There
is consistent research evidence that shows improvement of the engineering
properties of subgrade soils treated with lime or cement. However, limited
information is available on the effect of climatic changes on the subgrade
stiffness. The thesis studies the effects of changes in soil moisture content
and temperature on the resilient modulus of treated and untreated subgrades in
Indiana. Two types of soils were tested: A-6 and A-7-6, from two locations in
Indiana: Hartford City and Bloomington, respectively. When existing standards
ASTM D559/559-15 and ASTM D560/560-16 for wetting/drying (WD) and
freezing/thawing (FT) processes, respectively, were followed, the treated and
untreated samples failed through the process of preparation due to the
stringent procedures in the standards. Appropriate test conditions were
investigated, as part of the research, to develop new protocols more
appropriate to the field conditions in Indiana. Two new test protocols were developed
and successfully applied to the treated soils. A total of 26 resilient modulus,
MR, tests were conducted following the standard AASHTO T307-99. The
MR results showed that the repeated action of WD and FT cycles reduced
the stiffness of the chemically-treated soils down to values similar to or
lower than those of the untreated soils. However, when the amount of chemical
was doubled, with respect to the optimum, the MR of the treated
soils improved over that of the untreated soils, even after the wetting-drying cycles.


Websites today have to cater to a fragmented device ecosystem. Previous web design trends utilizing fixed-width layouts, aimed at desktop computer browsing, have been replaced by new approaches embracing fluidity, accessibility and context-awareness. Responsive web design is one such approach, merging desktop and mobile layouts into a single codebase. With this merger one feature is often overlooked, namely performance. In this thesis I have aimed to identify inherent performance challenges within the responsive web design paradigm. I have looked at how existing performance optimization techniques can be utilized to alleviate these challenges by comparing their effects under both mobile and desktop browsing contexts. The methods used included collection and discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of existing performance optimization techniques, as well as exploratory research through experiments. The aim of experimentation was to observe how different techniques work in a controlled setting in order to identify how performance was improved, and at which cost. The findings show that several existing techniques can be applied to improve web performance, some especially targeting responsive design and mobile use cases. However, the problem with many of these techniques is that they are workarounds for deficiencies inherent in current web protocols, markup technologies and browsers. While these workarounds can be proven to enhance web performance in certain use cases, most also possess inherent disadvantages. This emphasizes the demand for new technologies. HTTP 2.0 as well as emerging responsive image technologies are predicted as potential solutions to some of these deficiencies.


Proactively monitoring and assessing the economic health of financial system has always been the cornerstone of supervisory authorities for supporting informed and timely decision making. Bank of Greece as the competent supervisory authority for the Greek banking system evaluates both the riskiness of banks on an individual level and the health of the financial system in total, from a macro prudential perspective. In accomplishing those targets, the Bank of Greece could make use –inter aliaof various statistical methods along with expert judgment. In this work, we employ a series of innovative modeling techniques in the prediction of individual bank insolvencies and generalized financial crises. Our empirical results indicate that innovative statistical techniques, i.e. Deep Learning and Machine Learning methodologies, have superior out of sample and out of time predictive performance in comparison to traditionally employed methods in finance, such as Logistic Regression, Classification Tress, and Linear Discriminant Analysis. In essence, we build an Early Warning System for bank insolvencies and another one for stock market crises, which could complement the assessments performed by micro-prudential and macroprudential authorities. In short, the holistic monitoring of the resilience of the financial system would steer decision making, via triggering the imposition of any necessary targeted corrective actions, leading vulnerable institutions back to viable business performance and the financial system back to balanced operation.


We determine the optimal exploitation time-paths of three types of perfect substitute energy resources: The first one is depletable and carbon-emitting (dirty coal), the second one is also depletable but carbon-free thanks to a carbon capture and storage (CCS) process (clean coal) and the last one is renewable and clean (solar energy). We assume that the atmospheric carbon stock cannot exceed some given ceiling. These optimal paths are considered along with alternative structures of the CCS cost function depending on whether the marginal sequestration cost depends on the flow of clean coal consumption or on its cumulated stock. In the later case, the marginal cost function can be either increasing in the stock thus revealing a scarcity effect on the storage capacity of carbon emissions, or decreasing in order to take into account some learning process. We show among others the following results: Under a stockdependent CCS cost function, the clean coal exploitation must begin at the earliest when the carbon cap is reached while it must begin before under a flow-dependent cost function. Under stock-dependent cost function with a dominant learning effect, the energy price path can evolve non-monotonically over time. When the solar cost is low enough, this last case can give rise to an unusual sequence of energy consumption along which the solar energy consumption is interrupted for some time and replaced by the clean coal exploitation. Last, the scarcity effect implies a carbon tax trajectory which is also unusual in this kind of ceiling models, its increasing part been extended for some time during the period at the ceiling.


Scenes, like objects, are visual entities that can be categorized into functional and semantic groups. One of the core concepts of human categorization is the idea that category membership is graded: some exemplars are more typical than others. Here, we obtain human typicality rankings for more than 120,000 images from 706 scene categories through an online rating task on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We use these rankings to identify the most typical examples of each scene category. Using computational models of scene classification based on global image features, we find that images which are rated as more typical examples of their category are more likely to be classified correctly. This indicates that the most typical scene examples contain the diagnostic visual features that are relevant for their categorization. Objectless, holistic representations of scenes might serve as a good basis for understanding how semantic categories are defined in term of perceptual representations.


The main performance bottleneck of modern digital subscriber line (DSL) networks is the crosstalk among different lines (i.e., users). By deploying dynamic spectrum management (DSM) techniques and reducing excess crosstalk among users, a network operator can dramatically increase the data rates and service reach of broadband access. However, current DSM algorithms suffer from either substantial suboptimality in typical deployment scenarios or prohibitively high complexity due to centralized computation. This paper develops, analyzes, and simulates a new suite of DSM algorithms for DSL interference-channel models called autonomous spectrum balancing (ASB). The ASB algorithms utilize the concept of a "reference line," which mimics a typical victim line in the interference channel. In ASB, each modem tries to minimize the harm it causes to the reference line under the constraint of achieving its own target data-rate. Since the reference line is based on the statistics of the entire network, rather than any specific knowledge of the binder a modem operates in, ASB can be implemented autonomously without the need for a centralized spectrum management center. ASB has a low complexity and simulations using a realistic simulator show that it achieves large performance gains over existing autonomous algorithms, coming close to the optimal rate region in some typical scenarios. Sufficient conditions for convergence of ASB are also proved.


Abstract This study investigates the characteristics of the prompt radiation field due to the operation of the proposed Taiwan Photon Source (TPS). Two extreme beam loss cases are considered to bound the possible beam loss scenarios in the tunnel; i.e., all electrons are lost at one point, or they are lost uniformly along the whole electron orbit. Energy spectra and dose distributions of the prompt radiation field for the shielding design of the TPS are studied using analytic estimations and Monte Carlo simulations. The radiation levels of photons and neutrons outside the shielding wall are estimated for various operation modes and beam loss scenarios. The calculated results show that the preliminary shielding design of the TPS is highly practicable to achieve its annual design dose limit of 1 mSv for personnel. Meanwhile, the radiation impact on the environment is also far below the regulatory requirement.


Factors related to the research context such as inquiry mode, experimenter contact, and setting may affect participants' comfort with and willingness to admit to engaging in sensitive sexual behaviors or to disclose certain sexual attitudes. Threehundred-and-thirty-seven undergraduates (261 female, 41% non-White) completed a survey containing measures of sexual behavior, attitudes, sexual victimization, and sexual perpetration history. The level of experimenter contact (high vs. low contact), setting of completion (in lab vs. out of lab), and inquiry mode (pencil-and-paper vs. computer) were manipulated and participants were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions I hypothesized that low contact, out of lab, computer conditions would be associated with the highest rates of reported sexual behaviors (including higher frequencies, a wider variety of behaviors, and higher rates of reported victimization and perpetration). I also predicted that these same experimental conditions would be associated with more liberal attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Further, I hypothesized that these effects would be moderated by race, such that differences across conditions would be greater for non-White participants than for White participants because nonWhite participants might fear that reporting socially undesirable sexual behavior will fuel racial stereotypes. For female participants, a general pattern emerged across sexual behavioral measures suggesting that mode interacts with race to impact responding: Non-White women tended to report more sexual behaviors on pencil-and-paper surveys than on McCallum, Ethan, 2013, UMSL, p. 7 computers. White women either demonstrated no mode-related differences or reported more sexual behaviors in computer conditions than in paper-and-pencil conditions. One exception was sexual victimization, with White women reporting more victimization on pencil-and-paper measures than on computer. For attitudinal measures, experimenter contact tended to be the most important experimental variable, though effects were again moderated by race. White women endorsed more liberal attitudes towards sex in high contact conditions, and non-White women endorsed more liberal attitudes in low contact conditions. Evaluation of differences for men was hampered by a small sample of male participants. Overall, these results suggest that methodological factors such as experimenter contact and mode have a significant impact on sexual self-report and the direction and magnitude of impact is often moderated by race. McCallum, Ethan, 2013, UMSL, p. 8 Measuring the impact of inquiry mode above and beyond situational characteristics and experimenter contact in sexual behavior self-report research


