be characterised by its ability to be applied at all levels of information processing (from raw input data to high-level abstractions concerning the evolution of the observed scene), support and exploit any combination of spatial and temporal dependencies (i.e. context) present among the input data, and deliver good reasoning performance when applied at any categorical domain. On the other hand, the requirements the reasoning engine sets will be used as a guideline for the design of a memory architecture conducive to the former. Therefore, the latter must be able to handle arbitrary input data types, depending on the scope of the current cognition task. It must also allow for both forward and feedback interaction with the reasoning framework, as contextual information extracted from the observed scene at a later stage may assist the reasoning engine in altering a decision made in previous stages - just like humans do when presented with contradicting evidence. To further emulate the mechanisms that enable human cognition, forgetting processes were also embedded in the memory infrastructure. For this particular feature, different layers of memory storage facilitate forgetting at different speeds; the system forgets raw input and low-level feature data very quickly, whereas high-level concepts about the evolution of the observed scene are retained over relatively long term. Finally, the overall proposed system has been implemented and tested on a real-world application - the annotation of broadcast tennis video sequences. In this sample application, the goal was to create a cognitive vision system that would keep track of the score for the duration of the broadcast match, based on the main components described above. The results obtained from processing a set of sequences captured off-the-air indicate that the overall approach achieves far superior results to simply segmenting the video sequence into shots and analysing each one separately, taken out of the context of the match. This demonstrates that the ability to adapt by discovering and exploiting context is paramount to the efficiency of any future computer vision system, and is, in no small part, a feature that sets biological cognitive vision systems apart from their machine-based counterparts.


"To be able to resist to the most folkloristic calls of the mountain environment, one
must be a cultured architect, and Gellner with his works has certainly proven to be
one. In the "Casa Menardi", his first project, built in Cortina d'Ampezzo in 1947, he
proves to be an attentive connoisseur of the valley's traditional architecture, by defining
the way in which the building relates to the land and to the landscape. Later,
with the "Palazzo Poste/Telve", built for the 1956 Winter Olympics, Gellner renewed
the tradition of old local houses by instilling them with the language of modernity.
To further understand why we should consider Gellner a milestone in the history
of alpine architecture, we need to look very closely at "Ca' del Cembro", his home
and studio, built in Cortina d'Ampezzo in 1951. Inside his home, Gellner seems to
be willing to transfer and inculcate all his past experience, his studies on rural architecture
and his wish to invent a new alpine architecture. This building becomes
the prototype from which he will then develop all of his architecture: the concept of
continuous space, the relationship between interior and exterior, the mixture of traditional and modern materials, the concept of integrated furniture generating all the surrounding space. All these experiences will lead the architect, a few years later,
to develop the project of the "Villaggio di Borca di Cadore" in which he will be able
to realize a work of "total architecture" with the creation of a new inhabited and animated
landscape, made of architecture and living spaces."


The focus of this dissertation is to understand how mental rules of thumb, cognitive biases, and individual differences can lead judgments and decisions to systematically deviate from the theoretical "optimal" choices. The first essay examines how a decision-maker's subjective belief is determined by her risk preference in a coordination game. We conduct a laboratory experiment where the participants played a repeated, fixed-partner stag-hunt game. In the experiment, we elicited the participants' subjective belief, risk aversion and cautiousness levels. Here, we confirm the findings from past studies that suggest that the traditional measure of risk aversion in economics cannot explain people's behavior. Additionally, we find that the psychological concept of cautiousness plays a key role in determining the origin and the evolution of the decision-maker's belief. Specifically, we find that cautiousness affects the way people form the mental representation of their partners. A decision-maker with a higher cautiousness level is less likely to believe that her partner will choose the risky option. When the stag-hunt game was played repeatedly, a high cautiousness level prevents the decision-maker from updating her belief effectively, and consequently impedes cooperation between the players. The second essay proposes and experimentally tests the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance associated with the context plays a key role in determining people's decisions in economic experiments. We conduct a laboratory bribery game experiment where the cognitive dissonance levels are controlled using different treatments (familiar-context treatment, unfamiliar-context treatment, and context-free treatment). With the aid of an independent attitude survey, we find that people in the unfamiliar-context treatment and the context-free treatment experience the same cognitive dissonance level; meanwhile, we do not observe different behavior in the lab. We also find the familiar-context treatment triggers the most intensive cognitive dissonance level among all treatments where the subjects are much less likely to behave unethically. Our theory is able to unify the mixed results from past studies on the experimental context effects. In the third essay, using a unique data set from a sample of recent local college graduates in China, we investigate the effect of agreeableness on the respondents' starting salary and perceived career satisfaction level. Results from our analyses indicates that agreeableness positively predict women's starting salary. This effect is highly robust to change in model specifications. However, agreeableness does not impact the men's starting salary. Our result here suggests that non-cognitive ability (such as personality traits) plays a vital role in determining labor market outcome. In addition, we find that agreeableness positively related with subjective jobsatisfaction level. But this result is not robust to changes in model specifications. When we add the respondents' major as a control variable, the effect of agreeableness on job-satisfaction becomes negligible and not statistically significant. This result might suggest a self-sorted story when choosing major. Further examination is required to explore this possibility. Three Essays on Behavioral and Experimental Economics


