By leveraging the technological advancements in information, communication, and connectivity technologies, specifically the internet, firms continue to innovate and create value through new digital business models which are disrupting entire industries. More recent success stories include Spotify, a music streaming service which has transformed the way music is consumed and has disrupted the entire music retail industry as well as Dropbox, which has been attributed a similar disruptive role in regards to consumer file storage. However, competition and distraction in the online space are fierce and consumers often expect products and services on the internet to be free, urging firms to rethink the design of their conversion funnel to win new customers and thus capture the value they create. The conversion funnel describes the transformation users undergo when sequentially proceeding through four stages to ultimately complete an online transaction with the firm: from being a non-visitor to becoming a visitor (also called acquisition), to becoming a registered user (also called activation) and lastly a converted customer (also called customer conversion). While Information Systems (IS) research on the conversion funnel of digital business models has dealt quite extensively with the antecedents of consumer decision making in all parts of the funnel, big questions remain as to how firms may actively shape desired outcomes in regards to acquisitions and customer conversions. Research on acquisitions has emphasized that traditional advertising is becoming less effective due to media saturation and consumers wanting to rely on more credible sources when seeking information on new products and services. This has lead mechanisms such as referrals, which relate to passing along messages received by the marketer to one's peers, to become a critical component of marketing strategy. However, extant contributions have focused on the antecedents of consumer referral decisions, leaving a big gap as to how firms may actually enhance referrals and thus improve acquisition outcomes. Similarly, research on customer conversions has mainly focused on identifying the antecedents of consumer decision making at the neglect of shedding light on how one may actually shape conversion outcomes. On the other hand, IS research on activations is quite mature and has paid attention to both the antecedents of consumer decision making as well as how firms may drive better activation outcomes. Digital nudging, which refers to the practice of using visual user interface elements to influence consumer behavior in digital choice environments, has shown promising results in driving activation outcomes in this regard. For example, the usage of pull vs. push mechanisms in requesting information to consumers may influence their privacy concerns and thus activation outcomes. However, digital nudges have so far been widely ignored in the context of acquisition and customer conversions. Against this backdrop, three studies were conducted. The first study, by drawing on a randomized field experiment in the context of an online fashion service named StyleCrowd, investigates the effect of scarcity and personalization nudges in enhancing consumer referrals and thus improving acquisition outcomes. Building on this, the second study is focused on examining the potential of scarcity and social proof nudges as referral enhancers in the context of a randomized online experiment with the German startup Blinkist. Lastly, the third study examines how free trial order nudges may be used to enhance customer conversions within freemium business models by drawing on a contest-based online experiment. Overall, this thesis expands our understanding of how digital nudges may be used to enhance acquisition and conversion outcomes within the conversion funnel of digital business models. On the acquisition end, we provide evidence of how scarcity, social proof as well as personalization nudges may increase consumers' propensity to engage in referrals and explicate the drivers that mediate these effects. Furthermore, we also shed light on the positive interaction effects between scarcity and social proof as well as the negative interaction effects between scarcity and personalization, and provide explanations for these phenomena. On the customer conversion end, we demonstrate how free trial order nudges may be used to enhance premium conversion within freemium business models. Besides unveiling the drivers that mediate this positive effect, we also explicate external factors that act as moderators. In sum, the contributions of this thesis are not limited to digital business models and digital nudges, but also extend into IS and marketing research on electronic word of mouth as well as research on cognitive biases. From a practical perspective, firms may leverage our findings for the design of their conversion funnel by carefully employing digital nudges to enhance acquisition and conversion outcomes.


