The cyberattacks that occurred in recent years have raised concerns in critical infrastructures, including power system networks. Identifying ongoing attacks is essential to enable the energy industry to respond to adversaries. Many commercial products and research projects include machine learning based intrusion detection systems but there is still a need for understanding the data training requirements for those systems in order to successfully deploy them to protect power systems. This paper presents the development of an anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on a machine learning methodology to create a whitelist. The system was implemented using GNU Octave. It was trained using traffic flow from real devices generated from a Virtual Site Acceptance Testing and Training (VSATT) platform where multi-vendor secondary devices were set up and communicated to each other. The system was then tested using different datasets which were also generated from the VSATT platform. Results show that the implemented IDS performed correctly under different case studies. The results also indicate that the learned traffic identifies GOOSE and MMS messages based on the normal behaviours from those protocols, but the presence of other messages might require manual inputs to be incorporated in the training dataset.


Reviewing this book has proved a nostalgia exercise for me. Was it really way back in 1983 that I travelled to Michigan on a TWJ fellowship and first met John Niparko? With a two-year-old lad in tow, an exhausted Flood family arrived at Detroit airport, to find that this young trainee had driven all the way from Ann Arbor, waited some hours, and then proceeded to ferry us to our new home. The foreword of the book is presented by our trainer back then, Malcolm Graham; of him, I can only repeat what the preface tells us: 'A good teacher is worth more than all the training literature ever written'. The content of this book is very familiar to me. I was delighted to be invited to sit on the Ann Arbor Temporal Bone Course, but this was tempered by the news that I was then to demonstrate on the next course, in two weeks' time! This is a large format, if appropriately slim, spiralbound book, ideally suited for the temporal bone dissection room. There is excellent use of illustrations, whether monochrome drawings, CT scans or histology sections. The artwork is quite remarkable, especially in its use of shading. The thinned canal wall really does seem to transilluminate; the microscope lamp reflects off the metal bone holder. (I confess a personal interest, if not this level of skill.) The text follows the traditional sequence. An introduction to best use of the microscope and drill tells us that required instrumentation includes 'malleus snipers'. Watch that tree line then! Temporal bone anatomy covers surface landmarks, histology sections (perhaps the only area where colour might have helped) and CTs in axial and coronal planes. The novice is then taken through a series of steps to render the temporal bone down to dust. Throughout, there are useful clinical tips ('technical pearls and potential pitfalls'); a particular favourite is the diagram of the low dura, leading you straight into the descending facial nerve. There are many such works, but another novelty here lies in the final chapter, 'Achieving Procedural Competence etc', which reproduces a checklist of competency assessment for various stages of mastoidectomy, and a global evaluation of technical and competency skills. There is a lot packed into 63 pages of text, in what the authors well describe as 'this highly graphic primer'. Highly recommended (and thanks for the lift, John). LIAM M FLOOD Middlesbrough, UK


Background: A recent association study identified a common variant (rs9790517) at 4q24 to be associated with breast cancer risk. Independent association signals and potential functional variants in this locus have not been explored. Methods: We conducted a fine-mapping analysis in 55,540 breast cancer cases and 51,168 controls from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium. Results: Conditional analyses identified two independent association signals among women of European ancestry, represented by rs9790517 [conditional P = 2.51 × 10−4; OR, 1.04; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.02–1.07] and rs77928427 (P = 1.86 × 10−4; OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02–1.07). Functional annotation using data from the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project revealed two putative functional variants, rs62331150 and rs73838678 in linkage disequilibrium (LD) with rs9790517 (r2 ≥ 0.90) residing in the active promoter or enhancer, respectively, of the nearest gene, TET2. Both variants are located in DNase I hypersensitivity and transcription factor–binding sites. Using data from both The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC), we showed that rs62331150 was associated with level of expression of TET2 in breast normal and tumor tissue. Conclusion: Our study identified two independent association signals at 4q24 in relation to breast cancer risk and suggested that observed association in this locus may be mediated through the regulation of TET2. Impact: Fine-mapping study with large sample size warranted for identification of independent loci for breast cancer risk. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 24(11); 1680–91. ©2015 AACR.


It is estimated that around 20 million Southeast Asians work outside of their home country. In 1991, Taiwan first introduced about 3,000 migrant workers from Thailand. In mid-2015, there were approximately 579,000 migrant workers who came under the category of foreign laborers mainly from Southeast Asia. However, there is scarce research on representations of the south–south international migration. This study critically analyzes mainstream news discourse on migrant workers in Taiwan to discern their relations to their residing society. Four themes emerged: objectification of foreign laborers; differentiated and gendered marginalization; multilevel triangulations over migrant bodies; and imperialistic cultural attitudes toward migrant workers. Through omissions, inferences, and emphases on particular events in news reports, the migrant workers are in an impossible position to exist politically, economically, and culturally in Taiwanese society.


Soil bacteria are exposed to constant changes in temperature, moisture, and oxygen content. Additionally, they have to encounter different antimicrobial substances, which are produced by competing bacteria. Those agents often target the bacterial cell envelope, which is an essential structure composed of the cell wall and cell membrane. In order to counteract such life-threatening conditions, bacteria developed signal transducing systems to monitor their environment and to respond signal-specifically to any stress conditions, mostly by differential gene expression. Different principles of signal transducing systems have been evolved: one-component systems (1CSs), two-component systems (2CSs), and extracytoplasmic function (ECF) sigma factors. Bacillus subtilis is a soil bacterium, which counteracts cell envelope stress by four different 2CSs (LiaSR, BceRS, PsdRS, and YxdJK) and at least three different ECF sigma factors (σX, σM, and σW). In the course of the present thesis, the LiaSR 2CS was investigated in detail.
The LiaSR 2CS of B. subtilis is a cell envelope stress-sensing system that shows a high dynamic range of induction in response to cell wall antibiotics like bacitracin. It provides no resistance against its inducer molecules. Rather, it is a damage-sensing system that maintains the cell envelope integrity under stress conditions. The membrane-anchored histidine kinase (HK) LiaS and its cognate response regulator (RR) LiaR work together with a third protein, LiaF, which was identified as the inhibitor of the 2CS. Upon induction, the target promoter PliaI is induced by phosphorylated LiaR, leading to the expression of the liaIH-liaGFSR locus, with liaIH as being the most induced genes. In the first part of this thesis, the mechanisms of stimulus perception and signal transduction of the LiaFSR system were analyzed. Therefore, the native stoichiometry of the proteins LiaF, LiaS, and LiaR were determined genetically and biochemically with a resulting ratio of 18 to 4 to 1. We found out that maintaining this specific stoichiometry is crucial for the functionality of the LiaFSR system and thus a proper response to cell envelope stress. Changing the relative protein ratios by the overproduction of either LiaS or LiaR leads to a constitutive activation of the promoter PliaI. These data suggest a non-robust behavior of the LiaFSR system regarding perturbations of its stoichiometry, which stands in contrast to quantitative analyses of other well-known 2CSs. Furthermore, a HK-independent phosphorylation of the RR LiaR was observed. This happened in each case if the amount of LiaR exceeded those of LiaS, irrespective of the presence or absence of a stimulus. By using growth media supplied with different carbon sources, acetyl phosphate was identified as being the phosphoryl group-donor for LiaR under these conditions. Moreover, by performing a mutagenesis experiment, we obtained genetic evidence that LiaS is a bifunctional HK offering both a kinase and a phosphatase activity.
In the second part of this thesis, the liaI promoter was used to generate a protein expression toolbox for the use in B. subtilis, referred to as the LIKE (from the German "Lia-kontrollierte Expression") system. PliaI is a perfect candidate for driving recombinant protein expression. It is tightly regulated under non-inducing conditions showing no significant basal expression levels. Depending on the inducer molecule concentration, it is induced up to 1000-fold reaching a maximum already 30 minutes after addition of the inducer. Two expression vectors, an integrative and a replicative one, were constructed consisting of an alternative liaI promoter, which was optimized to enhance promoter strength. Additionally, different B. subtilis expression hosts were generated that possess liaIH deletions to prevent undesired protein production. The feasibility of the LIKE system was evaluated by using gfp and ydfG as reporter genes and bacitracin as inducer molecule. As a result, both proteins were successfully overproduced.


The goal of this study was to improve the understanding of the large-scale mechanisms underlying the recovery of the zooplankton of Lake Orta from historical contamination, following reduced input of ammonia and metals and the subsequent 1989/90 liming intervention. The industrial pollution had been severe and long-lasting (1929-1990). Zooplankton biodiversity has improved, but most of the new taxa appearing in our counts are rotifers, while many calanoids and the large cladoceran predators ( Bythotrephes and Leptodora ) that are common in the nearby Lake Maggiore, were still absent from Lake Orta 17 years after liming. To aid understanding of the large-scale mechanisms controlling changes in annual richness, we assessed the annual persistence (P) of Crustacea and Rotifera taxa as an estimator of whether propagules that survived introduction, as result of the natural recolonization process, also thrived. We found that the rate of introduction of zooplankton colonists and their persistence in the water column of Lake Orta changed from 1971 to 2007. New rotifer taxa appeared in the lake after the mid-1980s, when discharge of toxic substances decreased, but their annual persistence was low (P<0.5) until the turn of the century. The numerical values of rotifer and crustacean persistence in Lake Orta were unexpectedly high in 2001 and 2007 (0.55 and 0.72 for rotifers, 0.85 and 0.86 for crustacean, respectively), much higher than in limed lakes in Sudbury, Canada, and in adjacent Lake Maggiore. We hypothesize this could be related to the lack of Cladoceran predators and zooplanktivorous fish in the pelagic waters of Lake Orta.


