This paper provides a theory of endogenous network formation in over-the-counter markets based on trade competition and inventory risk balancing. A core-periphery network structure arises as an equilibrium outcome. A small number of agents emerge as core dealers to intermediate among a large number of peripheral agents. The equilibrium level of dealer entry (the size of the core) depends on the combined effect of two countervailing forces: (i) network competition among dealers in their pricing of immediacy to peripheral agents, and (ii) the benefits of a concentrated set of dealers for lowering inventory risk through their ability to quickly offset purchases against sales. The size of the dealer core grows with the total number of agents, and reaches a finite limit size in a market with infinitely many agents. The dealer sector also increases as agents become more risk tolerant. Having more dealers competing to provide liquidity lowers the equilibrium bid-ask spread, individual dealer inventory levels and turnover, but increases market-wide dealer inventory cost. From the viewpoint of market efficiency, surprisingly, dealers tend to under-compete in liquid markets, and over-compete in illiquid markets. This suggests regulation that is differentiated by asset liquidity.


Melvil is an ontology-based knowledge retrieval platform that provides a three-dimensional visualization of search results. The user can tailor the presentation of the search results to his or her preferences by changing the settings of various parameters on the screen. In this paper, we report on a prototype implementation of a user profiling device that learns to predict appropriate settings for these parameters for the current search results based on previous experiences. In a preliminary study, we evaluated several off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms on parts of the problem. The final implementation required the flexibility of handling both regression and classification problems, being able to deal with set-valued input and output attributes, as well as incorporating Melvil 's ontologies for the respective application domain. Thus, we selected a nearest-neighbor approach for the prototype implementation. An evaluation on off-line data collected from several users showed a satisfactory performance.


Synopsis
In this profoundly important text, Elizabeth McMillan shows how the insights of complexity science can allow today's managers to embrace the challenges and uncertainty of the twenty-first century, and successfully oversee organizational change and development. Complexity science refers to the study of complex adaptive systems. These can absorb information, learn and then intelligently adapt in response to environmental changes. This book brings these ideas into an important new arena by: outlining the historical relationship between science and organizations; reviewing current perspectives on organizational change and best practice; citing real-life examples of the use of complexity science ideas; and discussing issues which may arise when using ideas from complexity.Written in an accessible style to bridge the gap from scientific theory to commercial applicability, this ground breaking text shows how organizations can become more effective, democratic and sustainable through complexity science. It is a key text for all students of business and management, and all practitioners working in the field.


The mechanisms of ultrashort-pulse laser ablation of materials are discussed, and the differences to that of long laser pulses are emphasized. Ultrashort laser pulses offer both high laser intensity and precise laser-induced breakdown threshold with reduced laser fluence. The ablation of materials with ultrashort pulses has a very limited heat-affected volume. The advantages of ultrashort laser pulses are applied in precision micromachining of various materials. Some femtosecond laser pulse micromachining results, including comparison with long pulses, are presented. Ultrashort-pulse laser micromachining may have a wide range of applications where micrometer and submicrometer feature sizes are required.


Part 1 Basic Issues: Why bother? In the beginning... Building a framework Cash Flow, Profit and Capital: Cash flow Net Profit Profit statements Capital Capital Statements Depreciation Interpretation of Financial Accounts: Adjusting for realism Interpreting the profit and loss account Interpreting the balance sheet Management Accounts: Management versus financial accounts Gross margin accounts Full cost accounts Allowing for cost behaviour Pricing Variations from the Norm: Farm management accounting Partnerships and companies Voluntary/non-profit organizations Part 2: Basic Budgeting: A profit budget: Introduction Compiling a profit budget Home Farm profit budget A Cash Flow Budget for the Whole Farm: Basic principles Value Added Tax and overdraft interest Cash flow budgets in practice Reconciling cash flow and profit A Budgeted Balance Sheet: Compiling the budget A budgeted balance sheet for Home Farm Budgeting for Incremental Change: Relevant costs and benefits Partial budgets Part 3 Financial History: Recording Cash Flow: Designing a cash recording system The cash analysis system Petty cash Statutory records Recording Profit and Capital: Preparing a profit and loss account Valuing stocks Recording capital The 'Back-up' Records: Introduction Transaction records Physical records Stock control Background records Organizing paperwork Post-script Part 4: Controlling the Business: Monitoring Cash Flow: Why monitor cash flow? Comparison of actual and budgeted results Interpreting the results Annual cash flow monitoring Monitoring Profit and Capital: The importance of monitoring profit Comparison with previous years Inter-farm comparisons (1): conventional profit and loss account inter-farm comparisons (2): profit and loss accounts in enterprise account form Budgetary comparisons Variance analysis profit monitoring for Home Farm Monitoring capital Part 5: More on Planning and Control: The Planning Process - A Wider View: Tactics and strategy The mission Setting aims and objectives Assessing 'internal' characteristics and external environment Generating alternative plans Selecting the optimal plan Implementing and monitoring the selected plan Involving other members of the organization Planning for Livestock Enterprises: Introduction Feeding livestock Allocation of forage costs Estimating potential production Replacement of breeding livestock Livestock with long production cycles Labour and Machinery Planning in Farming: Introduction Estimating level of use Estimating labour and machinery costs Investigating alternatives Capital Planning: Introdiction Sources of capital Estimating the cost of capital Comparing alternative uses of capital (1): simple measures Comparing alternative uses of capital (2): discounted cash flow techniques Allowing for Risk and Uncertainty: Introduction Allowing for risk and uncertainty in planning Risk and investment appraisal Allowing for Inflation: Introduction Inflation and financial accounts Inflation and management accounts Inflation and planning Inflation and investment appraisal Appendix A. Personal Computers in Management: A.1 Introduction A.2 Computers and farming A.3 General business applications


For decades, U.S. international tax policy has shifted back and forth between territorial-source-exemption taxation and worldwide-residence-credit taxation. The former is generally associated with capital import neutrality (CIN) and the latter with capital export neutrality (CEN). One reason why national tax policy has shifted back and forth between those benchmarks is because it is widely accepted that a tax system cannot simultaneously satisfy both CEN and CIN unless tax rates on capital are harmonized across jurisdictions. In this essay, I argue that the international tax literature contains two different and conflicting definitions for CIN. Under one definition, which goes back at least to Peggy Musgrave's early writings and which has been adopted by politicians, lawyers and lay readers, CIN is understood to refer to a tax system that was competitively neutral. That idea can be conceptualized as a tax system that does not distort the ownership of capital (ownership neutrality). In the economics literature, ownership neutrality is closely associated with the recent work of Mihir Desai and James Hines, who coined the phrase capital ownership neutrality (CON) to describe a tax system that does not distort the ownership of assets. Under the other definition, which goes back to Thomas Horst and which has been broadly adopted by professional economists, CIN is understood to refer to a tax system that does not distort the consumption - savings choice (savings neutrality). In this essay, I show that the widely accepted and often repeated proof that a tax system cannot simultaneously satisfy both CEN and CIN is based on the assumption that CIN refers to saving neutrality. In contrast, when CIN is interpreted as ownership neutrality, the global adoption of a worldwide tax system simultaneously satisfies both CEN and CIN. However, global adoption of a territorial tax system still cannot simultaneously achieve both CEN and CIN because a territorial tax system violates CEN. Not surprisingly, the use of the term CIN to denote two different types of neutrality - ownership neutrality and savings neutrality - has produced much confusion for those trying to understand, influence and set international tax policy. Accordingly, I recommend that commentators either stop talking about CEN and CIN and talk instead about locational, ownership, and savings neutrality or if they continue to talk about CIN that they clearly specify whether they mean CIN as ownership neutrality or as saving neutrality.


A pedagogy of dialogue can facilitate student civic engagement and critical self-reflection into divisive social issues. Although several scholars theorize and support this claim, few describe their practices for teaching students how to become agents of social change in their everyday lives through dialogic public discourse. This paper describes the context and methods used to foster students' understandings of divergent points of view during a winter intersession colloquium that was affiliated with a campus and community lecture series at a women's liberal arts college.


Current levels of greenhouse gases will result in significant sea level rise in the future, irrespective of the success of any future mitigation efforts. Paleoclimate and geologic data from past periods of rising sea level show that low lying areas, especially river deltas which are home to half a billion people, will be inundated. The best way to represent this risk through insurance is to apply the human-life insurance model to coastal property insurance. Human-life insurance is based on the assumption that every insured will die. Because the risk of death increases with age, the cost of insurance increases with age. Property-life insurance assumes that coastal properties will be lost at an unknown future date determined by the rate of sea level rise and patterns of catastrophic storms. As with human-life insurance, premiums would increase on a regular schedule through time. This predictable premium increase would create a powerful risk signal to incentivize adaptation.


The Kos–Nisyros–Yali volcanic field has produced a range of volcanic products over the last 3 million years. Volumetrically, silicic magma dominates, and activity includes one of the largest known explosive eruptions of the Aegean arc, the >60 km3 (dense-rock equivalent), 161 ka rhyolitic Kos Plateau Tuff. The Kos–Nisyros–Yali volcanic field is situated within an area of active crustal extension, which has greatly influenced magmatic processes and landscape development in the region. Recent seismic unrest, surface deformation and intense geothermal activity indicate that the system remains active, particularly around the Nisyros and Yali edifices. These signs of magmatic activity, together with the fact that the most recent eruptions have become increasingly silicic, would justify detailed monitoring of the area.


