"Impact Investing" is an emerging concept that focuses on developing a common ground between capital investment and philanthropy. This relatively new theory of social entrepreneurialism focuses on creating positive social impacts while also maintaining an economic commitment to investor returns. This innovative concept has been notably championed by Credit Suisse as well as other financially based institutions and NGO's. The purpose of this paper is to explore and address the defining factors within the developing and growing field of Impact Investment. The increased effort by business towards moving beyond standard methods of Corporate Responsibility has resulted in the catalyzed formation of new methods to achieving sustainable business on an international level. This paper will take a look the historical factors that have lead to the standardization of the sustainable development movement that is central to the notion of Impact Investment. From this platform, this paper will attempt to identify the foundation for the Impact Investment field as a concept derived from the fusion of venture capital Core Business models and social impact Philanthropic models. This paper will look to understand various sustainable business models to achieving Impact Investment. Furthermore, collaboration between the public sector and private sector has become viewed as necessary for social, environmental, and economic impact. This paper will take a look at the abilities and skills the public and private sectors can provide to a collaborative effort towards social enterprise in the developing world. Next, this paper will look to identify the major themes within Impact Metrics and the effectiveness of attempting to measure the arbitrary concepts of social and environmental impact. This paper will then discuss the prevalent and complicating challenges Impact Investor actors must realize, address, and overcome to attain impact. Finally, this paper will look towards the future of Impact Investment and the direction it must take to maximize the effectiveness of all defining factors. Impact Investment is an exciting and inspiring business concept that is working to prove that the difference between profit maximization efforts and philanthropy is not as great as once was thought. Brooks 6


Abstract. Construction progress documentation is currently of great interest for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) branch and BIM (Building Information Modeling). Subject of this work is the geometric accuracy assessment of image-based change detection in indoor environments based on a BIM. Line features usually serve well as geodetic references in indoor scenes in order to solve for camera orientation. However, building edges are never perfectly built as planned and often geometrically generalized for BIM compliant representation. As a result, in this approach, line correspondences for image-to-model co-registration are considered as statistically uncertain entities as this is essential for dealing with metric confidences in the field of civil engineering and BIM. We present an estimation model for camera pose refinement which is based on the incidence condition between model edges and corresponding image lines. Geometric accuracies are assigned to the model edges according to the Level of Accuracy (LOA) specification for BIM. The approach is demonstrated in a series of tests using a synthetic image of an indoor BIM. The effects of varying edge detection accuracies on the estimation are investigated as well as the effects of using model edges with different geometric quality by adding Gaussian noise to the synthetic observations, each within 100 simulation runs. The results show that the camera orientation can be improved with the presented estimation model as long as the BIM compliant references meet the conditions of LOA 30 or higher (σ < 7.5 mm).


Abstract Effective social protection is increasingly as essential to supporting affected populations in situations of protracted instability and displacement. Despite the growing use of social protection in these settings, there is comparatively little rigorous research on what works, for whom, and why. This special issue contributes by adding seven high-quality studies that raise substantially our understanding of the role of social protection in fragile contexts and in settings of forced displacement and migration. Together, these studies fill knowledge gaps, help support informed decision-making by policy-makers and practitioners, and demonstrate that impact evaluation and the analysis of social protection in challenging humanitarian settings are possible. The studies provide evidence that design choices in implementation, such as which population to target, choice of transfer modality or which messages are delivered with programmes, can make a substantial difference in the realisation of positive benefits among vulnerable populations. Furthermore, the findings of the studies underline the relevance of tailoring programme components to populations, which may benefit more or less from traditional programme implementation models.


Promoting public safety is a central mandate of government. But despite decades of dramatic improvements, most Americans believe crime is rising—a mysterious pattern that may pervert the criminal justice policymaking process. What explains this disconnect? We test five plausible explanations: survey mismeasurement, extrapolation from local crime conditions, lack of exposure to facts, partisan cues and the racialization of crime. Cross-referencing over a decade of crime records with geolocated polling data and original survey experiments, we show individuals readily update beliefs when presented with accurate crime statistics, but this effect is attenuated when statistics are embedded in a typical crime news article, and confidence in perceptions is diminished when a copartisan elite undermines official statistics. We conclude Americans misperceive crime because of the frequency and manner of encounters with relevant statistics. Our results suggest widespread misperceptions are likely to persist barring foundational changes in Americans' information consumption habits, or elite assistance.


The existence of a vertical age gradient in the Milky Way disc has been indirectly known for long. Here, we measure it directly for the first time with seismic ages, using red giants observed by Kepler. We use Stromgren photometry to gauge the selection function of asteroseismic targets, and derive colour and magnitude limits where giants with measured oscillations are representative of the underlying population in the field. Limits in the 2MASS system are also derived. We lay out a method to assess and correct for target selection effects independent of Galaxy models. We find that low-mass, i. e. old red giants dominate at increasing Galactic heights, whereas closer to the Galactic plane they exhibit a wide range of ages and metallicities. Parametrizing this as a vertical gradient returns approximately 4 Gyr kpc(-1) for the disc we probe, although with a large dispersion of ages at all heights. The ages of stars show a smooth distribution over the last similar or equal to 10 Gyr, consistent with a mostly quiescent evolution for the Milky Way disc since a redshift of about 2. We also find a flat age-metallicity relation for disc stars. Finally, we show how to use secondary clump stars to estimate the present-day intrinsic metallicity spread, and suggest using their number count as a new proxy for tracing the ageing of the disc. This work highlights the power of asteroseismology for Galactic studies; however, we also emphasize the need for better constraints on stellar mass-loss, which is a major source of systematic age uncertainties in red giant stars. (Less)


This paper presents an automated method for preparing digital X-rays for use by a procedural mesh generator. This process will facilitate the generation of a 3D polygon mesh depicting the bones contained within the X-ray image. The process of preparing the image involves identifying and retaining bone elements whilst removing any superfluous aspects contained within the image, such as text and orientation markers. This will allow a virtual podiatric surgical simulator, VirtuOrtho to feature patient specific bone models generated from the processed X-rays. The algorithm additionally employs parallel processing techniques that are capable of utilizing either multi-core CPUs or a GPU to help to reduce the computational time required to process an image. The relative performance of the multi-core CPU implementation will be compared and contrasted to the performance of the GPU version. As part of the image processing algorithm, two GPGPU algorithms for median filter are proposed: a caching method improves upon the fast, small-radius median filter (McGuire, 2008) and a second method which uses a histogram based technique (Huang et al., 1979) to facilitate filters with large-radius masks to be processed using the GPU.


Abstract Thermography is a non-contact, non-invasive technique that detects surface heat emitted as infrared radiation. Because skin temperature reflects the status of underlying tissue metabolism and blood circulation, abnormal thermal patterns can signify areas of superficial inflammation or circulatory impairments (i.e. congestion). In sheep different methods have been adopted to measure udder blood circulation and the effect of cold exposure and lactation on the distribution of blood flow. The effect of milking procedures on udder and teat skin temperature was investigated in cows through thermographic scanning. Thermography results in a very useful tool to evaluate, estimate and differentiate short and longer-term tissue reactions to machine milking. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of working vacuum level on udder and teat temperature changes during milking procedures and the recovery by indirect monitoring of the circulatory impairments of teat tissue via infrared thermography. Two groups of six lactating Sarda ewes were milked experimentally at two vacuum levels (28 and 42 kPa) and same pulsation parameters (120 cycles/min and 60% ratio). Thermographic images (Flir System, ThermaCam P25, sensitivity of 0.08 °C) of posterior udder area (PUA) and teats (teat base – TB; mid teat – MT and teat tip – TT) were taken pre-milking (PM), during milking (M) (only for PUA), and immediately after milking (IAM) up to 2 minutes after milking (AM+). Temperatures were recovered by processing the thermographic images in ThermaCam Researcher Basic 2.8 SR-1 Software (Flir System). The PUA showed a drop of 1°C in both treatments between PM and M. After milking, values did not show remarkable changes. The vacuum level effect on teats temperature results to be different between treatments. Results during IAM indicate a general drop of the teats temperatures and specifically for high vacuum level (from 39.82 to 37.92 °C and from 39.71 to 37.75 °C for low and high vacuum level respectively). During AM+ (monitored up to 60 sec - AM +30; up to 90 sec - AM+60 and up to 120 sec – AM+90) the increase of teat temperatures were different (P<0.05) between vacuum levels (AM+30: 38.12 vs 37.54 °C; AM+60: 38.19 vs 37.96 °C and AM+90: 39.02 vs 38.58 °C for low and high vacuum level respectively). Differences among TB, MT and TT were evident also at AM+90 only for the high vacuum level while in low one, at the same time, it was persistent only the difference between TT and TB. The higher teat temperature for the low vacuum level could be attributable to a faster return to a normal condition of the blood flow in all teat locations. Teat circulation impairments due to milking procedures need further surveys.