We are dealing with the possibility of electronic waste separation by the temperature effect. It gives a possible direction how to solve the problem of electronic waste growth not only in Czech Republic, but also throughout the world. Further, we are dealing with a heat transfer inside the printed circuit boards (PCBs). With the usage of the utilized experience from detail references background research and various software simulators we achieved the maximum analysis of the problem. The solving, which resulted from the calculations. The development of new criteria for PCBs recycling has opened new possibilities of treatment for used materials.


Man is an imaginary individual created by God in classical economic milieus and he is conceived of as behaving rationally, regularly and predictably in his economic activities with motives that are egoistic, acquisitive and short-term in outlook. From the beginning man was endowed by God with skills to adapt from objects in the natural world for his social, economic, political and material needs. Therefore, working for survival and meeting immediate needs are natural phenomena in human existence. Despite the natural endowment of God some people are still perceived by the human society as lacking desirable traits or deviating from the societal norms and therefore they tend to be excluded by the wider society in the scheme of things and they are ostracized or marginalized as undesirable. These marginalized people who are not self-sufficient become, at a minimum, burden to their immediate milieus, family members, friends and the society, at large. They lose their self confidence because they cannot be fully self supporting. The opportunities denied them also deprive them of many developmental projects that others, with greater opportunities, have accomplished over the years. This has, however, given many of such under privilege individuals psychological, social and even mental health problems. Economic empowerment through arts and crafts is the only means available for these marginalized people to obtain the basic human needs, either directly by themselves, or through the assistance of those who have access to funds that can be used to encourage and develop their skills for self sufficiency.


Safety and performance are key enablers for autonomous driving: on the one hand we want our autonomous vehicles (AVs) to be safe, while at the same time their performance (e.g., comfort or progression) is key to adoption. To effectively walk the tight-rope between safety and performance, AVs need to be risk-averse, but not entirely risk-avoidant. To facilitate safe-yet-performant driving, in this paper, we develop a task-aware risk estimator that assesses the risk a perception failure poses to the AV's motion plan. If the failure has no bearing on the safety of the AV's motion plan, then regardless of how egregious the perception failure is, our task-aware risk estimator considers the failure to have a low risk; on the other hand, if a seemingly benign perception failure severely impacts the motion plan, then our estimator considers it to have a high risk. In this paper, we propose a task-aware risk estimator to decide whether a safety maneuver needs to be triggered. To estimate the task-aware risk, first, we leverage the perception failure - detected by a perception monitor - to synthesize an alternative plausible model for the vehicle's surroundings. The risk due to the perception failure is then formalized as the"relative"risk to the AV's motion plan between the perceived and the alternative plausible scenario. We employ a statistical tool called copula, which models tail dependencies between distributions, to estimate this risk. The theoretical properties of the copula allow us to compute probably approximately correct (PAC) estimates of the risk. We evaluate our task-aware risk estimator using NuPlan and compare it with established baselines, showing that the proposed risk estimator achieves the best F1-score (doubling the score of the best baseline) and exhibits a good balance between recall and precision, i.e., a good balance of safety and performance.


The Grid2003 Project has deployed a multivirtual organization, application-driven grid laboratory ("Grid3") that has sustained for several months the production-level services required by physics experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (ATLAS and CMS), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, the gravitational wave search experiment LIGO, the BTeV experiment at Fermilab, as well as applications in molecular structure analysis and genome analysis, and computer science research projects in such areas as job and data scheduling. The deployed infrastructure has been operating since November 2003 with 27 sites, a peak of 2800 processors, work loads from 10 different applications exceeding 1300 simultaneous jobs, and data transfers among sites of greater than 2 TB/day. We describe the principles that have guided the development of this unique infrastructure and the practical experiences that have resulted from its creation and use. We discuss application requirements for grid services deployment and configuration, monitoring infrastructure, application performance, metrics, and operational experiences. We also summarize lessons learned.


In this paper we study the problem of weak processes regulating the activity in primary school children with learning disabilities. The study was conducted on children with severe learning difficulties (from 1 to 4-5 grades), and on the sample of first graders with varying success in learning. The main method was Luria's neuropsychological assessment adapted for 5 – 9 years old children (Akhutina et al., 2008/2012; Polonskaya, 2007). It is shown that the children of both samples can be divided into three groups according to the function states that regulate the activity: children with hyperactivity-impulsivity disorder, children with fatigue and low tempo characteristics, and children without a significant deficit of the unit I functions. The close relationship of unit I functions deficit and school performance was demonstrated. It was revealed that children with hyperactivity disorder characterized by severe weakness of programming and controlling processes and visual and visual-spatial functions (with weak left analytical hemisphere and right-hemisphere which is responsible for holistic strategies of processing information). Children with sluggish cognitive tempo are characterized by less pronounced weakness in programming and controlling functions and also by prominent audioverbal and kinesthetiс difficulties (weakness of the left hemisphere which is responsible for analytical strategy of processing information). Various components of higher mental functions in children with learning disabilities show uneven age dynamics: from 1 to 4-5 grade the symptoms of fatigue, low rate and kinesthetic difficulties practically do not manifest positive dynamics in contrast to all other components of the higher mental functions.


Despite concerted academic interest in the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) since the 1980s, a coherent body of theory capable of guiding practice has not materialised. This is because many prior studies focus only on a single process characteristic, often rationality or comprehensiveness, and have paid insufficient attention to context. To further develop theory, research is required which examines: (i) the influence of context from multiple theoretical perspectives (e.g. upper echelons, environmental determinism); (ii) different process characteristics from both synoptic formal (e.g. rationality) and political incremental (e.g. politics) perspectives, and; (iii) the effects of context and process characteristics on a range of SDMP outcomes. Using data from 30 interviews and 357 questionnaires, this thesis addresses several opportunities for theory development by testing an integrative model which incorporates: (i) five SDMP characteristics representing both synoptic formal (procedural rationality, comprehensiveness, and behavioural integration) and political incremental (intuition, and political behaviour) perspectives; (ii) four SDMP outcome variables—strategic decision (SD) quality, implementation success, commitment, and SD speed, and; (iii) contextual variables from the four theoretical perspectives—upper echelons, SD-specific characteristics, environmental determinism, and firm characteristics. The present study makes several substantial and original contributions to knowledge. First, it provides empirical evidence of the contextual boundary conditions under which intuition and political behaviour positively influence SDMP outcomes. Second, it establishes the predominance of the upper echelons perspective; with TMT variables explaining significantly more variance in SDMP characteristics than SD specific characteristics, the external environment, and firm characteristics. A newly developed measure of top management team expertise also demonstrates highly significant direct and indirect effects on the SDMP. Finally, it is evident that SDMP characteristics and contextual variables influence a number of SDMP outcomes, not just overall SD quality, but also implementation success, commitment, and SD speed.


Summary

In contrast to the static chemoreceptor-related flavour perception, texture of food capable of flow is detected dynamically with oral mechanoreceptors while the food is manipulated in the mouth. The resulting sensation called mouthfeel strongly depends on the different physical properties of food. Aim of the current study is to determine numerically the occurring fluid mechanical forces in food suspensions using a simplified tongue-palate model system consisting of two parallel plates. For this purpose, the equations of fluid and particle motion are numerically solved by using structured overlapping grids. In the computational experiment, a density neutral fluid system between the plates is compressed by moving the upper plate with constant velocity down to the other one. It has been found that suspended particles move with the fluid flow but have only minor effect on the global flow field in the applied concentration.


Hyperbaric oxygenation (HBO) in a pressure chamber with an oxygen pressure of up to 2.8 absolute atmospheres administered to patients with various lesions of the spinal cord (trauma sequelae, discogenic ischemic myelopathy, states after tumor removal, etc.,) was frequently followed by a more or less pronounced regression of the existent neurological symptomatology. Pelvic and motor functions as well as sensitivity and reflexes returned to normal and the pain syndromes were alleviated. The therapeutic response to HBO is directly dependent on the role played by reversible functional lesions of the spinal cord in the general picture of the disease.


Last Term, the Supreme Court decided two election law cases that had significant implications for the ability of political actors to bring challenges to a state's election regime. In Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party and Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (the voter ID case), the Court rejected facial challenges to the laws and boldly stated that political actors may only challenge election laws as applied. In essence, this means that voters and others no longer can achieve pre-election, prospective relief, instead having to endure at least one election cycle under a law that might be invalid as applied to them.This article examines the immediate, practical effect of these decisions. I catalogue every case that has cited these Supreme Court decisions thus far and compare election law challenges in 2004 and 2008 to demonstrate that lower federal courts are now slightly more likely to uphold states' election regulations. As compared to the 1960s, when the Court enacted widespread electoral change by sustaining facial challenges, the balance of power in an election law case has now shifted to favoring the government's election practice through this seemingly procedural rule of allowing only as-applied litigation. After examining this jurisprudential shift, I then discuss how these results show the unique importance judges have in defining the scope of the right to vote, and, as a corollary, the meaning of political participation and self-governance. Finally, I argue that the Court should abolish the facial/as-applied distinction for election law cases and adopt the overbreadth doctrine in its place.