This statement analyzes and reflects upon my Master of Fine Arts thesis exploration of material collision as a metaphor of my life experiences. The thesis exhibition, entitled "Equilibrium", consists of six sculptural works constructed in glass, wood, metal, and repurposed heavy industrial objects. Within each individual piece I selected materials that would, when forced together under pressure and intense heat, bring attention to the utilization and exploitation of their inherent qualities. The manipulation of these material qualities has enabled me to express the complexity of human emotion. I am confident that all materials can convey certain emotional properties. During the fabrication, shaping, and forming of such a variety of materials I have attempted to exemplify personal reactions to events in my life, to search for meaning, and to understand my emotional response to the forms I have created.


Dissolved oxygen is an essential controlling factor in the performance of facultative and maturation ponds since both take many advantages of algal photosynthetic oxygenation. The rate of this photosynthesis strongly depends on the time during the day and the location in a pond system, whose roles have been overlooked in previous guidelines of pond operation and maintenance (O&M). To elucidate these influences, a linear mixed effect model (LMM) was built on the data collected from three intensive sampling campaigns in a waste stabilization pond in Cuenca, Ecuador. Within two parallel lines of facultative and maturation ponds, nine locations were sampled at two depths in each pond. In general, the output of the mixed model indicated high spatial autocorrelations of data and wide spatiotemporal variations of the oxygen level among and within the ponds. Particularly, different ponds showed different patterns of oxygen dynamics, which were associated with many factors including flow behavior, sludge accumulation, algal distribution, influent fluctuation, and pond function. Moreover, a substantial temporal change in the oxygen level between day and night, from zero to above 20 mg O2·L−1, was observed. Algal photosynthetic activity appeared to be the main reason for these variations in the model, as it was facilitated by intensive solar radiation at high altitude. Since these diurnal and spatial patterns can supply a large amount of useful information on pond performance, insightful recommendations on dissolved oxygen (DO) monitoring and regulations were delivered. More importantly, as a mixed model showed high predictive performance, i.e., high goodness-of-fit (R2 of 0.94), low values of mean absolute error, we recommended this advanced statistical technique as an effective tool for dealing with high autocorrelation of data in pond systems.


From 1994 to 1999, we investigated how climatic conditions influence the laying dates and number of fledged young of the Crag Martin Ptyonoprogne rupestris, a poorly studied colonial martin that, like other aerial feeding birds, is supposed to be highly dependent on weather conditions. Laying dates were concentrated in May and the first half of June. The mean annual laying date differed significantly among years; however, probably because of the small absolute difference between early and late years, there was no influence on the clutch size nor on the number of fledged young. Mean clutch size was 4.4 ± 0.9 eggs, the hatching rate was 80.2 percent, and the average number of fledged young was 3.1 ± 1.9. Temperature and rainfall in the days before laying and during the incubation period did not influence the breeding success, while in the chick rearing period there was a negative relationship between temperature and number of fledged young. It is supposed that high temperature can negatively influence breeding success through the drying up of small rivers where parents find food (mainly aquatic insects). In our study area the Crag Martins nested solitarily or in small colonies (mean 3.5 ± 1.9 nests). Colony size did not influence the laying date, the clutch size or the number of successfully fledged young.


Normalizing flows are a class of probabilistic generative models which allow for both fast density computation and efficient sampling and are effective at modelling complex distributions like images. A drawback among current methods is their significant training cost, sometimes requiring months of GPU training time to achieve state-of-the-art results. This paper introduces Wavelet Flow, a multi-scale, normalizing flow architecture based on wavelets. A Wavelet Flow has an explicit representation of signal scale that inherently includes models of lower resolution signals and conditional generation of higher resolution signals, i.e., super resolution. A major advantage of Wavelet Flow is the ability to construct generative models for high resolution data (e.g., 1024 x 1024 images) that are impractical with previous models. Furthermore, Wavelet Flow is competitive with previous normalizing flows in terms of bits per dimension on standard (low resolution) benchmarks while being up to 15x faster to train.


The big rise in the existence of digital data contributed to creating many good chances, especially related to corporations, institutions and firms. Also, it gives the capability to scrimp data regarding its major or area, where the countries have benefited from the analysis of big data (BD) greatly in the face of epidemics and diseases, especially COVID-19 since BD is now available everywhere around us, from official reports and scientific studies related to virology and epidemiology. The general aim of this study is to clarify how the conjunction among both BD and machine learning (ML) created huge differences in data science and a big influence on the applications related to a lot of fields chiefly in COVID-19. The method which is used in this study 'relevance tree' by identifying papers related to ML and BD, especially in COVID-19. The results have been shown that the use of reinforcement learning in analyzing BD provides effective and tremendous results, although it faces many challenges and restrictions that have been explained in detail in this study. In addition, the results showed that most of the countries in the time of Corona turned into smart cities, totally dependent on smart applications based on the analysis of BD using ML, and one of the most important applications that were circulated around the world global positioning system. In addition to the results that have been found, data privacy is one of the most important challenges facing data analysis. Consequently, it recommended future researchers to focus on studying the challenges faced by ML in analyzing medical data in the COVID-19 era.


Hard evidence on bias in expert reviews and its consequences for ratings is rare. This holds particularly true for conflicts of interest that are thought to be common in non-blind product reviews but are not readily observable: ad hoc relationships between reviewers and producers. We present a textbook case of a long-running expert product review in the food service industry for which we happen to know the reviewer's conflict of interest: being affiliated to one particular producer. As is typical, only insiders were aware of the possible source of bias in the review. The review resembles other non-blind tests of product quality. We obtained detailed data to map the consequences of the conflict of interest. We find evidence of a sizable bias in the reviewers' ratings. Our findings suggest that reviewers' ad hoc relationships with producers, often dismissed as `coming with the job', can be very harmful.


Broadening the Basis of Plant Resource Conservation V.H. Heywood. Scientific Issues Affecting Gene Conservation and Exploitation of Some Tropical Perennials J.T. Williams. The Naranjilla, the Cocona, and their Hybrids C.B. Heiser. The Conservation and Utilization of Genes from Endangered and Extinct Plants R.P. Adams. Exploitation of Genetic Resources P.R. Day. Molecular Evaluation of Plant Genetic Resources M.T. Clegg. Exploiting the Diploid D Genome Chromatin for Wheat Improvement E.S. Lagudah, et al. Understanding and Exploiting the Transcriptional Control Mechanisms of Plant Cells M. Bevans, et al. Expression of Transformed Genes in Transgenic Rice and Tobacco L.A.M. Hensgens, R.A. Schilperoort. Enhancement of Plant Productivity by Manipulation of ADPglucose Pyrophosphorylase T.W. Okita, et al. Gene Introgression for Cotton Improvement D.W. Altman. Index.


Defects and errors in new or recently completed work continually pervade the construction industry. Whilst inspection and monitoring processes are established vehicles for their 'control', the procedures involved are often process driven, time consuming, and resource intensive. Paradoxically therefore, they can negatively impinge upon the broader aspects of project time, cost, and quality outcomes. Acknowledging this means appreciating concatenation effects such as the potential for litigation, impact on other processes and influence on stakeholders' perceptions textendash that in turn, can impede progress and stifle opportunities for process optimisation and innovation. That is, opportunities relating to for example, logistics, carbon reduction, health and safety, efficiency, asset underutilisation, and efficient labour distribution. This study evaluates these kinds of challenge from a time, cost, and quality perspective, with a focus on identifying opportunities for process innovation and optimisation. It reviews textendash within the construction domain textendash state of the art technologies that support optimal use of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and complex adaptive systems. From this, a conceptual framework for development of a real-time intelligent observational platform (RtIOP) supported by advanced intelligent agents, is presented and discussed. RtIOP actively, autonomously, and seamlessly manages intelligent agents (cameras, RFID scanners, remote sensors, etc.) in order to identify, report, and document 'high risk' defects. Findings underpin a new ontological model that supports ongoing development of a dynamic, self-organised sensor (agent) network, for capturing and reporting real-time construction site data. The RtIOP model is a 'stepping stone' towards advancement of independent intelligent agents, embracing sensory and computational support, able to perform complicated (previously manual) tasks that provide optimal, dynamic, and autonomous management functions.


Two-sided markets are the new issues in economic theory and have been studied since the beginning of the 21th century. Barriers to entry are also important to provide a balanced full competition condition in markets. Generally, incumbent firms don't want new rivals because new rivals usually mean decreases in profits provided that firms seek profit maximizing. However, some of the previous studies show that profit maximizing firms can find unprofitable to set up barriers to entry in two-sided markets. The aim of this study is to confirm these studies by conducting a research in a shopping mall in Istanbul. To this end, we prepared a survey and applied it in this area. We hope that the results are pioneering for further studies.


