Politicians regularly claim that 3-4 million jobs either 'depend on' or are 'associated with' our membership of the European Union (EU). This is calculated as the number of jobs linked – both directly and indirectly – to exports from the UK to customers and businesses in other EU countries. It is further suggested that the UK leaving the EU would put 3-4 million jobs 'at risk'. Yet these jobs are associated with trade, not membership of a political union. There is no evidence to suggest that trade would substantially reduce between British businesses and European consumers, even if the UK was outside the EU. Even in a hypothetical world where trade completely broke down between the UK and EU, there would still not be the loss of 3-4 million jobs, as 'import substitution' would partially offset the fall in exports and trade would develop with other parts of the world. The worst case scenario would be a failure to negotiate a free trade deal in the result of Brexit. If this were the case, both parties would be bound by the World Trade Organization's 'most favoured nation' (MFN) tariffs paid by other developed countries. This would prevent the imposition of punitive tariffs by the EU following the UK's exit, meaning job losses would not be significant. The UK labour market is incredibly dynamic, and would adapt quickly to changed relationships with the EU. Prior to the financial crisis, the UK saw on average 4 million jobs created and 3.7 million jobs lost each year – i.e. there is substantial churn of jobs at any given time. Indeed, the annual creation and destruction of jobs is almost exactly the same scale as the estimated 3-4 million jobs that are associated with exports to EU actors. A changed relationship with the EU could of course likely change the structure of the economy, so that jobs might not be in exactly the same industries as they are today. There is likely to be a substantial degree of trade diversion and distortion which occurs at the moment due to our membership of a customs union. Ultimately, whether EU membership is a net positive or negative for jobs and prosperity in the UK depends on what policies the UK pursues outside of the EU (in relation to employment regulation, welfare and tax); the way the UK decides to use its saved contribution to the EU budget; and the extent of new trade deals adopted with third parties. For a healthy labour market, liberal economic policies in each of these areas should be pursued. We can say with certainty that 3-4 million jobs are not at risk if the UK leaves the EU. There may well be net job creation or a range of other possible outcomes which should be debated rationally.


A lot of sugarcane clones obtained out of a breeding program started in 1967 was tested in a series of experiments. The experiments were carried out at the IAC Experiment Station, at Piracicaba, on a Ortho Dark Red Latosol soil, and in the property of the mills: Santa Elisa (Sertaozinho, Dusky Red Latosol), Itaiquara (Tapiratiba, Humic Red-Yellow Latosol soil) and Catanduva (Ariranha, Podzolized soils on calcareous sandstone, Marilia variation). The field trials started in 1974, and the commercial varieties 'IAC 52-150', 'IAC 52-326', 'IAC 58-480', 'CB. 41-76' and 'NA 56-79' were used as controls, as they represent about 70% of the sugarcane area in the Sao Paulo State, Brazil. Three harvests were done consecutively in plant cane (18 months), first ratoon (12 months after) and second ratoon (12 months). Statistical analysis were made in a three harvest mean for all experiments. It was found out that clones 67-112, 67-48, 67-145 and 67-122 had a cane yield superior to that of the controls. Clones 67-19, 67-6, 67-14, 67-28, 67-21 and 67-7 were not statistically different from the best control, 'IAC 58-480'. Clone 67-139 had a sugar content superior to the all the other treatments. On the other hand, clone 67-55 had a sugar content similar to that of the three best controls. In sugar yield, clone 67-112 was superior to all the other treatments, except 67-122. This one, as well as clones 67-48, 67-12, 67-47 and 67-145 were not different from the three best controls. Clones 67-12, 67-47, 67-48, 67-55, 67-112, 67-122 and 67-139 were considered as new varieties, receiving the prefix IAC.


The contact angle (α) varies nonlinearly with the soil water content (θg) in water‐repellent soils; however, a quantitative description of such a θg dependence of α is still lacking. Using a dimensionality reduction technique such as dynamic factor analysis (DFA), we managed to identify two common patterns within a scattered data set of α vs. θg measurements performed with the molarity of an ethanol droplet test in 16 soil samples. These two common patterns, derived from the DFA, provided the basis for calibrating a proposed empirical, three‐parameter, linear model that described satisfactorily (R2 > 0.89) an additional α–θg data set used for model validation, from 40 soil samples with organic matter contents spanning from 110 to 650 g kg−1 This offered both scaling and a flexible quantitative description of the soil water content dependence of water repellency.


A new metabolite of cholesterol was found in reaction mixtures containing cholesterol or 4‐cholesten‐3‐one as a substrate and extra‐ or intracellular protein extracts from recombinant Streptomyces lividans and Escherichia coli strains carrying cloned DNA fragments of Streptomyces sp. SA‐COO, the producer of Streptomyces cholesterol oxidase. The new metabolite was identified as 4‐cholesten‐6‐ol‐3‐one based on comparisons of its high‐performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, infrared and proton‐nuclear magnetic resonance spectra with those of an authentic standard. Genetic analyses showed that the enzyme responsible for the production of 4‐cholesten‐6‐ol‐3‐one is cholesterol oxidase encoded by the choA gene. Commercially purified cholesterol oxidase (EC 22.214.171.124.) of a Streptomyces sp., as well as of Brevibacterium sterolicum and a Pseudomonas sp., and a highly purified recombinant Streptomyces cholesterol oxidase were also able to catalyse the 6‐hydroxylation reaction. Hydrogen peroxide accumulating in the reaction mixtures as a consequence of the 3β‐hydroxysteroid oxidase activity of the enzyme was shown to have no role in the formation of the 6‐hydroxylated derivative. We propose a possible scheme of a branched reaction pathway for the concurrent formation of 4‐cholesten‐3‐one and 4‐chotesten‐6‐ol‐3‐one by cholesterol oxidase, and the observed differences in the rate of formation of the 6‐hydroxy‐ketosteroid by the enzymes of different bacterial sources are also discussed.


Silver staining at the electron microscopic level of the nucleolar organizers was carried out on Xenopus laevis oocytes at various stages of oogenesis. The results indicate that a positive reaction takes place exclusively in the dense fibrillar component of the extrachromosomal nucleoli. This constituent undergoes morphological changes of distribution and architecture, which have been correlated with modifications of the transcriptional activity of the nucleoli. When nucleolar activity is reduced, during previtellogenesis, this constituent appears as dense homogeneous spherules well-segregated from the granular component. In contrast, when nucleolar activity is high, during vitellogenesis, it forms an heterogeneous area with an ill-delimited outline: it is organized into a fibrillar core with emerging skein-like strings. It thus seems that this constituent remains silver-stained throughout oogenesis. These findings suggest that the method used would allow one to follow the evolution of the nucleolar organizer region (NOR) topography during oogenesis. Moreover, they point out facts that have relevance to the problem of the correlation between Ag stainability of NORs and nucleolar transcriptional activity.


Abstract Migraine attacks can be accompanied by many different symptoms, some of them appearing within 24 hours before the onset of the headache. In previous work, reduced habituation to an electrical pain stimulus at the head was observed in the pre-ictal phase within 24 hours before the headache attack. Based on these results, this work presents an application to track influence factors on migraine attacks and an Arduino-based control unit which replaces the traditional approach of manual electrical stimulation. The usability of both components of the project was evaluated in separate user studies. Results of the usability study show a good acceptance of the systems with a mean SUS score of 92.4. Additionally, they indicate that the developed control unit may substitute the current manual electrical stimulation. Overall, the designed system allows standardized repeatable measurements and is a first step towards the home-use of a device for establishing a new method for migraine prediction.


Novel radar satellite missions also include sensors operating in X-band at very high resolution. The presented study reports methodologies, algorithms and results on forest assessment utilizing such X-band satellite images, namely from TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed sensors. The proposed procedures cover advanced stereo-radargrammetric and interferometric data processing, as well as image segmentation and image classification. A core methodology is the multi-image matching concept for digital surface modeling based on geometrically constrained matching. Validation of generated surface models is made through comparison with LiDAR data, resulting in a standard deviation height error of less than 2 meters over forest. Image classification of forest regions is then based on X-band backscatter information, a canopy height model and interferometric coherence information yielding a classification accuracy above 90%. Such information is then directly used to extract forest border lines. High resolution X-band sensors deliver imagery that can be used for automatic forest assessment on a large scale.


This information was presented at the 2012 Cornell Nutrition Conference for Feed Manufacturers, organized by the Department of Animal Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. Softcover copies of the entire conference proceedings may be purchased at http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/dm/proceedings_orders.html or by calling (607)255-4285.


Major and minor element compositions of a suite of ferromanganese nodules and crusts dredged from the Mozambique Ridge on the RV Sonne cruise in 2005 are combined with previously published data from both the Mozambique Ridge and adjacent Mozambique Basin, in order to examine the relationship between regional variations in chemical composition and environmental controls on ferromanganese mineralisation. Three principal environmental controls on ferromanganese nodule and crust composition have previously been recognised: primary productivity in the surface waters, the oxygen minimum layer, and the calcium carbonate compensation depth. Of these three, the oxygen minimum layer is identified as having the greatest controlling influence on the composition of the ferromanganese deposits of the Mozambique Ridge and Basin, with primary productivity and the calcium carbonate compensation depth being secondary in importance. As a result, three different mineralisation zones can be defined in the study area: deepwater basin deposits, ridge flank deposits formed below the base of the oxygen minimum layer, and ridge crest deposits formed within the oxygen minimum layer. Nodules and crusts from these different zones display distinct variations in chemistry and mineralisation style.