Abandoned metal mines in the Tamar catchment, south west England, represent a significant threat to surface water quality via generation of acid mine waters. Currently the River Tamar fails environmental quality standards (EQS) established under the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) for dissolved Cu (x ̅ = 0.19 ± 0.05 μmol L-1) and Zn (x ̅ = 0.19 ± 0.06 μmol L-1, both 1997-2007) downstream of historic mining area of Gunnislake. The aim of this study was to quantify the risk to surface water quality by diffuse drainage generated by mine waste tips. For the first time, a GIS model was compiled and used to generate a priority list of known areas of mine waste, based on physical and environmental factors. The methodology was consistent with European guidance documentation published to meet the requirements of the Mining Waste Directive (2001/21/EC) and has since been applied, in a modified form, to other catchments in south west England. Two study sites, with contrasting mineralogy and hydrology, scored highly in the model and were the subject of field investigations from 2007-2009. These were Devon Great Consols (DGC), an abandoned Cu-As mine near Gunnislake and Wheal Betsy (WB), an abandoned Pb-Ag mine, near Mary Tavy. At each site, surface waters and shallow groundwaters were sampled and analysed for dissolved metals (including Al, Cu, Zn, Mn, Pb, Ni, and Cd), metalloids (As, Sb), major ions and anions. Samples of four selected mine waste tips were also gathered and subjected to a range of laboratory leaching experiments including the novel application of a dynamic upflow percolation test, based on an existing European method (CEN TS 14405). Leachates generated by the waste tips in the field were highly variable and elevated with respect to EQS for Al (up to 1850 μmol L-1), Cu (570 μmol L-1), Zn (34 μmol L-1), Ni (3.8 μmol L-1), Cd (0.17 μmol L-1), Mn (216 μmol L-1), Fe(537 μmol L-1) , As (380 μmol L-1) and Sb (5.4 μmol L-1). Estimated annual fluxes of dissolved metals were predicted using average rainfall data and catchment areas calculated in ArcHydro9 to estimate the annual discharge of waters from the tip. These calculations showed annual contaminant flux from the tips to exceed, or be of the same order of magnitude to, major adit discharges in the catchment (e.g. Cu 50900-66900 mol y-1 at DGC and 470 mol y-1 Cd at WB) and represented a significant contributor to metal flux in the Tamar catchment. Primary sulphide minerals in the waste were generally highly altered and metals (Pb, Cu, Zn, and Mn) and As were found to be strongly associated with secondary iron minerals, precipitated under oxic conditions. In finer wastes, sorption to clay minerals was also found to be very important for the retention of dissolved metals, particularly Pb. Concentrations of contaminants in column field leachates were similar for most metals (Cu, Zn, Mn, Ni and Cd) and may provide a useful tool for prediction of leachate Diffuse Minewater Pollution: Quantification and Risk Assessment in the Tamar Catchment 


The article addresses the situation of the Estonian law-enforcement legislation in relation to the ongoing legislative reform in the associated field. On 23 February 2011, the Parliament of Estonia adopted the Law Enforcement Act, on which the new Estonian law-enforcement legislation shall be based. That act has its foundation in the idea of preventive maintenance of public order, and the core threshold set for implementation of measures restricting fundamental rights is linked to the concept of (specific) threat. Selection of suitable law-enforcement legislation concepts has been accompanied by serious doubts. The author addresses several dispute-laden issues, such as the possible scope for delegation of public-law enforcement tasks to private persons, the legal-cultural suitability of a law-enforcement model that is based on the concept of threat as part of our legal order, the issue of ensuring optimal balance between repression and prevention, and the compliance of several aspects of threat-control legislation with the Constitution – especially with its principles of legal clarity and proportionality.


Text preprocessing and segmentation are critical tasks in search and text mining applications. Due to the huge amount of documents that are exclusively pre- sented in PDF format, most of the Data Mining (DM) and Information Retrieval (IR) systems must extract content from the PDF files. In some occasions this is a difficult task: the result of the extraction process from a PDF file is plain text, and it should be returned in the same order as a human would read the original PDF file. However, current tools for PDF text extraction fail in this objective when working with complex documents with multiple columns. For instance, this is the case of official government bulletins with legal information. In this task, it is mandatory to get correct and or- dered text as a result of the application of the PDF extractor. It is very usual that a legal article in a document refers to a previous article and they should be offered in the right sequential order. To overcome these difficulties we have designed a new method for extraction of text in PDFs that simulates the human reading order. We evaluated our method and compared it against other PDF extraction tools and algo- rithms. Evaluation of our approach shows that it significantly outperforms the results of the existing tools and algorithms.


Today, the luxury residential property segment in Malaysia has experienced product development in an exponential rate, causing the segment to encompass more than just exclusivity, fancy address and facilities. For purchasers, the luxury concept has moved beyond the physical product. As such, it is important for marketers to understand how luxury is perceived from a larger perspective so that they can gauge, shape and fulfil potential purchasers' expectations. In the current soft market for luxury apartments, such understanding is crucial to the business sustainability of developers. This paper attempts to conceptualise luxury residential property based on an extensive review of the relevant literature. Ultimately, the findings of this paper will contribute towards an effective marketing strategy to boost the sale of luxury high-rise residential properties which are currently experiencing a soft market. The 4P's of marketing underpinned the formulation of the concept of luxury residential spaces in this paper. Information is gleaned from texts, articles, journals, books and seminar papers from various perspectives including real estate, marketing, economics and sociology mainly from international authors. As such, the scope of this paper is much wider than simply capturing the nuances of local culture in shaping the notion of luxury residences, but rather take a global and academic view of the conceptualisation of luxury residential property. The framework of luxury residential property as presented in this paper will give practitioners and researchers an informed insight into the evolution, normalisation and development of the concepts of luxury and luxury residence with potential applications for benchmarking and research. Although far from definitive, sufficient theories, definitions and discourse from the body of knowledge on luxury real estate have been covered and thus provide a valuable reference. Keywords: Conceptualisation, Luxury, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Residential property.


This paper argues that the expansion of the White House's role in judicial appointments since the late 1970s, at the expense of the Senate, has contributed to heightened levels of ideological conflict and gridlock over the appointment of federal appeals court judges, by making a cooperative equilibrium difficult to sustain. Presidents have greater electoral incentive to behave ideologically, and less incentive to cooperate with other players in the appointments process, than do senators, who are disciplined to a greater extent in their dealings with each other by the prospect of retaliation over repeat play. The possibility of divided government exacerbates the difficulty of achieving cooperative equilibrium by making both the benefits of cooperative behavior and the costs of retaliation highly uncertain.


Strong interactions between localized surface plasmons and nanoscale objects have led to the development of highly sensitive biochemical sensing in planar metallic nanostructures with sensing performance mainly dependent on the interaction volume and the local electric field. However, the sensitivity and the interaction volume of these planar structures have been limited by the achievable aspect ratios based on the standard lift-off process. We propose a new technique which involves cold sonicated development and pulsed electrodeposition to overcome this limitation, and demonstrate robust gold square dimers with sub-10 nm gaps and a gap aspect ratio of ∼8. We show that smooth gold surfaces can be achieved by growing the gold film directly on a transparent ITO substrate without a gold seed layer, and demonstrate a significant improvement in Q factors and resonance contrast in electrodeposited dimers compared to dimers fabricated by physical vapor deposition. We demonstrate that the electrodeposited dimers exhibit near 50% higher bulk refractive index sensitivity than their planar counterparts. The technique may be used to grow a variety of metals of arbitrary geometries and spatial arrangements.


Motivated by the full liberalization of the Japanese retail electric power market which started in April 2016, trading of wholesale electricity via the Japan Electric Power Exchange (JEPX) has been attracting much more attention recently. In addition, the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM) is now planning to list electricity futures/forward contracts on the JEPX spot prices, and a variety of electricity derivatives using those contracts are expected to be available in the near future. However, the construction of forward/future models is considered difficult due to the lack of sufficient observed data despite its importance in introducing such derivatives. Also, it should be noted that electricity needs to be consumed as soon as it is produced so that future/forward contracts cannot be replicated using the spot electricity contracts, further exacerbating the pricing problem. In this paper, we develop a prediction based forward pricing model by extending our previously developed technique for estimating predicted values of JPEX spot prices. To the end, we decompose the log- process of JEPX spot prices into a trend function modeled by a spline regression and the residual term represented by state space equations formula. Then, we apply a financial engineering technique known as the Esscher transformation for the daily forward pricing problem to derive forward prices with arbitrary delivery periods (e.g., from one week to six months). An empirical analysis illustrates the accuracy of predicted forward prices estimated by our proposed technique and the risk aversion coefficient implied by realized forward prices in JEPX.


We herein report the anti-cancer activities of some synthesized pyridine derivatives substituted with thiazole, pyrazole and triazole moieties. A series of these derivatives 1-12 were synthesized and evaluated as anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anticonvulsant and antiparkinsonian agents before. Twelve compounds were conveniently screened for their in vitro cytoyoxicity against a wide rannge of cell lines and they are also showed potent activities against renal and prostate cancer cell lines. The in vivo antirenal cancer and antiprostate cancer of the most active in vitro compounds was estimated and founded highly potent. In search for the mechanism of action of anticancer activities it was foundeded that these compounds exert its action via histone decarboylase inhibition and inhibition of p53 ubiquitination.