Multi-pattern string matching remains a major performance bottleneck in network intrusion detection and anti-virus systems for high-speed deep packet inspection (DPI). Although Aho-Corasick deterministic finite automaton (AC-DFA) based solutions produce deterministic throughput and are widely used in today's DPI systems such as Snort [1] and ClamAV [2], the high memory requirement of AC-DFA (due to the large number of state transitions in AC-DFA) inhibits efficient hardware implementation to achieve high performance. Some recent work [3], [4] has shown that the AC-DFA can be reduced to a character trie that contains only the forward transitions by incorporating pipelined processing. But they have limitations in either handling long patterns or extensions to support multi-character input per clock cycle to achieve high throughput. This paper generalizes the problem and proves formally that a linear pipeline with H stages can remove all cross transitions to the top H levels of a AC-DFA. A novel and scalable pipeline architecture for memory-efficient multi-pattern string matching is then presented. The architecture can be easily extended to support multi-character input per clock cycle by mapping a compressed AC-DFA [5] onto multiple pipelines. Simulation using Snort and ClamAV pattern sets shows that a 8-stage pipeline can remove more than 99% of the transitions in the original AC-DFA. The implementation on a state-of-the-art field programmable gate array (FPGA) shows that our architecture can store on a single FPGA device the full set of string patterns from the latest Snort rule set. Our FPGA implementation sustains 10+ Gbps throughput, while consuming a small amount of on-chip logic resources. Also desirable scalability is achieved: the increase in resource requirement of our solution is sub-linear with the throughput improvement.


The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action negotiations are likely to lead to a Paris outcome that embodies a hybrid climate policy architecture, combining top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including 'Intended Nationally Determined Contributions' from participating countries, detailing plans to reduce emissions, based on national circumstances. For such a system to be cost-effective – and thus more likely to embody greater ambition – a key feature will be linkages among regional, national, and sub-national climate policies. By linkage, we mean formal recognition by a mitigation programme in one jurisdiction of emission reductions undertaken in another jurisdiction for the purposes of complying with the first jurisdiction's requirements. The Paris outcome could play at least four different roles with respect to linkage of heterogeneous policy instruments. First, it could discourage linkage, either by not allowing countries to count international transfers toward their mitigation contributions, or by limiting the number or types of transferred units that can be counted for compliance purposes. Second, it could be silent on the topic of linkage, creating legal and regulatory uncertainty about whether international transfers are allowed. Third, it could expressly authorize linkage but not provide any further details about how linkage should occur, leaving it to future United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiating sessions to work out the details or to national governments to develop bilateral or multilateral linkage arrangements. Finally, the Paris outcome could establish institutional arrangements and rules that facilitate and promote linkage. We examine how a future international policy architecture could help facilitate the growth and operation of a robust system of international linkages. Several design elements merit serious consideration for inclusion in the Paris outcome, either in the core agreement or by establishing a process for subsequent international elaboration. At the same time, including detailed linkage rules in the core agreement is not desirable because this could make it difficult for rules to evolve in light of experience. Policy relevance These findings have implications for the efficient and effective design of an international climate policy architecture by detailing the role that linkage can play in supporting heterogeneous climate policies at the regional, national, and sub-national levels.


Twitter has become exceedingly popular, with hundreds of millions of tweets being posted every day on a wide variety of topics. This has helped make real-time search applications possible with leading search engines routinely displaying relevant tweets in response to user queries. Recent research has shown that a considerable fraction of these tweets are about "events," and the detection of novel events in the tweet-stream has attracted a lot of research interest. However, very little research has focused on properly displaying this real-time information about events. For instance, the leading search engines simply display all tweets matching the queries in reverse chronological order. In this paper we argue that for some highly structured and recurring events, such as sports, it is better to use more sophisticated techniques to summarize the relevant tweets. We formalize the problem of summarizing event-tweets and give a solution based on learning the underlying hidden state representation of the event via Hidden Markov Models. In addition, through extensive experiments on real-world data we show that our model significantly outperforms some intuitive and competitive baselines.


The Louvre, originally the palace of King Philip II of France, reinvented itself as an art museum in 1793. Since then, it has grown in scope and renown and is today the most visited art museum in the world. "Louvre: 400 Masterpieces", an accessible book-object in a brand new format, is a unique survey of not only the collections - filled with such iconic works as the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa - but to the history and artistry of the institution itself. With a foreword by the institution's director, Henry Loyrette, the book is organized according to the museum's eight departments: Near Eastern Antiquities, Egyptian Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, Sculptures, Decorative Arts, Paintings, Prints and Drawings. Each chapter is prefaced with a brief text describing the history of the department and its acquisitions over the centuries. The ninth and final chapter tells the history of this royal - once imperial - palace as seen through its architecture.With its appealing square shape, 450 reproductions, never-before-see archival plans and documents and lively essays, "Louvre: 400 Masterpieces" is the perfect book for museum visitors, art lovers and Francophiles.


Increasingly, private corporations engage in "private politics", or "corporate social responsibility" (CSR). In some cases, such as the infamous Enron affair, huge discrepancies between stated and actual policies have been revealed, while in others corporations seem to have been taken hostage by interest groups, even if stated and actual polices matched. The paper attempts to model the "private politics" of CSR in economic terms. On the one hand, it is assumed that corporations can generate economic rent by favourable responses from policy makers, regulators and consumers to building a CSR image. Building an image is, however, costly. On the other hand, the rent might be subject to rent-seeking activities from pressure groups, labour (in the form of "rent sharing") etc. The resulting game is modelled as a Stackleberg rent-seeking game. A corporation is assumed to be able to deter attacks on its CSR rent by direct investments in deterrence (public policy, advertising etc.) and by backing up its CSR image by actual policies. Both of these are costly, too. The model illustrates the effect on CSR of risk aversion and of comparative advantages in implementing CSR policies as well as in creating defending "image rents". CSR activities might also result from principal-agent problems between owners and management.


The gravitational aether theory is a modification of General Relativity that decouples vacuum energy from gravity, and thus can potentially address the cosmological constant problem. The classical theory is distinguishable from General Relativity only in the presence of relativistic pressure (or vorticity). Since the interior of neutron stars has high pressure and as their mass and radius can be measured observationally, they are the perfect laboratory for testing the validity of the aether theory. In this thesis, we first solve the hydrostatic equations of stellar structure for the gravitational aether theory and find the predicted mass-radius relation of nonrotating neutron stars using two different realistic proposals for the equation of state of nuclear matter. We find that the maximum neutron-star mass predicted by the aether theory is 12%-16% less than the maximum mass predicted by General Relativity assuming these two equations of state. We then study the dynamics of a neutron star in the aether theory and establish that a Cauchy problem can be defined. We derive the dynamical equations, and through analyzing them, we find two modes, one of which is well-posed (expansion of matter in the aether frame) and the other is not well-posed (collapse of matter in the aether frame). Starting from a hydrostatic neutron star configuration that we perturb by adding extrinsic curvature (and radial velocity), we numerically evolve the Einstein field equations for the aether theory in the well-posed mode and find that it evolves towards the not well-posed regime. This feature may pose a serious challenge to our initial value formulation of the aether theory. Whether an alternative formulation can handle the collapsing neutron stars is a question of utmost importance for the viability of the aether theory. It has been clear for some time now that super-critical surface magnetic fields, exceeding 4× 10 G, exist on a subset of neutron stars. These magnetars may harbor interior fields many orders of magnitude larger, potentially reaching equipartition values. However, the impact of these strong fields on stellar structure has been largely ignored, potentially complicating attempts to infer the high density nuclear equation of state. In this thesis, we assess the effect of these strong magnetic fields on the mass-radius relationship of neutron stars. We employ an effective field theory model for the nuclear equation of state that includes the impact of hyperons, anomalous magnetic moments, and the physics of the crust. We consider two magnetic field geometries, bounding the likely magnitude of the impact of magnetic fields: a statistically isotropic, tangled field and a force-free configuration. In both cases even equipartition fields have at most a 30% impact on the maximum mass. However, the direction of the effect of the magnetic field depends on the geometry employed force-free fields leading to reductions in the maximum neutron star mass and radius while tangled fields increase both challenging the common intuition in the literature on the impact of magnetic fields.


Turtle Geometry presents an innovative program of mathematical discovery that demonstrates how the effective use of personal computers can profoundly change the nature of a student's contact with mathematics. Using this book and a few simple computer programs, students can explore the properties of space by following an imaginary turtle across the screen.The concept of turtle geometry grew out of the Logo Group at MIT. Directed by Seymour Papert, author of Mindstorms, this group has done extensive work with preschool children, high school students and university undergraduates. Harold Abelson is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Andrea diSessa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.


extract] Bankers' relationships with those who use their services are recognised to have a fiduciary nature in at least some of their aspects. There is Australian and Canadian authority to this effect and even Halsbury's Laws of England now sees things so. Traditionally, things were different. The relationships of banks with those who dealt with them were treated just as instances of the debtor and creditor relation. Mutual obligations were thought to be entirely described by the terms of the contractual retainer subsisting between the parties.