Three experiments were conducted to examine whether semantic association contributes to unconscious priming. Experiment 1 used exclusion instructions in which participants were told to avoid completing the stem (e.g. mo---) with a word related to a masked prime (e.g. cash) flashed for 0, 38, or 212 ms. Significant semantic priming was found only in the items analysis when data was averaged across participants. In the subjects analysis, this performance was moderated by participants' ability to report the prime. Experiment 2 used a free association task to examine unconscious semantic priming. Participants were instructed to respond to a target homograph (e.g. pupil) with the first word that came to mind that is not related to the meaning of the flashed word (e.g. student). No significant unconscious semantic priming was found. Experiment 3 replicated the conditions previously used to demonstrate unconscious semantic priming and show that such priming is due to methodological problems. The same methodology as Experiment 2 was used except participants were given inclusion instead of exclusion instructions. Significant priming was found across all trials; however, this priming dissolved when only the trials where participants failed to report the prime were examined. The results of all experiments suggest that unconscious semantic priming from word stimuli is a result of residual conscious awareness of the prime.


Cities, states, and countries around the world face a significant challenge in limiting pollution that harms local air quality and contributes to climate change. In recent years, some jurisdictions have begun to engage in coordinated governance of pollutants, planning policies that "kill two birds with one stone" to achieve climate and air quality goals at the same time.

California is one of the earliest jurisdictions to grapple with coordinated governance of air and climate change, and now has extensive experience in multi-pollutant planning. This report offers a study of the coordinated governance of air and climate pollutants — with a focus on the California experience. The research initiative was carried out in collaboration with Chinese partners examining possibilities for air and climate co-control within China. Coordinated policies in China, where coal represents a large percentage of the energy mix, offer the promise of even greater traditional air pollutant and greenhouse gas co-benefits. Although the report is aimed at policymakers in China, it will be of interest to regulators and researchers in any jurisdiction looking to improve coordinated regulation.

The report is authored by Alex Wang, Professor of Law, UCLA Law; David Pettit, Senior Attorney, NRDC; and Siyi Shen, Emmett Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy, UCLA Law.


The New Britain to Hartford Busway is a two-lane, exclusive, bus-rapid-transit facility to be constructed along abandoned and active rail lines connecting the cities of New Britain and Hartford. The preliminary design and Environmental Impact Statement are currently being completed for this 15.1-km (9.4-mi), 12-station facility. As part of the preliminary design, a process of evaluating varying platform layout configurations was undertaken. To design the busway stations, many elements had to be taken into consideration. First, the busway is to provide multiple types of service, including express bus service, therefore requiring bus pull-offs. Second, the right-of-way along the busway corridor is narrow and the effect of this needs to be minimized; therefore, alternative platform layouts need to have a minimum width when possible. In addition, the busway operation and patron use had to be safe, secure, comfortable, and convenient while providing connectivity to the adjoining land use. Three platform configurations were investigated, including center platforms, traditional opposite platforms, and offset platforms. Although the offset platforms provided the narrowest design, their use was rare because they were perceived by many to be less safe for the rider than the opposite platform design. For most of the stations, a modified opposite platform design was chosen by the reviewing agencies and members of the public. The center platforms were eliminated because it was decided that the existing right-side-door fleet of buses would be used in conjunction with any new buses.


Negotiations on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of biological, nuclear, and chemical weapons and their means of delivery are now at a critical phase after more than three decades of prenegotiations. This article examines the factors that have impeded negotiations in order to identify the key actors whose mutually reinforcing efforts are essential to its establishment. We argue that current efforts to negotiate a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems (WMDFZ) in the Middle East can learn much from the successful negotiation of other nuclear weapons free zones (NWFZs). Nevertheless, the circumstances in the Middle East are unique and require a more holistic approach. Success here will depend largely on a multidimensional perspective that brings together the energies and insights of a range of state and nonstate actors, not least civil society in the Middle East, where confidence and trust building is too complex and demanding a task to be seen as the preserve of political and geostrategic calculation. Enabling the societies and polities of the region to identify areas of mistrust and misunderstanding across strategic, political, but also cultural and religious divides in order to open up possibilities for dialogue and mutual respect holds the key to creating a favorable negotiating environment.


Introduction/Aim: Women have a higher incidence of asthma compared to men and exacerbations in women are often more severe and correlate with high estrogen levels. Using an experimental animal model for asthma, we have observed that female rats with experimental asthma also develop more severe exacerbations compared to male rats. The aim of the study was to investigate if the female sex hormone estrogen can impact the asthma response and identify the immunological mechanism for this effect.

Methods: By implanting estrogen-releasing pellets into male rats prior to ovalbumin-sensitisation and re-challenge we investigated how estrogen-exposed males responded compared to untreated males and females. We used multi parameter flow cytometry to investigate proportion and activation of antigen presenting dendritic cells, responding T effector and regulatory T cells in airways before and after allergen rechallenge.

 Results: We discovered that estrogen was sufficient to induce a female-like disease phenotype during exacerbations in male rats. Interestingly, male and female rats also displayed significant differences in CD4 +/CD8+ T cell ratios in airway draining lymph nodes and this was directly impacted by estrogen exposure. In addition, female and estrogen treated male rats, but not male rats, displayed signs of recruitment of CD4+ cells into the airways following allergen re-challenge which most likely contributed to the exacerbated response.

Conclusion: Our data suggest that estrogen is sufficient to induce female like asthma symptoms in male rats and appears to alter the T cell balance promoting allergic responses.

Grant Support: The study was funded by the Asthma Foundation of Western Australia, the Telethon Kids Institute and the Swedish Society for Medical Research.


Object-Oriented frameworks, OO frameworks, have been discussed over a long period of time, that when introducing Object-Oriented frameworks, the defect-density will decrease and the quality of software will increase. Capgemini had developed a framework that had been in the organization for nine years. Since then, the framework has been reengineered several times to meet the continuously changing requirements of the software systems the framework supports. My work was to develop a new framework to make the maintainability and evolution of the framework easier while not compromising the quality of the framework or the applications built on it. The new framework that I developed was called the Capgemini Development Framework, CDF. Results from the case study, conducted to test the differences between these two frameworks, showed that the CDF framework preserved the maintainability of the applications built on the framework. The architecture of the CDF framework made it also easier to handle any future updates to the core functionality of the framework.


Background: Electrical burn injuries result from accidental contact with exposed parts of electrical appliances, wiring, or lightning strikes. The purpose of this study was to analyze the mode of electric burn injuries occurring in the current technological world. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis of 3-year experience of electric burn injury case admitted in the burn unit of our institute was conducted from April 2016 to March 2019. Of the total 3983 patients, 914 patients were of electric burn injury. All age groups of patients were included, with exclusion of thermal, flame, and scald burn patients. We evaluated the variables according to age, sex, total burn surface area, injury type, and mode of injury. Results: Out of 914 cases, we had admitted 329 cases from February 2016 to August 2017 (Group 1) and 585 cases admitted from September 2017 to March 2019 (Group 2). Seven hundred sixty-nine cases were male and 145 were female. Group 1 had 187 cases in the age group of 40–59 years. While in Group 2, 226 cases were in the age group of 20–39 years. About 40.7% of the cases had electric burn due to working over electric pole in Group 1, while in Group 2, 19.65% cases had electric burn due to malfunctioning of appliances and 2.7% cases had smartphone electric burn injury. About 3.9% of the cases had electric burn due to working or taking selfies near electric train. Conclusion: In this technology era, the use of electric current in various appliances leads to increase the risk of electric burn injury, and these injuries can be prevented by education and safety measures to reduce the incidence of electrical injuries.


There has been a widespread belief that genetic disorders are of little importance in low income countries, an opinion that is perhaps understandable given the often daunting prevalence of infectious diseases and nutritional problems faced by these populations. The failure to recognize genetic disorders as significant contributors to the overall disease profile of low income countries is, however, a serious error. For example, an estimated 7.6 million children are born per year with a severe congenital or genetic disorder (Alwan and Modell 2003), and one in seven of the world's population are carriers of a haemoglobin disorder (WHO 2002). In both cases a large majority of those affected are resident in low income countries, which currently comprise over 80% of the global population (PRB 2004). There is also convincing preliminary evidence that some sub-populations are genetically predisposed to contract serious infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and leprosy (Pitchappan 2002). Further, because of the requirement to treat β-thalassaemia major individuals with regular blood transfusions, in 2003 Thalassaemia International Federation estimated that 30–80% of all cases worldwide were infected with hepatitis B and/or hepatitis C, a testament to the lack of adequate blood screening facilities in low income countries. Thus the contribution of genetic disorders to global population disease profiles, directly and indirectly, is of major significance.


Teasing has been defined as a humorous speech genre in which a co-present participant is the target of joking (Boxer and Cortes-Conde 1997). Research on teasing in everyday conversation has revealed a range of functions, including social influence, identity negotiation, conflict resolution, bonding, and amusement (e.g. Mills and Babrow 2003). While teasing has long been studied from ethnographic and conversation-analytic perspectives, the insights and methods from this research have heretofore not been applied to teasing involving L2 learners. The present study addresses this topic, analyzing teasing in conversations between L2 learners studying abroad in Spain and their Spanish host families and applying a communities of practice framework to examine teasing practices.