Judges in domestic cases often underestimate the risk to a mother and her children that an angry and abusive father or other intimate partner poses. In a recent Maryland case, for example, two judges refused to deny a father visitation or require that visitation be supervised, despite the fact that the father had threatened suicide. During the father's unsupervised visitation, he drowned all three of his children, then attempted to kill himself.The Danger Assessment tool (the D.A.) developed by a Johns Hopkins Nursing professor and validated by herself and other social scientists shows how much the father's thoughts of suicide increased the risk that he would commit murder. Had the judges had that Danger Assessment, the children might have been kept safe.The attached article does something that we think has never been done before. It takes the D.A., which has been used widely to counsel domestic violence victims, and investigates whether and how it might be admissible in myriad types of court proceedings, both civil family law proceedings and criminal matters. The primary goal is to inform judges of the importance of the impact of the complex of factors in a particular case, including unemployment of the abuser, access to a gun, the presence in the home of children from an earlier relationship, and threats of suicide. My co-author and I hope this will be a pivotal article that will lead to the taking of steps that result in heightened understanding by judges and provision of greater protection for victims and their children. We suggest (1) how the D.A. evidence may be admissible (or not) under current rules; (2) the possible advisability of amendments to current rules or statutes; and (3) judicial training on the D.A. factors.


Importance
A 50% reduction of glaucoma-related blindness has previously been demonstrated in a population that was screened for open-angle glaucoma. Ongoing screening trials of high-risk populations and forthcoming low-cost screening methods suggest that such screening may become more common in the future. One would then need to estimate a key component of the natural history of chronic disease, the mean preclinical detectable phase (PCDP). Knowledge of the PCDP is essential for the planning and early evaluation of screening programs and has been estimated for several types of cancer that are screened for.

Objective
To estimate the mean PCDP for open-angle glaucoma.

Design, Setting, and Participants
A large population-based screening for open-angle glaucoma was conducted from October 1992 to January 1997 in Malmö, Sweden, including 32 918 participants aged 57 to 77 years. A retrospective medical record review was conducted to assess the prevalence of newly detected cases at the screening, incidence of new cases after the screening, and the expected clinical incidence, ie, the number of new glaucoma cases expected to be detected without a screening. The latter was derived from incident cases in the screened age cohorts before the screening started and from older cohorts not invited to the screening. A total of 2029 patients were included in the current study. Data were analyzed from March 2020 to October 2021.

Main Outcomes and Measures
The length of the mean PCDP was calculated by 2 different methods: first, by dividing the prevalence of screen-detected glaucoma with the clinical incidence, assuming that the screening sensitivity was 100% and second, by using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) model simulation that simultaneously derived both the length of the mean PCDP and the sensitivity of the screening.

Results
Of 2029 included patients, 1352 (66.6%) were female. Of 1420 screened patients, the mean age at screening was 67.4 years (95% CI, 67.2-67.7). The mean length of the PCDP of the whole study population was 10.7 years (95% CI, 8.7-13.0) by the prevalence/incidence method and 10.1 years (95% credible interval, 8.9-11.2) by the MCMC method.

Conclusions and Relevance
The mean PCDP was similar for both methods of analysis, approximately 10 years. A mean PCDP of 10 years found in the current study allows for screening with reasonably long intervals, eg, 5 years.


For just over a decade the Equal Opportunities Commission (ED . C.) has been employed in its task of ending sexual discrimination. Up until comparatively recently gender differences in education were thought to be a problem that co-education could put right . Since girls must be part of any social class or ethnic group, their advantages or disadvantages would vary with whatever group to which they belonged. Better opportunities for some groups wo.uld, therefore, seem to offer better opportunities for some girls . The issue of girls was thought to be part of bigger issues in society and education. Even though sex-role differences might have certain questionable aspects other matters had priority. But, gradually, with changes in the structure of the family and in the legal and vocational status of women there came a realization that equal opportunities did not seem to exist for women in society and education.


Landscape is the resultant of interaction between territory and lifestyle. Thus, to sustain landscape value it is important that the lifestyle of the inhabitants of that place is intrinsically linked in a mutually beneficial manner to the value of that landscape. It is evident that degradation in landscape quality has arisen when the lifestyle of the inhabitants of that place has diminishing cognisance and involvement with the place itself.For that reason, the primary aim of a management plan which aims to enhance and sustain landscape quality and value must be to engender, for mutually beneficial purposes, awareness and respect for the value of landscape quality in the people who inhabit and use that place. ie. lifestyle quality must be intrinsic with landscape quality, and 'progress' and development of both must be mutual and sustainable.Thus, MAG proposes that the theme of 'community' should precede all other management themes. Without success in this theme, the landscape value of the AONB will be neither inherent nor sustainable.Conservation or protection of a status quo is not a privilege which is available in the management of any landscape. However, it should be possible to strive for and maintain a constant level of 'value', even in a changing and evolving landscape / lifestyle, and this should be the stated aim of any landscape policy. Landscape value depends on the input and direction of community and not just beauty and amenity, wildlife, historic objects or natural phenomena. Likewise, enjoyment and access must be core to the value of the community lifestyle within that landscape and not aimed primarily at a visiting population.


Bayesian modeling of unknown causes of events is an important and pervasive problem. However, it has received relatively little research attention. In general, an intelligent agent (or system) has only limited causal knowledge of the world. Therefore, the agent may well be experiencing the influences of causes outside its model. For example, a clinician may be seeing a patient with a virus that is new to humans; the HIV virus was at one time such an example. It is important that clinicians be able to recognize that a patient is presenting with an unknown disease. In general, intelligent agents (or systems) need to recognize under uncertainty when they are likely to be experiencing influences outside their realm of knowledge. This dissertation investigates Bayesian modeling of unknown causes of events in the context of disease-outbreak detection.
The dissertation introduces a Bayesian approach that models and detects (1) known diseases (e.g., influenza and anthrax) by using informative prior probabilities, (2) unknown diseases (e.g., a new, highly contagious respiratory virus that has never been seen before) by using relatively non-informative prior probabilities and (3) partially-known diseases (e.g., a disease that has characteristics of an influenza-like illness) by using semi-informative prior probabilities. I report the results of simulation experiments which support that this modeling method can improve the detection of new disease outbreaks in a population.
A key contribution of this dissertation is that it introduces a Bayesian approach for jointly modeling both known and unknown causes of events. Such modeling has broad applicability in artificial intelligence in general and biomedical informatics applications in particular, where the space of known causes of outcomes of interest is seldom complete.


We propose a nanometer-scale hollow core waveguide that can be fabricated with standard methods on a silicon-on-insulator substrate. High optical confinement in the core is possible, making such a waveguide structure suitable for sensing applications, applications making use of strong optical nonlinearities, and optofluidics applications. We extend a historical method (Marcatili's method) to provide analytical solutions for field distributions in the device and simulate power confinement, intensity, and parametric dependencies with beam propagation and finite-difference time-domain methods for two polarizations. In an example worked out, the optical confinement in the air core is ~40% of the total waveguide power, which is favorable to that of a standard slot waveguide. The intensity per μm2 in the hollow core is 95% higher than in the silicon cladding region, indicating that avoiding optical nonlinearities is also possible.


Much of the debate over whether or not developing countries gain from regional trade agreements (RTA's) has focused on two characteristics that are common to developing countries: their relatively high tariffs and their high trade dependencies on one or a few developed trade partners. In this paper, we address a third common characteristic: their use of distorting domestic policies that are closely linked to trade restrictions. We argue that participation in an RTA can create pressures for domestic policy reforms. We analyze the case of a small country, Mexico, forming an RTA with two larger countries, the U.S. and Canada, in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico exhibits all three characteristics of a developing country: relatively high tariffs, a high trade dependency on the U.S., and an extensive and pervasive system of farm support that was linked to the restriction of trade. For the analysis, we use a 26- sector, multi-country, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model in which the three single- country models are linked through trade flows, and farm programs are modeled in detail. We find that there are welfare gains from trade liberalization in all three countries only when domestic reforms are in place. Mexico gains from NAFTA only when it also removes domestic distortions in agriculture. Then, agriculture can generate allocative efficiency gains that are large enough to offset the terms of trade losses which arise because Mexico has higher initial tariffs than other RTA members.


Event detection has a lot of use-cases, for example summarization, automatic timeline generation or automatic knowledge base population. However, there is no commonly agreed on definition what counts as an event or how events are expressed in text. As a consequence, many different definitions, annotation schemes and corpora have been published, often focusing on specific applications. For a new application, there is a high chance that new data must be annotated and that a machine learning approach must specifically be trained and tuned for this new dataset.

Instead of a system that works well for one specific dataset, we are interested in a universal learning approach that can be used for a wide range of event detection tasks. In this thesis, we analyze an architecture that is based on bidirectional long short-term memory networks (BiLSTM) and conditional random fields (CRF). The BiLSTM-CRF architecture was successfully used by other researchers for sequence tagging tasks and is a strong candidate for the task of event detection. However, besides numerous hyperparameters, researchers have also published various modifications and extensions of this architecture. These parameters and design choices can have a big impact on the performance and selecting them correctly can make the difference between mediocre and state-of-the-art performance. Which parameters and design choices are of relevance is not clear. This leads to a slow adaptation of the approach to new datasets and requires expert experiences and sometimes brute force search to find optimal parameters. This situation is especially unfavorable for event detection where datasets are often application specific.