The short microRNAs have become well known for exerting important regulatory influences during development, including roles in heart development. Together, these two articles show a role for miRNAs in contributing to sudden death in the adult. Yang et al. show that miR-1 abundance is increased in patients with coronary heart disease and in rat models of cardiac infarction (heart attack). miR-1 expression is increased in the ischemic area relative to the expression in the nonischemic area (see Anderson and Mohler for commentary). Arrhythmias after a heart attack are common and, in the rat model, delivery of an antisense oligonucleotide to decrease miR-1 abundance in the myocardium decreased postinfarct arrhythmias, whereas overexpression of miR-1 increased the occurrence of postinfarct arrhythmias and was arrhythmogenic in healthy hearts as well. The arrhythmias appeared to result from slowed conduction and depolarization of the heart, which were reversed by treatment with the antisense oligonucleotide to miR-1. Complementary sequences to miR-1 were present in the 3′-untranslated regions of the transcripts for the Kir2.1 subunit of the potassium channel, primarily responsible for setting the resting membrane potential, and for the connexin 43 gap junction protein. Indeed, these two proteins were decreased in abundance in rats that had experienced myocardial infarction, and this effect was eliminated if the rats were treated with the antisense oligonucleotide to miR-1. Reporter gene experiments in transfected cultured cells and overexpression experiments in rat hearts confirmed that miR-1 targeted these two transcripts. To verify that these two proteins were responsible for the arrhythmias, each was knocked down by RNA interference, and this caused arrhythmias in ischemic hearts. Zhao et al. returned to the developmental roles of miRNA in heart development and selectively knocked out miR-1-2 (see commentary by Mishima et al.). They found that homozygous mice showed an increased occurrence of sudden death or death due to failure of ventricular septation, which may have been the result of elevated abundance of the transcription factor Hand2, a key regulator of cardiac morphogenesis. Those mice that survived exhibited cardiac hyperplasia, which appeared to be due to increased numbers of postnatal cells undergoing cell division. The surviving mice also exhibited cardiac arrhythmias, which appeared to be due to altered potassium channel abundance as a consequence of elevated abundance of the transcription factor Irx5 that represses the expression of the potassium channel gene Kcnd2. Because they had selectively knocked out one specific miRNA, the authors were able to analyze the targets of that miRNA. They determined that the complementary sites for miR-1-2 binding in the mRNAs that were increased in the knockout mouse hearts were in accessible regions of the mRNA (compared with the average calculated accessibility in any random mRNA pool). B. Yang, H. Lin, J. Xiao, Y. Lu, X. Luo, B. Li, Y. Zhang, C. Xu, Y. Bai, H. Wang, G. Chen, Z. Wang, The muscle-specific microRNA miR-1 regulates cardiac arrhythmogenic potential by targeting GJA1 and KCNJ2. Nat. Med. 13, 486-491 (2007). [PubMed] M. E. Anderson, P. J. Mohler, MicroRNA may have macro effect on sudden death. Nat. Med. 13, 410-411 (2007). [PubMed] Y. Zhao, J. F. Ransom, A. Li, V. Vedantham, M. von Drehle, A. N. Muth, T. Tsuchihashi, M. T. McManus, R. J. Schwartz, D. Srivastava, Dysregulation of cardiogenesis, cardiac conduction, and cell cycle in mice lacking miRNA-1-2. Cell 129, 303-317 (2007). [PubMed] Y. Mishima, C. Stahlhut, A. J. Giraldez, miR-1-2 gets to the heart of the matter. Cell 129, 247-249 (2007). [PubMed]


Testing for associations in big data faces the problem of multiple comparisons, with true signals buried inside the noise of all associations queried. This is particularly true in genetic association studies where a substantial proportion of the variation of human phenotypes is driven by numerous genetic variants of small effect. The current strategy to improve power to identify these weak associations consists of applying standard marginal statistical approaches and increasing study sample sizes. While successful, this approach does not leverage the environmental and genetic factors shared between the multiple phenotypes collected in contemporary cohorts. Here we develop a method that improves the power of detecting associations when a large number of correlated variables have been measured on the same samples. Our analyses over real and simulated data provide direct support that large sets of correlated variables can be leveraged to achieve dramatic increases in statistical power equivalent to a two or even three folds increase in sample size.


Following the adoption of the Treaty on European Union, the concept of Community or Union citizenship has been the subject of widespread academic and political debate. Part I of the book provides a framework within which to examine the concept of Community or Union citizenship, discusses the importance of Member State nationality for both the free movement of persons in the European Community and Union citizenship and, finally, examines the traditional requirement in Community law of involvement in an economic activity. Part II focuses on the relationship between the principle of equal treatment and Union citizenship, given the fact that many of the rights conferred on Union citizens are simply extended to them on the basis of the principle of equal treatment. Finally, Part III looks beyond equal treatment and questions whether a direct relationship can be said to exist between Union citizens and the Union. It also suggests some of the issues relevant to citizenship which may feature at the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference in 1996.