Findings from younger patients may not be generalizable to older adults with this condition. Objective: To investigate the evidence from RCTs for the effectiveness of physiotherapeutic interventions on pain and function in older adults with non-specific CLBP. Study group: Studies including older adults (≥65years) with non-specific CLBP of ≥3 month's duration were included. Methods: The Cochrane Back Research Groups' guidelines were used as a methodological template for this systematic review. A literature search of EMBASE, CENTRAL, Medline, AMED, CINAHL and PEDro was performed up to November 2010. Two reviewers assessed the quality of included articles and the evidence for interventions was qualified using the GRADE system. Results: Three moderate quality RCTs were included. They investigated the following: mindfulness meditation, Percutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation [PENS], Exercise, and PENS and Exercise combined. Outcome measures for pain and function were reported for the short and medium-term only. There was limited evidence that compared to control/placebo interventions mindfulness meditation, exercise, and PENS combined with exercise have no effect on pain or function in older adults with non-specific CLBP. There was conflicting evidence that PENS compared to placebo is effective for pain and function. Conclusions: This systematic review identified only three studies that have investigated the effect of physiotherapeutic interventions on older adults with CLBP. There was insufficient research upon which to make firm clinical recommendations. Further research is needed on this severely under investigated and growing clinical population, to guide clinical practice.


The recent rulings of the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization in the China--Raw Materials (1) case have important legal, economic, and policy implications for China and other WTO members. My presentation introduces the special features of this case and discusses its potential impact (or lack thereof) on U.S. downstream industries, using Midwest companies as examples. The discussion seeks to elucidate the complexity confronting the world trading system. THE CHINA--RAW MATERIALS CASE (2) Background China--Raw Materials is a WTO dispute brought by the United States, the European Union, and Mexico against China in 2009. At issue were tariff and nontariff measures adopted by China to restrict the export of nine types of raw materials (bauxite, coke, fluorspar, magnesium, manganese, silicon carbide, silicon metal, yellow phosphorus, and zinc). The complainants challenged these measures as inconsistent with the provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and of China's Accession Protocol (the Protocol). (3) China defended its measures by invoking GATT Article XX(g), which excuses measures relating to the conservation of exhaustible natural resources, and Article XX(b), which allows measures necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health. China's defense was rejected by the WTO judiciary. The WTO judiciary made two key findings. First, it found that China's export duties breached China's obligation to eliminate export duties under Paragraph 11.3 of the Protocol, and that China may not invoke GATT Article XX to justify this breach because there is no textual link between Paragraph 11.3 and the GATT provision. Second, it found that China's export restrictions violated GATT Article XI: 1, which prohibits all quantitative restrictions on imports and exports, and that the violation cannot be excused by the environmental exceptions under Article XX(b) or (g) because China failed to demonstrate that it has similarly restricted domestic consumption. Implications for China's Industrial and Environmental Policies The WTO rulings have serious implications for China's industrial and environmental policies. For years, China has overexploited its natural resources at the expense of environmental degradation and resource depletion. With only limited natural resources, China nonetheless has been exporting raw materials at cut-rate prices, driving out foreign competition and making itself a major supplier to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, rapid industrialization at home has increased domestic demand for raw materials tremendously. Realizing that China badly needs to conserve exhaustible natural resources and protect the environment, but not wanting to hinder development of domestic downstream industries, the government has resorted to export restrictions to reduce foreign consumption without simultaneously curbing domestic consumption. This policy, however, can no longer be pursued. Under the WTO rulings, China must treat domestic and foreign users evenhandedly in the distribution of its resource products. Domestic industries may not be given preference over foreign purchasers with respect to access to China's raw materials. If for whatever reason China is unable to implement proper environmental standards in the production of raw materials, resulting in "subsidization" of its domestic industries with low-priced resources, then it must do the same for foreign buyers, while bearing the consequences of environmental degradation at home. It is important to understand that China's predicament stems from its special commitment to eliminate export duties. Currently, GATT rules prohibit quantitative restrictions on exports, but permit the use of export tariffs. Since tariff and nontariff measures can achieve the same effect of limiting exports, the WTO discipline on export restrictions has been rendered largely ineffective. …


Plasmonic nanostructures, which can confine and manipulate light below the diffraction limit, are becoming increasingly important in many areas of optical physics and devices. One of the areas that can greatly benefit from surface-plasmon mediated confinement of optical fields is the enhancement of emission in low quantum yield materials. The resonant wavelength for plasmonic structures used for emission enhancement is either the excitation or emission wavelengths of the luminescent material. Therefore, a key component in designing plasmonic structures used in luminescent enhancement applications is the ability to engineer and tune plasmonic building blocks to create structures resonant at the desired wavelength. In this thesis, we have used two approaches to build tunable structures for luminescent enhancement: 1) using already synthesized metallic nanocrystals resonant at the desired wavelengths as building blocks, we designed structures that would result in maximum emission enhancement. 2) Designing arrays of plasmonic nanostructures with the help of simulation software to be resonant at the desired wavelength and then fabricating them with top-down nanoscale fabrication techniques. In either approach, the resulting large area structures were macroscopically studied by steady state and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements to quantify the plasmonic effects on enhancement. We were able to achieve high enhancement factors in almost all of the structures and designs. Furthermore, we were able to identify and study various effects that play a role in plasmonic enhancement processes. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Electrical & Systems Engineering First Advisor Cherie R. Kagan


Material Supplemental http://genome.cshlp.org/content/suppl/2013/06/18/gr.153296.112.DC1.html References http://genome.cshlp.org/content/23/8/1258.full.html#ref-list-1 This article cites 54 articles, 18 of which can be accessed free at: Open Access Open Access option. Genome Research Freely available online through the License Commons Creative . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at , is available under a Creative Commons Genome Research This article, published in


And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. -Judges 12: 5-6


We mapped the distributary channel system of the Amazon deep-sea fan using the GLORIA long-range side-scan sonar. Individual channels were continuously traced for distances of up to 150 km. Channel bifurcation, although observed in only a few places, results in many cases from breaching of channel levees on the outsides of meander loops. Whether both channels remain active after branching or the original channel is abandoned by avulsion generally cannot be determined. The most striking channel characteristic is high sinuosity that results in extensive, intricate, often recurving meanders. Cutoffs and abandoned meander loops (oxbows) are observed in a few places. These meandering channels are comparable in size and appearance to those of mature fluvial systems on land, such as on the lower Mississippi River. The formation, maintenance, and modification of such extensive, well-developed meander systems would seem to require large volumes of continuous turbidity flow through the channels for relatively long time periods. This may challenge the traditional concept that channel formation and modification are accomplished by intermittent or sporadic turbidity-current events.


Data obtained from surveillance can underpin public health activities and infection prevention and control programs. This process can be extremely important in the context of continuous quality improvement to demonstrate improved patient outcomes, and can provide reliable data on which to base decisions. Generally, surveillance data allows assessment of the size of the problem, trends over time and can assist with planning and evaluating interventions. For smaller hospitals, the standard (or outcome-based) surveillance method, which is required by the state-run health department's surveillance reporting centre (in the case of Western Australia, Healthcare Infection Surveillance Western Australia), is not suitable. This article describes a short trial of signal infection surveillance at an integrated district hospital in rural Western Australia, an alternative surveillance system for smaller hospitals, which is currently not recognised in Western Australia.


We discuss a novel approach to "weighing" the Milky Way (MW) dark matter halo, one that combines the latest samples of halo stars selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with state of the art numerical simulations of MW analogs. The fully cosmological runs employed in the present study include "Eris," one of the highest resolution hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of a Mvir = 8 × 1011 M☉ late-type spiral, and the dark-matter-only Mvir = 1.7 × 1012 M☉ "Via Lactea II" (VLII) simulation. Eris provides an excellent laboratory for creating mock SDSS samples of tracer halo stars, and we successfully compare their density, velocity anisotropy, and radial velocity dispersion profiles with the observational data. Most mock SDSS realizations show the same "cold veil" recently observed in the distant stellar halo of the MW, with tracers as cold as σlos ≈ 50  km s−1 between 100 and 150 kpc. Controlled experiments based on the integration of the spherical Jeans equation as well as a particle tagging technique applied to VLII show that a "heavy" Mvir ≈ 2 × 1012 M☉ realistic host produces a poor fit to the kinematic SDSS data. We argue that these results offer added evidence for a "light," centrally concentrated MW halo.


Abstract Despite the importance of literacy to employment and social well-being, the literacy rate of the visually impaired and deaf population is estimated to be quite low. Braille, the primary method of reading and writing for the blind, is a tactile system in which embossed dots representing letters and numbers can be read with the fingers. Similarly, the primary method of communication for the deaf is sign language. Sign language simultaneously combines hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a deaf speaker's thoughts. As is the case in spoken language, Braille and sign language can differ from one region to another, but the basic elements of both Braille and sign language remain consistent across cultures. A significant problem in education for both the deaf and visually impaired populations is that they are minority populations and hence often have less guided practice in communication. They also participate in fewer interactions with the larger community that reinforce their literacy and communication skills. Finally, the focus of technological enhancements to education has primarily focused on the majority populations, and hence very few automated tutors and educational computing games have been created for visually impaired and deaf children. Our work aims to remedy this situation by developing assistive technology to enhance education for the visually impaired and deaf populations throughout the world. We have developed several tools including a Braille writing tutor (BWT) and the DeSIGN software application, which provides guided practice for communication using sign language. The BWT is a device that connects to a computer through a USB cable. As the student writes each Braille letter or number, the tutor provides immediate audio feedback by repeating the written characters and guiding writing through audio cues, and a variety of curricular and game modes. The DeSIGN tool aims to increase the reading level of the students who are taught to communicate using sign language by reinforcing the mapping between vocabulary and signs through lessons, tests, and games. It also has an interactive game, which provides teachers with a customizable tool for motivating students.