Aims To compare quality of life (QoL) and factors associated with QoL change after retropubic (RMUS) and transobturator midurethral slings (TMUS) using the Incontinence Impact Questionnaire (IIQ) and the International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire (ICIQ). Methods Five hundred ninety-seven women in a multicenter randomized trial of RMUS versus TMUS were examined. The IIQ and the ICIQ were obtained at baseline and at 12 and 24 months. Repeated-measures analysis of variance tested for differences by treatment group over time. Multivariable analysis identified factors associated with QoL change at 12 months postoperative, controlling for treatment group and baseline QoL. Results Improvement in IIQ was associated with the following: treatment success, younger age, improvement in stress urinary incontinence (SUI) symptom severity, and bother (all P < 0.05). Improvement in ICIQ was associated with treatment success, younger age, improvement in SUI symptom severity and bother, lower body mass index, and no reoperation (all P < 0.05). Improvement of the IIQ was stable over time (P = 0.35) for both treatment groups (P = 0.66), whereas the ICIQ showed a small but clinically insignificant decline (P = 0.03) in both treatment groups (P = 0.51). Conclusions Postoperative QoL was improved after RMUS and TMUS. Measures of QoL functioned similarly, although more surgically modifiable urinary incontinence factors predicted improvement with the IIQ.


The theory of Stereotype Threat (ST) predicts that, when widely accepted stereotypes allege a group's intellectual inferiority, fears of confirming these stereotypes cause individuals in the group to underperform relative to their true ability and knowledge. There are now hundreds of published studies purporting to document an impact for ST on the performance of women and racial minorities in a range of situations.This article reviews the literature on stereotype threat, focusing especially on studies investigating the influence of ST in the context of gender. It concludes that there is currently no justification for concluding that ST explains women's underperformance compared to men on standardized tests of mathematics ability, or in scientific fields more generally. The current experimental literature provides no information about the magnitude of ST's influence relative to other possible causes of gender or race disparities in academic performance generally, or in women's underperformance in math more specifically. Existing studies are fully consistent with a minimal role for ST in accounting for observed patterns. In addition, there are unexplained inconsistencies and puzzles in the ST literature that further undercut the possibility of drawing firm conclusions about the magnitude of ST effects or the importance of ST to observed group disparities. The article concludes by proposing new ST research methodology that would help to address unanswered questions about the significance of ST as compared to other possible causes of observed gaps. These modifications would allow researchers more precisely to measure the magnitude of ST effects, and thus to determine whether ST accounts for all, most, some, or only a little of observed racial and gender performance differences on standardized tests of verbal and mathematical ability.


As tourism continues to grow as one of the world's most ubiquitous markets, the development and promotion of non-invasive techniques for cultural stone decay analysis and landscape change are vital to establishing conditional base-lines to best aid cultural heritage management (CRM) efficacy. Using rock art as a medium, this dissertation presents three independent case studies employing the Rock Art Stability Index (RASI) and repeat photography to explore the merits of mixed rapid field assessment techniques in relation to CRM and heritage tourism. While rock art is only one example of irreplaceable world heritage resources, examining how they decay and what methods can effectively quantify their change provides valuable data leading to a better understanding of human/environment interaction within the context of tourism and cultural resource management. The first case study examines the applicability of combining the two methods on rock art in the Arkansan Ozark region, showing considerable promise. The second addresses the temporal flexibility of the mixed methods on rapidly changing, and highly impacted, rock art sites on Grenada, West Indies, demonstrating the method pairing's tremendous monitoring and emergency response potential. The third case study explores adapting RASI to analyze other forms of cultural stone by employing the mixed methods on selected hewn monuments in Petra, Jordan, aptly identifying a critical disparity between appearance and stability. Ultimately, each case study exemplifies different aspects of cultural stone decay and modern challenges: from initial preliminary evaluations to assessing the impact of uninformed conservation efforts, and examining the influences of mass tourism and human interaction at heritage sites. Mixed field techniques effectively highlighted both the need for and benefits of employing such methods for rock art management, cultural stone stability, and global heritage management.