Estimating the influence of a given feature to a model prediction is challenging. We introduce ROAR, RemOve And Retrain, a benchmark to evaluate the accuracy of interpretability methods that estimate input feature importance in deep neural networks. We remove a fraction of input features deemed to be most important according to each estimator and measure the change to the model accuracy upon retraining. The most accurate estimator will identify inputs as important whose removal causes the most damage to model performance relative to all other estimators. This evaluation produces thought-provoking results -- we find that several estimators are less accurate than a random assignment of feature importance. However, averaging a set of squared noisy estimators (a variant of a technique proposed by Smilkov et al. (2017)), leads to significant gains in accuracy for each method considered and far outperforms such a random guess.


Simon Rottenberg's seminal 1956 article in the Journal of Political Economy, 1956, is generally accepted as the starting point for the development of the economics of sport. While he recognised that certain features of professional sports leagues were unusual he saw little reason to treat this industry any differently from a conventional industry. He discusses the importance of uncertainty of outcome, the monopsonistic nature of the labour market, the nature of the product and demand (attendances). He considers alternatives to the reserve clause, such as equal revenue sharing, maximum salary limits, equal market franchise distribution and roster limits. Each of these is rejected in favour of a free market solution which, on the basis of the invariance principle, he suggests will perform just as well as the reserve clause in allocating talent to where it is most productive. The ensuing literature has focused on all these issues, many of which have created considerable debate amongst sports economists. In particular the assumption of profit maximisation has been challenged and a divergence of views, reflected in the so-called North American and European models of sports leagues has emerged. Over the last 50 years sports leagues have expanded, TV markets have opened up and legal challenges to existing practices have multiplied. This paper seeks to evaluate Rottenberg's contribution to a rapidly expanding field and to judge its relevance today.


The objectives of this project (Defra project OF0144), lead by EFRC, were to:
• identify acceptable organic fungicide products to control mildew in transplant production
• produce integrated organic transplant production systems for brassica, allium and lettuce over the autumn and winter period by identifying optimum cell/block sizes in relation to nutrient requirements and sources, growing media formulation, and supplementary feeding and watering
• evaluate developed transplant production protocols during the winter period
• undertake technology transfer and dissemination of the results
Results:
Protocols were tested for a range of crop species and varieties, growing media, cell size and feeding regimes over the three seasons under experimental and commercial conditions. It is possible to produce transplants of a suitable quality over the winter period although propagation time is generally longer than at more favourable times of year.
With respect to identifying acceptable fungicide products
• a range of fungicidal products was identified including L-Carvone, Mycosin, fennel and clove oils that showed potential in controlling mildew on a range of crop species. However the work also raised the question of the suitability of the use of such materials in organic systems which has not been resolved.
• work on spectral filters found no benefits to their use in transplant production
• cell size has minimal effect on disease spread
As far as integrated organic transplant production systems are concerned:
• production time was longer overwinter than in spring
• lettuce was relatively easy to produce in a range of media and block sizes with no supplementary feed being necessary
• similarly cabbage was relatively easy to produce although feeding was required
• cauliflower was produced using smaller cell size and full nutrient compost


Carbon Disulfide Poisoning in Korea with Social and Historical Background: Eunil Lee, et al. Department of Preventive Medicine and Institute for Environmental Health, College of Medicine, Korea University—In Korea, carbon disulfide was used mostly in a viscose rayon factory which was established in 1962 and was closed in 1993. About 550 workers were diagnosed and compensated for CS2 poisoning from 1987, to June 1995, and more workers will be diagnosed and compensated. There was no pertinent environmental monitoring or periodic medical examination for the workers exposed to CS2 until 1986. The first cases of CS2 poisoning reported in May, 1987 were 4 retired workers who were very sick. It became possible tor them to be diagnosed and compensated because a democratic movements pervaded all the country after the end of military rule in Korea. After they were compensated, many other retired workers also requested to be diagnosed and compensated for CS2 poisoning. Many radicals and radical doctors joined them against the government and company. The government promised that retired workers could be diagnosed by Compensation Insurance organization for Worker's Injury managed by the Ministry of Labor. The rayon company also promised reparation for retired workers who had CS2 poisoning. The diagnosis of CS2 poisoning for retired workers was carried out by the commitee of doctors half of whom were appointed by the company and the remaining half by the workers. There were conflicts between conservative doctors and radical doctors in the diagnosis of CS2 poisoning even after the establishment of legal diagnostic criteria for CS2 poisoning. Workers pressured doctors and the goverment to bring about a change in the diagnostic criteria, and they succeeded. The important findings of CS2 poisoning among Korean workers were as follows: retinal microaneurysm, polyneuropathy, cerebrovascular infarction and intercapillary glomerulosclerosis.


Streaming media applications are plagued with playback disruptions due to client buffer underflow resulting from fluctuations in network throughput. When some clients are experiencing buffer underflow and disruptions, other clients may have excess buffered data. This suggests that disruptions can be reduced by the redistribution of resources to provide higher throughput to streaming sessions with less buffered data, that is, to sessions with greater need. This paper proposes a scheme that achieves an effective or endto-end result of the above dynamic resource allocation without the use of either explicit per-session resource reservation or across-session coordination. Instead, each packet is stamped at the source with the buffer occupancy of the session, and prioritized scheduling is performed at the resource bottleneck to favor packets with smaller buffer occupancy. Due to the actions of end-to-end congestion control, higher throughput can then be maintained for streaming sessions with less buffer. Experimental and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can increase the mean time between playback disruptions by a factor of 4 for fixed initial buffer time, or reduce the required initial buffer by a factor of 2.5 for fixed probability of hitting a playback disruption.


Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action–whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers–lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states–those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name–are expected to act.


This report provides a description of the Benz 300 H.P. aircraft engine containing 12 cylinders placed at a 60° angle. It includes a detailed description of the development of the constructional points, particularly the cylinders, pistons, and connecting rods, as well as the engine fitting, lubrication, oil pumps, bearings, oil tank, fuel pump, carburetors, and cooling system. There are seven pages of illustrative figures at the end of the report.


An examination of the extent and diversity of languages in Europe and specifically in the European Union reveals that there are over sixty indigenous languages currently spoken in, and historically established in, the territory of the EU, along with almost thirty sign languages. The authors identify and briefly examine the spoken languages, with due attention to the difficulty of working with language statistics. European languages within the EU can be divided into three categories, based on the number of native speakers of a given language in the EU itself. The authors also compare European linguistic diversity with linguistic diversity worldwide, and present a brief overview of language policies in the EU with respect to the designation of official languages in various member states.


Abstract. The Samsung Gear 360 is a consumer grade spherical camera able to capture photos and videos. The aim of this work is to test the metric accuracy and the level of detail achievable with the Samsung Gear 360 coupled with digital modelling techniques based on photogrammetry/computer vision algorithms. Results demonstrate that the direct use of the projection generated inside the mobile phone or with Gear 360 Action Direction (the desktop software for post-processing) have a relatively low metric accuracy. As results were in contrast with the accuracy achieved by using the original fisheye images (front and rear facing images) in photogrammetric reconstructions, an alternative solution to generate the equirectangular projections was developed. A calibration aimed at understanding the intrinsic parameters of the two lenses camera, as well as their relative orientation, allowed one to generate new equirectangular projections from which a significant improvement of geometric accuracy has been achieved.


Many of the traditional air pollutants and greenhouse gases have common sources, offering a cost-effective potential for simultaneous improvements of traditional air pollution problems and climate change. A methodology has been developed to extend the RAINS integrated assessment model to explore synergies and trade-offs between the control of greenhouse gases and air pollution. With this extension, the GAINS (GHG-Air pollution INteraction and Synergies) model will allow the assessment of emission control costs for the six greenhouse gases covered under the Kyoto Protocol (CO2, CH4, N2O and the three F-gases) together with the emissions of air pollutants SO2, NOx, VOC, NH3 and PM. This report describes the first implementation (Version 1.0) of the model extension model to incorporate CH4 emissions.

GAINS Version 1.0 assesses the options for reducing N2O emissions from the various source categories. It quantifies for 43 countries/regions in Europe country-specific application potentials of the various options in the different sectors of the economy, and estimates the societal resource costs of these measures. Mitigation potentials are estimated in relation to an exogenous baseline projection that is considered to reflect current planning. The report identifies 28 control measures, ranging from animal feed changes over waste management options to various approaches for gas recovery and utilization. For each of these options, the report examines country-specific applicability and removal efficiency and determines the costs.

As a result, CH4 emissions in Europe are estimated for the year 1990 at 63,600 kt CH4. Assuming the penetration of emission controls as laid down in the current legislation, emissions would decline up to 2020 by 12,600 kt CH4 per year. Full application of the presently available emission control measures could achieve an additional decline in European CH4 emissions by 24,000 kt per year. Seventy percent of this potential could be attained at a cost of less than two billion Euro/year or Euro/ton CO2- equivalent, while the further 7,000 kt CH4/year would require costs of 12 billion Euro/year.