Researchers have identified many characteristics of teachers and teaching that contribute to student outcomes. However, most studies investigate only a small number of these characteristics, likely underestimating the overall contribution. In this paper, we use a set of 28 teacher-level predictors drawn from multiple research traditions to explain teacher-level variation in student outcomes. These predictors collectively explain 28% of teacher-level variability in state standardized math test scores and 40% in a predictor-aligned math test. In addition, each individual predictor explains only a small, relatively unique portion of the total teacher-level variability. This first finding highlights the importance of choosing predictors and outcomes that are well aligned, and the second suggests that the phenomena underlying teacher effects is


We present StyleBabel, a unique open access dataset of natural language captions and free-form tags describing the artistic style of over 135K digital artworks, collected via a novel participatory method from experts studying at specialist art and design schools. StyleBabel was collected via an iterative method, inspired by `Grounded Theory': a qualitative approach that enables annotation while co-evolving a shared language for fine-grained artistic style attribute description. We demonstrate several downstream tasks for StyleBabel, adapting the recent ALADIN architecture for fine-grained style similarity, to train cross-modal embeddings for: 1) free-form tag generation; 2) natural language description of artistic style; 3) fine-grained text search of style. To do so, we extend ALADIN with recent advances in Visual Transformer (ViT) and cross-modal representation learning, achieving a state of the art accuracy in fine-grained style retrieval.


In the United Kingdom few river catchments have overflow records longer than 35 years. The wealth of precipitation data in the United Kingdom enables long records of riverflow to be produced with a catchment model calibrated over the recent period. For most parts of England and Wales it is shown that monthly sequences of riverflow that account for 90–95 per cent of the variance of the measured riverflow can be produced back to 1860. Reconstructions are made on 10 catchments (size range 400–4500 km2) in both upland and lowland Britain. Reliable reconstructions are possible using as few as 4 rainguage records. The reconstructions provide not only a valuable database for the study of the effect of climatic change on riverflow, but also allow stationarity, homoscedasticy and changes in the frequency of extreme events to be examined. It is shown that on the 10 catchments extreme droughts with a duration of 18 months are three times more likely to have occurred between 1925 and 1979 than between 1870 and 1924. The significance of this and other findings are discussed in the context of water resource analysis. The reconstructed riverflows, apart from their obvious use for water resource analysis, also provide a valuable climatological database for the possible further extension of riverflow using proxy climate indicators such as tree rings.


We present a method for creating a video mosaic, a two-dimensional arrangement of small source videos (tiles) that suggests a larger, unified target video. We develop a distance measure to assess the match between source and target based on average color and also three-dimensional wavelet decomposition signatures in the YIQ color space. We also introduce a dynamic programming algorithm that automatically chooses the smaller tiling sub-sequences from a large collection of candidate source video sequences to best match the target video. After the selection process, the color in the tiling videos is automatically adjusted to better suggest the target video. Finally, our method also supports the use of different tiling shapes to create an additional level of visual interest.


The issue of coordination is one that has received significant attention in the experimental literature. In this thesis I delve deeper into this by combining and exploring a number of issues from the literature in economics and the social sciences in the context of coordination games. More specifically in all three chapters a common theme of the examination of the efficiency-equality trade off in coordination games prevails. In the first chapter I take inspiration from Holm's (2000) paper ''Gender Based Focal Points'' and look further into aspects of both the equity-efficiency trade off in coordination games and gender information. In the second chapter we combine elements of the coordination literature with the literature on the effects of punishment: Most previous investigations of punishment have concentrated on the effects of punishment when free riding is a possibility (for example Fehr & Gachter, 2000, Abbink et al., 2010) and here we are able to report results from an experiment where free riding is not a possibility. In the third chapter we investigate the effects of communication in coordination games. We take our initial inspiration from Cooper et al. (1990) and Farrell (1987) and expand on these papers by examining the effects of rich and free form communication between subjects and also expanding the type of games used in the experiment.
We find a number of interesting results which will be described in more detail with this thesis. In chapter one we find that an inefficient compromise very quickly loses its appeal to subjects as its inefficiency increases. We also find that unisex pairings are more successful in term of expected payoffs from coordination games as compared to mixed gender pairings. In chapter two we find that, whilst gender information and punishment do not tend to affect behaviour in isolation, the two treatment variables combined do lead to observed behavioural changes. We also find gender differences in punishment behaviours with males becoming more aggressive in punishment when playing against a male and males punishing more aggressively than females. In chapter three we find that payoff structure is highly relevant in how the availability of communication affects choices in the game. Through our novel experimental design we show that subjects will use an equitable split of earnings as a focal point for coordination rather than out of an intrinsic preference for an equitable split of earnings.