A contractor's view of RCC dam construction is presented. It begins with the principal construction elements and the challenge created by their interrelationships. Men and equipment selection, and their use are discussed in terms of availability, suitability and cost. Construction success depends upon thorough project evaluation and factors that affect intensity and placement rate. The human factor is developed by considering labor efficiency and the RCC learning curve. Recognizing that every project has a learning curve, what is its impact on cost, schedule and quality? The benefit derived by having an experienced team is clearly shown for projects with relatively short dam-placement durations. Another element to be discussed is design constructibility; what considerations should be given or what questions should be asked during the development of various design details and specifications?


Advanced ovarian cancer (OC) is not curable by surgery alone and chemotherapy is essential for its treatment. Isothiocyanates have been shown to inhibit carcinogen-induced tumorigenesis in animal models, yet no efforts have been made to determine their therapeutic potential in OC. In the present study, we investigated the mechanism of the anti-proliferative and apoptotic activity of benzyl isothiocyanate (BITC) in OC. BITC inhibited the proliferation of OC cells and induced apoptosis in OC cells. Apoptosis was induced by a strong activation of caspase-3 and -9, and cleavage of PARP-1. However, caspase-8 was not activated by BITC. Cytotoxic effects of BITC were reversed by the inhibition caspase-3 and -9 specific inhibitors. BITC showed a concentration dependent decrease in the levels of Bcl-2 with a concomitant increase in Bax levels. In addition, BITC activated proapoptotic signaling by phosphorylation JNK1/2 and p38 while simultaneously inhibiting survival signaling mediated by ERK1/2 and Akt phosphorylation in a dose-dependent manner. While JNK inhibitor SP600125 and p38 inhibitor SB203580, abolished the cytotoxic effect of BITC, MEK inhibitor, PD98059 and PI3 kinase inhibitor, LY294002 failed to show such reversal indicating a critical role played by JNK1/2 and p38 signaling in apoptosis induced by BITC. In summary, our studies demonstrate that BITC inhibits proliferation of OC cells and induces apoptosis via caspase-9 and -3 pathways. BITC inhibits ERK1/2 and Akt survival signaling while simultaneously activating pro-apoptotic p38 and JNK1/2. Therefore, BITC can be potentially developed as a therapeutic agent to treat OC.


The Ganges River Basin is shared by four countries – Bangladesh, China, India and Nepal – and though it lacks a regional basin-level cooperation agreement to facilitate its joint management and address common challenges such as floods and climate change, there are four bilateral agreements on the Ganges River and its tributaries. A number of studies appraising the provisions and implementation of these bilateral agreements are available online, but none assess the degree to which international water law principles have already been integrated into the existing agreements. This paper uses the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UNWC) as a reference point to provide qualitative arguments and insight on the degree to which international water law principles have been mainstreamed. It is envisaged that this paper will help strengthen the existing legal framework for cooperation in the Ganges Basin through improved understanding of international water law principles among stakeholders, and by highlighting gaps and opportunities to mainstream international water law into existing agreements in the Ganges Basin.


Abstract I consider a model of endogenous human capital formation with competitively determined wages in a dynamic setting. In the presence of two distinguishable, but ex ante identical groups of workers, discrimination will be persistent in equilibrium. Using this framework, I then consider the effectiveness of three government policies designed to eliminate this discrimination. I determine the paths that workers will take after a policy is instated as well as how long a policy needs to be in place to guarantee the successful elimination of discrimination. The policies I consider are (1) a hiring subsidy that promotes the hiring of disadvantaged workers to the better job, (2) an investment voucher that defrays the monetary cost of human capital investment, and (3) an equal treatment policy under which firms are required to treat workers equally across groups. I find that all three policies have the potential to eliminate persistent discrimination if certain conditions are met. In a general equilibrium setting, I also address the welfare effects of the three policies for a parametric example.


The present study explored whether particular discrepancies among an individual's self-beliefs, as described by Higgins' (1987) Self-Discrepancy Theory, were differentially related to the two broad situational domains of social anxiety: performance and social interaction anxiety. Fifteen people (4 males) with a primary diagnosis of GSP from Macquarie University's Emotional Health Clinic, and 25 undergraduate psychology students from Macquarie University (8 males) with mean chronological ages of 31.7 and 20.6 years respectively, participated in the study. As predicted, the study found that the 'actual/other:ought/other' self-discrepancy was uniquely related to performance anxiety, the 'actual/own:ought/other' self-discrepancy was uniquely associated with social interaction anxiety, and the 'actual/own:ideal/own' self-discrepancy was uniquely associated with depression. The results are discussed in terms of their unique contribution to Self-Discrepancy Theory research, the current empirical debate regarding the existence of subtypes within social phobia, and their implications for the cognitive models and treatment of social anxiety.


Over the past several decades the design approach to containment of spills has not been consistent resulting in release of hazardous substances into the environment. The increased discovery of environmental contamination from released substances due to inadequate containment designs has produced more interest in these designs from governmental regulators and corporate officers. However, no specific comprehensive environmental regulations presently address requirements for containment, while a potpourri of regulations have produced some fragmented standards. These imprecise regulations have left interpretation and implementation to individual design engineers resulting in inconsistent and sometimes poor design quality. Environmental liabilities have also become a serious concern. Many industries have been faced with costly liabilities for: surface and ground water clean-ups; soil remediation; regulatory fines; legal costs; property damages; and lost production. Additionally, industries may suffer damaged images from adverse publicity. Consistent engineering design standards for secondary containment are required. This document provides recommended design practices for secondary containment that meet environmental regulations, minimize potential safety and environmental liabilities while providing lowest cost to the owner.


Purpose The compound heterozygous mutations in the β subunit of chaperonin containing TCP-1 (CCT), encoded by CCT2, lead to the Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). In this study, a cct2 mutant line of zebrafish was established to investigate the role of CCT2 mutations in LCA in vertebrates. Methods A cct2 mutant zebrafish line was produced using the CRISPR-Cas9 system. Changes in the eyes of developing wild-type and mutant larvae were monitored using microscopy, immunostaining, TUNEL, and EdU assays. Phenotypic rescue of mutant phenotype was investigated by injection of CCT2 RNA into zebrafish embryos. Results The cct2 mutation (L394H-7del) led to the synthesis of a mutated cctβ protein with the L394H replacement and deletion of 7 amino acid residues (positions 395–401). The homozygous cct2-L394H-7del mutant exhibited a small eye phenotype at 2 days post fertilization (dpf) and was embryonically lethal after 5 dpf. In homozygous cct2-L394H-7del mutants, the retinal ganglion cell differentiation was attenuated, retinal cell cycle was affected, and the neural retinal cell death was significantly increased at 2 dpf compared with wild-type. Injection of RNA encoding wild-type human CCTβ rescued the small eye phenotype, reduced retinal cell death, and restored the levels of CCTβ protein and the major client protein Gβ1 that were significantly reduced in the homozygous cct2-L394H-7del mutant compared with wild-type. These results indicate that cct2 plays an essential role in retinal development by regulating the cell cycle. Conclusions The retinal pathology observed in the homozygous cct2-L394H-7del mutants resembles the retinal pathology of human LCA patients.


Background

Standard operating procedures state that police officers should not drive while interacting with their mobile data terminal (MDT) which provides in-vehicle information essential to police work. Such interactions do however occur in practice and represent a potential source of driver distraction. The MDT comprises visual output with manual input via touch screen and keyboard. This study investigated the potential for alternative input and output methods to mitigate driver distraction with specific focus on eye movements.

Method

Nineteen experienced drivers of police vehicles (one female) from the NSW Police Force completed four simulated urban drives. Three drives included a concurrent secondary task: imitation licence plate search using an emulated MDT. Three different interface methods were examined: Visual-Manual, Visual-Voice, and Audio-Voice ("Visual" and "Audio" = output modality; "Manual" and "Voice" = input modality). During each drive, eye movements were recorded using FaceLAB™ (Seeing Machines Ltd, Canberra, ACT). Gaze direction and glances on the MDT were assessed.

Results

The Visual-Voice and Visual-Manual interfaces resulted in a significantly greater number of glances towards the MDT than Audio-Voice or Baseline. The Visual-Manual and Visual-Voice interfaces resulted in significantly more glances to the display than Audio-Voice or Baseline. For longer duration glances (>2s and 1-2s) the Visual-Manual interface resulted in significantly more fixations than Baseline or Audio-Voice. The short duration glances (<1s) were significantly greater for both Visual-Voice and Visual-Manual compared with Baseline and Audio-Voice. There were no significant differences between Baseline and Audio-Voice.

Conclusion

An Audio-Voice interface has the greatest potential to decrease visual distraction to police drivers. However, it is acknowledged that an audio output may have limitations for information presentation compared with visual output. The Visual-Voice interface offers an environment where the capacity to present information is sustained, whilst distraction to the driver is reduced (compared to Visual-Manual) by enabling adaptation of fixation behaviour.