In this article, we propose a strategy for the synthesis of fault-tolerant schedules and for the mapping of fault-tolerant applications. Our techniques handle transparency/performance trade-offs and use the fault-occurrence information to reduce the overhead due to fault tolerance. Processes and messages are statically scheduled, and we use process reexecution for recovering from multiple transient faults. We propose a fine-grained transparent recovery, where the property of transparency can be selectively applied to processes and messages. Transparency hides the recovery actions in a selected part of the application so that they do not affect the schedule of other processes and messages. While leading to longer schedules, transparent recovery has the advantage of both improved debuggability and less memory needed to store the fault-tolerant schedules.


Background: Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols have become standard of care in perioperative management.
Methods: We retrospectively analyzed consecutive patients at our VA institution undergoing urologic surgery, namely nephrectomy and prostatectomy, with ERAS management over a sixmonth timeframe.
Findings: 62 patients underwent prostate (n=32) or kidney surgery (n=30) at our institution between September 2017 and February 2018. Median ERAS length of hospital stay for the prostatectomy group was 1.5 days and 3 days for the nephrectomy group (p=0.001). Intraoperatively, there was a trend towards increased median fluid administration for the ERAS nephrectomy group compared to the ERAS prostatectomy group (2275 vs 1990.5 ml; p=0.05), without a significant increase in estimated blood loss or total operative time. Patients in the ERAS prostate surgery group were out of bed one day sooner compared to patients in the ERAS kidney surgery group (median post op day 1 vs. median post op day 2, p=0.02). Minor complications were similar for both groups (36.7% for the ERAS nephrectomy group compared to 21.9% for the ERAS prostatectomy group; p=0.26), however there was a significant difference in major complications (26.7% for the ERAS nephrectomy group compared to 3.1% for the prostatectomy group; p=0.01). 30- and 90-day readmission rates were similar between the ERAS nephrectomy and ERAS prostatectomy groups (10% vs. 6.3%; p=0.67; and 6.7% vs. 0%; p=0.23). American Society of Anesthesia physical status classification (ASA) score was similar (median ASA 3 vs. 3; p=0.05) for both groups.
Conclusions: Despite ERAS based perioperative management for urologic procedures, there are significant differences in outcomes in this observational comparative study, possibly related to patient and or surgical factors.


Abstract Rhabdomyolysis (RM) is defined as striate muscle-cell damage with disintegration of skeletal muscles and release of intracellular constituents to the circulation, with or without subsequent kidney injury. RM is one of the leading causes of acute kidney injury and is associated with substantial morbidity. The major signs of acute kidney injury in rhabdomyolysis are: pain, weakness and swelling of the injured muscle or muscle groups and myoglobinuria with reddish discoloration of the urine and decrease in urine output to anuria. The authors describe three cases of rhabdomyolysis with acute renal injury and discuss the current knowledge on the etiopathogenesis, clinical manifestations, diagnosis and treatment of this condition.


Taking dialogue to be social practice within organizations, we reflect and ask ourselves: Under what circumstances does dialogue work as a process that can promote or hinder knowledge development in organizations? In response, we extend organizational perspectives by situating knowledge construction within interactions influenced by dialogue and conversation. The key issue is that humans communicatively constitute knowledge by way of interaction and social practices that vary according to their social-historic contexts (see Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). We present the case of a Brazilian Innovation unit charged by the government to incorporate knowledge-dialogue dynamics in organizational change processes. Through this case, we illuminate ways in which communication constructs and upgrades knowledge within organizational environments.


The analysis of the restoration carried out on the Acropolis of Athens between 1834 and 1875 offers the opportunity to evaluate the inferences of law and artistic taste on the reconstruction of one of the most famous monuments in the world. The ethical and aesthetic ambiguities of this early work are outlined through the study of Leo von Klenze's memoranda on the refurbishment of the Acropolis temples, and the first laws on the protection of the Greek heritage issued by the Bavarian rulers in 1834 and 1837. In particular, the discussion will consider Klenze's guidelines in relation to his conceptual inconsistencies about Romanticism and Neoclassicism, and within the implications – both juridical and aesthetic – of the edicts issued on the safeguard of antiquity in Greece. As will be argued, this early restoration not only would transform the Acropolis historical profile, but also affect the later refurbishment completed on the site in the twentieth century.