Descriptive complexity theory is a branch of complexity theory that views the hardness of a problem in terms of the complexity of expressing it in some logical formalism; among the resources considered are the number of object variables, quantifier depth, type, and alternation, sentences length (finite/infinite), etc.
In this field we have studied two problems: (i) expressibility in ∃ SO and (ii) the descriptive complexity of finite abelian groups. Inspired by Fagin's result that NP = ∃SO, we have developed a partial framework to investigate expressibility inside ∃ SO so as to have a finer look into NP. The framework uses combinatorics derived from second-order Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games and the notion of game types. Among the results obtained is that for any k, divisibility by k is not expressible by an ∃SO sentence where (1) each second-order variable has arity at most 2, (2) the first-order part has at most 2 first-order variables, and (3) the first-order part has quantifier depth at most 3.
In the second project we have investigated the descriptive complexity of finite abelian groups. Using Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games we find upper and lower bounds on quantifier depth, quantifier alternations, and number of variables of a first-order sentence that distinguishes two finite abelian groups. Our main results are the following. Let G1 andG2 be a pair of non-isomorphic finite abelian groups, and let m be a number that divides one of the two groups' orders. Then the following hold: (1) there exists a first-order sentence p that distinguishes G1 and G2 such that p is existential, has quantifier depth O(logm), and has at most 5 variables and (2) if p is a sentence that distinguishes G1 and G2 then p must have quantifier depth Ω(log m).
In infinitary model theory we have studied abstract elementary classes. We have defined Galois types over arbitrary subsets of the monster (large enough homogeneous model), have defined a simple notion of splitting, and have proved some properties of this notion such as invariance under isomorphism, monotonicity, reflexivity, existence of non-splitting extensions.


Objectives The association between hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and cardiovascular disease remains uncertain. This study explored long-term hard endpoints (ie, myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke) and all-cause mortality in diabetic patients with chronic HBV infection in Taiwan from 2000 to 2013. Design This study was retrospective, longitudinal and propensity score-matched. Setting Nationwide claims data for the period 2000–2013 were retrieved from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database. Participants The study included 40 162 diabetic patients with chronic HBV infection (HBV cohort) and 40 162 propensity score-matched diabetic patients without HBV infection (control cohort). Chronic HBV infection was identified based on three or more outpatient clinic visits or one hospital admission with a diagnosis of HBV infection. Main outcome measures Primary outcomes were major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE, including myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke), heart failure and all-cause mortality. Results During the median follow-up period of 5.3±3.4 years, the HBV cohort had significantly lower risks of myocardial infarction (adjusted HR (aHR)=0.49; 95% CI 0.42 to 0.56), ischaemic stroke (aHR=0.61; 95% CI 0.56 to 0.67), heart failure (aHR=0.50; 95% CI 0.43 to 0.59) and all-cause mortality (aHR=0.72; 95% CI 0.70 to 0.75) compared with the control cohort. The impact of HBV infection on the sequential risk of MACE was greater in patients with fewer diabetic complications. Conclusions Chronic HBV infection was associated with decreased risk of MACE, heart failure and all-cause mortality in patients with diabetes. Further research is needed to investigate the mechanism underlying these findings.


Most Language Service Providers (LSPs) have implemented some form of project management system. As the LSP grows and diversifies, the system will initially accommodate increased demands, but continued growth will eventually strain the system to its breaking point. At this critical juncture and under tremendous pressure, the LSP must decide whether to modify the existing system, build a new system or consider buying an off-the-shelf solution. A better approach to making such an important decision is to proactively review the project management system periodically, as part of the organization's ongoing evaluation of its processes and procedures. This chapter provides a methodology and specific tools to facilitate this evaluation and improve the LSP's decision-making process.


There is an ongoing debate in criminal justice departments as to whether a person with a JD degree has the education necessary to be a full‐time faculty member. Recently, several authors have argued that a JD should be sufficient and that a PhD should not be required. In this essay I argue otherwise. JD training is not equivalent to PhD training. PhD training provides a background in social science methods, statistical analysis, and theory that JD training does not. The discipline of criminal justice needs to assert control over its credential standards lest others do it for us.


This paper moves from the awareness that companies in the energy sector are increasingly stimulated to deal with the growing societal challenges – like scarcity of resources and high political instability. Hence, companies in this industry are more and more pushed to fit their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy to the pressures of the external contexts. The ways how these companies develop and implement their CSR strategies is however highly diversified, leading to the objectives of this paper. Referring to the Italian context, different configurations of CSR can be identified and classified, when analysing different energy companies that compete in the energy value chain. In details, the goal of this paper is to investigate if a link exists between key features of companies' profile and key dimensions of CSR, thus defining fixed categories of adopted CSR configurations for certain energy companies' profiles. The investigation is carried out through a case study methodology, concerning three Italian energy companies. Data were collected from a documental analysis and from exploratory interviews with CSR mangers and other informants. The investigation highlighted significant differences in terms of CSR configurations considering larger versus smaller enterprises due to the different stakeholders addressed and the different challenges to be faced.


Background: The aim of study was to find out the potential pathogenic role of virulence factors elaborated by strains of vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) isolated from clinical samples and VRE colonizing the gastrointestinal tract of hospitalized patients. Materials and Methods: Enterococci were isolated from various clinical samples and also from fecal specimens of colonized patients at the time of admission, after 48 h and after 5 days of admission. Various virulence determinants were detected by phenotypic tests. Vancomycin susceptibility in enterococci was detected by disc diffusion and agar screen method. Minimum inhibitory concentration was determined by agar dilution method. Results: Out of all the clinical and fecal samples processed, 12.0% isolates were either vancomycin resistant or vancomycin intermediate. Hemagglutinating activity against rabbit red blood cells was seen with 27.8% and 25.0% of clinical and fecal strains, respectively. Slime layer formation was seen with fecal VRE strains (37.5%) when compared to clinical VRE (27.8%). Among the clinical VRE strains the most prolific biofilm producers were Enterococcus. fecalis (92.9%) when compared to Enterococcus. faecium (52.9%). Biofilm formation/(presence of adhesions) was also seen in (29.2%) of the fecal VREs. In wound infection production of gelatinase, deoxyribonuclease (DNase), and caseinase (70.0% each) were the major virulence factors. The predominant virulence factors seen in the blood stream infection were adhesin, and hemolysin (44.4% each) and in catheter induced infection were DNase and adhesins (75.0% each). Adhesin (29.2%), slime layer (37.6%), DNAse (33.3%), gelatinase (25.0%), lipase (20.8%) and caseinase (16.6%) and hemolysin (8.3%) were produced the fecal isolates. Conclusion: An association between adhesin (as detected by biofilm formation) and urinary tract infection, adhesion and hemolysin with BSI, as also between DNase gelatinase & caseinase with wound infection was noted.


Two major mechanisms have been postulated for the arrhythmogenic tendency observed in Brugada Syndrome (BrS): delays in conduction or increased heterogeneities in repolarization. We use a contact mapping system to directly investigate the interacting roles of these two mechanisms in arrhythmogenesis using a genetic murine model for BrS for the first time. Electrograms were obtained from a multielectrode recording array placed against the left ventricle and right ventricle (RV) of spontaneously beating Langendorff-perfused wild type (WT) and Scn5a+/− mouse hearts. Scn5a+/− hearts showed activation waves arriving at the epicardial surface consistent with slowed conduction, which was exacerbated in the presence of flecainide. Lines of conduction block across the RV resulting from premature ventricular beats led to the formation of reentrant circuits and polymorphic ventricular tachycardia. WT hearts showed an inverse relationship between activation times and activation recovery intervals measured at the epicardial surface, which resulted in synchronicity of repolarization times. In contrast, Scn5a+/− hearts, despite having smaller mean activation recovery intervals, demonstrated a greater heterogeneity compared with WT. Isochronal maps showed that their normal activation recovery interval gradients at the epicardial surface were disrupted, leading to heterogeneity in repolarization times. We thus directly demonstrate the initiation of arrhythmia in the RV of Scn5a+/− hearts. This occurs as a result of the combination of repolarization heterogeneities leading to lines of conduction block and unidirectional conduction, with conduction slowing allowing the formation of reentrant circuits. The repolarization heterogeneities may also be responsible for the changing pattern of block, leading to the polymorphic character of the resulting ventricular tachycardia.


Through a close reading of Kim Scott's Benang: from the heart, this thesis
interrogates what whiteness in an Australian colonial context looks like from an
Aboriginal perspective. Its central proposition is that Scott's narrator, Harley,
discovers whiteness as a consequence of discovering his Aboriginality. It suggests
whiteness is imbued with a power that arises through its invisibility and its ability
to racialise and circumscribe non-white others. When this process is reversed, and
whiteness is made visible, its power is diminished. Harley (re)places whiteness
into an Aboriginal paradigm from within which he imagines a syncretic future for
Australia.