In order to accelerate the adaptation to new tasks, we provide an extensive evaluation of the BiLSTM-CRF architecture and its individual components and parameters. We identify which parts are relevant for achieving a good performance and which parameters are important to tune for specific tasks. We derive a standard configuration for the architecture that worked well for various tasks. We then show that the BiLSTM-CRF architecture with the proposed default configuration achieves strong results on different event detection tasks.

In most applications, we are not only interested to know that an event happened, but also need to know when it happened. Different methods for annotating temporal information for events have been proposed. In an annotation study we show that the existent annotation schemes have major drawbacks in providing temporal information for events, at least for news articles. Existent schemes provide insufficient temporal information for the majority of events. This is due to the limitation of the annotation scope to only one sentence or two neighboring sentences. As we show in an annotation study, the relevant temporal information for an event can be several sentences apart from the event mention. We developed a new annotation scheme that addresses short-comings of previous schemes and which requires about 85% less annotation effort. Still, it provides better temporal information for events in a document.

While the new scheme requires less human effort, it creates new challenges for automatic event time extraction systems. Existent schemes can be modeled as a pair-wise classification task, but this is no longer possible for the new scheme. Instead, the whole document must be considered and information from different parts of the document must be merged together. We propose an automatic system that uses a decision tree with convolutional neural networks as local classifiers. The neural networks consider the whole document. The final label is derived step-wise, with different branching options. Compared to state-of-the-art systems, the developed architecture significantly improves the accuracy for event time extraction on our annotated data. Further, it generalizes well to other datasets and tasks. Without adaption, it improved the F1-score for the task of automatic event time line generation for the SemEval-2015 Task 4 by 4.01 percentage points.

The final part of the thesis addresses the evaluation of machine learning approaches. Comparing approaches is a major driving force in our research community, which tries to improve the state-of-the-art for tasks of interest. The question arises how reliable our evaluation methods are to spot differences between approaches. We investigate two evaluation setups that are commonly found in scientific publications and which are the de-facto evaluation setups for shared tasks. We show that these setups are unsuitable to compare learning approaches. This introduces a high risk of drawing wrong conclusions. We identify different sources of variation that must be addressed when comparing machine learning approaches and discuss difficulties of addressing those sources of variations.


When sea ice forms it scavenges and concentrates particulates from the water column, which then become trapped until the ice melts. In recent years, melting has led to record lows in Arctic Sea ice extent, the most recent in September 2012. Global climate models, such as that of Gregory et al. (2002), suggest that the decline in Arctic Sea ice volume (3.4% per decade) will actually exceed the decline in sea ice extent, something that Laxon et al. (2013) have shown supported by satellite data. The extent to which melting ice could release anthropogenic particulates back to the open ocean has not yet been examined. Here we show that Arctic Sea ice from remote locations contains concentrations of microplastics are several orders of magnitude greater than those that have been previously reported in highly contaminated surface waters, such as those of the Pacific Gyre. Our findings indicate that microplastics have accumulated far from population centers and that polar sea ice represents a major historic global sink of man‐made particulates. The potential for substantial quantities of legacy microplastic contamination to be released to the ocean as the ice melts therefore needs to be evaluated, as do the physical and toxicological effects of plastics on marine life.


The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a new breed of human-computer interfaces that combines several human language technologies to enable humans to converse with computers using spoken dialogue for information access, creation and processing. In this paper, we introduce the nature of these conversational interfaces and describe the underlying human language technologies on which they are based. After summarizing some of the recent progress in this area around the world, we discuss development issues faced by researchers creating these kinds of systems and present some of the ongoing and unmet research challenges in this field.


Ibogaine is a psychedelic alkaloid which has
been subject of intense scientific research due to its reported ability to
attenuate drug-seeking behavior. Recent work suggested that ibogaine effects on
alcohol self-administration in rats was related to the release of Glial Cell
Derived Neurotrophic Factor (GDNF) in the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA), a
mesencephalic region which hosts soma of dopamine neurons. It is well known
that neurotrophic factors (NFs) mediate the neuroadaptations induced in the
mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic system by repeated exposure to drugs. Although
previous reports have shown ibogaine´s ability to induce GDNF expression in rat
midbrain, there are no studies addressing its effect on the expression of GDNF,
Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) or Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in
distinct regions containing dopaminergic neurons. In this work, we examined the
effect of ibogaine acute administration on the expression of these NFs in the VTA,
Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) and the Substantia Nigra
(SN). Thus, rats were i.p. treated with ibogaine 20 mg/kg (I20), 40
mg/kg (I40) or vehicle, and NFs expression was analyzed after 3 and
24 hours. Only at 24 h an increase of the expression for the three NFs were
observed in a site and dose dependent manner. Results for GDNF showed that only
I40 selectively upregulated its expression in the VTA and SN. Both
doses of ibogaine elicited a large increase in the expression of BDNF in the
NAcc, SN and PFC, while a significant effect was found in the VTA only for I40.
Finally, NGF was found to be upregulated in all regions after I40,
while a selective upregulation was found in PFC and VTA for the I20
treatment. An increase in the content of mature GDNF was observed in the VTA
but no significant increase in the mature BDNF protein content was found in all
the studied areas. Interestingly, an increase in the content of proBDNF was
detected in the NAcc for both treatments. Further research is needed to
understand the neurochemical bases of these changes, and to confirm their
contribution to the anti-addictive properties of ibogaine.


Long-wave infrared (LWIR) polarimetric signatures provide the potential for day-night detection and identification of objects in remotely sensed imagery. The source of optical energy in the LWIR is usually due to thermal emission from the object in question, which makes the signature dependent primarily on the target and not on the external environment. In this paper we explore the impact of thermal equilibrium and the temperature of (unseen) background objects on LWIR polarimetric signatures. We demonstrate that an object can completely lose its polarization signature when it is in thermal equilibrium with its optical background, even if it has thermal contrast with the objects that appear behind it in the image.


Purpose: The study aims to examine the complexity of attribute configurations affecting tourism decisions related to peer-to-peer accommodation and the sharing economy in destinations affected by recession.

Design/methodology/approach: Based on chaos and complexity theories this non-parametric research examines the perspectives of 352 peer-to-peer accommodation holidaymakers in Athens, Greece. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), the study examines the complex relations between social and economic aspects, benefits, risks, and consumer trust with regard to purchasing intentions. The paper also compares fsQCA with the dominant linear methods of analysis (regression; Cramer's V) and highlights fsQCA's suitability when dealing with tourism complexity.

Findings: The results reveal three configurations explaining the attributes of holidaymakers' tourism decisions characterised by socio-economic orientation, trust formulation, and price sensitivity. They also highlight the superiority of fsQCA towards conventional linear analyses in complexity aspects.

Research limitations/implications: The examination of the complexity concept using fsQCA can provide a better understanding of the influence of attributes which affect tourism decisions especially for countries suffering from deep recession such as Greece. Still, due to the lack of fsQCA implementation in tourism studies its full potential needs to be further examined.

Originality/value: In terms of the literature, the study provides an understanding of the complexity formulation of tourism decisions during recession, with special focus on the sharing economy. It further explores the attributes that affect tourism decisions and associated linkages. Methodologically, the study highlights the value of fsQCA and its advantages compared to conventional methods of correlational analysis. It also progresses from fit to predictive validity for the models suggested.

Keywords: Sharing economy, Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory, Holidaymakers, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Greece


This paper solves for a firm's optimal cash holding policy within a continuous time, contingent claims framework that has been extended to incorporate most of the significant contracting frictions that have been identified in the corporate finance literature. Under the optimal policy the firm targets a level of cash holding that is a non-monotonic function of business conditions and an increasing function of the amount of long-term debt outstanding. By allowing firms to either issue equity or to borrow short-term, we show how share issue and dividends on the one hand and cash accumulation and bank borrowing on the other are all mutually interlinked. We calibrate the model and show that it matches closely a wide range of empirical benchmarks including cash holdings, leverage, equity volatility, yield spreads, default probabilities and recovery rates. Furthermore, we show the predicted dynamics of cash and leverage are in line with the empirical literature. Despite the presence of significant contracting frictions we show that the model exhibits a near irrelevance of long-term capital structure property. Furthermore, the optimal policy exhibits a state-dependent hierarchy among financing alternatives that is consistent with recent explorations of pecking order theory. We calculate the agency costs generated by the conflict of interest between shareholders and creditors regarding the firm's liquidity policy and show that bond covenants that establish an earnings restriction on dividend payments may be value increasing.


This article analyzes the work of Palestine9s most established queer rights organization, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, to reveal the political power of being queer in Palestine. It argues that an open, feminist, queer space such as alQaws is a productive site to think and practice decolonization. Relying on the author9s direct involvement with the group, the article traces the development of queer Palestinian thought to provide a critique of queer politics in Palestine: it recounts how since the establishment of the organization in 2001, alQaws activists have increasingly transcended exclusivist gay identifications and rejected singling out sexuality as a discrete site of oppression disconnected from Zionist settler colonialism. The discussion covers Israeli pinkwashing and its counter, Palestinian pinkwatching; it deconstructs pinkwashing narratives, rejects the myth of the colonial savior, and reveals how discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism. It also documents alQaws9s challenge to normalizing development discourse.