The Plant Patent Act of 1930 was the first step towards creating property rights for biological innovation: it introduced patent rights for asexually-propagated plants. This paper uses data on plant patents and registrations of new varieties to examine whether the Act encouraged innovation. Nearly half of all plant patents between 1931 and 1970 were for roses. Large commercial nurseries, which began to build mass hybridization programs in the 1940s, accounted for most of these patents, suggesting that the new intellectual property rights may have helped to encourage the development of a commercial rose breeding industry. Data on registrations of newly-created roses, however, yield no evidence of an increase in innovation: less than 20 percent of new roses were patented, European breeders continued to create most new roses, and there was no increase in the number of new varieties per year after 1931.


Hybrid polymer composites are relatively new group of plastics that are rapidly developed. These materials combine high demands on the mechanical strength while keeping minimal density, thus generally opposing properties. Hybrid polymer composites have potentially very wide applicability, especially in aircraft or automotive industry where weight of the components is one of the critical parameters In the frame of this contribution the effect of individual components of multiphase systems incorporated into thermoplastic matrix on resulting deformation processes was primarily analyzed. This study includes hybrid composites which are modified for the injection moulding technology. Test specimens for determining the mechanical properties (tensile, bending and Charpy impact) were made of nylon 66 with incorporated fibrous (glass fibres and carbon fibres) and particulate fillers (hollow glass beads / spheres).The final parameterization of individual process steps is very demanding by reason of the composite nature and hybrid structure.


American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador The United States once again finds itself actively supporting a foreign government in its struggle against a violent insurgent force. For many, the defeat of a capable, determined Iraqi insurgency by coalition forces appears doubtful, and to frustrated U.S. personnel, the lack of an effective counterinsurgency (COIN) policy in Iraq makes the goals and outcome of U.S. policy in Iraq problematic. Through bouts of criticism and perhaps despair, it is important to point out that the United States has been down this path before. Blueprints on how to better understand and even untangle the problems do exist. Benjamin C. Schwarz's American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador provides one blueprint.1 In a RAND-sponsored study, Schwarz assesses the political and social dimensions of U.S. COIN policy in El Salvador circa 1991 and critiques the U.S.'s initial policy goals there. How can this report about El Salvador's civil war help us understand Iraq? U.S. Government policy in El Salvador, which was designed to "fortify the national armed forces, to wear down the rebels in combat, and bolster democracy [so] as to weaken the rebel's claims," sounds a lot like current policy in Iraq.2 El Salvador thus offers a potentially insightful historical parallel to Iraq. A review of Schwarz's book might help identify which of the lessons U.S. personnel learned in El Salvador that we can apply today. Despite a decade of civil war and committed U.S. involvement, El Salvador was still locked in a struggle against the highly motivated insurgency of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in the early 1990s. Schwarz begins his assessment of U.S. COIN policy in El Salvador by reviewing U.S. doctrine in Vietnam. He then sets forth explanations as to why U.S. efforts to foster Salvadoran military and civic reform did not produce the desired results. The book concludes with an evaluation of the future efficacy and applicability of then-current doctrine regarding low-intensity conflict (LIC). Schwarz asserts that by 1991 the United States had failed to reach its goal in El Salvador: a clear-cut victory for the Central American regime. Like a ghost of nationbuilding past, Schwarz points out that in El Salvador "the United States perhaps did not consider sufficiently that human character, history, culture, and social structure are highly resistant to outside influence."3 Schwarz effectively leads the reader through the historical and political background of the conflict, gradually building his argument with facts and logical conclusions. His report was compiled mainly from interviews with numerous press, state department, intelligence, and government officials, in many cases under the condition of anonymity. America's Future Policies in El Salvador According to Schwarz, in 1991 LIC doctrine failed for several reasons, foremost of which was the inability to fundamentally alter El Salvador's undemocratic culture. Schwarz states that U.S. strategy to defeat the insurgency required El Salvador's Government to establish a just and equitable society. This demand forced the United States to try to reverse centuries of military and government-sponsored abuse. …


According to physicists, the laws of physics don't allow us to discern one inertial frame from another. It does allow. This study shows two ways to distinguish one inertial frame from another. Physics hasn't defined what is space, what is matter, what is time. In this study (in Space-Matter Theory), space is what matter uses as space, regardless of its texture. Matter is what can exist as matter in the given space. Both matter and space have three spatial dimensions. When action and reaction occurs between matter and space, the result is time. Time appears as a given wave of space. No particle, no frame of reference can exist without generating space waves. A and B inertial frames of reference are not identical if e.g. two identical electrons (electronA and electronB) create different wavelengths of space waves. One way to distinguish one inertial frame from another is to calculate or measure the length of the wavelength of the space wave. Via tunneling, a particle (with or without mass) travels through the barrier with superluminal velocity. In this case the barrier is a "special" space made out of matter (matter-space), where the particle travels with c velocity. This velocity appears in our space as superluminal velocity. Saying this, there are more spaces and more times instead of one spacetime. The different spaces make changes in the particle, too. The particle builds its action out of Planck constants h, where h has two parts which depend on the velocity of the particle in the given space. So there is also a phenomenon in the matter that makes it possible to distinguish one inertial frame from another.


The early regulatory protocols for organising a football club were established in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. Because of their long history, many English clubs founded within this period are considered to be among the most prestigious in the football world. However, longevity of existance versus current competitive status has led many to question how the stature of a club might be gauged. In February 2007 Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez refered to their city rivals Everton as a 'small club' sparking a heated debate which has stirred reactions from the media as well as players, managers and supporters. This paper explores fan perspectives regarding how the status of British clubs might be defined, particularly in the context of what counts as a 'big' or 'great' club. Electonic-fanzine (e-zine) data was gathered from the supporters of ten clubs from five British cities during two consecutive football seasons. Responses were grouped according to historical significance, domestic and international success, fan base, structural strength, global appeal and individuality. Supporters noted that European success built on a legacy of domestic acheivement was the most significant gauge of club stature, with Champion's League victories a pre-requisite for 'greatness'. Domestic trophy tallies were also considered important, although such acheivments were discussed relative to the competitiveness of individual tournaments. Ground size, fan base and distinctiveness were also perceived to be key definers of a club's prominence, as was 'strategic assets' such as playing and managerial staff.


Scientific innovations continue to advance the possibilities of human reproduction, raising important empirical and ethical questions. In vitro fertilization, disease reproductive genetic technologies, and enhancement reproductive genetic technologies are three reproductive technologies with varying moral support. Instead of assuming moral poles, we use original, nationally representative survey data of US adults (N = 8107) and multinomial logistic regression to examine how religiosity and orientations toward science shape the moral acceptability, amorality, and the moral rejection of in vitro fertilization, disease reproductive genetic technologies, and enhancement reproductive genetic technologies. We find that increased confidence and trust in science lowered the odds of holding moral concerns, while greater religiosity was associated with higher odds of viewing these technologies as morally wrong. Moral attitudes further varied across religious tradition as certain religious groups had significantly higher odds of viewing these technologies as amoral. Findings have implications for advancing understandings of morality around the faith-science interface beyond conceptions of a moral binary.


A configuration of composite resonators consisting of three split-ring resonators is proposed to obtain a triple-band response with two transmission zeros between the passbands. Two new topologies are presented to design triple-band filters with controllable responses. A systematic filter design approach is presented based on a filter coupling model. The model is established to enable triple-band filter design with controlled passbands. Two methods are proposed and compared for the extraction of filter parameters. Coupling between nonadjacent elements is considered in the model and shown to have a significant effect. By changing the orientation of the coupled composite resonators, it is possible to introduce additional transmission zeros. Two sixth-order filter examples illustrate the use of the coupling model with the filter design approach to design filters with specified responses. The limitations of this filter topology are discussed.


With the explosion in the business media - newspaper stories, television programmes, on-line services - nearly any business can get media attention, and that can be dangerous. Overexposure, misrepresentation, and negative rumours are some of the pitfalls. This innovative guide prepares executives for taking advantage of the opportunities while avoiding the risks. It supplies both overviews of the business news revolution and practical strategies for managing corporate image in this perilous and chaotic environment.


htmlabstractLink-enriched video can support users in processes
of environmental opinion-forming and decision-making. For
this, audiovisual content must be represented and annotated
to enable automatic link generation and computer manipulation.
Given the time and budget constraints of content
providers and the diversity of user information needs, the
challenge is to select the information to be captured in video
representation. The goal of this research is to specify the information
that should be captured in an annotation schema to
enable environmental opinion-forming and decision-making.
For that purpose, expert interviews were conducted to explore
and elicit potential users' information needs. Then, a
user survey was carried out to assess the relevance of types
of information for users. Finally, a user experiment observed
their behavior and needs when forming environmental opinions
and decisions. Possible information to be captured from
videos, types of information that users state are useful and
information that users require when forming opinions are
specified. The results provide insights into the information
that should be considered in the annotation of videos in order
to make them useful and valuable sources of information
for users when forming their environmental opinions.