'However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all. This is sufficient proof that there is no essential difference within mankind.' (Laws l.29-30) Cicero's The Republic is an impassioned plea for responsible governement written just before the civil war that ended the Roman Republic in a dialogue following Plato. Drawing on Greek political theory, the work embodies the mature reflections of a Roman ex-consul on the nature of political organization, on justice in society, and on the qualities needed in a statesman. Its sequel, The Laws, expounds the influential doctrine of Natural Law, which applies to all mankind, and sets out an ideal code for a reformed Roman Republic, already half in the realm of utopia. This is the first complete English translation of both works for over sixty years and features a lucid Introduction, a Table of Dates, notes on the Roman constitution, and an Index of Names. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.


The Strangways Metamorphic Complex in central Australia is a key terrane in models for the evolution of the Australian continent. The Arunta Complex preserves a long-lived (c. 1700–320 Ma) record of crustal reworking, the drivers of which are the subject of considerable debate. Pressure–temperature data and in situ monazite geochronology constrain the reworking to be coincident with the c.1645 Ma Liebig Orogeny. This suggests that reworking in the Strangways Metamorphic Complex is related to terrane accretion rather than other factors such as anomalous enrichment in high-heat-producing elements or within-plate processes.


A major goal of population genetics is to quantitatively understand variation of genetic polymorphisms among individuals. The aggregated number of genotyped humans is currently on the order of millions of individuals, and existing methods do not scale to data of this size. To solve this problem, we developed TeraStructure, an algorithm to fit Bayesian models of genetic variation in structured human populations on tera-sample-sized data sets (1012 observed genotypes; for example, 1 million individuals at 1 million SNPs). TeraStructure is a scalable approach to Bayesian inference in which subsamples of markers are used to update an estimate of the latent population structure among individuals. We demonstrate that TeraStructure performs as well as existing methods on current globally sampled data, and we show using simulations that TeraStructure continues to be accurate and is the only method that can scale to tera-sample sizes.


The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little support for the argument that differences in market power dictate the geography of downstream processing. Tariffs on processed products may also play only a limited role. The degree of vertical integration varies and appears to be mainly driven by production economics. Market determined processing margins fluctuate, which raises the risks of investing in downstream processing capacity. Policies for downstream processing are discussed based on experiences in four countries: India, Indonesia, Zambia, and Tanzania. In most of these cases, a very limited amount of analysis appears to have been undertaken to design the policies. Results so far seem to indicate that a number of unintended consequences dominate the outcomes.


Abstract During a study of Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis) nesting in eastern Texas, we discovered a single breeding pair of woodpeckers with two simultaneous nests in nest trees that were 24 m apart. Incubation of eggs in each nest tree was at least 13 d and may have been as long as 16 d. The breeding male incubated and fed a nestling in one nest tree and the breeding female incubated and fed a nestling in the other nest tree until the nestlings were ≥24 d old. Prior to fledging, both the breeding male and female were observed feeding both nestlings in both nest trees. The pair successfully fledged the two nestlings, a single fledging from each nest tree, during one nesting cycle. After the nestlings were fledged, both the male and female woodpeckers were observed feeding both fledglings about 350 m from the pair of nest trees. Our observations indicate that there are exceptions to the current theory that the contribution by the breeding male and female to incubation and feeding of nestlings is essential and that neither the male nor the female can normally rear young birds without the contribution of the other.


Local search algorithms for MAX-k-SAT must often explore large regions of mutually connected equal moves, or plateaus, typically by taking random walks through the region. In this paper, we develop a surrogate plateau "gradient" function using a Walsh transform of the objective function. This function gives the mean value of the objective function over localized volumes of the search space.  This information can be used to direct search through plateaus more quickly. The focus of this paper is on demonstrating that formal analysis of search space structure can direct existing algorithms in a more principled manner than random walks.  We show that embedding the gradient computation into a hill-climbing local search for MAX-k-SAT improves its convergence profile.


The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history, and the country felt its impact in many ways. One of those ways was in the expansion of the pension system. The scale of the war left thousands of wounded soldiers in need of care, and a government that recognized its duty to help. In this thesis, I examine the new pension laws that not only benefitted veterans, but also their dependents. Women and children were included within the laws of the ever changing and expanding pension system. This system was not just for white veterans, but also for African-American soldiers who served in the United States Colored Troops. I will further examine how even though lawmakers in Congress meant for the system to be colorblind, black veterans and their dependents faced a great number of additional obstacles when applying for their pensions – obstacles not faced by white veterans. Even if the veteran could afford to make an application, racism within the pension bureau and among the government-appointed doctors created an additional hurdle that could reject a claim, or delay it for months, even years. I conclude that Louis Benecke represented another kind of obstacle – a lawyer who was entrusted by his clients to help them, but instead took advantage of them. Benecke's actions would result in a series of trials that would lead all the way to the Supreme Court – a court whose limited reading of the law favored Benecke. These obstacles were detrimental to veterans and further hindered their ability to create a new life after the war.


DTU Orbit (19/12/2018)  Absorption and refractive index dynamics in waveguide semiconductor electroabsorbers This thesis describes the optical characterization of waveguide semiconductor electroabsorbers with an INGaAsP multiquantum well heterostructure. The investigations have focused on applying the electroabsorbers as electroabsorption modulators or as saturable absorbers. The components have been manufactures with the Danish research council sponsored SCOOP-programme (Semiconductor COmponents for Optical signal Processing) in collaboration with the Danish company GiGA-An Intel Company. The focus of the SCOOP-programme is to develop new semiconductor components for optical signal processing in telecommunication systems.Both the amplitude and phase transfer functions of electroabsorption modulators as function of reverse bias and wavelength, are measured using a heterodyne detection technique. With this information, the bias and wavelength dependent áH-parameter is calculated and so is the electroabsorption modulator response to a 10 Gb/s modulation of the bias. It is concluded that operation close to the absorption edge is advantageous both chirp-wise and with respect to lowering the drive voltage. This however becomes at the expense of a higher insertion loss. A comparison between a component with 10 shallow quantum wells and a component with 5 deep quantum wells shows that the shallow 10 quantum wells component is preferable with respect to chirp, extinction ratio and potentially also the insertion loss. Calculations of the refractive indes change confirms the measurements and show, that the fabricated electroabsorption modulators can generate high quality pulses for optical fiber transmission. The all-optical wavelength conversion and demultiplexing capabilities of the electroabsorbers, when operated as saturable absorbers, are investigated using femtosecond laser pulses in an amplitude and phase sensitive heterodyne pump-probe experiment. It is shown that the absorption can be bleached effectively by optical generation of carriers. The absorption recovery is measured as a function of pump pulse energy and reverse bias applied to the component and it is shown that a 10 ps switching window with 9.6 dB of extinction ratio can be realized. Teh sign of the refractive index change, induced by optical generation of carriers in the active region, is seen to depend both on the optical power and on the reverse bias applied to the saturable absorber. The trends of the observed refractive index dynamics are explained from a combination of band filling and field screening. It is concluded, that for the right bias and wavelength it is possible to wavelength convert into negatively chirped pulses.


The effed of a short-term (hours) shift to low temperature (5°C) and long-term (months) cold hardening on photosynthesis and carbon metabolism was studied in winter rye (Secale cereale 1. cv Musketeer). Cold-hardened plants grown at 5'C exhibited 25% higher in situ COz exchange rates than nonhardened plants grown at 24°C. Cold-hardened plants maintained these high rates throughout the day, in contrast to nonhardened plants, which showed a gradual decline in photosynthesis after 3 h. Associated with the increase in photosynthetic capacity following cold hardening was an increase in ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/ oxygenase and sucrose phosphate synthase activity and 3- to 4-fold increases in the pools of associated metabolites. Leaves of nonhardened plants shifted overnight to 5'C required 9 h in the light at 5°C before maximum rates of photosynthesis were reached. The gradual increase in photosynthesis in leaves shifted to 5'C was correlated with a sharp decline in the 3-phosphoglycerate/triose phosphate ratio and by an increase in the ribulose bisphosphatel 3-phosphoglycerate ratio, indicating the gradual easing of aninor-ganic phosphate-mediated feedback inhibition on photo-synthesis. We suggest that the strong recovery of photosynthesis in winter rye following cold hardening indicates that the buildup of photo- synthetic enzymes, as well as those involved in sucrose synthesis, is an adaptive response that enables these plants to maximize the production of sugars that have both cryoprotective and storage functions that are critical to the performance of these cultivars during over-wintering.