Cyber-optimists anticipate that electronic media will serve as an extensive public space, a virtual agora, that will re-engage the public with politics and the policies that affect everyday life. For three years we were involved in a U.S. National Science Foundation funded project designed to enhance the participation of citizens in government agency rulemaking processes using online public deliberation and Natural Language Processing technologies. Despite a promising approach in an important arena for direct and regular public engagement, the project was met with serious obstacles in trying to secure a partnership with a government agency or interest groups. This led us to consider the policy process literature for insights regarding the obstacles we faced. That literature, a mainstay in the public policy and public administration curriculum in the U.S. and an attempt to capture how policy makers actually make decisions, heavily focuses on institutional actors and their adversarial relationships. Yet, it provides for hardly any role for the public to participate in what ideally should be a democratic process. Important components of the literature imply that institutional actors should discourage direct public engagement. The analysis seeks to clarify leverage points and contexts that could be used to promote online public engagement as a regular component of government processes.


We study the optical colors of 147,920 galaxies brighter than g* = 21, observed in five bands by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) over ∼100 deg2 of high Galactic latitude sky along the celestial equator. The distribution of galaxies in the g*-r* versus u*-g* color-color diagram is strongly bimodal, with an optimal color separator of u*-r* = 2.22. We use visual morphology and spectral classification of subsamples of 287 and 500 galaxies, respectively, to show that the two peaks correspond roughly to early- (E, S0, and Sa) and late-type (Sb, Sc, and Irr) galaxies, as expected from their different stellar populations. We also find that the colors of galaxies are correlated with their radial profiles, as measured by the concentration index and by the likelihoods of exponential and de Vaucouleurs' profile fits. While it is well known that late-type galaxies are bluer than early-type galaxies, this is the first detection of a local minimum in their color distribution. In all SDSS bands, the counts versus apparent magnitude relations for the two color types are significantly different and demonstrate that the fraction of blue galaxies increases toward the faint end.


The vascularized ocular tissues are conjunctiva which covers the outer layer of the eye and the retina which is located in the back of the eye. Conjunctival microvascular hemodynamic alterations due to systemic and vascular diseases have been reported. However, previous qualitative or semi-automated methods were limited for quantifying hemodynamics in a large number of vessels within the microvascular network. Due to the high physiological variability and vessel density, there is a need for an automated image processing technique for quantitative and comprehensive assessment of hemodynamics in the conjunctival microvascular network. Additionally, assessment of alterations in the conjunctival and the retinal vascular pattern provides a means for computerized disease diagnosis and discrimination. Techniques have been developed for discriminating systemic and ocular diseases using retinal vascular images. Nevertheless, a method for discriminating stages of disease based on conjunctival microvascular images has not been reported previously. Finally, increased retinal vessel tortuosity is known to be among early indicators of various retinopathies. However, previous techniques for quantitative assessment of retinal vessel tortuosity are limited in that their findings are not always consistent with the visual perception of tortuosity or might be scale dependent. Therefore, the goal in this research study was to develop and apply image processing techniques for detection of hemodynamic, vascular pattern, and morphological alterations due to systemic and vision-threatening diseases.


1. Radiographic methods have been used to study the rate of deposition of the hen's egg shell and the changes in volume and orientation undergone by the egg in the shell gland.

2. Shell deposition commences about 5 hr. after the yolk is ovulated and several series of radiographs were obtained tracing the process from these earliest stages through to the fully calcined shell.

3. From radiographs of calcium carbonate-gelatin mixtures it was found that, for a series of comparable objects differing only in calcium carbonate content, the densitometer readings on their radiographs were directly proportional to the density of calcium carbonate traversed by the X-rays in each object.

4. Hence, densitometer measurements on the periphery of the shell in each of a series of radiographs taken during the development of a single egg shell give values which are proportional to the density (or thickness) of calcium carbonate traversed by the tangential rays. It is shown that the radial thickness is closely proportional to the square of these values.

5. Plotting these squared densitometer readings against time indicates that the rate of deposition of mineral matter in the shell follows an S-shaped curve, with a marked acceleration in shell deposition 5-6 hr. after its onset.

6. During its first few hours in the shell gland, the egg undergoes a 25% osmotic increase in volume. This swelling is brought to a fairly abrupt halt by the increase in the rate of shell deposition and the consequent increase in the impermeability and rigidity of the shell.

7. Throughout all but the last hour or two of its 20 hr. stay in the shell gland, the egg lies with its pointed end caudal. Shortly before it is laid, however, it usually undergoes a 180° rotation in a horizontal plane. Thus the blunt end finally becomes caudal and emerges first when the egg is laid. During the rotation, the egg sinks to a more ventral position. This is necessary because, in most hens, the length of the egg plus the thickness of the walls of the shell gland is greater than the width of the pelvis.

8. The possible significance of the S-shaped curve of shell deposition is discussed. The volume, shape and orientation of the egg are considered in relation to the needs of the chick embryo and to the characteristic structure of the bird's oviduct and pelvis.


Understanding the wear and friction phenomena in bearings is of key importance for the reduction of friction and wear. Boundary layers formed by oil additives during operation may significantly influence the frictional behaviour. To investigate the behaviour of such layers standardised test runs with cylindrical roller thrust bearings were conducted using differing oils with varying additivation. For these tests a FE-8 test rig for characterisation of rolling contact bearing lubricants was applied. As oil a low reverence and high reverence oil, as well as differently additivated oils were used. These oils may result in different boundary layers on the wear tracks. To analyse the frictional behaviour of these layers on the bearing surface, a micro-pin-on-disk tester was used under very low load. The contact of a spherical pin (made of 100Cr6) on a bearing disk (also called washer) without lubrication was examined. As a counterpart the bearing disks were used after the run in a bearing test rig under various oils, unused, and etched on the surface. Before application on the micro-pin-on-disk tester, all adhesive oil was removed. During the tests the coefficient of friction was monitored. The tests were performed at a rotational velocity of 1 min-1, the load was 27 mN.


Despite it is widely acknowledged that the ability to hydrolyze dissolved organic matter using extracellular phosphatases is diverse in fresh water phytoplankton, the competition within single species related to presence and quantity of cell-surface-bound phosphatases has not been examined in natural conditions yet. Here, we studied phytoplankton species competition in a freshwater reservoir during an in situ experiment. A natural plankton community, with the exclusion of large zooplankton, was enclosed in permeable dialysis bags inside two large containers of different bioavailable phosphate concentrations. Phytoplankton species biomass and the abundance of bacteria were determined in purpose to compare the development of enclosed microbial communities. Total and cell-surface-bound phosphatase activities in the phytoplankton were investigated using the Fluorescently Labelled Enzyme Activity (FLEA) technique that allows for direct microscopic detection of phosphatase-positive cells and, with image cytometry, enables quantification of phosphatase hydrolytic capacity. Production of extracellular phosphatases was not completely inhibited or stopped in the phosphate-enriched environment, phytoplankton cells only showed the activity less often. Under the phosphate-nonenriched conditions, the production of phosphatases was enhanced, but active species did not proliferate amongst phytoplankton assemblage. Further, specific growth rates of the phosphatase-positive species in the non-enriched environment were lower than the same phosphatase-positive species in phosphate-enriched environment. Interestingly, the phosphatase-positive cells of Ankyra ancora increased their size in both treatments equally, although the population in phosphate-enriched environment grew much faster and the cell-specific phosphatase activity was lower. We hypothesize that brand new daughter cells had sufficient phosphorus reserves and therefore did not employ extracellular phosphatases until they matured and needed extra bioavailable phosphorus to support their metabolism before cell division. Based on presented in situ experiment, we propose that the ability to hydrolyze organic polymers and particles with cell-surface-hound phosphatases is advantageous for longer persistence of given population in a phosphate-scarce environment; although phosphatase-positive species cannot dominate the reservoir phytoplankton solely because of specific phosphorus-scavenging strategy.


We present first results of a petrographic study of hydrothermally altered peridotites drilled during Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 209 in the 15°20′N fracture Zone area on the Mid‐Atlantic Ridge (MAR). We find that serpentinization is extensive at all drill sites. Where serpentinization is incomplete, phase relations indicate two major reaction pathways. One is reaction of pyroxene to talc and tremolite, and the other is reaction of olivine to serpentine, magnetite, and brucite. We interpret these reactions in the light of recent peridotite‐seawater reaction experiments and compositions of fluids venting from peridotite massifs at a range of temperatures. We suggest that the replacement of pyroxene by talc and tremolite takes place at temperatures >350°–400°C, where olivine is stable. The breakdown of olivine to serpentine, magnetite, and brucite is favored at temperatures below 250°C, where olivine reacts faster then pyroxene. High‐temperature hydrothermal fluids venting at the Logatchev and Rainbow sites are consistent with rapid reaction of pyroxene and little or no reaction of olivine. Moderate‐temperature fluids venting at the Lost City site are consistent with ongoing reaction of olivine to serpentine and brucite. Many completely serpentinized peridotites lack brucite and talc because once the more rapidly reacting phase is exhausted, interaction with the residual phase will change fluid pH and silica activity such that brucite or talc react to serpentine. At two sites we see strong evidence for continued fluid flow and fluid‐rock interaction after serpentinization was complete. At Site 1268, serpentinites underwent massive replacement by talc under static conditions. This reaction requires either removal of Mg from or addition of Si to the system. We propose that the talc‐altered rocks are Si‐metasomatized and that the source of Si is likely gabbro‐seawater reaction or breakdown of pyroxene deeper in the basement. The basement at Site 1268 is heavily veined, with talc and talc‐oxide‐sulfide veins being the most common vein types. It appears that the systems evolved from reducing (oxygen fugacity buffered by magnetite‐pyrrhotite‐pyrite and lower) to oxidizing (dominantly hematite). We propose that this transition is indicative of high fluid flux under retrograde conditions and that the abundance of hematite may relate to the Ca‐depleted nature of the basement that prevents near‐quantitative removal of seawater sulfate by anhydrite precipitation. At site 1272 we find abundant iowaite partly replacing brucite. While this is the first report of iowaite from a mid‐ocean ridge setting, its presence indicates, again, fairly oxidizing conditions. Our preliminary results indicate that peridotite‐seawater and serpentinite‐seawater interactions can take place under a wider range of temperature and redox conditions than previously appreciated.