We introduce an open source python framework named PHS - Parallel Hyperparameter Search to enable hyperparameter optimization on numerous compute instances of any arbitrary python function. This is achieved with minimal modifications inside the target function. Possible applications appear in expensive to evaluate numerical computations which strongly depend on hyperparameters such as machine learning. Bayesian optimization is chosen as a sample efficient method to propose the next query set of parameters.


1. Measurements have been made of the gill areas of fourteen species of British fish, all marine except for the tench and trout. In addition the gill area of the Antarctic icefish, Chaenocephalus (lacking haemoglobin) has been measured. 2. The different parameters of the gill sieve have been considered quantitatively in relation to the size of the gill area, resistance to the passage of water, and the diffusion conditions at the gills. 3. From calculations of the expected flow through a sieve of the measured dimensions it has been concluded that a sufficient volume would pass in the inter-lamellar spaces despite their fine dimensions. Differences in the nature of the sieve relative to the theoretical one and changes during the respiratory cycle account for the ventilation volumes measured being less than those calculated. 4. The theoretical analysis of the operation of the gill sieve are discussed in relation to measurements of Gray (1954) and to the developmental studies of Price (1931). 5. It is concluded that more active fish not only have larger gill areas but that the conditions for gaseous exchange are better than for more sluggish forms and that the area is increased in such a way as to keep the resistance to flow to a low value. This is mainly achieved by having an increased total filament length and a large number of secondary folds. More sluggish fish have more widely spaced and higher lamellae and their total filament length is reduced. The resistance to flow relative to the area is less in these forms than in the more active species. 6. Consideration is given to the different pathways along which water can infiltrate past the respiratory epithelium and analogies are drawn with the alveolar air, and the physiological and anatomical dead-spaces of the mammalian lung.


Abundance is the state variable of interest in most population–level ecological research and in most programs involving management and conservation of animal populations. Abundance is the single parameter of interest in capture–recapture models for closed populations (e.g., Darroch, 1958; Otis et al., 1978; Chao, 2001). The initial capture–recapture models developed for partially (Darroch, 1959) and completely (Jolly, 1965; Seber, 1965) open populations represented efforts to relax the restrictive assumption of population closure for the purpose of estimating abundance. Subsequent emphases in capture–recapture work were on survival rate estimation in the 1970's and 1980's (e.g., Burnham et al., 1987; Lebreton et al., 1992), and on movement estimation in the 1990's (Brownie et al., 1993; Schwarz et al., 1993). However, from the mid–1990's until the present time, capture–recapture investigators have expressed a renewed interest in abundance and related parameters (Pradel, 1996; Schwarz & Arnason, 1996; Schwarz, 2001). The focus of this session was abundance, and presentations covered topics ranging from estimation of abundance and rate of change in abundance, to inferences about the demographic processes underlying changes in abundance, to occupancy as a surrogate of abundance.
The plenary paper by Link & Barker (2004) is provocative and very interesting, and it contains a number of important messages and suggestions. Link & Barker (2004) emphasize that the increasing complexity of capture–recapture models has resulted in large numbers of parameters and that a challenge to ecologists is to extract ecological signals from this complexity. They offer hierarchical models as a natural approach to inference in which traditional parameters are viewed as realizations of stochastic processes. These processes are governed by hyperparameters, and the inferential approach focuses on these hyperparameters.
Link & Barker (2004) also suggest that our attention should be focused on relationships between demographic processes such as survival and recruitment, the two quantities responsible for changes in abundance, rather than simply on the magnitudes of these quantities. They describe a type of Jolly–Seber capture–recapture model that permits inference about the underlying relationship between per capita recruitment rates and survival rates (Link & Barker, this volume). Implementation used Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and appeared to work well, yielding inferences about the relationship between recruitment and survival that were robust to selection of prior distribution. We believe that readers will find their arguments compelling, and we expect to see increased use of hierarchical modeling approaches in capture–recapture and related fields.
Otto (presentation without paper) also recommended use of hierarchical models in analysis of multiple data sources dealing with population dynamics of North American mallards. He integrated survival inferences from ringing data, abundance information from aerial survey data, and recruitment information based on age ratios from a harvest survey. He used a Leslie matrix population projection model as an integrating framework and obtained estimates of breeding population size using all data.
Otto's approach also permitted inference about biases in estimated quantities. As with the work of Link & Barker (2004), we find Otto's recommendation to use hierarchical models to integrate data from multiple sources to be very compelling. Alisauskas et al. (2004) report results of an analysis of capture–recapture data for a Saskatchewan population of white–winged scoters. They used the approach of Pradel (1996) to estimate population growth rate (􀀛) directly. Estimates for 1975–1985 were quite low, but estimates for the recent period, 2000–2003, increased to values > 1. Parameter estimates for seniority, survival and per capita recruitment (Pradel, 1996) led to the inference that increased recruitment was largely responsible for the improvements in population status and growth. However, various data sources also indicated that this increase in recruitment was likely a result of increased immigration rather than improved reproduction on the area. This latter inference is important from a conservation perspective in indicating the importance of birds in other locations to growth and health of the study population.
Lukacs and Burnham presented material to be published elsewhere that dealt with the use of genetic markers in capture–recapture studies. The data sources for such studies are samples of hair or feces, which are then analyzed using molecular genetic techniques in order to determine individual genotypes with respect to a usually small number of loci. Two types of classification error can arise in such analyses. First, if only a small number of loci is examined, then there may be nonnegligible probabilities that multiple individual animals will have the same genotypes. The second type of error arises during the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) process and can result from failure of alleles to amplify (allelic dropout) or from PCR inhibitors in hair and feces that produce the appearance of false alleles or misprinting (Creel et al., 2003). Lukacs and Burnham developed models that formally incorporate possible misclassification of samples resulting from these errors.
These models permit estimation of parameters such as abundance and survival in a manner that properly incorporates this uncertainty of individual identity. We anticipate that noninvasive sampling based on molecular genetic analyses of hair or feces will become extremely important for some species, and that the models of Lukacs and Burnham will become very popular for such analyses.
MacKenzie & Nichols (2004) discuss the use of occupancy (proportion of patches or habitat area that is occupied) as a surrogate for abundance. In cases of territorial species and where birds occur at low densities, the number of occupied patches may provide a reasonable estimate of abundance. In other cases, occupancy can be viewed as providing information about one tail of the abundance distribution, P (N = 0). The motivation for considering occupancy as a surrogate for abundance is that occupancy is based on so–called presence–absence surveys that are frequently less expensive of time and effort than methods that estimate abundance directly. We describe one set of models that can be used to estimate occupancy for a single season and another that can be used to estimate parameters such as local probabilities of extinction and colonization that are associated with occupancy dynamics. We outline a possible hybrid approach that combines occupancy data with data on marked individuals in order to better explore the mechanisms underlying occupancy dynamics.
These five presentations made for an interesting session containing useful information and recommendations for future work. A number of themes connecting these presentations could be emphasized. For example, two of the presentations considered alternatives to standard capture–recapture sampling that can be used to draw inferences about abundance, or a portion of the abundance distribution, with field methods that should be less expensive than usual capture–recapture approaches of handling animals. We believe that the most important theme of the session was the emphasis on the processes responsible for changes in abundance. In particular, we are excited by the potential for using hierarchical models as a means of investigating relationships among vital rates and as a means of combining multiple sources of data relevant to system dynamics. Indeed, we expect the importance of this session theme to be reflected in the content and presentations of the next EURING meeting.


Previous HgCdTe detectors on HST have suffered from a count-rate dependent non-linearity, motivating an investigation of a similar effect on the WFC3-IR detector. An initial measurement of this effect was made by comparing the photometry of star clusters observed over a wide dynamic range and at overlapping wavelengths in WFC3-IR and NICMOS and/or ACS-WFC. Utilizing a color term to account for differences in the observed bandpasses, we find a significant detection of a non-linearity in WFC3-IR photometry which is in the same direction but a few times smaller than that of NICMOS. From 235 stars in 47Tuc observed with WFC3-IR in F110W and F160W and in similar bandpasses in NICMOS Camera 2, we measure a non-linearity of WFC3-IR of 0.011+/0.0023 and 0.010+/-0.0025 mag per dex, respectively, over a range of 10 magnitudes (4 dex). An independent measurement utilizes 1390 stars in NGC 3603 observed with ACS-WFC F850LP and WFC3-IR F098M and yields a very similar result, 0.010 +/- 0.0033 mag/dex. The consistency of this measurement from two different comparison detectors of different technology indicates this result is robust. The impact of this non-linearity is that photometry of faint (i.e., sky dominated) sources calibrated with WFC3-IR zeropoints will appear 0.04 +/-0.01 mag too faint.