Along with bloom it world so society alive need more bloom and many, so boot rarely everyone allows all manner in fulfill every the alive need. So boot rarely we meet a lot of crime modus in life everyday not with the exception of at unlucky city.
Diverse this crime modus is influenced by situation and condition from executants in do faked report doing an injustice. In this watchfulness is author copes to detect to how efforts that done policeman in faked report doing an injustice investigation, along with obstacles in it.
From this watchfulness result is author finds efforts that done by Polresta unlucky in the effort faked report doing an injustice investigation:
1. Investigation on screen of crime
2. Collect explanation from witness and suspect
While obstacle in faked report doing an injustice investigation:
1. faked report doing an injustice investigation consumes long time:
In defendant faked report doing an injustice handling, can not be processed when only rely on explanation/acknowledgement from be suspected, and when does case concerned with faked report doing an injustice not yet revealed or proved.
2. difficult verification
the difficult case be proved in investigation because actually this case there is no so that investigator must sharper and patient in every proof goods collecting.
the mentioned above related to paragraph 184 KUHAP where mentioned acknowledgement suspected not belong as a means of proof valid.
Tackling from obstacle:
1. Intensify every report or inputs from everyone about everything related to faked report doing an injustice problem
2. Vigilance enhanced new crime modus existence.
Key word: Investigation, faked crime


AUV's came into being in the late 80's. DARPA was the promoter of the technology. To expand their horizons, DARPA created the AUV Conference, a biannual twoday conference. This paper reviews the first 18 years of AUV technology conferences and workshops. The leader of this effort was the IEEEOceanic Engineering Society Technology Program Committee (TPC) Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) Group, headed by Claude P. Brancart. The paradigm is changing. Effective as of OCEANS'08 MTS/IEE Quebec, the new chair of the IEEEOES TPC UUV will be Dr. Hanumant Singh.


From different documentation situation the aim of this study is to investigate the focus of the documentation as well as the communication between preschool teachers and children in these situations. The research questions are: What is the focus of the documentation? What characterizes the communication between the teachers and the children when these teachers at the same time are documenting? To interpret and understand this communication Habermas' concepts of communicative and strategic action are used. Data consists of video observations, where 157 minutes of recordings have been analyzed. 30 children, 1-3 years, and their 7 preschool teachers have participated in the study. The results show that it is mainly children's achievements that are documented and that the preschool teachers either become silent observers or eager advocators of a particular discovery. What is communicated and documented by the teachers have a high degree of abstraction, and the communication is of a strategic character.


Petrarch, a 14th century pioneer of humanistic education, promoted the idea that to study humanities is to study the principles which make us human, and a humanistic education is the education for a moral self. As a humanities teacher, my teaching aims not only at transferring to students the knowledge of the major great works in literary, philosophical, and artistic fields, but more at inspiring students' reflective and critical consciousness towards these great works. In the attempt to find ways of engaging the students in class, I proposed to use films to facilitate the teaching of literary masterpieces and possibly for further use in different humanities courses. After the acquisition of relevant film adaptations of literary masterpieces and the design of new in-class and take-home teaching and learning activities, I discovered that film is not only an effective tool to enliven teaching and learning of literary masterpieces, but also excellent teaching materials for a multitude of Humanities courses such as Gender Studies, Language and Humanities, and special topics in humanities. A collection of useful films for various purposes was built from the funds of this project and several very successful credit-bearing courses were commissioned by the Education Bureau and the Hong Kong Academy of Gifted Education.


A pulse-stream signaling mechanism is described that is analogous to that found in natural neural systems. Previous work has resulted in the development of synthetic neural networks implemented as VLSI devices using pulse streams to represent neural states and a time-chopping technique to implement multiplication by synaptic weights. Synaptic weights are stored on-chip in digital memory. An alternative method for representing synaptic weights is described which uses dynamic storage capacitors to hold the charge proportional to synaptic weight. The capacitive storage devices are refreshed from off-chip digital RAM via a digital-to-analog converter. The presence, absence, and rate of pulse firing of the neuron are used to represent its state. Multiplication of a neuron state by a synaptic weight is performed by modifying the width of individual pulses passing through the synapse. A circuit that performs this function is described. The small synaptic circuit that results allows relatively high levels of integration in comparison to other programmable silicon neural forms.<<ETX>>


Entrepreneurship is a vehicle to improve the quality of life for individuals, families and communities and to sustain growth of the economy and livelihoods improvement. Farm based entrepreneurship has been eclipsed by traditions and cultures as more a way of life rather than a business opportunity based on desired economic gains. Farm based entrepreneurship is driven by farmers who respond to new opportunities related to farm based activities. This study was carried out to assess the entrepreneurial characteristics of smallholder improved trees growers' in Lari District Central Kenya guided by the following
objectives; to assess the entrepreneurial characteristics of smallholder forest farmers, to determine the factors influencing the planting of improved eucalyptus trees and to analyse the relationship between the entrepreneurial characteristics of farmers and their motivation to plant the improved eucalyptus trees. The study applied a survey design. The target population for this study comprised of 2,500 smallholder tree farmers in Lari District. The researcher applied the snowball sampling technique to select the respondents. The sample size was 385 farmers. Structured questionnaire were employed in obtaining primary data for
this study. Data was analysed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics in form of multiple regression. The findings indicated that 87.3% of the respondents were over 36 years old which is the age of investments in assets such as land. 66% of the forest growers were
male dominated as compared with 32.5% females while 46.8% respondents were educated up to secondary school level putting them in good stead for forestry extension and innovation. 66% of the growers operated on less than 2 acres of land which fits in the definition of
smallholder farmers. Probit analysis indicated the p-value 0.01 <0.05 meaning that there is no significant different between the number of trees planted and personality traits. Factor analysis indicates four factors had significant influence on the planting of the improved eucalyptus trees. These were prior knowledge in agro-forestry, skills that makes it work, passion for environmental conservation and availability of ready markets. The multiple regression analysis indicated that the focus on technology opportunities (p<0.05) also presents a new
perspective on how entrepreneurial tree farmers, with fewer cutting-edge technological innovations, can still discover technological opportunities. It is recommended that to stimulate entrepreneurship in tree farming and enhance demand for improved trees varieties training and access to information on availability of the improved varieties needs to be more
entrepreneurs friendly. Further research is recommended in determining the influence of role models in triggering the entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation by tree farmers.


The study examined the stage of clean-up of the Port Lavaca bay sites in Texas, which were polluted during the early 1990's by effluent containing mercury (Hg) from a chloralkali plant. In addition to Hg intoxication through environmental contaminations, human exposure through dietary fish and other seafoods occurred. Bacteria converts inorganic Hg to alkyl organic compounds and subsequently the metal crosses the blood brain barrier thus exerting adverse effects on the fetal developing nervous system. In order to conduct a survey of dietary Hg exposure, blood was collected from pregnant women and those of childbearing age at routine clinic visits at each of three centers in South Texas cities (Galveston, Texas City, Port Lavaca/Victoria, TX). A questionnaire sought dietary and lifestyle information including consumption, sources of fish and other seafoods. A significant number of subjects (119 out of 175, 68%) ate fish caught locally. The blood Hg concentrations (µg L−1) range varied with the location of the study centers: City of Galveston 2.6–62; Texas City 2.8–111.8; and the Port Lavaca areas 3.02–126.7. The concentrations of blood Hg was directly proportional to the number of fish meals consumed for each species considered. Mean blood Hg concentrations for no fish meals per week were: Port Lavaca 4.5 (N = 3), Galveston 4.3 (N = 3), Texas City 3.5 (N = 10). For >3 fish meals per week, the mean blood Hg concentrations were: Port Lavaca, 48.0 (N = 53), Galveston 29.1 (N = 35), Texas City, 36.1 (N = 31). Data show that residues of Hg were still present in 1994 despite the clean-up efforts.


In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling shiftable loads, over multiple users, in smart electrical grids. We approach the problem, which is becoming increasingly pertinent in our present energy-thirsty society, using a novel distributed game-theoretic framework. In our specific instantiation, we consider the scenario when the power system has a local-area Smart Grid subnet comprising of a single power source and multiple customers. The objective of the exercise is to tacitly control the total power consumption of the customers' shiftable loads, so to approach the rigid power budget determined by the power source, but to simultaneously not exceed this threshold. As opposed to the "traditional" paradigm that utilizes a central controller to achieve the load scheduling, we seek to achieve this by pursuing a distributed approach that allows the users1 to make individual decisions by invoking negotiations with other customers. The decisions are essentially of the sort, where the individual users can choose whether they want to be supplied or not. From a modeling perspective, the distributed scheduling problem is formulated as a game, and in particular, a so-called "Potential" game. This game has at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE), and we demonstrate that the NE point is a global optimal point. The solution that we propose, which utilizes the theory of learning automata (LA), permits the total supplied loads to approach the power budget of the subnet once the algorithm has converged to the NE point. The scheduling is achieved by attaching a LA to each customer. The paper discusses the applicability of three different LA schemes, and in particular, the recently-introduced Bayesian learning automata. Numerical results, obtained from testing the schemes on numerous simulated data sets, demonstrate the speed and the accuracy of proposed algorithms in terms of their convergence to the game's NE point.1In this paper, we use the terms "customers" and "users" interchangeably.