Over the last decade, managers have placed increasing emphasis on the creation of tangible measures of intangible organizational properties. Many major corporations now include measures for intellectual capital, knowledge capital, reputational capital, and other such intangible assets on their financial ledgers. Counter to the rubric that "If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done", we argue that some intangibles are truly intangible, and attempts to force fit such measures on them creates undue organizational stress and harms the underlying asset. Instead, managers may better foster the growth of intangible assets by placing less emphasis on outcome measurement and more emphasis on the process. Using New York University's Office of Community Service as a case study, we illustrate how a Zen approach can augment tangible measures to create a truly "balanced" organizational strategy. American firms have widely adopted the strict measurement practices of Japanese firms, but have largely not adopted the Eastern practice of Zen. A Zen approach fosters trust and provides flexibility that allows organizations to better achieve success in the long run.


This article explores the variability and the limits of the political in regard to cyclists' unions in Germany and the Netherlands between 1900 and 1940. In both countries, cyclists formed national consumer organizations, mixing consumer demands with social and even political im-plications. The Dutch Cyclists' Union managed to establish herself as an eminent political actor and "system builder" with lasting impact on traffic legislation and road construction. While liber-als were loosing the political majority in Dutch parliament, the Cyclists' Union became a strong-hold of Dutch liberalism outside the narrow confines of the old institutionalized political arena. In contrast, German cyclists' dreams of opening up social elites and fostering social and political change through the bicycle were shattered. The bicycle, which had started off as a luxury good in the 1890s and had become a common means of transport by the 1920s, was more suitable for political communications "from top to bottom". Old liberal elites in the Netherlands were quite successful in making use of this consumer object in order to reformulate their existing claims to power and create new realms of the political. A transformation of social and political conditions, "from the bottom up", as it was hoped for by part of the German cyclists' movement, however, turned out to be utopian.


Our goal was to determine PBDE levels in Taiwanese household dust and to examine the particle-size distribution of PBDEs in dust samples. Nine paired samples of floor and electronic dust were gathered from nine individual houses. Each sample was sieved with 100 (< 0.149 mm) and 200 (< 0.074 mm) meshes to obtain three fractionated samples (> 0.149, 0.074–0.149, and < 0.074 mm). Each house had 8 samples taken from it, including a pair of overall dust samples and 3 pairs of fractionated samples. Thirty PBDEs (BDE-7, 15, 17, 28, 47, 49, 66, 71, 77, 85, 99, 100, 119, 126, 138, 139, 140, 153, 154, 156, 183, 184, 191, 196, 197, 203, 206, 207, 208, and 209) in 72 dust samples were analyzed by high resolution gas chromatograph/ high resolution mass spectrometry (HRGC/HRMS). The levels of Σ28PBDEs and PBDEs in electronic dust were not significantly higher than those in floor dust in the paired overall dust samples, or the three fractionated samples. In addition, the levels of Σ28PBDEs and PBDEs were not significantly different for these three particle-sizes of floor and electronic dust. Based on the results of the factor analysis, the patterns of the PBDE distributions in floor and electronic dust were also very similar. A significant correlation of Σ28PBDEs was shown in the paired samples of floor and electronic dust. For the three fractionated dust samples, we found that only the levels of PBDEs from dito tetrain floor dust were significantly correlated with those in electronic dust. This may be because the PBDE contaminants in floor and electronic dust might originate from the same exposure sources, particularly for lower brominated PBDE congeners. The toddlers (6−48 months) (median estimated PBDE daily intake from mean floor dust: 2.73 ng/kg b.w./day) possibly ingested more PBDEs in household dust compared to the adults (0.0414 ng/kg b.w./day) based on our results. Our sample size was too small to represent the level of PBDE contamination in house dust from southern Taiwan, and thus a larger scale study is encouraged. In conclusion, our findings suggest that it may be not necessary for household surveys of PBDEs to collect different meshes of dust.


Objective: Thiamine deficiency has often been reported in patient with alcohol use disorder and its role in alcohol withdrawal is unclear. This study was conducted to find out levels of whole blood thiamine in patients with alcohol use disorder and its relationship with demographic variables, severity of alcohol withdrawal symptoms and neurological soft signs.

Methods: A total of 60 consecutive male patients with alcohol use disorder were recruited and assessed with Sociodemographic and clinical data sheet, Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol Scale and Extended Standard Neurological Assessment Instrument. High Performance Liquid Chromatography was used for assessing levels of whole blood thiamine level. Mean whole blood thiamine level was 8.7 (SD ± 12.9) μg/l. Seventy percent of patients developed withdrawal symptoms, while more than half of the patients had neurological soft signs. In multiple regression analysis seven predictors explained 31.6 % of the variance (R2 = .316, F = 3.430, p < 005) of whole blood thiamine levels. The two predictors that statistically significantly predicted the value of whole blood thiamine level were duration of the current episode of alcohol intake (Beta= - .357, t= - 2.889, p< .001) and quantity of daily alcohol intake (Beta = - .259, t =- 2.122, p < .05). Score of neurological soft sign and withdrawal score did not predict significantly the whole blood thiamine level.

Conclusions: Based the finding of this study, it may be concluded that low levels of whole blood thiamine is common in patient with alcohol use disorder and positively associated with quantity & duration of alcohol intake. Severity of alcohol withdrawal and soft neurological signs are not associated with whole blood thiamine levels.


Performance and rebound of intensive source depletion technologies were evaluated at 59 chlorinated solvent sites where remediation targeted dense non–aqueous phase liquid (DNAPL) source zones. The four technologies included in the study are chemical oxidation, enhanced bioremediation, thermal treatment, and surfactant/cosolvent flushing. Performance was evaluated by examining temporal ground water concentration data before and after source remediation was performed. Results indicated that all four technologies have median concentration reductions of 88% or greater for the parent chlorinated volatile organic compound (CVOC). Approximately 75% of the source depletion projects were able to achieve a 70% reduction in parent compound concentrations. A median reduction in total CVOC concentrations (parent plus daughter compounds) of 72% was observed at 12 chemical oxidation sites and 62% at 21 enhanced bioremediation sites. Rebound was assessed at sites having at least 1 year of posttreatment data. Rebound occurrence was most prevalent at sites implementing chemical oxidation. At chemical oxidation sites where rebound was evaluated (n= 7), the median parent CVOC concentration reduction was 90% immediately following treatment compared to 78% at the end of posttreatment monitoring (i.e., 1 to 5 years after treatment). For enhanced bioremediation sites where rebound was evaluated (n= 10), median parent CVOC concentration reduction changed from 77% to 96% over the posttreatment monitoring period. Minimal concentration change was observed over the posttreatment monitoring period at surfactant/cosolvent sites (n= 2) and thermal treatment sites (n= 1) evaluated for rebound. Based on current data, none of the 59 source depletion projects was able to meet maximum contaminant levels throughout the treatment zone for all CVOCs.


Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle. Can psychoanalysis with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about what love really is ? In this lively and wide-ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism and providing an in-depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan s paradoxical claim that love is giving what you don t have. He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don t have. This first-ever commentary on Lacan s Seminar VIII, Transference, provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan s views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychology and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.


Research on the quality of the narrative portion of the annual report has long been hampered by a lack of tools that permit an objective analysis of qualitative disclosure. This study is the first piece of accounting disclosure quality research which proposes a comprehensive index that uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enhance understanding of the quality of narrative information disclosure in a very important transitional period of 2002 to 2007. Our results show that after the adoption of IFRS, the level of narrative disclosure compliance with the IASB's Management Commentary Framework (MCF) is medium, ranging from 8% to 75%, averaging 53% and this shows that there is much room for improvement with respect to the financial statements. Thus, despite the continued demand for better comparability in financial reporting practices, in our sample, a large number of firms do not seem to converge toward a single set of standards for both the narrative and financial disclosure. On the other hand, the region forced to comply with mandatory requirements (e.g., the US) will not provide a greater amount of disclosure information in their MCF reporting than the regions that are not required to comply with these disclosure guidelines (e.g., Western Europe and Northern Europe).