We examine a new approach to modeling uncertainty based on plausibility measures, where a plausibility measure just associates with an event its plausibility, an element is some partially ordered set. This approach is easily seen to generalize other approaches to modeling uncertainty, such as probability measures, belief functions, and possibility measures. The lack of structure in a plausibility measure makes it easy for us to add structure on an "as needed" basis, letting us examine what is required to ensure that a plausibility measure has certain properties of interest. This gives us insight into the essential features of the properties in question, while allowing us to prove general results that apply to many approaches to reasoning about uncertainty. Plausibility measures have already proved useful in analyzing default reasoning. In this paper, we examine their "algebraic properties", analogues to the use of + and × in probability theory. An understanding of such properties will be essential if plausibility measures are to be used in practice as a representation tool.


Esophageal cancer has a strikingly uneven geographical distribution, resulting in focal endemic areas in several countries. One such endemic area is in western Kenya. We conducted a retrospective review of all pathology-confirmed malignancies diagnosed at Tenwek Hospital, Bomet District, between January 1999 and September 2007. Tumor site, histology, sex, age, ethnicity, and location of residence were recorded. Cases were analyzed within and outside a traditional catchment area defined as < or = 50 km from the hospital. Since 1999, the five most common cancer sites were the esophagus, stomach, prostate, colorectum, and cervix. Esophageal cancer accounted for 914 (34.6%) of the 2643 newly diagnosed cancers and showed increasing trends within and outside the catchment area. Fifty-eight (6.3%) patients were < or = 30 years old and 9 (1%) were < or = 20 years old; the youngest patient was 14 years at diagnosis. Young cases (< or = 30) were more common among patients of Kalenjin ethnicity (9.2%) than among other ethnicities (1.7%) (odds ratio [95% confidence interval] 5.7 [2.1-15.1]). This area of western Kenya is a high-risk region for esophageal cancer and appears unique in its large proportion of young patients. Our findings support the need for further study of both environmental and genetic risk factors for esophageal cancer in this area.


The susceptibility of four isolates of Schistosoma mansoni (BH, MAP, MPR-1 and K) to four multiple doses of anti-schistosomal agents (hycanthone, niridazole, oxamniquine, and praziquantel) were evaluated in infected female Swiss albino mice. These schistosomal isolates had been maintained in the laboratory without further drug pressure for 20 to 30 generations. Multiple dosage regimens were used for each drug against each isolate of S. mansoni to generate ED50 (effective dose 50%) values. Results demonstrated that the K isolate is resistant to niridazole, the MPR-1 isolate to oxamniquine, and the MAP isolate to both hycanthone and oxamniquine. The BH isolate was susceptible to all drugs and was used as the reference isolate. All isolates were susceptible to parziquantel. The significance of the difference in response of the MPR-1 and MAP isolates is discussed. These results confirm the resistance of these isolates of S. mansoni to three schistosomicides and demonstrate that the resistance of these isolates are stable over long periods of time without exposure to drugs.


We examined the performance of Taiwan earthquake model (TEM) PSHA2015. We retrospectively forecasted the seismic activities of the 2018 Hualien, Taiwan, sequence and proposed recommendations for the next generation of seismic hazard assessment for Taiwan. We confirmed the model credibility of the area sources by comparing with locations of the Hualien sequence and seismicity during the period from 2012 to 2016. We also concluded similar forecasting reliability for the smoothing model, which could be incorporated in the next generation of probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA) as a branch of logic tree. To examine the performance of the seismogenic structure source model, we evaluated rupture probability of the Milun fault, which ruptured during the Hualien sequence. The TEM PSHA2015 model forecasts its rupture probability in 50 yrs as 53%, and the Brownian passage time (BPT) model forecasts 80%. The BPTmodel, considering also time-dependency rupture probability, is suggested for future hazard assessment, especially for the seismogenic structure sources with records of their last ruptures. This earthquake sequence has raised the importance of short-term seismic hazard assessment, which provides a basis for response after a devastating earthquake and/or forecasting consequence.


During the last few years, new technologies have been introduced for measuring the flow rates of outdoor air (OA) into HVAC systems; however, an evaluation of these measurement technologies has not previously been published. This document describes a test system and protocols developed for controlled evaluation of these measurement technologies. The results of tests of three measurement technologies are also summarized. The test system and protocol were judged practical and very useful. The test results indicate that one measurement technology can measure OA flow rates with errors of 20% or less without a field-based calibration, as long as the OA velocities are sufficient to provide an accurately measurable pressure signal. The test results for a second measurement technology are similar; however, a difficult field-based calibration relating the OA flow rate with the pressure signal would be required to reduce errors below approximately 30%. The errors in OA flow rates measured with the third measurement technology, that uses six electronic airspeed sensors downstream of the OA inlet louver, exceeded 100%; however, these errors could be substantially reduced through a difficult field based calibration. The effects of wind on the accuracy of these measurement technologies still needs to be evaluated.