The suspension polymn. of styrene in water with hydroxyapatite and calcium carbonate as Pickering emulsifiers and sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate (NaDDBS) and poly(vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) as surfactants was investigated. The adsorption of NaDDBS and PVP at the surface of the solids, the surface tensions of the aq. solns., the interfacial tensions between the aq. solns. and styrene and the contact angles vs. water and styrene, resp., were measured in dependence of the surfactant and the solids concns. In contrast to assumptions in literature, the adsorption equil. was found to be far on the side of desorption. The decrease of surface and interfacial tensions with increasing surfactant concns. esp. in the case of NaDDBS were stronger than expected due to an enhanced dissoln. of the solids caused by the surfactant. The contact angles of the binary systems were measured by the Washburn method. Surprisingly, their abs. values depended on the packing densities of the solids. The theory of Good and Girifalco was used to calc. the interfacial tensions and the contact angle between solids and water in the ternary system solid/water/styrene. For NaDDBS, the contact angle was higher than 90 Deg even at very low surfactant concns., causing unstable suspensions. Therefore, the modulation effect of NaDDBS seems to be very low and developing very slowly due to the slow adsorption process. Also for PVP the contact angle was higher than 90 Deg; however, stable suspensions were obtained. This may be due to the fact that PVP stabilizes polymer suspensions also without any solids and that in such a system the stabilizing effect of solids is of minor importance. In the case of PVP the particle size of polystyrene could be controlled by the PVP concn. and the length of the contact time between PVP and solid.


Abstract : One current venture of the United States Air Force (USAF) is the implementation of the largest ever single-instance of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This project, dubbed Enterprise Combat Support System (ECSS), has the potential to integrate the USAF worldwide supply chain and make transparent the currently cloudy connections between parts, people and processes. Unfortunately, ERP implementations are rife with potential problems and there is no guarantee of successfully implementing ECSS unless the USAF properly manages these problems. One problem area the USAF must manage is ERP education and training. According to the literature, this area is consistently underestimated. In addition, the education and training success factors are hard to identify and none of the reviewed literature contained a synthesis of these factors. The intent of this study is to help overcome this problem by first identifying the potential education and training success factors. Then, using a multiple case study methodology, the study empirically tests how well the identified factors compare to the methods used by companies implementing an ERP system. Finally, the study compares the proposed USAF ECSS end user training plan to these findings to identify potential problems and help develop recommendations for the implementation team.


The United Nations Special Procedures system is a key element of the evolving international framework for human rights protection and promotion. However, despite the system's expansion, the range of roles and functions performed by mandate holders, and the mounting evidence of its strengths and limitations, there has been very little academic interrogation or analysis of Special Procedures. This lacuna is ever-more problematic given the growing profile and effectiveness of the Special Procedures' work, as well as the increasing attention and challenges that they face, both externally from States and internally from within the UN system. Given the current 'state of play' of Special Procedures, it is essential that scholarly attention be focussed upon the system. How does it contribute to international human rights protection? How, when and why does it fail to do so? What steps can and should be taken to address shortcomings both within the system and in terms of the legal and political context within which it operates? Featuring expert contributions from key players within, and expert commentators on, the Special Procedures system, this volume addresses these questions in an in-depth and rigorous scholarly manner.


Singing occurs in nearly every setting of Amish life. It is a sanctioned pleasure that frames all Amish rituals and one that enlivens and sanctifies both routine and special events, from household chores, road trips by buggy, and family prayer to baptisms, youth group gatherings, weddings, and "single girl" sings. But because Amish worship is performed in private homes instead of public churches, few outsiders get the chance to hear Amish people sing. Amish music also remains largely unexplored in the field of ethnomusicology. In Why the Amish Sing, D. Rose Elder introduces readers to the ways that Amish music both reinforces and advances spiritual life, delving deep into the Ausbund, the oldest hymnal in continuous use. This illuminating ethnomusicological study demonstrates how Amish groups in Wayne and Holmes Counties, Ohio - the largest concentration of Amish in the world-sing to praise God and, at the same time, remind themselves of their 450-year history of devotion. Singing instructs Amish children in community ways and unites the group through common participation. As they sing in unison to the weighty words of their ancestors, the Amish confirm their love and support for the community. Their singing delineates their common journey - a journey that demands separation from the world and yielding to God's will. By making school visits, attending worship services and youth sings, and visiting private homes, Elder has been given the rare opportunity to listen to Amish singing in its natural social and familial context. She combines one-on-one interviews with detailed observations of how song provides a window into Amish cultural beliefs, values, and norms.


Medium to long-distance underground ac lines and both short- and long-distance HVdc are frequently integrated into network expansion plans. In conjunction with growing numbers of power-electronic converters in the grid, there is a rising risk related to the effects of harmonic currents. Resonance analysis should therefore be part of power system expansion planning. In this paper, network harmonic modeling and analysis are discussed, in particular, power transformer and power converter frequency models are proposed. Frequency scanning and resonance mode analysis are compared and discussed. The changes in resonance response due to transmission network expansion are drawn. The methods are applied to the investigation of the impact of one link reinforcement, both ac and ac solutions, as well as the impact of the power transformer disconnection. The performed analysis enables finding the resonance location at each studied case. The frequency analysis methods presented in this paper enable forseeing network frequency behavior that is valuable for both network analysis and network expansion planning.


Programming is recognized as one of seven grand challenges in computing education. Decades of research have shown that the major problems novices experience are composition-based---they may know what the individual programming language constructs are, but they do not know how to put them together. Despite this fact, textbooks, educational practice, and programming education research hardly address the issue of teaching the skills needed for systematic development of programs.
 We provide a conceptual framework for incremental program development, called Stepwise Improvement, which unifies best practice in modern software development such as test-driven development and refactoring with the prevailing perspective of programming methodology, stepwise refinement. The conceptual framework enables well-defined characterizations of incremental program development.
 We utilize the conceptual framework to derive a programming process, STREAM, designed specifically for novices. STREAM is a carefully down-scaled version of a full and rich agile software engineering process particularly suited for novices learning object-oriented programming. In using it we hope to achieve two things: to help novice programmers learn faster and better while at the same time laying the foundation for a more thorough treatment of more advanced aspects of software engineering. In this article, two examples demonstrate the application of STREAM.
 The STREAM process has been taught in the introductory programming courses at our universities for the past three years and the results are very encouraging. We report on a small, preliminary study evaluating the learning outcome of teaching STREAM. The study indicates a positive effect on the development of students' process competences.


With the recent shift in Government transport policy, more and more local councils are developing cycling strategies for their districts. However, a significant increase in cycling is not likely if such strategies are implemented in isolation from other council policies and actions. This is particularly a concern in locations where it appears that "providing for cyclists" is being interpreted as just "providing cycle facilities". A number of existing cycling strategies have certainly been fairly limited in both their scope of cycling-specific issues (such as education and promotion) and in their actual implementation. However, to really encourage more cycling, councils also need to seriously review and implement other "sustainable transport-friendly" policies for land use planning, speed limits, general road construction and maintenance, parks & reserves planning, travel demand management, traffic calming, and parking management, to name but a few. This paper discusses some of the pitfalls observed in local council cycling strategies and policies to date. It also identifies other policy areas that have an impact on cycling and suggests practical ways that councils can truly make a difference to encouraging more cycling.


Abstract The rapid transmission of vector map data over the Internet is becoming a bottleneck of spatial data delivery and visualization in web-based environment because of increasing data amount and limited network bandwidth. In order to improve both the transmission and rendering performances of vector spatial data over the Internet, we propose a proxy map server enabling parallel vector data fetching as well as caching to improve the performance of web-based map servers in a dynamic environment. Proxy map server is placed seamlessly anywhere between the client and the final services, intercepting users' requests. It employs an efficient parallelization technique based on spatial proximity and data density in case distributed replica exists for the same spatial data. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is proved at the end of the article by the application of creating map images enriched with earthquake seismic data records.


Abstract Conventional acceleration records do not properly account for the observed coseismic ground displacements, thus leading to an inaccurate definition of the seismic demand needed for the design of flexible (long period) structures. Large coseismic displacements observed during the 27 February 2010 Maule earthquake suggest that this effect should be included in the design of flexible structures by modifying the design ground motions and spectra considered. Consequently, Green's functions are used herein to compute synthetic low‐frequency seismograms that are consistent with the coseismic displacement field obtained from interferometry using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this case, the coseismic displacement field was determined by interfering twenty SAR images of the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS)/PALSAR satellite taken between 12 October 2007 and 28 May 2010. These images cover the region affected by the 2010 M w  8.8 Maule earthquake. Synthetic broadband seismograms are built by superimposing the low‐pass filtered synthetic low‐frequency seismograms with high‐frequency strong‐motion data. The broadband seismograms generated are then consistent with the coseismic displacement field and the high‐frequency content of the earthquake. A sensitivity analysis is performed using three different fault and slip parameters, the rupture velocity, the corner frequency, and the slip rise time. Results show that the optimal corner frequency of the low‐pass filter f c =1/ T c , leads to a trade‐off between acceleration and displacement accuracy. Furthermore, spectral response for long periods, say T ≥8  s, is relatively insensitive to the value of T c , whereas shorter periods are strongly dependent on both the slip rise time and T c . In general, larger displacements consistent with coseismic data are obtained using this technique instead of digitally processing the acceleration ground‐motion records.