Sepsis is a major mortality concern with burned patients, who have an increased susceptibility to infectious complications. PBMC from 41 of 45 severely burned patients (91%) failed to produce macrophage inflammatory protein 1α (MIP-1α) in cultures, while 2355–6900 pg/ml MIP-1α were produced by healthy donor PBMC, stimulation with anti-human CD3 mAb. Healthy chimeras (SCID mice inoculated with healthy donor PBMC) treated with anti-human MIP-1α mAb and patient chimeras (SCID mice reconstituted with burned patient PBMC) were susceptible (0% survival) to infectious complications induced by well-controlled cecal ligation and puncture. In contrast, patient chimeras treated with human recombinant MIP-1α and healthy chimeras were resistant (∼77–81% survival). Similarly, after anti-mouse CD3 mAb stimulation, splenic mononuclear cells from burned mice (6 h to 3 days after thermal injury) did not produce significant amounts of MIP-1α in their culture fluids. Normal mice treated with anti-murine MIP-1α mAb and burned mice were susceptible to cecal ligation- and puncture-induced infectious complications, while burned mice treated with murine recombinant MIP-1α and normal mice were resistant. Burned patients seemed to be more susceptible to infectious complications when the production of MIP-1α was impaired.


Drill core samples obtained from four mineralized zones of the Marathon Cu-PGE deposit in the Coldwell igneous complex have been investigated for their petrophysical characteristics. Remanent magnetization was used as a possible tool to reorient core samples but a drilling induced overprint magnetization dominated the record. Anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility was measured to provide a proxy for the petrofabric of samples obtained from oriented drill cores; a well-defined planar fabric was found to strike 177 and dip 25°W, with down-dip lineation, in excellent agreement with inferred magmatic flow direction based on 3D modeling of mineralized footwall troughs. Magnetite rich lithologies of the deposit show anomalous magnetic susceptibilities, natural remanent magnetizations, chargeabilities and resistivities which can be used as a resource vectoring tool to guide geophysical surveys in defining new feeder channels and conduit systems. Acoustic impedance contrasts between lithological units and highly mineralized zones indicate the possibility of employing seismic methods (reflection, tomography) to investigate the subsurface distribution of mineralization. Key wordsinduced magnetization, remanent magnetization, AMS, anisotropy, petrofabric, magnetic, susceptibility. chargeability, resistivity, P-wave velocity, petrophysics, gabbro, Marathon, Ontario, Cu-PGE


The essays in this collection offer an expansive view of how medical concerns have shaped and continue to shape our lives and destinies through the subtle communicative power of the visual arts and their interpretation in historical context. Each author demonstrates how works of art and the imagery of popular culture both reflect and reinforce the power of medical beliefs to define and to limit human behavior, and how art and medicine work together to communicate social directives in support of a perceived common good. Beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing to the modern era, subjects include discussions of hysteria, addiction, neurasthenia, consumption, cholera, and the culture of physical fitness as socially constructed phenomena that communicate powerful political agendas. Illustrated. Laurinda S. Dixon currently holds the William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities at Syracuse University.


The use of hydraulic fracturing to recover shale-gas has drawn attention to the fundamental fracture properties of gas-bearing shales. Such shales are strongly anisotropic, but there is a paucity of available experimental data on their mechanical and physical properties. Nevertheless, fracture propagation trajectories in these materials depend on the interaction between the anisotropic mechanical properties of the shale and the anisotropic in-situ stress field in the shallow crust. The mode-I stress intensity factor, KI, quantifies the concentration of stress at a crack tip under tensile loading. The fracture toughness of a linear elastic material is then defined as the critical value of this stress intensity factor; KIc, beyond which rapid, catastrophic crack growth occurs. However, shales deviate significantly from linear elasticity, and exhibit marked hysteresis during cyclic loading. Beneficially, this hysteresis enables the calculation of a ductility coefficient, which can be used to determine a ductility corrected fracture toughness value, KcIc. In Mancos shale this ductility correction can be as large as 60%. Here we report KcIc determined using a modified Short-Rod methodology in the three principal fracture orientations; Arrester, Divider and Short-Transverse, on Mancos shale. Experimental results for a range of other rock materials are also reported for comparison purposes. Significant anisotropy is observed in KcIc measurements at ambient conditions, with KcIc in the Divider and Arrester orientations being around 3.4 times that in the Short-Transverse orientation, where the fracture plane and propagation direction both lie parallel to the bedding. Here, a bimodal distribution in KcIc is recorded. This has been interpreted as being due to a progressing crack becoming trapped in one of the two types of layers within the material. KcIc measurements were also conducted on heat-treated samples, at elevated temperatures up to 150oC. After heat-treatment, we cease to observe the higher of the two Short-Transverse oriented KcIc values. We also observe a small increase in KcIc in the Arrester orientation with increasing temperature, causing a slight increase in anisotropy by 150oC compared to ambient conditions. Effective KIc was then measured as a function of confining pressure, with KIc increasing approximately four-fold between ambient conditions and 30MPa. KIc anisotropy is observed to decrease substantially with increasing confining pressure over the same range, suggesting that the material behaves near-isotropically at depth. Substantial difficulties were encountered with Arrester orientation fractures deflecting into the weaker Short-Transverse orientation during experiments. To analyse these deflections, fracture propagation criteria were developed based on the maximum circumferential stress and maximum energy release rate criteria. These criteria were trialled for the prediction of crack trajectories using a Singular Integral Equation methodology, and suggest that material anisotropy is able to cause sharp fracture deflection under stress states where no deflection occurs in isotropic material.


Photoresponse on the silicon nanowire (SiNW) and organic semiconductor interfaces embedding an insulating barrier is understood by a photogating effect associated with charge separations. Still elusive one is when the thickness of organic semiconductor is decreased down to a few molecular layers, where the photoresponse can be strongly altered by the spatial confinement of photoinduced carriers. In this work, the photoresponse modulation of SiNW field‐effect transistors coated with an ultrathin organic semiconductor poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) is reported, where the P3HT layer thickness is changed by an order of magnitude. In the absence of laser illumination, the P3HT interface on SiNW slightly decreases the SiNW channel current, irrespective of the P3HT thickness. Upon the laser illumination, the thick case of P3HT layers (≈100 nm) supports the dissociation of photoinduced electrons and holes, hence the photogating effect largely decreases the SiNW channel current. When the P3HT layer thickness is decreased down to the P3HT hole diffusion length (≈8.5 nm), the photoinduced P3HT holes screen out the P3HT interface states, effectively increasing the SiNW channel current up to the intrinsic level. The method of engineering the organic semiconductor thickness suggests a complementary optoelectronic operation, verifying the controllable photoresponse within a compact nanodevice.


Generally, in the optimization of thermoelectric generators, only the heat exchangers or the thermoelectric modules themselves are taken into account. However, the assembly of the generator as a whole is of vital importance since a bad contact or a thermal bridge can waste the performance of an optimal generator. In this sense, the present chapter analyzes experimen-tally the use of different interface materials to reduce the thermal contact resistance between the modules and the heat exchangers, the influence of the pressure distribution in the assem bly as well as the effect of different insulating materials in order to reduce the thermal bridge between the exchangers. Thus, it has been demonstrated that a good assembly requires the implementation of thermal interface materials to ensure the microscopic contact between the heat exchangers and the modules, besides a uniform clamping pressure. Nevertheless, since this is normally achieved with screws, they represent a source of thermal bridges in conjunc- tion with the small distance between the exchangers. In order to reduce heat losses due to thermal bridges, which can represent up to one-third of the incoming heat, an increment of the distance between the exchangers and the use of an insulator is recommended.


We obtain criteria for entanglement and the EPR paradox for spin-entangled particles and analyse the effects of decoherence caused by absorption and state purity errors. For a two qubit photonic state, entanglement can occur for all transmission efficiencies. In this case, the state preparation purity must be above a threshold value. However, Bohm's spin EPR paradox can be achieved only above a critical level of loss. We calculate a required efficiency of 58%, which appears achievable with current quantum optical technologies. For a macroscopic number of particles prepared in a correlated state, spin entanglement and the EPR paradox can be demonstrated using our criteria for efficiencies eta > 1/3 and eta > 2/3 respectively. This indicates a surprising insensitivity to loss decoherence, in a macroscopic system of ultra-cold atoms or photons.


Computers have transformed every facet of our culture, most dramatically communication, transportation, finance, science, and the economy. Yet their impact has not been generally felt in education due to lack of hardware, teacher training, and sophisticated software. Another reason is that current instructional software is neither truly responsive to student needs nor flexible enough to emulate teaching. The more instructional software can reason about its own teaching process, know what it is teaching, and which method to use for teaching, the greater is its impact on education.

Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors discusses educational systems that assess a student's knowledge and are adaptive to a student's learning needs. Dr. Woolf taps into 20 years of research on intelligent tutors to bring designers and developers a broad range of issues and methods that produce the best intelligent learning environments possible, whether for classroom or life-long learning. The book describes multidisciplinary approaches to using computers for teaching, reports on research, development, and real-world experiences, and discusses intelligent tutors, web-based learning systems, adaptive learning systems, intelligent agents and intelligent multimedia.

*Combines both theory and practice to offer most in-depth and up-to-date treatment of intelligent tutoring systems available
*Presents powerful drivers of virtual teaching systems, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the Internet
*Features algorithmic material that enables programmers and researchers to design building components and intelligent systems