ANGUSTIFOLIA (AN) is a regulator of leaf development, including the epidermis of the leaves and the leaf hairs (trichomes). Arabidopsis thaliana carrying mutations in an exhibit shorter, thicker leaves and defective trichome branching. Two groups analyzed these defects in more detail and cloned the AN gene. Kim et al. showed that cortical microtubules (MTs) were disorganized in leaf epidermis and Folkers et al. showed that the density distribution of MTs was altered in trichomes. The AN gene encodes a protein that appears to be a member of the CtBP and BARS family. These proteins are named for their dual functions: COOH-terminal-binding proteins (CtBP), which were originally identified as transcriptional repressors, and brefeldin A adenosine diphosphate (ADP)-ribosylated substrates (BARS), which are implicated in Golgi dynamics. Kim et al. showed that the expression of several genes was increased in An mutants, consistent with a function of transcriptional repressor. Folker et al. found a genetic interaction between AN and the Arabidopsis kinesin motor protein ZWICHEL. This interaction was confirmed by a yeast two-hybrid assay. Thus, the plant CtBP and BARS protein, AN, may also be a dual function protein. G.-T. Kim, K. Shoda, T. Tsuge, K.-H. Cho, H. Uchimiya, R. Yokoyama, K. Nishitani, H. Tsukaya, The ANGUSTIFOLIA gene of Arabidopsis, a plant CTBP gene, regulates leaf-cell expansion, the arrangement of cortical microtubules in leaf cells and expression of a gene involved in cell-wall formation. EMBO J. 21, 1267-1279 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text] U. Folkers, V. Kirik, U. Schöbinger, S. Falk, S. Krishnakumar, M. A. Pollock, D. G. Oppenheimer, I. Day, A. R. Raddy, G. Jürgens, M. Hülskamp, The cell morphogenesis gene ANGUSTIFOLIA encodes a CtBP/BARS-like protein and is involved in the control of the microtubule cytoskeleton. EMBO J. 21, 1280-1288 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The narrator of the Legend of Good Women is caught in a conundrum. Accused of wronging ladies with his poetry, he is assigned a penitential task: the praise of good, faithful women. Fulfilling this, however, means hurting women more. In describing their beautiful suffering, he becomes complicit in the aestheticization of female pain and makes women into objects of violent lust. Even in praising them he lies, thus resembling the silver-tongued men who deceive their wives and lovers. The narrator's solution is to present himself as an unskilled poet, a mere copier and translator who cannot be held responsible for the beauty and lies of his verse. He makes this show of ineptitude so as to conceal his participation in a long tradition of idealizing women who suffer and die.


Coastal ecosystems face a variety of natural and anthropogenic influences, raising questions about mechanisms by which species abundance and composition change over time. We examined these questions by synthesizing 6 surface-trawling efforts in greater Puget Sound, Washington (USA), spanning 40 yr, and then determining changes in forage fish abundance and composition and jellyfish prevalence. We also assessed whether patterns were associated with potential anthropogenic pressures (human population density and commercial harvest) as well as large-scale climate signals. We found evidence for trends in abundance of all forage species in 4 sub-basins of Puget Sound. Cumulative distribution functions of catch per unit effort indicate that the historically dominant forage fishes (Pacific herring and surf smelt) have declined in sur- face waters in 2 sub-basins (Central and South Puget Sound) by up to 2 orders of magnitude. How- ever, 2 other species (Pacific sand lance and three-spine stickleback) increased in all 4 sub-basins. Consequently, species composition diverged among sub-basins over the last 40 yr. In addition, jelly - fish-dominated catches increased 3- to 9-fold in Central and South Puget Sound, and abundance positively tracked human population density across all basins. The strongest predictors of forage fish declines were human population density and commercial harvest. Climate signals offered additional explanatory power for forage fish but not jellyfish catch. These patterns suggest possi- ble linkages between coastal anthropogenic activities (e.g. development, pollution) and the abun- dance of forage fish and jellyfish in pelagic waters. Our findings also provide a basis for improving indicators for assessment, monitoring, and spatial planning to rehabilitate pelagic ecosystems.


The Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey is a test of cognitive academic language proficiency that has been adapted from English into Xhosa by a South African team of researchers. This study was primarily concerned with the Verbal Analogies Scale of the Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey and aimed to extend previous research on the equivalence of the two language versions of the scale. The study employed a monolingual two-group design consisting of 150 mainly English-speaking and 149 mainly Xhosa learners in Grades 6 and 7. The first research objective was to investigate item bias (or differential item functioning items) in the Visual Analogies Scale across the Xhosa and English versions using logistic regression and Mantel–Haenszel statistical techniques. Five items were identified as differential item functioning. The second objective was to evaluate the construct equivalence of the two versions by conducting a factor analysis after removing the differential item functioning items from the scale. Two factors were identified. The first factor displayed significant loadings across both language versions. The second factor was stable for the English version but not for the Xhosa version. Results were supported by calculating a Tucker's phi coefficient for both factors. It was therefore concluded that Factor 1 is structurally equivalent across the two language versions but that Factor 2 was not structurally equivalent. Thus, the detection and removal of differential item functioning items did not result in structural equivalence.


Currently, Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology is considered a potentially life-changing new technology that brings science fiction to life and can fundamentally impact how and where people live and work. As is the case with any new technology, it is unknown how the future will unfold. Instead, ideas about the future can be captured through scenario planning and used to develop a range of plausible, alternative futures (or scenarios). These scenarios can be used for strategic decision-making in technology and urban planning, transportation and business. Because policy makers, technology developers, and end-users all need to make assumptions about future AV technology, there is a growing number of research on possible future developments, that each represent the unique perspective of the different stakeholder groups. However, an integration of these pieces of the puzzle into a holistic view of alternatives futures (i.e. scenarios) is still lacking. We propose a framework for scenario planning that leverages the insights from existing work on AV technology, and integrates the many perspective with the system-modeling technique of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM). We apply the framework in a case study. The work thus introduces a new approach to tackling the challenging problem of scenario planning for emerging technologies with many impacts. It also provides a review of the current status of AV technology.


In recent years, the problem triad of population, environment and development has been joined by the added element of consumption, with a consequent boom in studies on sustainable consumption. This study provides a holistic and quantitative overview of these studies, aiming to track the evolution of research on sustainable consumption, and identify the key authors and co-authorship network. Using the bibliometric method and network analysis, this study traces the development of the research themes at hand, and the research network concerned with them, through the analysis of core literature and journals dated 1995–2014. The findings highlight that the research on sustainable consumption can be divided into two periods. These findings clearly illustrate that sustainable consumption has evolved from being a single practice-oriented research topic into diverse topics studied in a systematized manner, involving the key factors of sustainability, consumption behavior, energy utilization and environmental impact. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment


Two-dimensional ultrasonic speckle correlation velocimetry (USV) is a new technique that allows imaging of moving scattering media, at a high frame-rate. In this paper we apply the technique to determine two-dimensional particle velocity profiles of multiphase flows. Experiments are realized with suspensions of Sonazoid (medical contrast agent) and Magnetite (Fe 3O4) in water. All measurements are performed in a vertical pipe with the flow moving downwards. The two-dimensional particle velocity profiles are then compared with a reference liquid volume flow velocity. As expected from theory, the heavier Magnetite particles have slightly higher velocity than the liquid, whereas the contrast agent simply follows the liquid motion. The proposed technique can be used in combination with other techniques to measure the mass flow of the solid phase, in solid/liquid multiphase flow. This is generally more interesting than measuring the bulk mass or volume flow.  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Nowadays, huge amount of data and information are available for everyone, Data can now be stored in many different kinds of databases and information repositories, besides being available on the Internet or in printed form. With such amount of data, there is a need for powerful techniques for better interpretation of these data that exceeds the human's ability for comprehension and making decision in a better way. In order to reveal the best tools for dealing with the classification task that helps in decision making, this paper has conducted a comparative study between a number of some of the free available data mining and knowledge discovery tools and software packages. Results have showed that the performance of the tools for the classification task is affected by the kind of dataset used and by the way the classification algorithms were implemented within the toolkits. For the applicability issue, the WEKA toolkit has achieved the highest applicability followed by Orange, Tanagra, and KNIME respectively. Finally; WEKA toolkit has achieved the highest improvement in classification performance; when moving from the percentage split test mode to the Cross Validation test mode, followed by Orange, KNIME and finally Tanagra respectively.


The support recovery problem consists of determining a sparse subset of a set of variables that is relevant in generating a set of observations, and arises in a diverse range of settings, such as compressive sensing, subset selection in regression, and group testing. In this paper, we take a unified approach to support recovery problems, considering general probabilistic models relating a sparse data vector to an observation vector. We study the information-theoretic limits of both exact and partial support recovery, taking a novel approach motivated by thresholding techniques in channel coding. We provide general achievability and converse bounds characterizing the trade-off between the error probability and number of measurements, and we specialize these to the linear, 1-bit, and group testing models. In several cases, our bounds not only provide matching scaling laws in the necessary and sufficient number of measurements, but also sharp thresholds with matching constant factors. Our approach has several advantages over previous approaches. For the achievability part, we obtain sharp thresholds under broader scalings of the sparsity level and other parameters (e.g., signal-to-noise ratio) compared with several previous works, and for the converse part, we not only provide conditions under which the error probability fails to vanish, but also conditions under which it tends to one.