Models of gap-phase regeneration in tropical wet forests are based primarily on studies of canopy trees. These paradigms are derived from studies of a small number of species whose life history traits place them easily into "pioneer" or "climax" species. Woody plants of the forest understory, subcanopy trees and shrubs, are known to affect significantly regeneration dynamics in treefall gaps, yet we lack fundamental information on life history characteristics of understory plants that could permit their incorporation into gap regeneration models. We investigated intra- and interspecific variability in early life history characteristics of understory Melastomataceae species of different growth forms and adult distributions from the lowland tropical rain forest at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica. We examined germination patterns in vitro (22 species), effects on germination of passage through birds (5 species), seedling establishment in the field (3 species), and growth in different light environments (8 species). Established seedlings were significantly more abundant in gaps than in nearby under- story sites. This pattern was generally applicable to all melastomes studied, regardless of the habitat where adults were normally most abundant. Seedlings were more common in the root pits and on the root mounds of uprooted trees, even though there was less light available to the seedlings in these microsites than elsewhere in the gaps. In a series of germination trials in vitro, most seeds germinated readily within 1-2 wk. Comparisons of germination rates between seeds collected from bird droppings and seeds extracted from fruits by hand gave varied results. With one exception, seeds of shade-tolerant species germinated more slowly following passage through birds, while seeds from high-light- demanding species germinated more rapidly after passing through birds. Seeds of three common species were sown directly into different microsites within gaps and understory control sites. In contrast to the germination trials, emergence percentages in the field ranged from 4% in understory sites to 21 % in gap centers. Survival after 1 yr was low (0.1%- /0.4%). After 1 yr, these seedlings were small (<2 cm tall) and produced few leaves. In similar light environments in the shade-house, melastome seedling survival was between 80% and 100%, and growth increased with increasing light levels from 2% (corresponding to understory sites) to 20% (small gap centers) of full sun. With the exception of two species common to abandoned pastures and river banks, the species used in the shade-house growth experiments did not show significant increases in growth with increases in light from 20% to 40%. Suites of early life history traits described for tropical tree species are not consistent with the variation in pattern seen within this one family of understory species.


Text predictions play an important role in improving the performance of gaze-based text entry systems. However, visual search, scanning, and selection of text predictions require a shift in the user's attention from the keyboard layout. Hence the spatial positioning of predictions becomes an imperative aspect of the end-user experience. In this work, we investigate the role of spatial positioning by comparing the performance of three different keyboards entailing variable positions for text predictions. The experiment result shows no significant differences in the text entry performance, i.e., displaying suggestions closer to visual fovea did not enhance the text entry rate of participants, however they used more keystrokes and backspace. This implies to the inessential usage of suggestions when it is in the constant visual attention of users, resulting in increased cost of correction. Furthermore, we argue that the fast saccadic eye movements undermines the spatial distance optimization in prediction positioning.


Many children with severe motor disabilities who are unable to speak or have unintelligible speech have reduced educational and social opportunities and "are treated as deaf, as having low intelligence, or are ignored completely" (Stewart and Wilcock, 2000, p.141). Because, as Bodine and Beukerman (1991) affirm, it is less likely for these children to develop or improve their speech in the future and may have difficulty communicating with people in their environment (McDonnell, Hardman, and McDonnell, 2003) assistive technology has been developed to foster their academic success and independence (Bryant, Bryant, and Raskind 1998). The purpose of this article is, by reviewing some of the studies that have been done in this area, to support the idea that assistive technology can improve the life quality of persons with severe motor disabilities.


Aalhus, J. L., López-Campos, Ó., Prieto, N., Rodas-González, A., Dugan, M. E. R., Uttaro, B. and Juárez, M. 2014. Review: Canadian beef grading - Opportunities to identify carcass and meat quality traits valued by consumers. Can. J. Anim. Sci. 94: 545-556. Beef value is in the eye, mouth or mind of the consumer; however, currently, producers are paid on the basis of carcass grade. In general, affluent consumers are becoming more discerning and are willing to pay for both credence and measureable quality differences. The Canadian grading system for youthful carcasses identifies both lean yield and quality attributes, whereas mature carcasses are broadly categorized. Opportunities exist to improve the prediction of lean meat yield and better identify meat quality characteristics in youthful beef, and to obtain additional value from mature carcasses through muscle profiling. Individual carcass identification along with development of database systems like the Beef InfoXchange System (BIXS) will allow a paradigm shift for the industry as traits of economic value can be easily identified to improve marketing value chains. In the near future, developing technologies (e.g., grade cameras, dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, and spectroscopic methods such as near infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging) will be successfully implemented on-line to identify a multitude of carcass and quality traits of growing importance to segments of the consuming population.


IT-business alignment in multi-business-unit firms that have a federated IT structure involves two types of alignment—local alignment and enterprise alignment. Local alignment efforts focus on serving the technology needs of an individual business unit and creating business value from such technology deployments. Enterprise alignment efforts involve coordinating potential economies and efficiencies across business units. In our study of a multi-business-unit company with federated IT governance, we found three components to be key to successful enterprise alignment: (1) Building the capabilities of the shared IT services group so it can provide infrastructure services more reliably and professionally, (2) Introducing opportunities for IT and business managers to collaborate so they can develop mutual trust and understanding, and (3) Creating new mechanisms for business unit leaders to be better informed about IT investment trade-offs and corporate IT leaders to be better informed about the business value of specific shared services. firm work


With the fast development of deep learning, it has become common to learn big neural networks using massive training data. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) is widely adopted to fulfill this task for its efficiency, which is, however, known to suffer from the problem of delayed gradients. That is, when a local worker adds its gradient to the global model, the global model may have been updated by other workers and this gradient becomes "delayed". We propose a novel technology to compensate this delay, so as to make the optimization behavior of ASGD closer to that of sequential SGD. This is achieved by leveraging Taylor expansion of the gradient function and efficient approximation to the Hessian matrix of the loss function. We call the new algorithm Delay Compensated ASGD (DC-ASGD). We evaluated the proposed algorithm on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that DC-ASGD outperforms both synchronous SGD and asynchronous SGD, and nearly approaches the performance of sequential SGD.


Pragmatists subscribe to the view that an individual's practical experiences shape and inform an individual's concept of the law. In Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, one of the legal community's most admired and prolific pragmatists, Judge Richard A. Posner, presents his thoughts on how courts should resolve questions of constitutional law that implicate national security and individual rights. As the relationship between security and liberty remains largely undefined in the post-9/11 world, Posner offers an important and timely perspective on a critical area of constitutional law. His framework is one in which security interests invariably supercede liberty interests in times of crisis. As such, according to Posner, an executive possesses significant authority to respond to national security needs in wartime and despite established rights, the judiciary should commensurately play a limited checking role on relevant executive action, profiling and discrimination of Muslims may be condoned, torture can be used to elicit information from detainees, and an executive may invoke the "law of necessity" to step outside of the "law of the Constitution." This essay uses an element of practical reality -- specifically themes from the acclaimed television series on law enforcement and crime, The Wire -- to challenge each of these conclusions from Not a Suicide Pact. Drawing on those themes, it argues that security and liberty are not locked in a zero sum game, that the judiciary should robustly check executive action especially in these perilous times, that profiling and discrimination of Muslims in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing should be deemed impermissible, that torture is not only inconsistent with American legal obligations but also counterproductive to the war campaign, and finally that the executive is bound by and must not act beyond the Constitution, exigent circumstances and moral positions notwithstanding. The essay thus suggests that the courts should give pause to the direction of constitutional law urged by Posner. Appealing to both law and practical reason, it admits that the law must be flexible in the post-9/11 era, but posits that the law and traditional constitutional norms still must guide and restrain the executive temptation to defend the nation at all costs.


The motion picture industry utilizes a varied collection of more or less formal mechanisms for dealing with the collective nature of audiovisual works, ranging from collective bargaining to legal presumptions. What these instances of copyright workarounds have in common is that they are all about circumventing traditional notions of authorship (the right to be deemed the author of a work) and ownership (the right to exert control over a work). When considered from an international perspective, the cinematographic industry is fertile ground for an exploration of such mechanisms.After a recitation of the Berne Convention, this paper will proceed to discuss countries where the Berne Convention has been applied to audiovisual works with drastically different results: France and the United States. From there it will retrace the history of the so-called Foreign Levies Agreement. This agreement illustrates the collision of the French and American copyright workarounds. It was born from, inter alia, a dispute between the Directors' Guild of America ("DGA"), the Writers' Guild of America ("WGA") and several movie producers upon the collection and distribution of foreign levies to American authors. This study will then discuss the contractual agreements between collective management organizations and guilds, and delineate underlying issues of collective action in this context.


Abstract Why haven't planners and public health professionals worked together consistently throughout the last century? This article puts their relationship in historical perspective, arguing that while the fields have always been connected, the bond has been stronger when upheld by converging theories and commonly perceived problems. Under such a conceptual umbrella, the two fields can collaborate. In this article, I address whether the concept of sprawl is rich enough to foster sustainable, long-term connections between the fields.