Heterogeneity of heart failure (HF) phenotypes indicates contributions from underlying common polymorphisms. We considered polymorphisms in the β1-adrenergic receptor (β1AR), a β-blocker target, as candidate pharmacogenomic loci. Transfected cells, genotyped human nonfailing and failing ventricles, and a clinical trial were used to ascertain phenotype and mechanism. In nonfailing and failing isolated ventricles, β1-Arg-389 had respective 2.8 ± 0.3- and 4.3 ± 2.1-fold greater agonist-promoted contractility vs. β1-Gly-389, defining enhanced physiologic coupling under relevant conditions of endogenous expression and HF. The β-blocker bucindolol was an inverse agonist in failing Arg, but not Gly, ventricles, without partial agonist activity at either receptor; carvedilol was a genotype-independent neutral antagonist. In transfected cells, bucindolol antagonized agonist-stimulated cAMP, with a greater absolute decrease observed for Arg-389 (435 ± 80 vs. 115 ± 23 fmol per well). Potential pathophysiologic correlates were assessed in a placebo-controlled trial of bucindolol in 1,040 HF patients. No outcome was associated with genotype in the placebo group, indicating little impact on the natural course of HF. However, the Arg-389 homozygotes treated with bucindolol had an age-, sex-, and race-adjusted 38% reduction in mortality (P = 0.03) and 34% reduction in mortality or hospitalization (P = 0.004) vs. placebo. In contrast, Gly-389 carriers had no clinical response to bucindolol compared with placebo. Those with Arg-389 and high baseline norepinephrine levels trended toward improved survival, but no advantage with this allele and exaggerated sympatholysis was identified. We conclude that β1AR-389 variation alters signaling in multiple models and affects the β-blocker therapeutic response in HF and, thus, might be used to individualize treatment of the syndrome.


Outlier detection research is currently focusing on the development of new methods and on improving the computation time for these methods. Evaluation however is rather heuristic, often considering just precision in the top k results or using the area under the ROC curve. These evaluation procedures do not allow for assessment of similarity between methods. Judging the similarity of or correlation between two rankings of outlier scores is an important question in itself but it is also an essential step towards meaningfully building outlier detection ensembles, where this aspect has been completely ignored so far. In this study, our generalized view of evaluation methods allows both to evaluate the performance of existing methods as well as to compare different methods w.r.t. their detection performance. Our new evaluation framework takes into consideration the class imbalance problem and offers new insights on similarity and redundancy of existing outlier detection methods. As a result, the design of effective ensemble methods for outlier detection is considerably enhanced.


Since Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" [Sha48], information theory has found applicability in a wide range of scientific disciplines. Over the past two decades, information theory has reemerged in theoretical computer science as a mathematical tool with applications to streaming algorithms, data structures, communication complexity etc. Properties of mutual information such as additivity and chain rule play an important role in these applications. In this thesis, we apply information theoretic tools to study various problems in complexity theory. These include the study of information complexity and communication complexity [BGPW13a, BGPW13c, BG14], hardness amplification of 2-prover games [BG15], applications of quantum information complexity to the study of quantum communication complexity of disjointness [BGK15] and the use of strong data processing inequalities to analyze communication complexity of distributed statistical estimation [GMN14, BGM16]. Along the way, we also develop several information theoretic tools such as correlated sampling theorems, subadditivity properties of information and quantum information cost etc. which could be of independent interest.


"Diane Arbus: A Chronology" is the closest thing possible to reading a contemporaneous diary by one of the most daring, influential, and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Drawn primarily from Arbuss extensive correspondence with friends, family, and colleagues; personal notebooks; and other unpublished writings, this beautifully produced volume exposes the private thoughts and motivations of an artist whose astonishing vision derived from the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them simply to be. Further rounding out Arbuss life and work are exhaustively researched footnotes that amplify the entire Chronology. A section at the end of the book provides biographies for fifty-five personalities, family members, friends, and colleagues, from Marvin Israel and Lisette Model to Weegee and August Sander. Describing the Chronology in Art in America, Leo Rubinfien noted that Arbus...wrote as well as she photographed, and her letters, where she heard each nuance of her words, were gifts to the people who received them. Once one has been introduced to it, the beauty of her spirit permanently changes and deepens ones understanding of her pictures...The texts in "Diane Arbus: A Chronology" originally appeared in Diane Arbus Revelations. This volume makes this invaluable text available in an accessible, paperback volume for the very first time.


Collaborative communities create popular work with widely recognized brands, such as Wikipedia, Linux, Android, and Firefox. Trademark law can provide protections to members of these communities and the users of their products so that they can rely on the brands to identify the original projects. This Article explores the conflict between collaborative communities and trademark law. While collaborative communities thrive on openness and decentralization, trademark law requires centralized quality control and various formalities. This Article introduces a descriptive taxonomy of "hacks" that collaborative communities have used to try to mitigate the tensions between their values and trademark law. These hacks are supported by a range of examples that illustrate their effectiveness and limitations in practice. Using the recent Wikimedia Trademark Policy as a case study, this Article proposes a public trademark policy for collaborative communities, similar to how Creative Commons serves as a hack for copyright law. Some of the hacks discussed in this Article are largely unprecedented, or may be combined in new ways to improve their effectiveness. As many other types of hacks, the trademark hacks outlined in this Article may ultimately need to be replaced by code that provides a more holistic patch to the identified "bug" in the trademark system.


Recent attention to carbon dioxide emissions is turning to an individual's contribution, which we name as "personal carbon footprint." One step towards solving this issue is to have smart software/calculator that can figure out individual carbon footprint. Such calculators have become more widespread on the internet. However even with similar inputs these calculators can generate varying results, often by as much as several metric tons per annum per individual activity. Overall the calculators lack consistency. Although carbon calculators can promote public awareness on the reduction of carbon emission due to individual's activities, calculators proposed so far cannot determine carbon footprint based on the dynamic behavior of the user or the environment. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Ubiquitous Carbon Footprint Calculation Platform that is customizable and adaptable. Based on the platform, we developed a Ubiquitous Carbon Footprint Calculator application (UCFC) that allows the user to be aware of their personal carbon footprint based on their ubiquitous activity and act accordingly. The major contribution of this paper is the presentation of the quantitative model of the platform along with the entire design and implementation of UCFC system. We also present the results, analysis, and findings of an extensive survey, that have been conducted to find out users' awareness regarding increased carbon footprint, feature requirements, users' expectation and desire to alleviate CO2 emission by using a footprint calculator. The design of UCFC system incorporates the analysis and inference of the survey results.


The theories Si1(α) and Ti1(α) are the analogues of Buss' relativized bounded arithmetic theories in the language where every term is bounded by a polynomial, and thus all definable functions grow linearly in length. For every i, a Σbi+1(α)‐formula TOPi(a), which expresses a form of the total ordering principle, is exhibited that is provable in Si+11 (α), but unprovable in Ti1(α). This is in contrast with the classical situation, where Si+12 is conservative over Ti2 w. r. t. Σbi+1‐sentences. The independence results are proved by translations into propositional logic, and using lower bounds for corresponding propositional proof systems. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)


Abstract. Hydrologic projections are of vital socio-economic importance. However, they are also prone to uncertainty. In order to establish a meaningful range of storylines to support water managers in decision making, we need to reveal the relevant sources of uncertainty. Here, we systematically and extensively investigate uncertainty in hydrologic projections for 605 basins throughout the contiguous US. We show that in the majority of the basins, the sign of change in average annual runoff and discharge timing for the period 2070–2100 compared to 1985–2008 differs among combinations of climate models, hydrologic models, and parameters. Mapping the results revealed that different sources of uncertainty dominate in different regions. Hydrologic model induced uncertainty in the sign of change in mean runoff was related to snow processes and aridity, whereas uncertainty in both mean runoff and discharge timing induced by the climate models was related to disagreement among the models regarding the change in precipitation. Overall, disagreement on the sign of change was more widespread for the mean runoff than for the discharge timing. The results demonstrate the need to define a wide range of quantitative hydrologic storylines, including parameter, hydrologic model, and climate model forcing uncertainty, to support water resource planning.


Background Back pain is a common and costly health problem worldwide. There is yet a lack of consistent methodologies to estimate the economic burden of back pain to society. Objective To systematically evaluate the methodologies used in the published cost of illness (COI) literature for estimating the direct and indirect costs attributed to back pain, and to present a summary of the estimated cost burden. Methods Six electronic databases were searched to identify COI studies of back pain published in English up to February 2021. A total of 1,588 abstracts were screened, and 55 full-text studies were subsequently reviewed. After applying the inclusion criteria, 45 studies pertaining to the direct and indirect costs of back pain were analysed. Results The studies reported data on 15 industrialised countries. The national cost estimates of back pain in 2015 USD ranged from $259 million ($29.1 per capita) in Sweden to $71.6 billion ($868.4 per capita) in Germany. There was high heterogeneity among the studies in terms of the methodologies used for analysis and the resulting costs reported. Most of the studies assessed costs from a societal perspective (n = 29). The magnitude and accuracy of the reported costs were influenced by the case definition of back pain, the source of data used, the cost components included and the analysis method. Among the studies that provided both direct and indirect cost estimates (n = 15), indirect costs resulting from lost or reduced work productivity far outweighed the direct costs. Conclusion Back pain imposes substantial economic burden on society. This review demonstrated that existing published COI studies of back pain used heterogeneous approaches reflecting a lack of consensus on methodology. A standardised methodological approach is required to increase credibility of the findings of COI studies and improve comparison of estimates across studies.