Background: Malnutrition due to insufficient intake of micronutrients, or due to impaired delivery of micronutrients to patients' cells, is suppressing immune functions that are fundamental to host protection. Concurrently, an excessive triggering of patients' immune reactions as the result of adverse responses to certain food antigens, can also lead to various chronic health conditions. Objective: To examine nutritional and immunological status in patients' groups varying in age, dietary regimens and gastrointestinal condition; and explore a possible correlation between an impaired patients' immune status and micronutrient deficiencies, food sensitivity and oxidative stress responses. Methods: This is a population-based study consisting of a American residents, age 13 and older, who completed the investigator's provided questionnaires with application of cell-based individualized functional assays. Data for this paper were collected from 845 individuals between May and September 2019, as part of CSS CNA beta study. Micronutrient deficiencies, immune Redox status, antioxidative responses and food sensitivity profiles were assessed for each patient participating in this study. Results: The group of patients with low Redox status demonstrated significantly higher percent of immune reactivity (17%) to food antigens as compared to15% reactivity detected in the groups with the average and strong Redox response. An average number of identified micronutrient deficiencies, as well as beneficial anti-oxidative protective compounds, was also significantly higher in the group with the weak immune function as compared to other two groups. Conclusion: This study suggests that high food sensitivity is associated with a higher nutrient deficiency, a stronger oxidative stress response and a lower immune redox status.


Pelle is a downstream serine-threonine kinase in the Toll signaling pathway in Drosophila. Toll signaling is involved in both fly immune responses and in dorsal-ventral patterning. Shen and Manley investigated the mechanism by which Pelle is activated during Toll receptor stimulation. Pelle was phosphorylated in fly embryos at the time of Toll signaling, and flies with a gain-of-function Toll receptor exhibited enhanced Pelle phosphorylation. In transfected Schneider L2 cells, the phosphorylation status of Pelle was correlated with its ability to activate the downstream transcription factor Dorsal, and Pelle phosphorylation was enhanced by coexpression of the active mutant Toll receptor. In vitro experiments demonstrated that Pelle phosphorylation was essential for Pelle kinase activity. Autophosphorylating ability of Pelle was demonstrated by showing that phosphatase-treated Pelle preincubated with adenosine triphosphate yielded an activated Pelle. Phosphatase-treated Pelle could also phosphorylate a catalytically inactive Pelle mutant. Thus, the authors propose that Pelle exists in an inactive complex with the Toll receptor and that ligand binding induces dimerization of the complex, allowing Pelle to autophosphorylate, which then promotes the dissociation of Pelle from the complex for interaction with downstream substrates. B. Shen, J. L. Manley, Pelle kinase is activated by autophosphorylation during Toll signaling in Drosophila. Development 129, 1925-1933 (2002). [Online Journal]


1. Electrical activity from the indirect, myogenic muscles of calliphorid flies was recorded during flight. The animals were suspended from an aerodynamic balance in the laminar air-stream from a wind-tunnel. Muscle action potentials, recorded with 25µ wire, were 5-7 msec. in duration, up to 10mV. in amplitude and positive in sign. Frequencies were mostly under 20/sec. 2. Frequencies in all the indirect muscles were similar, but these varied together with changes in aerodynamic power. 3. Frequencies in the indirect muscles of the two sides varied by no more than ± 10% during extreme turns to right or left (only left or only right wing beating). 4. Electrical records from the non-myogenic direct muscles were made during tethered flight. The potentials were 2-4 msec. in duration, up to 2 mV. positive and had frequencies up to 180/sec. 5. A nearly linear positive correlation exists between impulse frequency in the musculus latus (pleurosternal muscle), the inward movement of the pleural wall, and the wingbeat frequency, suggesting that this muscle is the basic frequency determiner. 6. Strong turning behaviour is associated with opposed frequency changes in the pairs of antagonistic adductor and abductor muscles of the wings on the two sides of the body. 7. The musculus dorsoventralis IV (tergo-trochanteral) is activated by a short impulse burst at the beginning of flight. It apparently acts as an oscillation starter. 8. Flight initiation normally requires 30-60 msec. Usually activity begins in the musculus latus, which stiffens the thorax. Then simultaneously the myogenic muscles are activated and the 'starter' muscle causes a jump and the beginning of oscillation of the thorax. Then the wings are drawn gradually forward and full wingbeat amplitude develops within the first six wingbeats. Flight begins with maximal lift and wingbeat frequency and a nearly synchronous burst discharge in all the indirect muscles. 9. Power production and the transmission and distribution of power are under separate control. The myogenic indirect motor varies only in total power output, this being influenced by its own state of excitation and by a muscle-controlling wingbeat frequency. Steering is accomplished by non-myogenic direct muscles which are capable of differentially engaging the two wings with the motor.


This article adopts a dialogical relational perspective to explore the recently introduced initiative of coercive treatment for drug misuse in the UK. Conversational interviews were undertaken with 11 people who had been sentenced to the Drug Treatment and Testing Order. Receiving treatment for drug misuse is often storied within a motivational account that is expectant of a readiness to change; such assumptions seem theoretically problematic when change is legally imposed. Therefore, moral and ethical concerns surround the introduction of this initiative, however the interview data illustrates the potential that participation might offer for the creation of counterstories where a more moral self can be enacted. Our analysis suggests that this counterstory is co-constructed thus being an outcome of both self and other. Furthermore such stories appear fragile; constantly under assault from detrimental authoritative discourses that are not only part of wider social understandings around drug misuse but also permeate the policy and practice of coercive treatment.


The use of food waste recycling concept can be an interesting option to reduce the use of landfill. This strategy is more environmental friendly, cheap and fast if proper management to treat the food waste is applied. Nowadays, the concept of recycling is not well practice among the community. In this study, vermicomposting is introduced as an alternative of the food waste recycling. Vermicomposting consists of the use of earthworms to break down the food waste. In this vermicomposting treatment, the nightcrawler earthworm are used to treat the food waste. The food will be collected from UTHM cafe. The experiment consist of peat soil as a base, earthworms and the food waste. The pH number and moisture content of each container were controlled at 7.0 to 7.2 and 60 to 80 % to maintain the favorable environment condition for the earthworms. The weight of the sample will be measured in three days time after exposure to the earthworm. The vermicomposting study was taken about two weeks time. After the treatment, the soil sample are tested for nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K) concentration. Based on the result obtained, it shows that vermicomposting will reduce the weight of treatment sample and the concentration of N, P, and K for the soil is greater than the chemical fertilizer. Therefore, vermicomposting is a promising  alternative treatment of food waste as it is more ecofriendly.


archaeological records. As a result of the manner in which human and animal remains are traditionally studied and
reported on, the analysis of taphonomic processes which affect the character of specimens between death and
incorporation into forming deposits is often confined to butchery, burning and fragmentation. This paper argues that
current methods of osteoarchaeological analysis fail to recognise the potential of a substantial and easily accessible
source of information in paying little attention to the processes of weathering, gnawing, trampling, abrasion and
longitudinal/spiral fracturing. More detailed taphonomic assessments have tended to focus on one specific process to
answer a particular research question rather than taking a holistic approach to pre-depositional affects (e.g. Outram
2001). Consequently biographies of skeletal material are only partially complete, as the period in the material existence
of bone prior to subterranean deposition is not fully investigated. The aforementioned taphonomic processes can
provide substantial evidence for human decision making regarding the treatment of different classes of remains.
This research explores the potential of holistic taphonomic analysis in a sample of c.9500 human and faunal specimens
from the Iron Age sites of Winnall Down and Danebury. These sites were selected as they are located in the heart of
Wessex, an area about which there has been considerable discourse and disagreement regarding the nature of human
and animal bone treatment in the Iron Age. Through comprehensive taphonomic analysis, highly regulated, socially
circumscribed behaviours surrounding bone handling were revealed. These results are suggestive of separate practices
relating to the treatment of human and faunal remains with the latter exhibiting significantly greater evidence of
exposure. The analysis of bone modification in features containing both human and faunal remains reveals a blurring
of the boundary between human and animal identities, as the treatment of the two classes of material differs to a
significantly lesser degree than when analysing the entire assemblage. Therefore each class of material is subjected to
a more closely related mode of treatment. This might be seen as indicative of a conceptual proximity of human and
faunal remains.


Title of Document: MEMORY AND PREDICTION IN CROSSLINGUISTIC SENTENCE COMPREHENSION Maria S. Lago Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Colin Phillips Department of Linguistics This dissertation explores the role of morphological and syntactic variation in sentence comprehension across languages. While most previous research has focused on how cross-linguistic differences affect the control structure of the language architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) here we adopt an explicit model of memory, content-addressable memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006) and examine how cross-linguistic variation affects the nature of the representations and processes that speakers deploy during comprehension. With this goal, we focus on two kinds of grammatical dependencies that involve an interaction between language and memory: subject-verb agreement and referential pronouns. In the first part of this dissertation, we use the self-paced reading method to examine how the processing of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, a language with a rich morphological system, differs from English. We show that differences in morphological richness across languages impact prediction processes while leaving retrieval processes fairly preserved. In the second part, we examine the processing of coreference in German, a language that, in contrast with English, encodes gender syntactically. We use eye-tracking to compare comprehension profiles during coreference and we find that only speakers of German show evidence of semantic reactivation of a pronoun's antecedent. This suggests that retrieval of semantic information is dependent on syntactic gender, and demonstrates that German and English speakers retrieve qualitatively different antecedent representations from memory. Taken together, these results suggest that crosslinguistic variation in comprehension is more affected by the content than the functional importance of gender and number features across languages. MEMORY AND PREDICTION IN CROSS-LINGUISTIC SENTENCE COMPREHENSION


BACKGROUND: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic relapsing disease characterized by activation of the mucosal immune system and inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. Management of IBD places a significant burden on the health care system because of the complexity of treatment, variability in patient outcomes, and chronic nature of the disease. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) and Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America's (CCFA) quality measurement sets in a sample of IBD patients. METHODS: Fourteen quality measures were restated for application to a claims database and calculated using Optum Clinformatics DataMart database. Selected measures were calculated over calendar year 2011. RESULTS: Performance measures ranged from 0.4% for AGA measure 9, prophylaxis for venous thromboembolism, to 66.9% for AGA measure 8, testing for Clostridium difficile. CCFA outcome measures ranged from 0.6% qualifying for CCFA O10, report of fecal incontinence, to 32.9% for CCFA O1, prednisone usage. In addition to Clostridium difficile testing, the use of appropriate corticosteroid-sparing therapy (51.1%) and testing for latent tuberculosis before initiating anti-tumor necrosis factor therapy (45.0%) were the highest achieved measures. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first examination of IBD quality measures using administrative claims. Rates of achievement across measures were variable and likely affected by the ability to calculate certain measures with claims data. Future studies should further examine measurement of IBD quality indicators in claims data to assess the validity of claims-based analyses and to ascertain whether measure attainment translates into better overall health or IBD-related outcomes.