We study Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) as a solution of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. As full Bayesian planning is intractable except for special cases, previous work has proposed several approximation methods. However, these were often computationally expensive or limited to Dirichlet priors. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that is fast and of polynomial time for near Bayesian optimal policy with any prior distributions that are not greatly misspecified. Perhaps even more interestingly, the proposed algorithm can naturally avoid being misled by incorrect beliefs, while effectively utilizing useful parts of prior information. It can work well even when an utterly misspecified prior is assigned. In that case, the algorithm will follow PAC-MDP behavior instead, if an existing PACMDP algorithm does so. The proposed algorithm naturally outperformed other algorithms compared with it on a standard benchmark problem.


Regarding the set of all feature attributes in a given database as the universal set, this monograph discusses various nonadditive set functions that describe the interaction among the contributions from feature attributes towards a considered target attribute. Then, the relevant nonlinear integrals are investigated. These integrals can be applied as aggregation tools in information fusion and data mining, such as synthetic evaluation, nonlinear multiregressions, and nonlinear classifications. Some methods of fuzzification are also introduced for nonlinear integrals such that fuzzy data can be treated and fuzzy information is retrievable. The book is suitable as a text for graduate courses in mathematics, computer science, and information science. It is also useful to researchers in the relevant area.


Data Warehouse (DWH) projects bring together different communities of practice to create one body of knowledge and help increase the competitive advantages of companies. In this paper we concentrate on the role of DWH professionals as a spanning community in DWH development projects. We argue that each time DWH professionals engage in a spanning activity towards neighboring communities of practice, representatives from these communities take spanning roles as well. As a result, a brokering situation resides within the social structure created by bridging multiple communities together, building a brokering community. In order to observe the roles of DWH professionals within these brokering situations more closely, we conducted interviews with experienced DWH professionals in two interconnected phases. Based on the results gathered, we argue that the selection of the community's representatives with experience in the boundary communities can improve brokering situations.


Abstract. We describe a method for removing systematic biases of column-averaged dry air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) and CH4 (XCH4) derived from short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) spectra of the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We conduct correlation analyses between the GOSAT biases and simultaneously retrieved auxiliary parameters. We use these correlations to bias correct the GOSAT data, removing these spurious correlations. Data from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) were used as reference values for this regression analysis. To evaluate the effectiveness of this correction method, the uncorrected/corrected GOSAT data were compared to independent XCO2 and XCH4 data derived from aircraft measurements taken for the Comprehensive Observation Network for TRace gases by AIrLiner (CONTRAIL) project, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole observations (HIPPO) program, and the GOSAT validation aircraft observation campaign over Japan. These comparisons demonstrate that the empirically derived bias correction improves the agreement between GOSAT XCO2/XCH4 and the aircraft data. Finally, we present spatial distributions and temporal variations of the derived GOSAT biases.


Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In Greater Good, the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function--and does so democratically. They maintain that people would benefit if the realms of politics and marketing were informed by one another's best principles and practices. Quelch and Jocz lay out the six fundamental characteristics that marketing and democracy share: (1) exchange of value, such as goods, services, and promises, (2) consumption of goods and services, (3) choice in all decisions, (4) free flow of information, (5) active engagement of a majority of individuals, and (6) inclusion of as many people as possible. Without these six traits, both marketing and democracy would fail, and with them, society. Drawing on current and historical examples from economies around the world, this landmark work illuminates marketing's critical role in the development, growth, and governance of societies. It reveals how good marketing practices improve the political process and--in turn--the practice of democracy itself.


Conventional analyses of the MJO tend to produce a repeating cycle, such that any particular feature cannot be unambiguously attributed to the current or previous event. We take advantage of the sporadic nature of the MJO and classify each observed Madden–Julian (MJ) event as either primary, with no immediately preceding MJ event, or successive, which does immediately follow a preceding event. 40% of MJ events are primary events. Precursor features of the primary events can be unambiguously attributed to that event. A suppressed convective anomaly grows and decays in situ over the Indian Ocean, prior to the start of most primary MJ events. An associated mid‐tropospheric temperature anomaly destabilises the atmosphere, leading to the generation of the active MJ event. Hence, primary MJ events appear to be thermodynamically triggered by a previous dry period, although stochastic forcing may also be important. Other theories predict that boundary‐layer convergence, humidity, propagation of dynamical structures around the Equator, sea surface temperatures, and lateral forcing by extratropical transients may all be important in triggering an event. Although precursor signals from these mechanisms are diagnosed from reanalysis and satellite observational data in the successive MJ events, they are all absent in the primary MJ events. Hence, it appears that these apparent precursor signals are part of the MJO once it is established, but do not play a role in the spontaneous generation of the MJO. The most frequent starting location of the primary events is the Indian Ocean, but over half of them start elsewhere, from the maritime continent to the western Pacific. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society


The article focuses on the negotiation of a new labour migration policy in Germany in the years 2011 and 2012, and on the role that actors on both the regional and the European Union levels played in encouraging the introduction of a more open labour migration framework. Up until now, research has highlighted the German use of the European level for introducing more restrictive changes in migration policy. In line with these precedents, during the negotiation of a European policy for admitting highly-skilled migrants, Germany advocated a restrictive framework. However, at the transposition of the EU directive on highly-skilled migrants in national law, the German government used the directive as an opportunity to introduce a paradigm change in labour migration policies, establishing a significantly more open labour migration policy hitherto exclusively associated with Anglo-Saxon countries. The article will analyse the preconditions for this change, assessing the value of the goodness-of-fit approach for understanding processes of Europeanization.


ABSTRACT We report the first genome sequences for six strains of Rhodanobacter species isolated from a variety of soil and subsurface environments. Three of these strains are capable of complete denitrification and three others are not. However, all six strains contain most of the genes required for the respiration of nitrate to gaseous nitrogen. The nondenitrifying members of the genus lack only the gene for nitrate reduction, the first step in the full denitrification pathway. The data suggest that the environmental role of bacteria from the genus Rhodanobacter should be reevaluated.


The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a world-wide, interconnected network of smart physical entities. These physical entities generate a large amount of data in operation, and as the IoT gains momentum in terms of deployment, the combined scale of those data seems destined to continue to grow. Increasingly, applications for the IoT involve analytics. Data analytics is the process of deriving knowledge from data, generating value like actionable insights from them. This article reviews work in the IoT and big data analytics from the perspective of their utility in creating efficient, effective, and innovative applications and services for a wide spectrum of domains. We review the broad vision for the IoT as it is shaped in various communities, examine the application of data analytics across IoT domains, provide a categorisation of analytic approaches, and propose a layered taxonomy from IoT data to analytics. This taxonomy provides us with insights on the appropriateness of analytical techniques, which in turn shapes a survey of enabling technology and infrastructure for IoT analytics. Finally, we look at some tradeoffs for analytics in the IoT that can shape future research.


Abstract This study investigates the effects of 'time to think' and 'ballot box' on willingness-to-pay, while providing the first empirical evidence on assessing the benefits of an air quality improvement program in urban Africa. Our hypothetical referendum scenario proposes to reduce the air pollution related morbidity rate in Douala, Cameroon by 25 per cent in exchange for a one-time surcharge on the electricity bill of each respondent. We find that on average WTP decreases by nearly one-fourth when allocating respondents time to think but markedly increases when we use a 'ballot box' approach allowing respondents to state their willingness privately. Our results suggest that on average households are willing to pay US$0.42 per month (0.2 per cent of household annual income). We conclude that total citywide benefits are unlikely to exceed the costs of implementing such a program at this point, although this situation may change quickly with increasing economic growth.


For over a century, politicians, government officials and scholars in the United States have debated whether corporate tax returns, which are currently subject to broad tax privacy protections, should be publicly accessible. The ongoing global discussion of base erosion and profit shifting by multinational corporations has generated calls for greater tax transparency. Throughout this debate, participants have focused exclusively on the potential reactions of a corporation's managers, shareholders and consumers to a corporation's disclosure of its own tax return information. There is, however, another perspective: how would the ability of a corporation's stakeholders and agents to observe other corporations' tax return information affect the corporation's compliance with the tax law?This Article examines the relationship of corporate tax privacy and tax compliance from this new vantage point, which it terms the "intercorporate perspective." The primary claim of this Article is that corporate tax privacy may limit the pressure to engage in more aggressive tax planning and reporting that corporate tax directors face from significant shareholders, non-tax managers, and even themselves. Specifically, tax privacy provides the government with valuable strategic defenses by restraining the ability of a corporation's stakeholders and agents to engage in benchmarking and reverse engineering, behaviors that would likely cause some tax directors to pursue more aggressive tax planning and reporting. Yet increased public access would also enrich public awareness and debate of corporate tax reform issues, which could motivate legislators to act. The result of this analysis, thus, is not a recommendation that all corporate tax return information should receive tax privacy protections. Rather, this Article offers a set of guidelines, including consideration of the strategic defenses of corporate tax privacy, which will better equip policymakers to evaluate specific proposals to make corporate tax return information public.