Spontaneous closure of idiopathic full thickness macular hole is a rare case as it occurs in only 3.5% while awaiting vitrectomy surgery. There are few pathologies associated with it such as vitreomacular traction (VMT) and posterior vitreous detachment. We report a case in a 74-year-old man who presented with right eye painless, progressive blurring of vision with idiopathic stage 4 full thickness macular hole which was confirmed on optical coherence tomography. It closed spontaneously after sometimes while waiting for surgery. It is important to monitor closely for the possibility of spontaneous closure based on the optical coherence tomography findings.


Text line segmentation plays a vital role in the overall performance of a document recognition system. In the literature, similar segmentation works for offline handwritten Bangla documents are rarely found. On the other hand, certain peculiarities of handwritten Bangla script such as widespread occurrences of ascenders and descenders or some of its characters appearing only as an ascender or descender often cause unique difficulties to this segmentation task. Existence of connected components over a number of successive text lines is a common phenomenon in unconstrained handwritten Bangla documents. In this article, we propose a novel and efficient approach for text line segmentation where initially, we smudge the input document image, to blur-out white spaces between words, while preserving gaps between consecutive lines. Next, we obtain an initial segmentation scheme by shredding the image based on the white most pixels in between consecutive smudged lines. Multi-line connected components have been taken care of by thinning, and then finding the most probable point of separation in the component. Combining it with the initial segmentation, we obtain the final output. The proposed approach has been evaluated on ICDAR 2013 Handwriting Segmentation Contest dataset of Bangla. The segmentation results show the efficiency of the proposed approach.


Summary
The New Guinea "B" strain of dengue virus has been propagated in mouse brain. Initially, the virus was carried through eight serial intracerebral passages in mice of the dba strain. It produced weakness or paralysis in about 50 per cent of these animals. A sample derived from the fourth passage was transferred to Swiss baby mice after it had been lyophilized for five years. After two passages, the virus was consistently infectious and lethal for 1 to 7 day old baby mice. The lethal titer of infected baby mouse brain was of the order of 10-7 to 10-8. Upon continued serial transfer in baby mice, the virus gradually acquired an increasing capacity for producing paralysis and death in adult mice as well. After a total of 26 passages, the transformation of the virus into a form consistently pathogenic for adult Swiss mice was complete. The titer in such animals then was similar to that in baby mice. Adult mice infected with samples derived from earlier baby mouse passages also supported viral multiplication, but the virus arising in them was qualitatively similar to the virus inoculated in that it was likewise of low-grade pathogenicity for adult mice but invariably lethal for baby mice. The nature of the change in the character of the mouse-adapted virus has been discussed. It is believed that the virus arising in early baby mouse passages consists of two types of particles, one pathogenic for baby mice only, the other for mice of either age, and that the latter gradually replace the former upon continued adaptation to the mouse brain.
Neutralization tests carried out with the mouse-adapted New Guinea "B" strain indicate that it is immunologically identical with the New Guinea "C" and "D" strains and distinct from the Hawaiian type. It is concluded that all known strains of dengue virus belong to one of two separate immunological types.


The sequelae of cardiovascular disease contribute significantly to morbidity and mortality in developed nations. As a class, the statins have been shown to measurably reduce the burden of atherosclerotic illness. However, muscle- and, more recently, nerve-related toxicity have emerged as potential complications leading to treatment withdrawal. Generally, the myopathic signs and symptoms of tenderness, myalgias, cramping and elevated serum creatine kinase (CK) activity are fully reversible after drug discontinuation. Growing evidence suggests that latent or previously minimal symptomatic muscle disease may predispose to the development of myopathy. Less information is available regarding the natural history of the sensorimotor neuropathy, but it appears to be less reversible if large fiber function is clinically manifest. Pathophysiologic clues regarding the potential causes of statin myopathy with or without neuropathy are discussed with particular attention paid to the implications of disrupted mevalonate metabolism. For example, secondary defects in isoprenoid biosynthesis are expected to impair the production of a variety of intermediaries such as dolichols, which are crucial for N-linked glycosylation; geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate, which is necessary for coenzyme Q(10) and G-protein synthesis; farnesyl-pyrophosphate, which facilitates the endoproteolytic cleavage and maturation of prelamin A and modifies B-type lamins and G-proteins; and isopentenylpyrophosphate, which is involved in a nucleoside modification of selenocysteinyl-tRNA and thus indirectly related to the synthesis of all selenoproteins (approximately 35). The nature of statin neuromyotoxicity remains unresolved; however, investigating the cellular corollaries of deranged isoprenoid metabolism may uncover clues that lead to a more complete understanding of the elusive pathophysiology.


Previous research has reported evidence of intergenerational transmission of both neighbourhood status and social and economic outcomes later in life; parents influence where their children live as adults and how well they do later in life in terms of their income. However, interactions between the individual, the childhood family and neighbourhood context and the neighbourhood experiences after leaving the parental home are often overlooked which might bias estimates of neighbourhood effects. It is likely that part of the effects attributed to neighbourhoods, are actually effects of the family in which someone was brought up. This study uses a sibling design to disentangle family and neighbourhood effects on income, and synthetic sibling pairs are used as a control group. The sibling design allows us to separate the effects of childhood family and neighbourhood contexts, but also between childhood neighbourhood effects and effects of the adult neighbourhood experiences. Using data from Swedish registers we show that the neighbourhood effect from both childhood and adult neighbourhood exposure is biased upwards by the influence of the family context. This leads to the conclusion that part of what appeared to be a neighbourhood effect was in fact a lasting family effect. Interestingly, we find that there is a long lasting effect of the family context on income later in life, and that this effect is strong regardless the individual neighbourhood pathway later in life.


BackgroundThe WHO suggests that simplification of the medical abortion regime will contribute to anincreased acceptability of medical abortion, among women as well as providers. It is expectedthat a home-based follow-up after a medical abortion will increase the willingness to opt formedical abortion as well as decrease the workload and service costs in the clinic. This studyprotocol describes an RCT that aims to evaluate the efficacy of home-based self-assessmentafter a medical abortion and the acceptability and feasibility of the intervention in a lowresourcesetting.Method/DesignThe study is a randomised, controlled, non-superiority trial that will evaluate the effectivenessand acceptability of self-assessment using a low-sensitivity pregnancy test and a checklist twoweeks after medical abortion. Women screened to participate in the study are those withunwanted pregnancies and gestational ages equal to or less than nine weeks. Eligible womenrandomised to the self-assessment group will use the low-sensitivity pregnancy test and thechecklist at home, while the women in the clinic follow-up group will return to the clinic forroutine follow-up carried out by a doctor. To ensure feasibility of the self-assessmentintervention an adaption phase took place at the selected study sites before study initiation.This was to optimise and tailor-make the intervention and the study procedures and resultedin the development of a pictorial instruction sheet for how to use the low-sensitivitypregnancy test and the checklist of danger signs after a medical abortion.DiscussionIn this paper, we will describe the study protocol for a randomised control trial investigatingthe efficacy of simplified follow-up in terms of home-based self-assessment, two weeks aftera medical abortion. Moreover, a description of the adaptation phase is included for a betterunderstanding of the implementation of the intervention in a setting where literacy is low andthe road-connections are poor.Trial registrationClinicaltrials.gov (No. NCT01827995)


This qualitative research was to describe the language development of children who indicated speech delay and to find out what factors make these children delay in speech. The data were got from a depth-observation of three children indicating speech delay; 4 and 6 years old children of the first writer's, and a 3 year- old-child of the writer's friend's. The observation was done since the children were indicating speech delay until November 2019. Besides, an open-ended interview was also administered with the mother of the youngest subject. The data were analyzed by using the normal pattern of children's speech development by Blum and Baron (1997) and main possible factors of speech delay as presented by Shetty (2012). This research found that the subjects experienced speech delay at the ages of 1 year. However, the development of speaking started to increase at the age of 3. Some factors that caused the condition to the subjects were maturation delay, developmental expressive aphasia, bilingualism, and social deprivation.


Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the case of verbal irony, there exists some debate concerning how these prosodic features manifest themselves in conversation. A form-function approach can provide a valuable tool for understanding speakers' varied vocal strategies in this domain. Here I describe several ways conversationalists employ prosodic contrasts, laughter, and other speech characteristics in their attempts to communicate effectively and efficiently. The presented examples, culled from spontaneous conversation recordings, reveal just a small sample of the enormous variation in delivery styles speakers adopt when communicating with ironic language.