Two types of floral morph, called thrum and pin, occur in heterostylous species. The thrum and pin flowers have shorter and longer styles, respectively. Heterostyly in Linum has been studied since Darwin's era. The floral morph, self-incompatibility, and related phenotypes have been well characterized using a natural population, but genetic analysis using a segregated population has not been reported, and the mode of inheritance of heterostyly in Linum remains to be investigated. We prepared a segregated population by crossing thrum and pin flowers of Linum grandiflorum Desf. and investigated style and stamen lengths. On the basis of the style to stamen length ratio, the population could be divided into thrum and pin clearly at a ratio of 1:1. Style length of pins was 1.6 times longer than that of thrums. To investigate the factor regulating the difference in style length, we further measured the style cell length of thrums and pins. The style cell length of pins was longer than that of thrums, whose rate was comparable to the rate of the style length ratio between thrum and pin flowers. These findings indicate that the floral morph of heterostyly in Linum is controlled by a single diallelic locus, and that a difference in the cell expansion rate caused thrum and pin morphs in the style, such as in a typical heterostylous species. PCR genotyping showed that TSS1, an S candidate gene reported previously, cosegregated completely with the thrum phenotype, indicating strong linkage between the S locus and TSS1. Furthermore, three flower colors (red, pink, and white) were observed at a 1:2:1 ratio, and no white thrum flowers or red pin flowers were found in this population. These flower color phenotypes could also be controlled by a diallelic locus, whose two alleles (R and r) would be incompletely dominant, and therefore, may be linked to the S locus.


Sapporo Waterworks Bureau's (SWB's) measures for CO2 reduction started in 1982 with a hydropower project at the Moiwa Water Purification Plant (MWPP) (cap. 155,000 m3/day). Operation of the generator was temporarily discontinued in 2001 for full-scale reconstruction of the water purification plant (WPP); after the completion of the reconstruction, the power generation equipment was renewed, and the operation resumed as a joint project with a private company in 2007.

Power generation is on-site since the hydropower generator within the MWPP area provides energy consumed at the MWPP and the adjoining Waterworks Museum. This power generation is expected to create an energy saving effect equivalent to 1,500 tons of CO2 and over 10 million yen of annual net benefit. In order to increase the usage rate of low-cost, clean energy like hydropower at the WPP, SWB has made a series of adjustments to the operating methods of the plant. Then, as a result, the generation covers 97% of the energy used on-site at present.

Furthermore, SWB is considering introducing other hydropower facilities of this kind that harness water transmission energy from the Shiraikawa WPP (cap. 650,000 m3/day) to the major distribution reservoirs.


Clostridioides difficile is the main cause for nosocomial antibiotic associated diarrhea and has become a major burden for the health care systems of industrial countries. Its main virulence factors, the small GTPase glycosylating toxins TcdA and TcdB, are extensively studied. In contrast, the contribution of other factors to development and progression of C. difficile infection (CDI) are only insufficiently understood. Many bacterial peptidyl-prolyl-cis/trans-isomerases (PPIases) have been described in the context of virulence. Among them are the parvulin-type PrsA-like PPIases of Gram-positive bacteria. On this basis, we identified CD630_35000 as the PrsA2 homolog in C. difficile and conducted its enzymatic and phenotypic characterization in order to assess its involvement during C. difficile infection. For this purpose, wild type CdPrsA2 and mutant variants carrying amino acid exchanges mainly in the PPIase domain were recombinantly produced. Recombinant CdPrsA2 showed PPIase activity toward the substrate peptide Ala-Xaa-Pro-Phe with a preference for positively charged amino acids preceding the proline residue. Mutation of conserved residues in its active site pocket impaired the enzymatic activity. A PrsA2 deficient mutant was generated in the C. difficile 630Δerm background using the ClosTron technology. Inactivation of prsA2 resulted in a reduced germination rate in response to taurocholic acid, and in a slight increase in resistance to the secondary bile acids LCA and DCA. Interestingly, in the absence of PrsA2 colonization of mice by C. difficile 630 was significantly reduced. We concluded that CdPrsA2 is an active PPIase that acts as a virulence modulator by influencing crucial processes like sporulation, germination and bile acid resistance resulting in attenuated mice colonization.