Fernando Buzzi's detection of the yelow spot in 1782 passed almost unnoticed, but when Theodor Soemmering became aware of the macula lutea in 1791 and postulated that there was a hole at its center, he triggered long -lasting controversies. He questioned Edme Marriotte's explanation of the blind spot and predicted the collapse of Haller's doctrine on the topography of the visual axis. This invite a short review of the supposed position of the visual axis since the Arabs' Golden Age up the modern-day histological description of the fovea by Heinrich Muller. The ophthalmoscope didn't bring clarification. Indeed, there was neither a hole nor any yelow color in the macular region ! Slowly, the macular yellow enjoyed its rebirth with the observations of Schmidt-Rimpler in 1875 and of Dimmer in 1894, but then Gullstrand started a controversy of Homeric dimensions, denying the existence of a yelow pigments in the retina, initaially between 1902 and 1908 against Schmidt-Rimpler and Dimmer, ans subsequently in 1918 against Votgt, who had shown the macular yelow by ophtalmoscopy in red free light. Nordenson made an attempt to back up Gullstrand, his compatriot, in 1949. but Wald had already proven the existence of lutein in the macula by spectroscopy in 1945, wich opened up the way for the development of instruments and methods to measure xanthophyll content during life, such as Raman spectroscopy, ophthalmo-spectomety and heterochromic flicker photometry (HFP) to investigate correlations between xanthophyll content and senile macular degeneration in our time.


PURPOSE
This prospective magnetic resonance (MR) imaging study investigated the development of symptomatic pars lesions in the lumbar spine of adolescent cricket fast bowlers.

METHODS
Annual MR examinations of the lumbar spine in male fast bowlers (N = 51) and swimmers (N = 20) without a prestudy history of symptomatic back injury were conducted to identify stress-induced pars injuries over 4 and 2 yr periods, respectively.

RESULTS
Symptomatic L4 and L5 pars lesions developed in 11 of 51 and 1 of 51 of the bowlers, respectively. Preexisting L5 lesions were observed in both bowlers (10 of 51) and swimmers (4 of 20). No significant difference existed between the proportion of bowlers and swimmers with preexisting L5 lesions (P = 1.00, Fisher's exact test). In contrast, bowlers had a significantly greater proportion of L4 pars lesions compared with swimmers, with 22% of the bowlers developing L4 injuries during the study, whereas there were no L4 lesions in the swimmers (P = 0.027, Fisher's exact test). The symptomatic L4 lesions in the bowlers developed between 15 and 17 yr of age, and all were unilateral lesions lateralized to the nonbowling-arm side. The MR characteristics of the L4 pars lesions were consistent with a stress fracture through the cortical bone. Of the acquired L4 lesions in the bowlers, 4 of 11 and 7 of 11 developed in individuals with and without preexisting L5 defects, respectively. No significant association existed between the acquired L4 pars lesions and preexisting L5 defects in the bowlers (P = 0.216, Fisher's exact test).

CONCLUSION
Fast bowling was directly associated with the development of symptomatic pars lesions of the lumbar spine, particularly unilateral L4 stress lesions, in a significant proportion of the adolescent bowlers examined in this prospective MR study.


Since policymakers increasingly regard foreign aid as a means to manage international flows of migrants, it is important to obtain accurate empirical evidence on the complex link between aid and migration. Recent research has shown that the impact of foreign assistance on migrant flows is highly heterogeneous across aid categories. In this paper, we focus on a dimension of heterogeneity that has so far not been considered in the literature, namely whether or not the delivery of foreign aid is associated with a transfer of resources to the recipient country. We show in a first step that non‐transferred aid is quantitatively important, accounting for more than 25% of overall aid given by OECD DAC donors in 2016. Running separate gravity‐type regressions for transferred and non‐transferred aid, we then find that transferred aid has a much stronger (negative) impact on migration than the previously used total aid variable that includes the non‐transferred component. As may be expected, non‐transferred aid itself does not appear to affect migrant flows. A high share of non‐transferred aid would therefore be at odds with the donors' stated goal of tackling the root causes of migration.


The role played by the Organization of American States (OAS) as midwife and matron for the promotion of a multidimensional approach to security in the Americas, has been substantially inspired by the effective advocacy of the small states of the Caribbean. Adopted fully in 2002, in the context of hemispheric security, amidst a broader process of conceptualizing global post-Cold War security relations, multidimensional security cooperation between the OAS and the member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is first reviewed in this paper, in terms of its origins and outcomes, and then, explored for its opportunities and outlook. This analysis offers diverse perspectives: extra-regional, intra-regional and institutional/organizational. Extra-regional partners remain committed but concerned. In spite of significant milestone achievements, vulnerabilities, deficiencies, and incapacities persist intra-regionally, which require improved policy governance, strategic guidance, and, operational performance. Finally, the OAS needs to be more integrative and inclusive, in order to sustain the value and volume of its assistance to the CARICOM region amidst severe resource constraints.


This presentation was given at UCT's Open Data Day on 6 March 2020. It covers the challenges and opportunities with regard to the sharing of genomics data.There are limits to what can be shared in terms of genomic data. The actual sequence data consists of a string of 4 letters – DNA. The accompanying data or meta-data such as a phenotype that using the NIH definition is any clinical measurement taken is what will add value and power to any analysis. However, a combination of some phenotypes will make it possible to identify populations and individuals, especially in cases of rare genetic diseases. The more data that is pooled together and analyzed will provide more power to detect minor polygenic differences which are usually linked to non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity, etc. A Data Access Committee (DAC) is comprised of members who are experts in their fields that review applications to access data. If there are 1,000 requests for data, the DAC will have to review each one and the fact that they are experts in their fields, means they have very little spare time. Usually, a DAC has to go through the data request forms to see if they are in line with the data sharing policy for the project, this can be quite tricky as there is no clear cut way of checking so we will have to go through each data request. Hence, there needs to be some way of automating the process for data requests to be evaluated. To address these problems, the GA4GH has created an eco-system of tools and a couple of driver projects, such as CINECA to implement these technologies at scale.Some of the challenges to create an eco-system that is secure and accessible with the right credentials include finding the data on multiple infrastructures around the world.Having the right credentials to be able to log in and request or access data. Harmonizing datasets across various consortia and ethical and legal frameworks that applicable across national boundaries.One of the projects within the GA4GH stable is the tagging of data with data use ontologies that enable data depositors to indicate what sort of research is permissible with the data they submitted, sort of like a cc license for data. Requesters also select various terms for what purpose they intend to use the data for, both are fed to a matching algorithm which then assists the DAC in deciding whether to not to enable access to a dataset. DUO represents one half of a single sign-on framework for automatically granting researchers access to multiple datasets based on their credentials. DUO provides the matching between data use restrictions and intended research use, while the DURI Researcher Identities provide researcher authentication.Another focus of CINECA is the harmonizing of meta-data across the different national cohort initiatives that are part of it. To share data, it needs to be interoperable. Ontologies are structured, the community agreed machine-interpretable representations of knowledge, have a formalized relationship definition to other terms. The richness of the H3Africa data is the meta-data, good standardization would facilitate its reuse with other datasets in the form of meta-analyses where the sample size is vital to ensure that population-based studies are not underpowered.A lot of the tools and technologies being developed for population-based human genomics and cohort analysis which underpin the realization of precision medicine would conform to FAIR standards, where FAIR is not Open Data or Open Science, but as open as possible and as closed as necessary.


Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has grown a lot during the last years. But providing user support for constructing workflows is still problematic. The large number of operators available in current KDD systems makes it difficult for a user to successfully solve her task. Also, workflows can easily reach a huge number of operators (hundreds) and parts of the workflows are applied several times. Therefore, it becomes hard for the user to construct them manually. In addition, workflows are not checked for correctness before execution. Hence, it frequently happens that the execution of the workflow stops with an error after several hours runtime. In this paper we present a solution to these problems. We introduce a knowledge-based representation of Data Mining (DM) workflows as a basis for cooperative-interactive planning. Moreover, we discuss workflow templates, i.e. abstract workflows that can mix executable operators and tasks to be refined later into sub-workflows. This new representation helps users to structure and handle workflows, as it constrains the number of operators that need to be considered. Finally, workflows can be grouped in templates which foster re-use further simplifying DM workflow construction.


In January 1994 a non - government organisation (NGO) in South Africa began to develop a technology course for secondary school pupils in South Africa . The course was originally intended as an enrichment course for pupils on an extra-curricular Saturday school programme . It was to be del i vered to pupils in senior secondary school as a first introduction to technology. It soon became apparent that there was significant interest in implementing the course in schools . There was also · a willingness by industry and by the ministers of education in the new South Africa to support a move into schools . This article will discuss the development of the course framework and highlight some of the aspects affecting technology in South African schoo l s.


This Master's thesis addresses problems in current digital forensic investigations. It proposes
the XIRAF system as a novel approach towards the integration of existing forensic analysis tools using
XML technology. The concept of integrating these tools can be compared to the concept of concurrent
XML hierarchies. The representation of concurrent XML has been widely studied, but concurrent XML
hierarchies cause a variety of unsolved problems when such data has to be queried. Querying concurrent
XML hierarchies has however many practical applications, including digital forensics, question answering,
and multimedia retrieval. This thesis introduces Burkowski axis steps in XPath as a viable solution for the
digital forensics application area. The steps can be used in stand-off XML annotation in which the content
is separated from the annotations. This approach has many advantages over inline annotation, especially in
field of digital forensics. The introduced steps have been implemented in an existing open source XQuery
system called MonetDB/XQuery.