The expansion of sex work (or harvat in Cebu) in the Philippines has surfaced transgender (TG) escorts and online-based sex workers (SWs), who are generally exposed to health risks such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), HIV/AIDS. Recent Philippine Integrated HIV Behavioral and Serological Surveillance (IHBSS) 2011 showed Cebu City having the second highest HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men (MSM) (i.e. 4.7 percent); which TG women are included. Due to the lack of social recognition of TG women, combined with the stigmatisation of SWs, this leads to discrimination, violence and health risks among TG women SWs. Hence, it is important to look at their gender identity and self-description; context and nature of sex work involvement; and their perceived/experienced occupational risks. The method used was face-to-face in-depth interviews with fifteen (15) TG women SWs in Cebu City as identified by the researcher. Content analysis was used for qualitative analysis of transcribed interviews. The findings revealed that TG women SWs do not necessarily identify themselves as TG but see themselves as women expressed in different modalities, but commonly undergoing body modifications (i.e. hormone pills, collagen injections). Economic benefits and sexual enjoyment gained are the main motivations for TG women SWs, which is related to greater preference for foreigner clients and "versatile" sexual role. Escorting has the most economic benefits, followed by online chatting and online harvat. Lastly, there were lesser experiences of occupational risks (i.e. health, abuse, legal) than what they perceived. The study concludes that perceived/experienced risks associated with sex work are not merely occupational, but are also behavioural and gender-based. As such, sexual behaviour and not their occupation as SWs make TG women at risk to STIs, HIV/AIDS. Hence, HIV education and prevention strategies should be client-specific to address health needs of the general TG women population.


Events of the Summer 2018 brought the long running sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church back onto the front pages, highlighting the role of diocesan bishops in covering up the scandal and enabling abusers. In response to these developments, the Church is again considering reforms to protect victims and punish abusers and enablers. This article proposes that the Church create a system for laity to anonymously report allegations, enact strong protections for whistleblowers, and impose a mandatory whistleblowing requirement on priests. As a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report demonstrates, however, the laity was reporting the abuse to the Church but the hierarchy buried those reports in secret files. The ultimate problem thus is not so much the lack of reporting, as it was the lack of action after the report. Accordingly, the article's principal proposal is the creation of both diocesan and national disciplinary bodies led by expert lay members as the ultimate authorities in sex abuse cases. The proposal draws an analogy between these bodies and corporate audit committees and argues that a number of aspects of how audit committees function can be usefully adapted to the proposed review bodies.


In many African countries accurate and reliable identification of poached wildlife products like carcasses or meat presents a big problem when morphological characters such as skin hair or bones are missing. We describe a molecular based approach that has a potential of serving as a forensic tool in game meat identification in Africa. A mitochondial DNA marker (mt700) and one restriction enzyme, Rsa1 were used in the PCR-RFLP species identification of game meat obtained from two National Parks in Tanzania. Species-specific reference DNA fragment patterns were obtained using fresh meat from ten wildlife and four domesticated species. All species except the zebra, produced unique monomorphic RFLP patterns. Collectively, these patterns demonstrate the potential ability of genetic techniques for discriminating between and among wildlife and domestic species. The reference PCR-RFLP fragments enabled species identification of about 79% of unknown meat samples. In addition, sex was also assigned to all of the samples following successful amplification of gender-specific, SRY and ZFY/X, chromosomal domains. Although the present study has been conducted on a limited range both in numbers and genetic diversity of wildlife species present in Africa, the results demonstrate the potential usefulness of the DNA approach in wildlife forensics in the continent.


ii Abstract The roasting of coffee is a complex process and it takes years of experience to be able to produce a quality cup of coffee (as well as consistently reproducing the same quality coffee). Although there are various factors that can influence the final taste of coffee, from the green bean processing method to the roasting equipment used, the most crucial part in coffee flavour development is the roasting process. Even the highest quality green coffee beans can be spoiled with improper roasting procedures. No set rules exist to produce a specific roast of coffee and roasting techniques differ from roaster to roaster. It is the objective of this study to model the roasting process for the purpose of system optimisation and control. The usefulness of the model to be implemented to predict the quality of the final roasted coffee (in other words the degree of roast) was also considered. In order to model the roasting process, the heat and mass transfer that take place during roasting were investigated and further quantified by means of heat and mass transfer models. Three heat and mass transfer models were identified from literature to be able to adequately model the moisture content and temperature of the beans during roasting. From these models, the roasting process was modelled and the predicted roast profiles were obtained. For model validation, several experimental roasting procedures are conducted. A comparison between the experimental and modelled results (for the 9.09 wt% green beans) showed that all three proposed models could predict the roast profiles fairly well, with some deviations occurring with prolonged roasting times. However, all three moisture loss models consistently overestimated the moisture loss that occurs during roasting, which improved somewhat for the longer roasting times. Two of the proposed models were found to be very sensitive for the higher initial moisture contents, where the predicted roast profiles showed higher overestimations than with the normal green coffee beans. The third model performed fairly similar with all initial moisture contents and no adverse reactions (such as the significant levels of overestimation seen with the other two models) to the increased moisture content could be observed. All three moisture loss models still showed a degree of overestimation of the moisture content during a roast. The degree of roast of the roasted coffee beans was determined from the final moisture content, the roast loss percentage (which includes moisture loss, volatile release and dry matter) and the progression of the roast. It was found that some defining roasting characteristics of the coffee beans (referred to as the first and second crack) consistently occurred at the same temperatures, with the first crack occurring at about 175 to 180 °C, and the second crack occurring at temperatures above 200 °C. From this, it was concluded that a


Addressing the diminished understanding of the value of security on the executive side and a lack of good business processes on the security side, Security Strategy: From Requirements to Reality explains how to select, develop, and deploy the security strategy best suited to your organization. It clarifies the purpose and place of strategy in an information security program and arms security managers and practitioners with a set of security tactics to support the implementation of strategic planning initiatives, goals, and objectives. The book focuses on security strategy planning and execution to provide a clear and comprehensive look at the structures and tools needed to build a security program that enables and enhances business processes. Divided into two parts, the first part considers business strategy and the second part details specific tactics. The information in both sections will help security practitioners and mangers develop a viable synergy that will allow security to take its place as a valued partner and contributor to the success and profitability of the enterprise. Confusing strategies and tactics all too often keep organizations from properly implementing an effective information protection strategy. This versatile reference presents information in a way that makes it accessible and applicable to organizations of all sizes. Complete with checklists of the physical security requirements that organizations should consider when evaluating or designing facilities, it provides the tools and understanding to enable your company to achieve the operational efficiencies, cost reductions, and brand enhancements that are possible when an effective security strategy is put into action.


This archive contains the prints held in the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers diploma print collection dating back to its conception in 1880. The collection consists of prints donated by members upon their election to the society, and as such, contains examples that reflect aesthetic and technical trends in printmaking from 1880 to the present day.

The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, originally known as the Society of Painter-Etchers, was established in 1880 by Francis Seymour Haden who was one of the most renowned British etchers of the time.

The society was set up in response to grievances felt by artists who used print as an expressive medium but were excluded from the Royal Academy which limited its members to painters, sculptors and architects. Original printmakers however, were excluded because their medium was seen to be primarily reproductive, used by artisans whose greatest achievement was 'in translating - with as little loss as possible - the beauties of 'Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.' Although in 1853 the Royal Academy had created a new class of Academician Engravers and Associate Engravers to honour those who reproduced the work of the painters, there was no recognition of the work of the original etcher.

As observed by Hopkinson, there were a number of reasons for this. These included a perception that original etchers of the time such as Barry, Blake and his followers were 'rebels'. That caricaturists, were seen as below the salt while print based artists from the Norwich School and Scots, such as Wilkie and Geddes were seen as 'provincials.'

It was Haden's wish to form a society that recognised and promoted artists who produced "original" and creative etchings.

This research project was funded by an award from the AHRC in 2006: 'Creating an on-line interactive database to aid research into historic printmaking processes and techniques'


Background and Objectives A prospective, double-blind, randomized, and controlled trial was conducted in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA) to evaluate the efficacy of infrared low-power Gallium-Arsenide (Ga-As) laser therapy (LPLT) and compared two different laser therapy regimes. Study Design/Materials and Methods Ninety patients were randomly assigned to three treatment groups by one of the nontreating authors by drawing 1 of 90 envelopes labeled A (Group I: actual LPLT consisted of 5 minutes, 3 J total dose + exercise; 30 patients), B (Group II: actual LPLT consisted of 3 minutes, 2 J total dose + exercise; 30 patients), and C (Group III: placebo laser group + exercise; 30 patients). All patients received a total of 10 treatments, and exercise therapy program was continued during study (14 weeks). Subjects, physician, and data analysts were unaware of the code for active or placebo laser until the data analysis was complete. All patients were evaluated with respect to pain, degree of active knee flexion, duration of morning stiffness, painless walking distance and duration, and the Western Ontario and Mc Master Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) at week 0, 6, 10, and 14. Results Statistically significant improvements were indicated in respect to all parameters such as pain, function, and quality of life (QoL) measures in the post-therapy period compared to pre-therapy in both active laser groups (P < 0.01). Improvements in all parameters of the Group I and in parameters, such as pain and WOMAC of the Group II, were more statistically significant when compared with placebo laser group P < 0.05). Conclusions Our study demonstrated that applications of LPLT in different dose and duration have not affected results and both therapy regimes were a safe and effective method in treatment of knee OA. Lasers Surg. Med. 33:330-338, 2003. © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc. ACTION OF 904 NM DIODE LASER IN ORTHOPAEDICS AND


Approximations to Gaussian processes based on inducing variables, combined with variational inference techniques, enable state-of-the-art sparse approaches to infer GPs at scale through mini batch-based learning. In this work, we address one limitation of sparse GPs, which is due to the challenge in dealing with a large number of inducing variables without imposing a special structure on the inducing inputs. In particular, we introduce a novel hierarchical prior, which imposes sparsity on the set of inducing variables. We treat our model variationally, and we experimentally show considerable computational gains compared to standard sparse GPs when sparsity on the inducing variables is realized considering the nearest inducing inputs of a random mini-batch of the data. We perform an extensive experimental validation that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art. Our approach enables the possibility to use sparse GPs using a large number of inducing points without incurring a prohibitive computational cost.