The water quality of surface waters is threatened by multiple anthropogenic pollutants and the large variety of pollutants challenges the monitoring and assessment of the water quality. The aim of this study was to characterize and quantify both point and diffuse sources of micropollutants impacting the water quality of a stream at catchment scale. Grindsted stream in western Jutland, Denmark was used as a study site. The stream passes both urban and agricultural areas and is impacted by severe groundwater contamination in Grindsted city. Along a 12 km reach of Grindsted stream, the potential pollution sources were identified including a pharmaceutical factory site with a contaminated old drainage ditch, two waste deposits, a wastewater treatment plant, overflow structures, fish farms, industrial discharges and diffuse agricultural and urban sources. Six water samples were collected along the stream and analyzed for general water quality parameters, inorganic constituents, pesticides, sulfonamides, chlorinated solvents, BTEXs, and paracetamol and ibuprofen. The latter two groups were not detected. The general water quality showed typical conditions for a stream in western Jutland. Minor impacts by releases of organic matter and nutrients were found after the fish farms and the waste water treatment plant. Nickel was found at concentrations 5.8 ‐ 8.8 g/l. Nine pesticides and metabolites of both agricultural and urban use were detected along the stream; among these were the two most frequently detected and some rarely detected pesticides in Danish water courses. The concentrations were generally consistent with other findings in Danish streams and in the range 0.01 ‐ 0.09 g/l; except for metribuzin-diketo that showed high concentrations up to 0.74 g/l. The groundwater contamination at the pharmaceutical factory site, the drainage ditch and the waste deposits is similar in composition containing among others sulfonamides and chlorinated solvents (including vinyl chloride). Vinyl chloride concentrations surpassed Danish stream water quality criteria with a factor 10. The largest chemical impact occurs at the reach downstream Grindsted city revealing that the main contaminant groundwater discharge zones are found here. The contaminant plume from the factory site north of the stream is known to impact the stream whereas the impact by the old landfill south of the stream remains to be assessed. A conceptual model of the chemical impacts by the identified sources was made, and high impact was assigned to the contaminant plume from the factory site and to the diffuse sources of urban-use and agricultural pesticides. The next step will be a quantification of the sources, which will be presented at the conference.


Many functions of the poliovirus genome in virally infected cells have been elucidated. However, the role of 2B (and of its precursor polypeptide, 2BC), encoded by the P2 region in the poliovirus genome, remains unknown. We have employed a genetic approach to examine the role of 2B in poliovirus-infected cells. We report here the phenotype of one previously isolated mutant in the 2B coding region, 2B201. In addition, we have constructed one additional mutation in the 2B coding region of an infectious poliovirus cDNA clone. Upon transfection into monkey Vero cells we could recover two 2B mutant polioviruses, 2B204 and 2B205. All three mutants exhibited small-plaque phenotypes on monkey Vero and human HeLa cells and displayed primary defects in viral RNA synthesis. None of the 2B mutants could be complemented by wild-type virus. Instead, the mutants exhibited a dosage-dependent dominance over wild-type poliovirus. Thus, the phenotypes of these 2B mutants implicate 2B and possibly its precursor, 2BC, in viral RNA amplification in poliovirus-infected cells, and the dominance of the 2B mutants suggests a structural role for 2B in viral replication complexes.