AmeriCorps engages adults in service learning positions within government and non-profit agencies that focus on improving communities. The healthy futures focus area of AmeriCorps' funding agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), is intended to support programs that provide services to individuals in underserved areas to enhance their health by focusing on assistance, prevention and intervention. Among current AmeriCorps State and National service programs funded by CNCS, only 8% of funding goes toward health. The National Health Corps, an example of a healthy futures programs, is aimed at increasing access to healthcare for vulnerable and underserved populations by placing members in host site organizations that address the most critical public health needs of the community. Through examining the benefits and limitations of the National Health Corps, for both the community and the members who complete their service, it is recommended that CNCS expands funding to include more healthy futures programs that can address pertinent public health needs.


This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered "the first American," his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged--a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad. Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.


This paper is the first of a two-part series on the topic of visual servo control using computer vision data in the servo loop to control the motion of a robot. In this paper, we describe the basic techniques that are by now well established in the field. We first give a general overview of the formulation of the visual servo control problem. We then describe the two archetypal visual servo control schemes: image-based and position-based visual servo control. Finally, we discuss performance and stability issues that pertain to these two schemes, motivating the second article in the series, in which we consider advanced techniques


Research on the way Protestants interpret the Bible in relationship to science has tended to focus on biblical literalists; less research, however, has examined the heterogeneity of how nonliteralists interpret the Bible. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews with 77 evangelical and mainline Protestants who attend high-SES congregations, we find that members of both groups draw on similar interpretation strategies in discussing the Bible and evolution. Both eschew literal interpretations of the Bible, demarcate boundaries between the Bible and science, and subsume evolution under broader theological beliefs. Mainline Protestants and evangelicals differ in the way they interpret miracles, with mainline Protestants revealing more openness to scientific and social interpretations of the Bible's miracles, while evangelicals emphasize God's authority over nature. Findings show that different strategies are evoked depending on the issue discussed, revealing implications for a deeper understanding of the way different traditions provide resources for interpreting the Bible and its relationship to scientific issues. Finally, findings contribute to a more robust knowledge of boundary work between the Bible and science as institutional and epistemic authorities.


Summary: Mycobacterium lepraemurium grew in diffusion chambers containing human embryonic skin cells maintained in mice, guinea pigs and Petri plate monolayer cultures of human embryonic skin cells. Growth also occurred in diffusion chambers without skin cells maintained in mice and guinea pigs. A 28.8-fold increase in the number of bacilli was obtained when chambers containing skin cells were incubated in mice for 50 days and a 14.2-fold increase when incubated in guinea pigs. Significantly, chambers without skin cells gave a 12.2-fold increase in the number of acid-fast bacilli when maintained in mice for 50 days but only a 5.9-fold increase when maintained in guinea pigs for 50 days.


This stunning, lavishly illustrated book chronicles the entire planning and construction process of the Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT. Taking us from the historical background and architectural context at MIT through the interaction of the clients' needs and the architect's vision to the choice of building materials and construction methods, Building Stata offers a uniquely detailed look at the evolution of a major work by a master architect.The purpose of the Stata Center is to bring the "intelligence sciences"--computer science, artificial intelligence, information and decision systems, linguistics, and philosophy--together into a space that emphasizes research-focused collaboration. Frank Gehry's design integrates flexible and interconnected workspaces and incorporates a series of steps from public to private space, with places for social and intellectual interaction on lower levels giving way to space for study and contemplation on the upper floors; thus a two-level warehouse-like space is topped by two towers. The Center is wrapped around a series of outdoor terraces visible from a central court in both towers. The characteristic Gehry curves are clad in metal, the more block-like elements in brick.The architectural drawings and photographs -- 300 of them in color -- in Building Stata document the making of the Stata Center from concept to concrete reality. The photographs by Richard Sobol portray a work in progress, evoking the beauty of its architectural form and capturing the telling detail -- the building's sculptured shape against a clear blue sky, or construction workers perched on a massive curve of metal.


his brief provides recommendations for the professional development (PD) of teachers, administrators, and school personnel in order to improve student outcomes. The significant achievement gap for diverse learners—including students with disabilities, a vast majority of whom are also culturally and/or linguistically diverse—can be reduced through high quality and ongoing PD. Unfortunately, there are numerous barriers to effective PD. To address these barriers, this brief outlines recommendations for best practices in PD for teachers and other school staff. Strategies for integrating evidence-based practices (EBPs) into existing educational initiatives are also provided, along with methods for improving the school-system climate in order to reduce barriers to providing and sustaining innovative training and intervention methods. T Improving Education for California Students via Professional Development


Secured claims have priority over other claims in the event of debtor insolvency with respect to the distribution of the debtor's encumbered assets. Numerous writings have discussed the necessity of security instruments in the context of growth and development of the economy. Credit is indeed necessary for the economy's development, but, at the same time, credit is the cause of insolvency. This can be put another way: efficient credit develops the economy, while inefficient credit causes insolvency. The author argues on this basis that restriction of the secured creditor's rights in insolvency proceedings means not less credit but more effective credit. A security-holder whose rights are limited is going to lend more responsibly and monitor the activity of the debtor more intensively and effectively, because the risk of loss would otherwise increase. Better monitoring should lead also to earlier intervention by the secured creditor in the actions of the debtor, which can be expected to increase the number of cases of rescue of debtors headed for insolvency. The author suggests the option of removing a small amount from the secured creditor and distributing it among the unsecured creditors to make the credit system more efficient and reduce injustice. Implementing this option would not harm the interests of the secured creditor as much as it helps to render the whole system more efficient.


Patient perception on physician practice while prescribing for radiology examination .our objectives is to assess the patient perception of physician practice and to assess the patient's perception on radiologic examination. The study was conducted from February 2014 to April 2014 in South Kanara District of Karnataka (rural 65.2%, n-326 and urban 34.8%, n-174). The patient referred from the department of orthopedists and medicine to the radiology department are considered for the study. The selections of the patients are based on the convenience sample. The prospective study design approach was considered for the study. In this study i had developed 15 items forming two domains using frequency four point scales with nine items and Likert five point scales with six items, to assess the patient perception of physician practice and the patient perception on radiologic examination.to analysis the data obtained from our questionnaire study we considered the descriptive static analysis and Pearson chi square test. The descriptive static analysis used to analysis the demographic chart of the patient and items. The Pearson chi square test was used to determine the association between the (a) educations of the patient and radiation awareness, (b) previous radiology examination and knowledge about radiation, (c) previous radiology examination and protective device used in radiology examination, (d) previous radiology examination and signage's used in radiology department. The outcome of our study shows that referring physician follows poor justification ofpractice. The majority of the physicians (75.0%) do not explain the importance of radiology examination to the patient. Only 1.2% of research population had agreed that the referring physician always explains or discuss the relevance of radiology examination prescribed to the diagnosis of the patient specific condition.The majority of the research population had reported that referring physician does not explain the risk (91.4%) and benefit (87.4%) associated with the radiology examination were radiation is used. Minority of research population had strongly agreed that they were comfortable when referring doctors informing about the risk (12.6%) and benefit (11.6%) from radiology examination. The most interesting outcome of the study shows that 88.2% of the referring physician never resists the patient wish to undergo the radiology examination when it is not necessary. In present study there is a poor communication between the medical practitioner and patient while prescribing for the radiology examination. The outcome of the study also shows that Patient who were undergoing the radiology examination had poor knowledge about the radiation and get very less or no information about the benefit, risk and dose involved in radiologic examination from the prescribed doctors.