Business Intelligence (BI) concept has continued to play a vital role in its
ability for managers to make quality business decision to resolve the business
needs of the organization.

BI applications comes handy which allows managers to query, comprehend, and
evaluate existing data within their organizations in order to obtain functional
knowledge which then assist them in making improved and informed decisions.

Data warehouse (DW) is pivotal and central to BI applications in that it
integrates several diverse data sources, mainly structured transactional
databases. However, current researches in the area of BI suggest that, data is
no longer always presented in only to structured databases or format, but they
also can be pulled from unstructured sources to make more power the managers'
analysis. Consequently, the ability to manage this existing information is
critical for the success of the decision making process.

The operational data needs of an organization are addressed by the online
transaction processing (OLTP) systems which is important to the day-to-day
running of its business. Nevertheless, they are not perfectly suitable for
sustaining decision-support queries or business questions that managers
normally needs to address. Such questions involve analytics including
aggregation, drilldown, and slicing/dicing of data, which are best supported by
online analytical processing (OLAP) systems. Data warehouses support OLAP
applications by storing and maintaining data in multidimensional format. Data
in an OLAP warehouse is extracted and loaded from multiple OLTP data sources
(including DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and flat files) using Extract, Transfer, and
Load (ETL) tools.

This thesis seeks to develop DW and BI system to support the decision makers
and business strategist at Crystal Entertainment in making better decision
using historical structured or unstructured data.


To operate effectively legal systems need clear boundaries such as those defining legal/illegal, man/woman, competent/incompetent, and parent/child. However, some situations blur the point at which one category changes into another – an example of this is when someone under 18 becomes a parent. In this article I explore how the law in England and Wales handles their dual status as parent and child in the context of consenting to their offspring receiving medical treatment and to being involved in medical research. I consider the current law on who can give consent where both the parent(s) and their offspring are minors, and suggest that the law is doctrinally incoherent in this regard and that this might leave both the parent and relevant health professional in a confused and precarious position. As under 18s continue to get pregnant and give birth, their legal position and responsibilities must be clear, and health professionals need to know from whom to obtain legal consent. I argue that 16 and 17 year olds should be presumed to have capacity under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and so be able to consent to their offspring being treated or involved in research, and propose that for the offspring of minor parents under 16 supportive guardians are created, following the model of special guardians. Supportive guardians would provide the necessary consent for treatment and research until the minor parents have the legal capacity to do so, but would facilitate and support the involvement of minor parents under 16 in the decision-making process.


Many of the recent armed conflicts have taken place in cities of the Developing World. In the
resulting emergency situations, water supply and sanitation are among the most essential services
to restore. They form part of the urban services available to the city dwellers that are
commonly managed by local water sector institutions.
This is, in principle, acknowledged by aid agencies but partnerships between them and water
sector institutions do not always happen because of concerns such as: independence vis-a-vis
the local government; possible corruption arid inefficiency problems; and political obstacles.
Moreover, agencies prefer short-term structural rehabilitation to long-term institutional development,
for which they do not always feel sufficiently qualified and experienced.
This study tackles the problem by determining how these partnerships influence the performance
of aid operations, in particular in terms of efficiency I effectiveness in the case of emergency
response and of sustainability and coverage in the case of rehabilitation. It is based on a
number of case studies selected in: Kabul (Afghanistan); Jaffna (Sri Lanka); Monrovia (Liberia);
Beni (Democratic Republic of Congo); Port-au Prince and Port-de-Paix (Haiti), and Grozny
(Chechnya in the Russian Federation).
For emergency operations, findings show that partnerships tend to take place when the type or
level of technology involved and/or security conditions do not allow the aid agency to work independently
from water utilities. Partnerships do not necessarily influence efficiency I effectiveness
in the short term but are beneficial because they prepare for rehabilitation.
In terms of rehabilitation, findings suggest that current practice maintains a separation between
large-scale rehabilitation projects and community-based projects focusing on specific
neighbourhoods. This has a detrimental effect on sustainability and fails to address the needs
of the most vulnerable populations. The study recommends a more coordinated approach that
involves a reform of funding patterns, in order to reconcile sustainability and universal service.


Protein kinases function not only as catalysts but also as scaffolds and docking targets. Papa et al. now show how an unanticipated conformation-dependent activation of the kinase Ire1 activates the "unfolded protein response" from within the endoplasmic reticulum. This response stimulates the production of protein chaperones and other factors to enhance the cell's ability to cope with the buildup of misfolded proteins within the secretory pathway. The conformational change can be mimicked by a bulky adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) analog when the ATP binding site is modified. The activation of the RNA splicing activity promoted by Ire1 is surprisingly independent of phosphorylation. F. R. Papa, C. Zhang, K. Shokat, P. Walter, Bypassing a kinase activity with an ATP-competitive drug. Science 302, 1533-1537 (2003). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Time series models are often adopted for forecasting because of their simplicity and good performance. The number of parameters in these models increases quickly with the number of variables modelled, so that usually only univariate or small-scale multivariate models are considered. Yet, data are now readily available for a very large number of macroeconomic variables that are potentially useful when forecasting. Hence, in this Paper we construct a large macroeconomic data-set for the UK, with about 80 variables, model it using a dynamic factor model, and compare the resulting forecasts with those from a set of standard time series models. We find that just six factors are sufficient to explain 50 percent of the variability of all the variables in the data set. Moreover, these factors, which can be considered as the main driving forces of the economy, are related to key variables such as interest rates, monetary aggregates, prices, housing and labour market variables, and stock prices. Finally, the factor-based forecasts are shown to improve upon standard benchmarks for prices, real aggregates, and financial variables, at virtually no additional modelling or computational cost.


Six middle school students diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder were selected for sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) training with EEG biofeedback. The subjects were evaluated following a 72-hour drug-free period with the WISC-III Digit Span subtest and the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA). Five of the subjects received 20 sessions of EEG biofeedback and one of the subjects received nine sessions of EEG biofeedback. The subjects were evaluated again following a 72-hour drug-free period. Five of the six subjects improved on their combined Digit Span, TOVA Inattention, and TOVA Impulsivity scores. These results supported previous findings that EEG biofeedback can be effective in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. More importantly, this study demonstrated that EEG biofeedback could be used in an actual school setting. Recommendations for implementing an EEG biofeedback program in the schools were provided.


The present study investigates which of two vocabulary learning methods best promotes long-term retention of the meaning and spelling of words. The first method is rote learning, i.e. learning by word lists, which requires pupils to memorize the meaning of new words by L1 translation. The second method is learning by sentence writing, which requires pupils to memorize new words by making up their own sentences in order to establish links between old and new knowledge. 16 pupils took part in the experiment; all were approximately 11 years old. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. All the participants were given one receptive and one productive recall test, both in the immediate and delayed post-tests. The result demonstrates that pupils who learn words using word lists only remember words in the short-term retention, while the sentence writing method results in greater long-term retention.


Cross-domain alignment between two sets of entities (e.g., objects in an image, words in a sentence) is fundamental to both computer vision and natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focus on designing advanced attention mechanisms to simulate soft alignment, with no training signals to explicitly encourage alignment. The learned attention matrices are also dense and lacks interpretability. We propose Graph Optimal Transport (GOT), a principled framework that germinates from recent advances in Optimal Transport (OT). In GOT, cross-domain alignment is formulated as a graph matching problem, by representing entities into a dynamically-constructed graph. Two types of OT distances are considered: (i) Wasserstein distance (WD) for node (entity) matching; and (ii) Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GWD) for edge (structure) matching. Both WD and GWD can be incorporated into existing neural network models, effectively acting as a dropin regularizer. The inferred transport plan also yields sparse and self-normalized alignment, enhancing the interpretability of the learned model. Experiments show consistent outperformance of GOT over baselines across a wide range of tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, image captioning, machine translation, and text summarization.


Delineation of curvilinear structures is an important problem in Computer Vision with multiple practical applications. With the advent of Deep Learning, many current approaches on automatic delineation have focused on finding more powerful deep architectures, but have continued using the habitual pixel-wise losses such as binary cross-entropy. In this paper we claim that pixel-wise losses alone are unsuitable for this problem because of their inability to reflect the topological impact of mistakes in the final prediction. We propose a new loss term that is aware of the higher-order topological features of linear structures. We also exploit a refinement pipeline that iteratively applies the same model over the previous delineation to refine the predictions at each step, while keeping the number of parameters and the complexity of the model constant. When combined with the standard pixel-wise loss, both our new loss term and an iterative refinement boost the quality of the predicted delineations, in some cases almost doubling the accuracy as compared to the same classifier trained with the binary cross-entropy alone. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of data, from microscopy to aerial images.