The contact loss beneath track slab caused by deteriorated cement emulsified asphalt mortar (CA mortar) has been one of the main diseases occurring in the CRTS- (China Railway Track System-) I Slab Track of high-speed railway in China. Based on the slab track design theory and the vehicle-track coupling vibration theory, a vehicle-track vertical coupling dynamic FEM model was established to analyze the influence of the contact loss length on the dynamic characteristics of vehicle and track subsystems at different train speeds. A prototype dynamic characteristic experimental test of CRTS-I Slab Track with CA mortar contact loss was conducted to verify the FEM model results. The train load was generated by the customized ZSS50 excitation car. The results showed that when the operation speed is less than 300 km/h, the contact loss with length smaller than 2.0 m barely affects the running smoothness ride safety of vehicle. The contact loss length effect on the dynamic characteristics of track subsystem is pronounced, especially on the track slab. Once the contact loss beneath the track slab occurs, the vibration displacement and the acceleration of the track slab increase rapidly, while it has little influence on the displacement and acceleration of the concrete roadbed.


Industry policy in the context of trade liberalization has played a critical reinforcing role in re-orienting production in the Australian manufacturing sector from the domestic to international market. In the textile, clothing, footwear and motor vehicle industries this has promoted sustainable output and employment growth. This policy has also been instrumental in improving the structure of manufacturing exports from simple to elaborately transformed manufacturing products. The niche capital and knowledge intensive nature of elaborately transformed manufacturing products is of particular importance because they exhibit a comparative advantage in international markets. This has helped to offset the competitive advantage provided by industry policy in stimulating manufacturing exports in the countries of the South East Asian region which constitute Australia's major export markets. Pressure is also being applied on other countries to implement industrial policy in order to remain competitive on the international market and in particular in this rapidly growing region of the world.


While the animation of humans is a well established topic in computer graphics, the animation of animals remains far less explored. Part of this is because in contrast to the wealth of easily obtainable motion data for humans, similar motion data for animals or fictional creatures is substantially more difficult or impossible to obtain. In this thesis I develop techniques for animating animals which do not rely on any motion capture data, but instead automatically synthesize motions by exploiting principles from physics and biomechanics.
I address three main components to the problem of animal motion synthesis. First, I present an optimization technique which is capable of solving for a cyclic gait for an animal without requiring any motion data, and which can additionally solve for the most efficient type of gait for the animal to perform as well as refine the shape of the animal itself if desired. Second, I address the problem of increasing the realism of the synthesized gaits by learning from a database of ground-truth animal gaits. Finally, I move beyond gait synthesis to the synthesis of kinematic controllers which can be interactively guided by a user to create animations in real-time.


Pulmonary dysfunction is a significant contributor to morbidity and mortality in the pediatric burned population. We have previously reported that the administration of a synthetic testosterone derivative, oxandrolone, significantly reduced hypermetabolism, and significantly increased height percentile, bone mineral content, lean body mass, and strength in pediatric burned patients. We hypothesize that the administration of oxandrolone will improve pulmonary function in burned pediatric subjects. A subset of severely burned pediatric subjects from a prospective clinical trial (n = 222) were included in our study (n = 54, 7–18 years, ≥30% TBSA burn). The subjects were previously randomized to either the control arm (n = 35) or the oxandrolone arm (0.1 mg/kg twice/day for 12 months, n = 19). Maximum voluntary ventilation, the ratio between forced expiratory volume and forced vital capacity, and diffusion capacity were measured 6 months following burn injury, and results were compared between burned subjects with and without oxandrolone administration. Maximum expired ventilation (VEmax) was also measured in a subset of burned subjects. Subjects treated with oxandrolone had a significantly higher maximum voluntary ventilation (98 ± 53 L/min vs 115 ± 56 with treatment, P = .03). During maximal exercise, subjects treated with oxandrolone had a significantly higher VEmax compared with untreated subjects (32.0 ± 8.7 L/min vs 43.7 ± 13.6 with treatment, P = .02). The administration of oxandrolone was associated with improved lung function in pediatric burned patients.


ABSTRACT This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today's multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corporations, professional associations, and the engineering profession itself. The twenty-first-century proliferation of university-level competitions in turn encouraged a trickling-down of technical contests to elementary-age children and high schools, fostering the institutionalization of what might be called a competition culture in engineering.


The potential of stem cell research to contribute to human understanding of human development, aging, ailment, and demise is indisputable. This essay surveys Judaic perspectives on these promising yet imperfect ways of securing pluripotent stem cells for scientific and medicinal purposes. As one might expect, there is disagreement among modern Jewish bioethicists about which modes of securing these cells is permissible. Yet there is overwhelming consensus among them that using such cells to improve scientific knowledge and medicinal treatments is indeed permissible if not obligatory. To appreciate these dynamics, we first look at some principles Judaism holds in regard to medicine in general. We then investigate in light of Judaic texts the particular strategies used to extract and establish pluripotent stem cells. The concluding section evaluates these principles and concerns.