To debunk the myth of how cooperation can emerge through the competition induced by Evolutionary Computation, this dissertation, inspired by nature, presents a new route to reach the evolution of cooperation in computational settings. The inspiration is drawn from multilevel selection theory in biology. This theory is an extension of the well-known group selection theory, which explains the evolution of cooperation by considering selection taking place both within and between groups. Although within-group selection encourages individuals to compete, between-group selection posits competition between groups, which leads to cooperation within groups. The concept of individuals and group are relative: groups can be regarded as individuals on a higher level; therefore, multilevel selection claims that selection should take place on every level of this hierarchical structure. -- Indeed, our biological world is hierarchically organized. However, most multilevel selection models in the literature take this hierarchical structure as given. The biological hierarchy, however, has developed gradually: simpler, smaller components appear before more complex, composite systems. Therefore, the new computational multilevel selection model we propose defines a bottom-up process, where entities on new levels are created with the help of a cooperation operator under the guidance of predefined reaction rules. Hence, new entities are able to possess different genotypic or phenotypic traits than their constituents. Evolution is performed on each level to optimize the traits of the entities on that level. Selection pressure from higher levels forces entities on lower levels to cooperate. Between-level selection determines which level to select and controls the growth of the hierarchy. As a result of these features, the model shows an emergent property: the appropriate structure required reaching a predefined cooperative goal, i.e., the number of individuals and the role each individual playing in the cooperation, are automatically developed during evolution. -- After introducing the model, we first experimentally evaluate the feasibility of our proposed multilevel selection model in achieving the evolution of cooperation on the N-player Prisoner's Dilemma (NPD) game. We further explore the transition ability of our model by using division of labor as an example. Our findings reveal that cooperation emerges and persists more easily in this model than in other models from the literature. In fact, the between-group selection is strong enough to ensure groups with all required skills emerging from a population of independent individuals, no matter whether the skills are equally rewarded or not. Next, we validate the cooperation and problem decomposition capability of this model in solving decomposable problems. Two case studies are performed on string covering problems and multi-class classification problems, respectively. The experiment results show that our model evolves faster and finds more accurate solutions than other cooperative evolutionary algorithms. More importantly, problem decomposition emerges through evolution without human intervention. -- The thesis concludes with a discussion of achievements and further work building on our results.


The United Nations is a vital part of the international order. Yet this book argues that the greatest contribution of the UN is not what it has achieved (improvements in health and economic development, for example) or avoided (global war, say, or the use of weapons of mass destruction). It is, instead, the process through which the UN has transformed the structure of international law to expand the range and depth of subjects covered by treaties. This handbook offers the first sustained analysis of the UN as a forum in which and an institution through which treaties are negotiated and implemented. Chapters are written by authors from different fields, including academics and practitioners; lawyers and specialists from other social sciences (international relations, history, and science); professionals with an established reputation in the field; younger researchers and diplomats involved in the negotiation of multilateral treaties; and scholars with a broader view on the issues involved. The volume thus provides unique insights into UN treaty-making. Through the thematic and technical parts, it also offers a lens through which to view challenges lying ahead and the possibilities and limitations of this understudied aspect of international law and relations.


The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy is a highly original and radical critique of contemporary moral theory. Paul Johnston demonstrates that much recent moral philosophy is confused about the fundamental issue of whether there are correct moral judgements. He shows that the standard modern approaches to ethics cannot justify - or even make much sense of - traditional moral beliefs. Applied rigorously, these approaches suggest that we should reject ethics as a set of outdated and misguided claims. Rather than facing up to this conclusion, most recent moral philosophy consists of attempts to find some ways of preserving moral beliefs. This places a contradiction at the heart of moral philosophy. As a resilt it is often impossible to tell whether a contemporary philosopher ultimately rejects or endorses the idea of objective right and wrong. On the basis of a Wittgenstein approach Paul Johnston puts forward an alternative account of ethics that avoids this contradiction and recognises that the central issues of ethics cannot be resolved by conceptual analysis. He then uses this account to highlight the contradictions of important contemporary moral theorists such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor.


PURPOSE
Patient setup in SBRT treatments typically involves specialized immobilization devices to mitigate the greater risk of target under-dosing due to inter-fraction positional differences. However there is little evidence of their necessity for prostate treatments. Here we evaluate for prostate SBRT treatments the potential consequences of inter-fraction motion on biologically effective doses to prostate and normal tissue.

METHODS
The original planning scan and daily CBCT scans for a patient treated with conventional prostate radiotherapy were used as simulated phantoms for this study. On the patient's original planning scan, a 2 Gy/fx VMAT plan was created in accordance with RTOG 0938. The plan was then transferred to each daily CBCT and recalculated to represent a daily "delivered" dose. BEDs for rectum, bladder and prostate were calculated for each day and summed to a full-course BED. The plan was then renormalized into hypofractionated (4.3Gy) and SBRT (7.25Gy) plans and recalculated on each CBCT. For the hypothetical SBRT and hypofractionation courses, each CBCT was viewed as a possible setup scan during the course of treatment. As such, all possible full-course BEDs for each tissue were found by selecting all possible combinations of 12 treatment days from 44 for the hypofractionated plan, and all possible combinations of 5 treatment days for the SBRT plan.

RESULTS
Conventional treatment delivered a prostate dose of 159.3Gy over 44 fractions, versus an average of 175.1Gy and 182.2Gy over all possible hypofractionated and SBRT courses respectively. Conventional rectal doses were 80.8Gy, versus an average of 68.1Gy for hypofractionation and 61.8Gy for SBRT.

CONCLUSION
For every possible combination of fractions, SBRT rectal and bladder doses proved lower than their conventional counterparts, while prostate doses increased and remained consistent for all combinations. Intra-fraction motion notwithstanding, it appears that conventional immobilization techniques are sufficient for high dose per fraction treatments.


A liquid diet solidified with an acrylamide-acrylate polymer gelling agent (Water-Lock) was compared with a standard meat diet for rearing screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax (Coquerel), larvae. Size and yield of larvae reared on gel diet were equal to, or greater than, those of larvae reared on meat diet. Duration of larval development was increased by ca. 13 h on gel diet; however, variability of pupal weight and larval survival over generations were reduced when gel diet was used. Larval size was also more uniform over the 3-d period when larvae leave the rearing medium to pupate (crawl-off). Gelled diet was more uniform over time than meat diet. In addition, gelled diet was easier to use, less objectionable to workers, and less expensive than meat diet.


Distributed source coding (DSC) has recently been considered as an efficient approach to data compression in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Using this coding method multiple sensor nodes compress their correlated observations without inter-node communications. Therefore energy and bandwidth can be efficiently saved. In this paper, we investigate a random-binning based DSC scheme for remote source estimation in WSN and its performance of estimated signal to distortion ratio (SDR). With the introduction of a detailed power consumption model for wireless sensor communications, we quantitatively analyze the overall network energy consumption of the DSC scheme. We further propose a novel energy-aware transmission protocol for the DSC scheme, which flexibly optimizes the DSC performance in terms of either SDR or energy consumption, by adapting the source coding and transmission parameters to the network conditions. Simulations validate the energy efficiency of the proposed adaptive transmission protocol.


This paper analyses the returns to education of specific occupations in Canada. The purpose is to scrutinize whether and in how far academic and vocational education do differ in monetary benefits regarding individual returns. Therefore, two different methodologies of calculation are used to compute the concrete returns to education. As a result it is shown empirically that within the here selected occupational groups (e.g. librarians and electricians) there is no decisive earnings benefit regarding academic careers, although a positive correlation of income level and educational achievement can be verified. Our findings justify revisiting the underlying assumption that vocational education and training cannot generate benefits comparable with those generated by higher education. The earnings data suggest that monetary aspects may be less crucial than generally assumed to the reputation and perceived value of vocational education and training. Therefore, social status and prestige seem to be the most significant contributory factors to vocational training's low status in Canada.


Cost-effective durable and highly active electrode materials have become greatly desirable in the electrocatalytic oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), a crucial element in energy devices. In particular, the low intrinsic conductivity and poor reactivity of TiO2 are believed to hinder the efficient applicability of this material as an ORR catalyst. Herein, we report for the first time an efficient one-step approach to synthesize conductive Ti3+ self-doped carbon-coated TiO2 anchored on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) hollow nanospheres. A remarkable 11-fold improvement of the conductivity of TiO2 with an optimized rGO(10%)/TiO2 sample is herein reported. The rGO/TiO2 hollow nanospheres unveiled comparable activity to a conventional Pt/C reference. Most importantly, improved stability and remarkable methanol tolerance were achieved. The results were attributed to a cooperative effect of the hybridization of TiO2 with rGO, Ti3+ self-doping and the formation of a carbon-coating layer over the TiO2 particles. The selected design for the morphology of this novel electrocatalyst was further confirmed to play a crucial role in providing an enhanced number of active sites for oxygen reduction. This new nanocomposite is believed to exhibit promising applicability in a wide range of research areas including energy storage and conversion, photocatalysis, and gas sensors.