Cross-border payments suffer from a lack of speed and transparency and limited access, resulting in higher overall costs than domestic payments. This paper analyses how the best execution principle developed in the context of securities and derivatives could be applied to cross-border payments. Under that principle, financial institutions are legally required to provide the most advantageous order execution in terms of speed, risks and costs for their customers given the prevailing market environment. We argue that introducing best execution could alter the current set-up of cross-border payments which rests, for the most part, on a system of large, globally connected correspondent banks. The current system is best understood as one of "best friends", in that the relationship among payment institutions determines through which institutions orders are routed. In turn, payment institutions charge their clients on a "cost plus profit" basis. Some of the payment institutions even benefit from rebates based on liquidity volume (kick-backs) and from reduced rates and soft commissions elsewhere in the payment chain. Overall, there is little incentive for payment institutions to truly put their clients first in terms of speed, costs and risks in the current "best friends" environment. Introducing "best execution" is potentially a game changer: it would require payment institutions to focus on their clients' interests (i.e., when choosing the route the order is to take). Based on experience with the best execution principle enshrined in securities law, we would expect the large-scale introduction of digital routing systems to identify the offer that constitutes best execution. Furthermore, we expect that more links between correspondent banks, new service providers from the FinTech space, and public payment networks (including regional integration systems) would be established and would assist in identifying excess liquidity in infrequently traded currency pairs. While none of this requires distributed ledger technology, strictu sensu, one convenient way, technically, to achieve that purpose is by implementing a distributed ledger that functions, initially, as a digital liquidity marketplace (a pure information sharing device) and, which in time, could be further developed into a "best execution platform".


The hedge fund industry has grown from $200 billion in assets under management around the turn of the millennium to now over $3 trillion. Many reports have criticized hedge funds for poor performance, particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). In this paper, I seek to demystify hedge fund strategies by evaluating fund performance that can be attributed to the markets as well as other well-known systematic factors with an emphasis on outcomes prior to and following the 2008 GFC. When adjusted for risk to stock/bond markets, the evidence shows that, after fees and costs, hedge fund managers as a group have shown a marked decline in risk-adjusted alpha in the 10 years following the GFC. To aid in a better understanding of the alpha deterioration, I further investigate equity hedge fund returns against a suite of well-known systematic risk/return factors documented in the literature beyond traditional market factors. In all, the model explains nearly 90 percent of the variation in returns. Equity hedge funds as a group show meaningful and consistent exposures to many of these factors over time, but whether intended or otherwise, significant changes also occurred (including a significant decline in active risk) following the GFC, in turn influencing their performance. Armed with this information, investors are hopefully better positioned to make more informed decisions in deciding hedge fund strategy allocations.


This research focused on a model setup fed with underground water pumped into a water supply network. The scope of the research included a long- and a short-term stagnation of water in the setup and a water flow of 0.1 m/s. The water supplied into the system gradually lost its corrosive properties and developed calcium carbonate precipitation capability. These processes indicated that cement components migrate from the lining into the water. Apart from the primary components, the presence of the following trace elements was found: iron (399.6 ppb), magnesium (17.8 ppm), zinc (26.9 ppb), barium (22.6 ppb), boron (21.6 ppb), sodium (10.8 ppm), gallium (2.1 ppb). At early stages of the operation, recorded quantities were not significant. Leaching of the trace elements from cement increased after water was chlorinated. In turn, the highest percent increases were observed in the case of zinc (217%), boron (19%) and gallium (12%), whereas the increase for sodium, iron, barium and magnesium in water was insignificant (reaching a few percent). A repeated analysis of samples of stagnant water in the setup showed that most of trace elements were below the detectability level. Final concentrations of all elements identified in the water after its contact with internal cement mortar lining were much lower than the limit values set out for drinking water.


A ubiquitous accessibility of data over the Web nowadays is very common. Although the Web, 3D graphics, and geographic data are crossing their ways, common applications are typically based on technologies that are rather esoteric to most web-developers. Nevertheless, in the last couple of months, some efforts towards a seamless integration of 3D graphics into common Web browsers have been performed. Regarding the data of such applications, they are mostly proprietary and commercial data, which are collected by professional cartographers or surveyors. Nevertheless, following the Web 2.0 approach, within the last five years the trend of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) became popular, describing an ever expanding range of users who voluntarily and collaboratively collect geographic data. Trying to merge the mentioned trends and desires, within this paper the authors present a way to transform the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap data into a 3D city model. Contrary to other existing approaches towards OpenStreetMap 3D, they combine emerging and established Web technologies, allowing an easy consumption in arbitrary web browsers. The applied technologies are easy to learn and understand by the web community and allow for quick prototyping, and creating mash-ups with further spatially enabledWeb2.0 data.


Evidence-based research on Grandparents Responsible for Grandchildren (GRfG) continues to grow in recent decades. This brief report expands global knowledge on custodial grandparents by making use of a large data resource in the United States (US). The specific aim was to delineate the demographic profile, geographic distribution, and prevalence of specific-disabilities for the GRFG population in the US mainland. We also explore how demographic factors are associated with likelihood of being in-poverty. The analysis used data from the 2009-2013 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) file. The ACS is a nationally representative, yearly, statistical survey administered by the US Census Bureau and is the premier source for detailed information about the U.S. population. The 141,270 actual units in the microdata are estimated to represent about 2,704,327 GRfGs. Population-weighted estimates detail the GRfG population and population-weighted multivariable logistic regressions indicate all race-ethnic GRfG minorities were at greater risk for being in-poverty when compared to Non-Hispanic-White GRfGs. Investigations should continue to paint the population profile of GRfGs using large-scale data sources to better understand the needs of custodial grandparents. GrandFamilies Vol. 3 (1), 2016 94


The Music Department is based on the belief that all of the world's musics warrant close study and that all musicians should cultivate the ability to engage with unfamiliar musical traditions. The department provides performance opportunities for the entire Wesleyan community through orchestra, Chinese orchestra, concert choir, the Collegium Musicum, organ, South Indian voice and percussion instruction, wind ensemble, jazz orchestra, Korean drumming and creative music ensemble, laptop ensemble, Javanese gamelan, West African drumming, South Indian music, steel band, and taiko. These offerings are supplemented by an extensive private lessons program. Courses in music history, music as a cultural practice, music theory, and composition are offered at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Music majors design their own programs of study in consultation with an advisor. Program proposals must demonstrate a balance between performance, historical/cultural study, and music theoretic/ compositional investigation. Each proposal is reviewed by the director of undergraduate study and ratified by the entire department.


In a large-scale space, structure is at a significantly larger scale than the observations available at an instant. To learn the structure of a large-scale space from observations, the observer must build a cognitive map of the environment by integrating observations over an extended period of time, inferring spatial structure from perceptions and the effects of actions. The cognitive map representation of large-scale space must account for a mapping, or learning structure from observations, and navigation, or creating and executing a plan to travel from one place to another. Approaches to date tend to be fragile either because they don't build maps; or because they assume nonlocal observations, such as those available in preexisting maps or global coordinate systems, including active landmark beacons and geo-locating satellites. We propose that robust navigation and mapping systems for large-scale space can be developed by adhering to a natural, four-level semantic hierarchy of descriptions for representation, planning, and execution of plans in large-scale space. The four levels are sensorimotor interaction, procedural behaviors, topological mapping, and metric mapping. Effective systems represent the environment, relative to sensors, at all four levels and formulate robust system behavior by moving flexibly between representational levels at run time. We demonstrate our claims in three implemented models: Tour, the Qualnav system simulator, and the NX robot.


This project was developed by ASOMENORES, a social foundation which aims the resocialisation of criminal Juvenile Offenders' Law in Bolivar Department in Colombia, in association with the Industrial Design Programme from Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogota, and other stakeholders from the Bolivar region. The main goal of this project was to contribute in social and economic reinsertion of young offenders within society by developing labour and social skills, and, therefore, helping them to improve their livelihood and life quality. The strategy consisted in a participatory design and implementation of the project named ""Popular Design, Productive Chains and Peace Building"" in the municipalities of Cartagena and Turbaco (Bolivar, Colombia). The project envisioned not only teaching to these minors inmates how to build handcrafts, but also included the construction of sustainable productive chains providing great value to their artisanal work. These NEOCraftstrategy (handicrafts renovation movement) included the handmade products transcendence, its environmental responsibility, the use of natural materials and waste management. Therefore, the fundamental value of the craftsmanship lies on its cultural and ancestral tradition that gives uniqueness to the product, separating it from the mass and global consumption of branded products. For ASOMENORES, and for this specific project, the social rehabilitation and reinsertion into society depends on various factors: one of them is the psychological rehabilitation provided by the penitentiary; another factor, the intervention was originated by this project through the construction of productive chains. The strategy was focused on determining skills' assessment of each participant. From that starting point, the result was the development of individual, technical and competitive advantages. These advantages emphasised over their culture, traditions and perspectives, where was planned to create and innovate with systemic awareness, inclusive and participative added value. It is expecting once the participants are resealed, they will be prepare, with proper tools, to be part of different companies as employees or create their own business. In this way, there is a high probability of decreasing their chances for these young guys to commit an offence again. The innovation of this project lies on the fact that different aspects such as the legal and social components are being intervened from the Design's Perspective, aimed to achieve institutional changes where all the stakeholders will be benefited from the project, starting with young inmates and their families, and those involved in the training process such as psychologists, teachers and penitentiary guardians, and foremost, the Industrial Design students who managed and experience the development of an educational process from a sustainable productive standpoint.