A thin layer of poly(caffeic acid) was electrodeposited onto the surface of a glassy carbon (GC) electrode under potentiostatic conditions in aqueous solution. This system was utilized for the detection of 3,4-dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine (L-DOPA) by square wave voltammetry (SWV) after the experimental parameters of pH, step, amplitude, and frequency were studied by a full factorial design (FFD) to identify the significant parameters and their interactions. The results showed that pH, step, and amplitude were significant, whereas frequency did not significantly impact response. Subsequently, a central composite design (CCD) was performed for the three significant factors in order to further optimize the method. The optimum conditions were pH: 4.8; step potential: 5 mV; amplitude: 88 mV. Under these optimized conditions, the modified electrode demonstrated high selectivity for L-DOPA in the presence of common biological interferences such as ascorbic acid and uric acid by the observation of three distinctive and well resolved oxidation peaks. The sensor was simple to prepare, provided short analysis times, and exhibited a linear range from 1.0–50.0 μM with a detection limit of 0.14 μM for analysis of L-DOPA.


Recent studies suggest that genetic polymorphisms of the estrogen receptor(ER) gene may be associated with breast cancer risk. To evaluate the role of this gene in the risk of breast cancer, we genotyped a newly identified GT dinucleotide repeat [(GT)n] polymorphism located in the promoter region (6.6 kb upstream of the transcription start site) in 947 breast cancer cases and 993 age frequency-matched community controls from a population-based case-control study conducted among Chinese in urban Shanghai. Sixteen alleles were identified, the most common one having 16 GT repeats [(GT)16]. Compared with subjects homozygous for this allele, subjects carrying the (GT)17 or (GT)18 allele had a decreased risk of breast cancer. The odds ratios (ORs) were 0.81 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.62–1.06] and 0.58 (95% CI, 0.36–0.94), respectively, for one and two copies of the (GT)17 or (GT)18 allele. The inverse association with carrying either of these alleles was stronger among women with >30 years of menstrual cycles (OR 0.66; 95% CI 0.51–0.85) than those with a shorter duration of menstrual cycles (OR 0.97; 95% CI 0.73–1.27), and the test for an interaction was statistically significant (P 0.04). Among breast cancer patients, the presence of either the (GT)17 or (GT)18 allele was associated with a reduced expression of progesterone receptor. Results of this study indicate that the GT dinucleotide repeat polymorphism in ERgene promoter region may be a new biomarker for genetic susceptibility to breast cancer.


OBJECTIVE
To identify individual and clinical risk factors associated with cesarean section (CS) delivery in a Chinese rural population.

STUDY DESIGN
A cross-sectional study was conducted with data from hospital medical records in Henan Province and Anhui Province, China, using univariate and multiple logistic regression analyses.

RESULTS
Between January 1 and December 31, 2008, 46.3% (4,823/10,425) of deliveries were via CS in the study population. After adjustment for other variables, pregnant women in the 25-29-year-old (odds ratio [OR] 1.41, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.24-1.61) and > or = 30-year-old (OR 1.73, 95% CI 1.46-2.04) age groups were more likely to give birth by CS as compared to the 20-24-year-old age group. Other independent factors related to a higher risk of CS included nonagricultural occupation (OR 1.44, 95% CI 1.27-1.62), gestational hypertension (OR 5.22, 95% CI 3.93-6.93), breech presentation (OR 10.47, 95% CI 6.37-17.20), dystocia (OR 28.62, 95% CI 24.62-33.28), and preterm delivery (OR 1.28, 95% CI 1.06-1.54).

CONCLUSION
Age, occupation, gestational hypertension, breech presentation, and dystocia may play an important role in the high level of CS among women in a Chinese rural population. Further comprehensive studies on both medical and nonmedical reasons for CS delivery are needed.


We examine if international trade improves labor market integration of immigrants in Sweden. Immigrants participate substantially less than natives in the labor market. However, trading with a foreign country is expected to increase the demand for immigrants from that country. By hiring immigrants, a firm may access foreign knowledge and networks needed to overcome information frictions in trade. Using granular longitudinal matched employer–employee data and an instrumental variable approach, we estimate the causal effects of a firm's bilateral trade on employment and wages of immigrants from that country. We find a positive, yet heterogeneous, effect of trade on immigrant employment but no effect on immigrant wages.