There is an important gap in the literature on the promotion of competition in electricity markets in what pertains to the analysis of two different streams: the absence and presence of regulation. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to analyze the interactions among market power indexes, marginal costs, and bidding strategies in the two mentioned scenarios, for comparative purposes. The methodology used is based on panel cointegration methods. The results point to the significant inclusion of different bidding strategies in the retail market: (i) fuel prices exercise a differential impact on the power plants' marginal costs, (ii) the marginal costs have a significantly positive effect on quantity sold and on net quantity, and (iii) the market power measures under regulation have a significantly positive long-term impact on the quantity sold and a negative impact on net quantity supplied in wholesale market. Although there is some literature on this issue, the main novelty of this article is the discussion of the regula‐ tory implications that could have been adopted in order to control and mitigate the market power, to encourage new investments in new technologies, and to recover sunk costs with the transition to a competitive market.


The reaction of colloidal iron hydroxide (CIH) with acidic groups was applied for an ultra-structural study of the distribution of sulphuric acid monoesters and sialic acid in synaptic vesicles and external nerve ending membranes isolated from rat brain. At pH 1.7 CIH was precipitated as electron-dense granules with a uniform size of 6-7 nm specifically labelling the carboxyl group of sialic acid and the sulphate group of monoesters of sulphuric acid. The differentiation of these 2 groups was achieved by treatment with neuraminidase and methylation followed by saponification. After preincubation with neuraminidase, which released 90-100% of the sialic acid from the membranes of the synaptic vesicles and the nerve endings, the electron-dense deposits marked the reaction sites of sulphate with CIH. The sulphate groups which were present at a concentration of 2.3 and 2.2 µmol/mg protein for the synaptic vesicle and nerve ending membrane preparations, respectively, were rendered soluble as methyl monosulphate by trans-esterification with acid/methanol and quantitatively removed from the structures. By this treatment membrane-bound sialic acid was blocked as sialic acid methyl ester and partly split off by acid hydrolysis. About 55% of the sialic acid found in the nerve ending membranes remained attached to the structure as compared with about 35% of the sialic acid of the vesicles. The acid-resistant proportion of the sialic acid could be localized with CIH after saponification of the esterified preparations. The method described allows the electron-microscopical demonstration of acid-resistant, neuraminidase-sensitive sialic acid in synaptic structures and the discrimination from sulphated mucopolysaccharides.


Bone health is a critical concern in managing preterm infants. Key nutrients of importance are calcium, vitamin D, and phosphorus. Although human milk is critical for the health of preterm infants, it is low in these nutrients relative to the needs of the infants during growth. Strategies should be in place to fortify human milk for preterm infants with birth weight <1800 to 2000 g and to ensure adequate mineral intake during hospitalization and after hospital discharge. Biochemical monitoring of very low birth weight infants should be performed during their hospitalization. Vitamin D should be provided at 200 to 400 IU/day both during hospitalization and after discharge from the hospital. Infants with radiologic evidence of rickets should have efforts made to maximize calcium and phosphorus intake by using available commercial products and, if needed, direct supplementation with these minerals.


The introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and the electricity market liberalization have pointed out the need to upgrade the current electricity transmission network. High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission system is potentially the key. Recent advances in power electronics have allowed the introduction of power converters in power system applications as the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC). In the same perspective, grid scale Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) have broadly appeared. The dual purposing to combine both systems can provide a completely new solution. Even though each submodule (SM) within modular converter can have its own ESS, decreasing the number of energy storage submodules (ES-SMs) may be required to reduce the cost. This paper deals with the opportunities to introduce split storage into an MMC. The analysis is focused on the internal energy exchange to maintain the proper function of the converter by using circulating current. Analysis shows that, SM capacitor voltage ripple or semiconductors load are greatly influenced by additional circulating current injection. This study helps to design embedded ESSs in the converter to provide new function like ancillary services for power system operation. Finally, a simulation of an MMC with ESS confirms analytical calculations.


This panel examines how communities engaged in digital practices rely on offline and online environments to maintain their networks. We argue that understanding how these kinds of spaces are used for private and public interaction is crucial in order to make sense of the networked practices of digitally grounded communities. Through four papers, we analyse gamer, hacker, and maker cultures as examples of networked actors known to rely on and create digital technologies. To what extent do networked publics require collocation (Trainer et al. 2016), i.e. physical co-presence more casually referred to as IRL, and direct face-to-face interaction? We ask whether 'networked publics', i.e. the concept that power in a society is exercised through the machinations of networks (Castells 2011), need to take greater account of co-located activities among what are heavily 'digitised' groups. We examine 'online founded' groups of hackers and gamers, both of which generate their own sense of what they make public and private. We then explore communities of makers who are heavily afforded by networked technologies but, unlike gamers and hackers, require physical collocation to create their public/private divides. We address two main, interrelated questions: What are the main factors in facilitation that a community focuses on to move between online interaction and collocation (and is this a false binary)? What kinds of practices and motivations foster an interest in combining digital and physical collaboration? This panel will reflect on the role of institutions, corporations, Internet technologies, and communities themselves in defining these choices. Particularly, we will explore − through the effects of face-to-face elements across the groups we are studying − how they create not just a sense of being a networked public, but one that this is complexly constructed out of a number of different public/private divides. In particular, the way collocation is integrated is different across the groups this panel studies, and these differences point to ways that each group is constituted by a number of ways, dividing public and private. The ongoing location of a FabLab contrasts with a 'pop up' makerspace in a cultural institution. The episodic collocation afforded by an annual conference contrasts with regular meetups of hackers in similar regions. These developments point to a more complex and fluid vision of networked publics in which it is important to trace multiple public/private divides and how they integrate online and offline interactions. Two challenges will be posed through this examination of cases and abovementioned current theories of networked publics. First, we will examine how collocation or physical connection remains a structuring element in different networked publics, and why this has been under-appreciated and theorised. Second, grasping the roles of collocation, we will make it clear that when discussing networked publics, it is important to be explicit that this is a public/private relationship that is continually created and re-created, and that each group is constituted by not just one such divide, but several.


ABSTRACT Bacterial textures are present on clay minerals in Oligocene Frio Formation sandstones from the subsurface of the Corpus Christi area, Texas. In shallower samples, beads 0.05-0.1 µm in diameter rim the clay flakes; at greater depths these beads become more abundant and eventually are perched on the ends of clay filaments of the same diameter. We believe that the beads are nannobacteria (dwarf forms) that have precipitated or transformed the clay minerals during burial of the sediments. Rosettes of chlorite also contain, after HCl etching, rows of 0.1 µm bodies. In contrast, kaolinite shows no evidence of bacterial precipitation. We review other examples of bacterially precipitated clay minerals. A danger present in interpretation of our earlier work (and much work of other ) is the development of nannobacteria-looking artifacts caused by gold coating times in excess of one minute; we strongly recommend a 30-second coating time. Bacterial growth of clay minerals may be a very important process both in the surface and subsurface.


The 'argument from species overlap' (abbreviated ASO) claims that some human and nonhuman animals possess similar sets of morally relevant characteristics, and are therefore similarly morally significant. The argument stands as a general challenge to moral theories, because many theories hold that all humans possess greater moral significance than all nonhuman animals. In this thesis I discuss responses to the ASO, primarily those of Peter Carruthers, Tom Regan, Evelyn Pluhar, and Peter Singer. Carruthers denies the conclusion of the ASO, while the other three do not. I argue that the ASO is a sound argument, and that Carruthers's attempts to counter it via his contractualist theory are unsuccessful. I next discuss the rights-based theories of Regan and Pluhar, which agree with the conclusion of the ASO but which, I believe, encounter significant theoretical difficulties. Finally, I address the ASO from a utilitarian perspective, first from Singer's utilitarian formulation and then from a 'welfareutilitarian' formulation. I answer a number of critical objections to welfare utilitarianism, and argue that the theory is most successful in facing the challenge of the ASO.


Trifolium L. species with a rich isoflavone content have been used as expectorant, analgesic, antiseptic, tonic, and wound-healer in folk medicine. The aim of the study is to evaluate pharmacological properties of the extracts and isolated compounds of T. tricocephalum. Phytochemical investigation of the aerial parts of T. trichocephalum led to the isolation of daidzein, genistein, quercetin, and daidzein 4'-O-β-glucoside for the first time from this species. Isolated compounds along with the methanol extract, water, ethyl acetate and chloroform subextracts were tested for their radical scavenging and cytotoxic activity which was evaluated by MTT assay. According to the results of activity tests, extracts showed a concentration-dependent radical scavenging activity as well as cytotoxic effect on HepG2 cells at 400 μg/mL, whereas the compounds did not exert any obvious cytotoxic effect at tested concentrations.


Australian Native Plants: Cultivation and Uses in the Health and Food Industries provides a comprehensive overview of native food crops commercially grown in Australia that possess nutritional and health properties largely unknown on a global basis. These native foods have been consumed traditionally, have a unique flavor diversity, offer significant health promoting effects, and contain useful functional properties. Australian native plant foods have also been identified for their promising antioxidant and antimicrobial properties that have considerable commercial potential. This book is divided into three parts: The first part reviews the cultivation and production of many Australian native plants (ANP), including Anise Myrtle, Bush Tomato, Desert Raisin, Davidson's Plum, Desert Limes, Australian Finger Lime, Kakadu Plum, Lemon Aspen, Lemon Myrtle, Muntries, Native Pepper, Quandong, Riberry, and Wattle Seed. It then examines the food and health applications of ANP and discusses alternative medicines based on aboriginal traditional knowledge and culture, nutritional characteristics, and bioactive compounds in ANP. In addition, it reviews the anti-obesity and anti-inflammatory properties of ANP and discusses food preservation, antimicrobial activity of ANP, and unique flavors from Australian native plants. The third section covers the commercial applications of ANP. It focuses on native Australian plant extracts and cosmetic applications, processing of native plant foods and ingredients, quality changes during packaging, and storage of Australian native herbs. The final few chapters look into the importance of value chains that connect producers and consumers of native plant foods, new market opportunities for Australian indigenous food plants, and the safety of using native foods as ingredients in the health and food sectors.