Purpose To estimate the radiation dose as a result of contrast medium administration in a typical abdominal computed tomographic (CT) examination across a library of contrast material-enhanced computational patient models. Materials and Methods In part II of this study, first, the technique described in part I of this study was applied to enhance the extended cardiac-torso models with patient-specific iodine-time profiles reflecting the administration of contrast material. Second, the patient models were deployed to assess the patient-specific organ dose as a function of time in a typical abdominal CT examination using Monte Carlo simulation. In this hypothesis-generating study, organ dose refers to the total energy deposited in the unit mass of the tissue inclusive of iodine. Third, a study was performed as a strategy to anticipate the biologically relevant dose (absorbed dose to tissue) in highly perfused organs such as the liver and kidney. The time-varying organ-dose increment values relative to those for unenhanced CT examinations were reported. Results The results from the patient models subjected to the injection protocol indicated up to a total 53%, 30%, 35%, 54%, 27%, 18%, 17%, and 24% increase in radiation dose delivered to the heart, spleen, liver, kidneys, stomach, colon, small intestine, and pancreas, respectively. The biologically relevant dose increase with respect to the dose at an unenhanced CT examination was in the range of 0%-18% increase for the liver and 27% for the kidney across 58 patient models. Conclusion The administration of contrast medium increases the total radiation dose. However, radiation dose, while relevant to be included in estimating the risk associated with contrast-enhanced CT, may still not fully characterize the total biologic effects. Therefore, given the fact that many CT diagnostic decisions would be impossible without the use of iodine, this study suggests the need to consider the effect of iodinated contrast material on the organ doses to patients undergoing CT studies when designing CT protocols. © RSNA, 2017 Online supplemental material is available for this article.


AdjudiPro, version 2.0, is the latest incarnation of United HealthCare's patented physician claims adjudication expert system (US patent # 5,359,509). Its core is an embedded expert system that contains the logic for processing 55% of all physician claim situations reviewed on United HealthCare's managed care system. Certain physician services are reviewed as part of the claims adjudication process to ensure that submitted charges meet contractual, and other guidelines. In 1995, nearly $20 million in gross savings was realized through use of this system. Since its initial deployment in 1991-1992, there has been a steep increase in AdjudiPro's processing volume. This increased demand created a number of issues that had to be addressed to ensure AdjudiPro's continued viability and growth. As a result, much of the past three years was spent rearchitecting AdjudiPro to meet the increasing load placed on it, while achieving acceptable throughput. AdjudiPro is now an essentially real-time application, processing claims twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This paper describes the current AdjudiPro application, and the key issues faced during the past three years.


Accurate assessment of air pollution exposure is crucial to better public health. Routine monitoring is done by standardized Air Quality Monitoring (AQM) stations, which are spread thinly due to size and cost. Recent technological developments have made Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensor Networks (WDESNs) that consist of low-cost Micro Sensing Units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs can be spread more densely and provide higher spatial resolution data. The availability of MSUs, however, poses the challenge of selecting optimal sensors' locations. Previous attempts assumed prior knowledge on pollution levels in the region of interest, and considered MSUs which measured only one pollutant. This paper presents a scheme for finding an optimal deployment of heterogeneous WDESN, which is based only on MSUs characteristics and land use analysis. To this end, a set of optional deployment locations (OLs) is defined. Each OL is characterized by a set of utilities of placing the various MSUs in that location. The optimization process seeks for the set of locations, under budget and resources constraints, that maximizes the overall utility. Using the suggested method leads to an intelligent deployment under a set of given premises. This is demonstrated vs. a real-world deployment scenario, with multiple types of MSUs.


A conceptual framework for the design of biotechnical streambank revetment is proposed. It is intended to be simple in practice, flexible in being widely applicable, familiar in retaining certain aspects of current practice while being patterned after other aspects, and encouraging a more environmentally sensitive approach to reliable streambank protection for INDOT projects. It distinguishes between a toe zone, where traditional hard armoring techniques such as those already included in the INDOT standard designs are more appropriate, and an upper bank zone where vegetation‐based techniques would typically be applied. Default techniques are identified to simplify the choice of measures for 'routine' problems, but more case‐specific techniques may also be selected. Primary techniques that offer immediate protection on their own are also distinguished from supplementary techniques that are used only in combination with other (primary) techniques. The boundary between the toe zone and the upper bank zone is proposed to be the maximum of the ordinary high water mark (or bankfull elevation), the elevation corresponding to the 2‐year discharge, and the elevation corresponding to the point that is one third up the slope from the bank toe at the design discharge (for streambank protection). For the upper bank zone, for bank slopes up to 2H:1V, regrading and revegetation with herbaceous species together with the use of rolled erosion control products (RECPs) is proposed as the default. The other (non‐default) main primary technique for the upper bank zone is the vegetated mechanically stabilized earth (VMSE, or vegetated reinforced soil slope VRSS, or soil lifts) option (where revegetation with herbaceous species is also considered standard). This requires more engineering and construct‐ion effort but is appropriate for those projects where a more vertical (up to maximum bank slope of 1H:1V) solution is desired. The supplementary techniques to be included are live staking to be used with the regrading option, and brush‐layering to be used with the VMSE option.


This study aimed to examine the effects of bierasure in relationships using measures of
self-esteem, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction, and to explore social expectations
as a possible predictor of bierasure. Bierasure is the exclusion of bisexuality, whether in
research, media, social contexts, historical works, and common discussion of sexuality. At the
time of this research, there are no published measures of bierasure, which is an experience
unique to bisexual individuals and has been linked to worsened mental health outcomes. Using
basic scale development techniques, the researchers developed the Experiences of Bierasure
Scale (EBES) for use in this study to test the desired relationships using a pilot study to begin to
identify scale structure. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the above constructs
in relation to each other from data gathered from bisexual-identified adults via an online
questionnaire. Results suggest complicated relationships between bierasure and other constructs,
with the EBES appearing as a stable questionnaire. While the overall theoretical model showed
few significant results related to bierasure and was not a good fit for the data, there were several
significant correlations between EBES factors, social expectations, self-esteem, relationship
satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction. These results imply that bierasure plays an important role in
the matrix of social interactions, but the exact structure of those relationships is unclear.


Starting from the observation that the constraints on VP-ellipsis (VPE) closely match those on VP-topicalization (VPT), Johnson (2001) proposes a movement account for VPE: in order for a VP to be deleted, it must first undergo topicalization. We show that although this proposal is attractive, making VPE dependent on VPT is problematic because VPE and VPT are not distributionally equivalent. While VPT targets the left periphery and consequently is subject to constraints on movement, VPE is not so restricted. We outline some alternatives for capturing the observed parallelism in the licensing of VPT and VPE.


developments and controversies in all areas of psychology, linking history to the present by focusing on ten conceptual issues that are relevant today. How did psychology become a science, and what kind of science did it become? How do psychologists measure and explain the fact that in some ways everyone is unique? Is psychoanalysis scientific? Why did cognitive science replace behaviorism? This book addresses all these questions and more, covering the whole range of psychology, from neuroscience and artificial intelligence to hermeneutics and qualitative research in the process. Drawing on the author's experience of how to make the subject interesting for students, the book is structured around ten key questions that engage with all the core areas of psychology and the main schools of thought. Showing how each of the different approaches or paradigms within psychology differ not based on data but on assumptions, Michael Hyland provides an engaging introduction to debates from history and in contemporary society. Including boxed material on hot topics, historical figures, studies/ experiments, and quirky facts, this is the ideal book for undergraduate students of psychology taking CHIPS and other history of psychology modules.


Eighteen organizations have formed a partnership to produce the Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF), which has been designed to provide critical data and research on solar pho-tovoltaic (PV) systems optimization in the public domain. Unlike many other projects, the OSOTF is organized under open source principles. All data and analysis, when completed, will be made freely available to the entire photovoltaic community and the general public. This paper documents how teamwork between educational institutions and industry has resulted in one of the largest systems in the world for this detailed level of analysis of PV systems performance in real-world conditions. The challenges to this approach will be addressed and appropriate models for garnering industrial teamwork will be discussed. Conclusions will be drawn about how to scale other opportunities for the sharing of data to assist in improved optimization of socially beneficial appropriate technologies.


In typical cameras the optical system is designed first; once it is fixed, the parameters in the image processing algorithm are tuned to get good image reproduction. In contrast to this sequential design approach, we consider joint optimization of an optical system (for example, the physical shape of the lens) together with the parameters of the reconstruction algorithm. We build a fully-differentiable simulation model that maps the true source image to the reconstructed one. The model includes diffractive light propagation, depth and wavelength-dependent effects, noise and nonlinearities, and the image post-processing. We jointly optimize the optical parameters and the image processing algorithm parameters so as to minimize the deviation between the true and reconstructed image, over a large set of images. We implement our joint optimization method using autodifferentiation to efficiently compute parameter gradients in a stochastic optimization algorithm. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by applying it to achromatic extended depth of field and snapshot super-resolution imaging.