Females and males differ in the energy consumption and nutritional requirements which are based on the interactions between environmental factors and sex hormones (1). The studies in early 1940s ascertained that females have enhanced capability of producing antibodies (2, 3). This enhanced immune reactivity in females helps mount an effective resistance to infection and therefore females are less susceptible to viral infections, but can develop immune-pathogenic effects and predisposition to autoimmunity due to hyper immune responses (4, 5). Sex hormones can also control the immune response via circadian rhythm. Many hormones like cortisol, known to regulate T cell mediated inflammation, have a circadian rhythm with a maximum peak at 8:00 a.m. and progressively lower levels as the day progresses (6). Interaction between sex hormones and environmental factors like cigarette smoke and infections lead to variable responses in both genders (5, 7, 8). There is emerging evidence that sex hormones impact microbial composition and the resulting immune response via secondary metabolites binding with receptors like estrogen receptors (ERs), peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) etc. (9). These differences in immune response can lead to variability in disease phenotypes with autoimmunity occurring more often in females and cancers occurring more in males (Figure 1).


It has been pointed out that when a single line of bracing is used, the member is usually made from structural tubing. It has been suggested that when the loads are not too great, consideration should be given to the use of double angles. The reasons for using these members include convenience, ease of construction, availability of material, etc. The compressive load carrying capacity of each of the three types of double angles have been outlined. The interconnection requirements were also given for the double angles.


Course guide to support GER 456 History of the German Language: An Introduction to Pre-Modern German Language, Literature, and Culture taught by Dr. Christian Schneider (Fall 2015)


For some positive constant \eps_0, we give a (3/2-\eps_0)-approximation algorithm for the following problem: given a graph G_0=(V,E_0), find the shortest tour that visits every vertex at least once. This is a special case of the metric traveling salesman problem when the underlying metric is defined by shortest path distances in G_0. The result improves on the 3/2-approximation algorithm due to Christofides [C76] for this special case. Similar to Christofides, our algorithm finds a spanning tree whose cost is upper bounded by the optimum, then it finds the minimum cost Eulerian augmentation (or T-join) of that tree. The main difference is in the selection of the spanning tree. Except in certain cases where the solution of LP is nearly integral, we select the spanning tree randomly by sampling from a maximum entropy distribution defined by the linear programming relaxation. Despite the simplicity of the algorithm, the analysis builds on a variety of ideas such as properties of strongly Rayleigh measures from probability theory, graph theoretical results on the structure of near minimum cuts, and the integrality of the T-join polytope from polyhedral theory. Also, as a byproduct of our result, we show new properties of the near minimum cuts of any graph, which may be of independent interest.


Abstract Article 52(1) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights lays down respect for the essence of right as one of the requirements that limitations on rights must respect. This provision is not innovative, as it formalizes into EU law the distinction between "core" and "periphery" of rights present in many national constitutions and in the ECJ and ECtHR case law. Nonetheless, the express reference to essence has given unprecedented resonance to that concept. Essence as the "limit of limits" has a Janus-like character. On the one hand, it pronounces that every fundamental right bears a minimum content which is ringfenced from interference by public and private actors. On the other hand, it stresses the malleability of rights and their social function. The core/periphery dichotomy reflects a balancing act moored in European legal tradition whose symbolism outperforms its utility as a judicial tool. This Article examines the essence clause of the Charter in light of the ECJ case law and the constitutional traditions of the Member States and assesses its role in the framework of fundamental rights protection in EU law. The Article first attempts a classification of rights limitations clauses in national constitutions, following which it discusses the interpretation of essence by the Spanish and the Italian Constitutional Courts. The Article then engages with a theoretical discussion of the concept of essence and examines the case law of the ECJ. Lastly, it looks at the limitations of the concept as a rights protection instrument in EU law.


This is an annotated edition of the treaties between the British colonies and Indian nations, originally printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin. Last published in 1938, "Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations" makes these important treaties available once again, featuring a simpler, easier-to-read format, extensive explanatory notes, and maps. A detailed introduction by Susan Kalter puts the treaties in their proper historical and cultural context. This carefully researched edition shows these treaties to be complex intercultural documents, and provides significant insight into the British colonists' relationship with native peoples of North America. They also reveal the complexity of Benjamin Franklin's perceptions of Native Americans, showing him in some negotiations as a promoter of the Indian word against the colonial one. Finally, the treaties offer an enormous wealth of linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural information about the Iroquois, the Delawares, and their allies and neighbors. Susan Kalter is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, Normal.


[1] The effects of large winds on the low-latitude E region ionosphere and the equatorial electrojet in particular are analyzed theoretically, computationally, and experimentally. The principles that govern the relationship between electric fields, currents, and winds in steady flows in the ionosphere are reviewed formally. A three-dimensional numerical model of low-latitude ionospheric electrostatic potential is then described. Scaled wind profiles generated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) thermosphere/ionosphere/mesosphere electrodynamics general circulation model (TIME-GCM) are used as inputs for the potential model. The model shows that the horizontal wind component drastically modifies the vertical polarization electric field in the electrojet and drives strong zonal and meridional currents at higher dip latitudes outside the electrojet region. Comparison between the model output and coherent scatter radar observations of plasma irregularities in the electrojet indicate that strong winds and wind shears are present in the E region over Jicamarca that are roughly consistent with NCAR model wind predictions if the amplitudes of the latter are increased by about 50%.


Forget the stereotypes. Today's Japanese women are shattering them -- breaking the bonds of tradition and dramatically transforming their culture. Shopping-crazed schoolgirls in Hello Kitty costumes and the Harajuku girls Gwen Stefani helped make so popular have grabbed the media's attention. But as critically acclaimed author Veronica Chambers has discovered through years of returning to Japan and interviewing Japanese women, the more interesting story is that of the legions of everyday women -- from the office suites to radio and TV studios to the worlds of art and fashion and on to the halls of government -- who have kicked off a revolution in their country. Japanese men hardly know what has hit them. In a single generation, women in Japan have rewritten the rules in both the bedroom and the boardroom. Not a day goes by in Japan that a powerful woman doesn't make the front page of the newspapers. In the face of still-fierce sexism, a new breed of women is breaking through the rice paper ceiling of Japan's salary-man dominated corporate culture. The women are traveling the world -- while the men stay at home -- and returning with a cosmopolitan sophistication that is injecting an edgy, stylish internationalism into Japanese life. So many women are happily delaying marriage into their thirties -- labeled losing dogs and yet loving their liberated lives -- that the country's birth rate is in crisis. With her keen eye for all facets of Japanese life, Veronica Chambers travels through the exciting world of Japan's new modern women to introduce these kickboxing geishas and the stories of their lives: the wildly popular young hip-hop DJ; the TV chef who is also a government minister; the entrepreneur who founded a market research firm specializing in charting the tastes of the teenage girls driving the country's GNC -- gross national cool; and the Osaka assembly-woman who came out publicly as a lesbian -- the first openly gay politician in the country. Taking readers deep into these women's lives and giving the lie to the condescending stereotypes, Chambers reveals the vibrant, dynamic, and fascinating true story of the Japanese women we've never met. Kickboxing Geishas is an entrancing journey into the exciting, bold, stylish new Japan these women are making.


This study attempts to improve automatic phonetic segmentation within the HMM framework. Experiments were conducted to investigate the use of phone boundary models, the use of precise phonetic segmentation for training HMMs, and the difference between context-dependent and contextindependent phone models in terms of forced alignment performance. Results show that the combination of special one-state phone boundary models and monophone HMMs can significantly improve forced alignment accuracy. HMM-based forced alignment systems can also benefit from using precise phonetic segmentation for training HMMs. Context-dependent phone models are not better than context-independent models when combined with phone boundary models. The proposed system achieves 93.92% agreement (of phone boundaries) within 20 ms compared to manual segmentation on the TIMIT corpus. This is the best reported result on TIMIT to our knowledge.


Over the past 12 months wind power has emerged from the periphery of global energy policy to become a viable alternative to coal-fired and other traditional energy sources. The shear volume of capital required to meet the global growth projections for wind energy suggests that developers and power producers ultimately will be required to go to the capital markets for funding. Over the past 24 months, there have been three instances of wind power transactions financed through the issuance of rated debt securities placed with institutional investors. While drawing on certain structural features and rating methodologies found in the structured asset-backed securities market, these transactions have more in common with the commercial-bank-funded project financings. It remains to be seen whether the cash flows from wind projects can be structured in ways that will take advantage of more of the structural features of the ABS market, and whether the employment of those structuring techniques can result in higher-rated tranches, higher advance rates, and lower all-in financing costs than are currently available to finance the needs of the growing global wind power economy.


The Clinton administration's failed health care reform was not the first attempt to establish government-sponsored medical coverage in the United States. From 1915 to 1920, Progressive reformers led a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful crusade for compulsory health insurance in New York State. Beatrix Hoffman argues that this first health insurance campaign was a crucial moment in the creation of the American welfare state and health care system. Its defeat, she says, gave rise to an uneven and inegalitarian system of medical coverage and helped shape the limits of American social policy for the rest of the century. Hoffman examines each of the major combatants in the battle over compulsory health insurance. While physicians, employers, the insurance industry, and conservative politicians forged a uniquely powerful coalition in opposition to health insurance proposals, she shows, reformers' potential allies within women's organizations and the labor movement were bitterly divided. Against the backdrop of World War I and the Red Scare, opponents of reform denounced government-sponsored health insurance as ""un-American"" and, in the process, helped fashion a political culture that resists proposals for universal health care and a comprehensive welfare state even today. |Shows how the issues that prevented passage of the 1915-1920 campaign for compulsory health insurance in New York helped to shape a national political culture that continues to resist proposals for universal health care as ""un-American.


There were times when Rachel Treherne fervently wished that her beloved father had left his fortune to somebody else, so overburdened did she feel with the administration of her estate. And never more so than now for, although she was surrounded by relatives who depended on her, whom she loved and who must surely love her, there was no doubt in her mind that somebody was trying to kill her.Threatening letters could be ignored, odd tasting chocolates can be rejected but when snakes are left in her bed, Rachel is convinced that someone means here terrible harm. Her only chance of a future life lay with Miss Silver, and Miss Silver was well on the way to unmasking the murderer when they struck again.


Transgenic plants expressing either bean yellow mosaic potyvirus or chimeric potyvirus coat protein (CP) were inoculated with various potyviruses. Antigen-coated plate, indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and immunoelectron microscopy of virus purified from transgenic plants showed that progeny virions contained from < 1% to as much as 25% transgenic CP. Different levels of transcapsidation may reflect the extent of compatibility between transgene CP and the viral CP.


Neutrophil aggregation in response to formyl peptide was analyzed in blood and isolated cells by fluorescence flow cytometry. The isolated leukocyte aggregates and the leukocytes in blood were identified with the vital nucleic acid stain LDS-751. This method enabled us to discriminate nucleated cells from other blood cells and to detect granulocyte aggregates without isolation or E lysis. Cells isolated in the absence of endotoxin retained the characteristics of cells in blood and exhibited similar aggregation kinetics and dose-response to formyl peptide. We show that it is possible to analyze epitope expression in blood with homogeneous flow cytometric assays and that carefully isolated neutrophils retain the expression characteristics of those in blood. The expression of CD18 was at its lowest levels in unstimulated cells, while the rate of formyl peptide stimulated aggregation was most rapid in these cells. Aggregation in isolated cells as well as blood preceded an increase in receptor expression. After stimulation, L-selectin expression decreased in both blood and isolated cells over a time frame similar to disaggregation. The aggregation response in blood was blocked by pretreatment with antibody to CD18 over a concentration range consistent with the amount of antibody bound. Aggregation was also blocked in isolated cells and blood by antibodies DREG-200 and DREG-56 to L-selectin, but not by isotype controls or anti-LFA-1. The results are discussed in terms of the roles of adhesive receptor expression and recognition in neutrophil aggregation. The methods validated here permit linkage between isolated cells and in vivo studies.


In the present report, a chemometrics-assisted second-order kinetic-spectrophotometric method has been developed for determining reducing sugars, glucose, fructose and lactose, in food samples, based on the reaction with hexacyanoferrate, HCF, at 70 °C in alkaline medium. A suitable experimental design helped us to establish the conditions (pH, temperature, and HCF concentration) for optimal sensitivity and selectivity among analytes. Second order data were recorded by measuring the absorbance of unreacted HCF in the spectral range of 370 to 470 nm for five minutes using a diode array. A calibration set of samples was prepared according to a central composite design containing the three sugars for training the algorithms. Validation samples containing only the analytes were prepared for checking the reliability of the algorithms. In this particular system, identical profiles for sample components are obtained in the spectral dimension corresponding to unreacted HCF. Moreover, two kinds of interferents may be present: sample components active in the spectral region at which HCF absorbs as well as potential reducing interferents, causing linear dependence, since they provide identical profiles in spectral dimension to those of the analytes of interest. In the present work, MCR-ALS in the spectral augmentation mode was the only algorithm that could successfully resolve linear dependence. Satisfactory results were obtained by applying MCR-ALS in the spectral augmentation mode in order to achieve a second order advantage for the determination of fructose and glucose in validation samples, in test samples containing the two kinds of interferents and in real food samples, providing LODs of 4.0 and 5.0 mg L−1, respectively. However, bad results were obtained for lactose which may be due to its low sensitivity in the augmented dimension. Good results were also obtained by applying U-PLS/RBL and N-PLS/RBL for determining simultaneously the three sugars in validation samples and in test samples containing only active spectral interferents. Finally, lactose and also, glucose and fructose, were successfully quantified in real milk samples, with LODmin = 1.0 mg L−1, 1.0 mg L−1 and 0.1 mg L−1 and LODmax = 3.5, 3.8 and 4.4 mg L−1, respectively, using UPLS/RBL, and LODmin of 1.3, 1.1 and 0.1 mg L−1 and LODmax of 4.0, 4.3 and 4.9 mg L−1 for lactose, glucose and fructose, respectively, for NPLS/RBL. Results for real samples in all cases were statistically comparable to those obtained by applying a reference method based on HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography).


This work investigates the interplay between fluids and metamorphic recrystallisation in the Austroalpine Dent Blanche Nappe (Western Alps, Italy). This nappe consists of the Arolla and Valpelline Units, respectively dominated by metagranitoids and paraschists with Pre-Alpine to Alpine polymetamorphic history. In the Arolla Unit the Alpine tectonitic to mylonitic foliation anastomoses around weakly deformed bodies preserving the pre-Alpine igneous textures. In the Valpelline Unit, the Alpine structures are concentrated within a narrow shear horizon at the contact with the Arolla Unit, which parallels the pre-Alpine foliation. This contrast in the Alpine deformation between the Arolla and the Valpelline Units suggests heterogeneous fluid distribution in the Dent Blanche system during the Alpine orogeny. The relict (meta)igneous Arolla rocks record a post-magmatic, pre-Alpine stage of amphibolite-facies hydration at relatively low pressure. A deeper crustal origin of the Valpelline Unit than the Arolla Unit can be envisaged due to the presence of high temperature and pressure assemblages (clinopyroxene, garnet, plagioclase, amphibole) in the mafic rocks. In Arolla granitoids igneous plagioclase records two hydration events recorded by aggregates of: (i) pre-Alpine amphibolite-facies andesine + epidote, and (ii) Alpine greenschist-facies albite + epidote. The quartz crystals associated with the altered magmatic plagioclase contain two-phase (liquid + vapour) and three-phase (liquid + vapour + chloride daughter crystals) inclusions. Isochores of the salt-saturated inclusions plot in the andesine + epidote stability field, pointing to pre-Alpine plagioclase alteration in response to infiltration of saline aqueous solutions at amphibolite-facies conditions. Most isochores of the liquid + vapour inclusions plot in the albite + epidote stability field, suggesting entrapment during the lower temperature greenschist-facies hydration of plagioclase. Preferential fluids influx in the Arolla Unit during pre-Alpine amphibolite-facies metamorphism enhanced the reaction softening of plagioclase. Alteration of plagioclase played a major role in promoting the deformation of granitoids during Alpine tectonics.


The speaker in Irene McKinney's poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure.The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney's poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.


The research enquired into undergraduate students' perception of their "learner journey" through the course of their degree, and considers the role they believe Library Services has, will, or should play in this. As librarians become increasingly teaching focused, and information literacy becomes more crucial to employability, it is important to understand how students perceive their learner journey to ensure information literacy instruction aligns with their need for library input both in terms of content and timing.

The research is a qualitative study employing focus groups and a one-to-one interview. Five undergraduate students took part in the research, representing levels four to six of study, and five of the University's seven academic institutes. Drawing on the principles of grounded theory, the data was analysed thematically and by means of constant comparative analysis. Five principal themes were identified: transition to, and preparedness for, university, progression, personal responsibility and engagement, employability, and communication. A narrative interpretation of the research contextualises these responses with regards to the literature and the current higher education environment.

The literature suggests that whilst there is a body of research around librarians' support of students' information literacy development, little prior work has been done specifically on the learner journey. Additionally, what is available either relates primarily to Further Education or approaches the journey in terms of the route taken into study rather than the skills attained once at university. This research addresses this gap in existing research, and concludes that whilst further work remains, it is clear that students do see a role for librarians in their conceptualisation of their learner journeys, and that in the realisation of these journeys Library Services has generally played a positive and supportive role. It is recommended that further cycles of research be carried out, and that Library Services continues its programme of engagement, outreach, and support.