Background Vitamin D has the potential to modulate the immune system for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)1, and which could potentially lead to improved clinical outcomes. Observational data have suggested a relationship between vitamin D and disease activity2. This observation has been confirmed by vitamin D3 supplementation studies, where positive immunological effects were reported in SLE patients3. Additionally a placebo controlled trial supplementing SLE patients with vitamin D3 identified a positive effect on inflammation and haemostatic markers as well as improvements in disease activity4. Research examining the relationship between vitamin D and bone mineral density (BMD) in SLE patients is limited, albeit a study has suggested a link between disease activity and BMD in SLE patients5 and thereby suggesting flares in disease activity has a negative effect on BMD. Objectives To examine for relationships between vitamin D and disease activity, damage and BMD. Methods A total of 52 SLE patients were recruited onto an observational study during the winter (November-March) and followed up during the summer months (June-July) (n=50). Total 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) concentration was measured using the liquid chromatography mass spectrometry method (MassChrom®, Chromsystems Gmbh, Heimburgstrasse, Germany) and BMD was measured at the lumbar spine and femur by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (Lunar iDXA™, UK). Disease activity and damage were assessed using Systemic Lupus Activity Measure (SLAM), British Isles Lupus Assessment Group (BILAG), Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Disease Activity Index (SELENA SLEDAI) and Systemic Lupus International Collaborative Clinics/American College of Rheumatology (SLICC/ACR). Results Mean (SD) 25(OH)D concentrations in winter (26.9 (16.2) nmol/L) and summer (28.7 (16.7) nmol/L) were not different (P=0.439), nor were differences observed between disease activity and damage. During the winter, but not during the summer, vitamin D was a significant predictor of BILAG (r=-0.307; P=0.027) and SELENA SLEDAI (β=-0.074; SE=0.036; P=0.044), controlling for age, BMI and medications. Osteoporosis and osteopenia was present in some 4 (8%) and 21 (45%) SLE patients respectively and there were no relationships observed between disease activity and BMD. Conclusions Vitamin D inadequacy was prevalent throughout the year and undiagnosed osteoporosis was apparent in this cohort, and, therefore, suggesting routine screening of both is warranted. Wintertime vitamin D status was a predictor of disease activity at that time of year. There was no relationship, however, observed between disease activity and BMD. The lack of seasonal variability in vitamin D status might suggest sun avoidance by the SLE patients; emphasising the importance of obtaining adequate vitamin D intake from the diet and supplements for SLE patients. References Marques et al. Revista Brasileira de Reumatologia. 2010;50(1):67-80. Breslin, et al. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. 2011 Nov;70(4):399-407. Terrier, et al. Arthritis Research and Therapy. 2012 Oct 17;14(5). Abou-Raya A, et al. Journal of Rheumatology, 2012. Zhang et al. Zhonghua Yi Xue Za Zhi, 2012 Sep 4;92(33):2331-4. Disclosure of Interest None Declared


Recent advances in cognitive science create smarter law learning opportunities for legal education. Legal educators can use empirical research from cognitive and learning science to improve student learning, in turn easing the bumpy transition from college to law school and maintaining confidence. More importantly, legal educators can instill effective learning strategies vital for students' success in school, the bar exam, and in practice. Some colleges and universities are failing in providing students with robust critical thinking, writing, and learning skills. The lack of foundational skills can create difficult transitions for students when pursuing graduate and professional educations, such as law school.Research shows that students often rely on improvised and ineffective learning strategies like rereading, cramming, and rote memorization, which are especially ill suited to the demands of legal education requiring higher order thinking and analysis. Inversely, retrieval practice, the testing effect, and periodic review create more effective long-term learning and higher order thinking and analytical skills, yet are counter-intuitive and not always used by students. Luckily, help is available: legal educators can leverage cognitive and learning science to maximize law learning.This Article explains how legal educators and students can leverage cognitive science for smarter law learning. It first summarizes key research findings on effective study and learning strategies, and then suggests simple, practical, and easily implemented ways to integrate them into the law school classroom.


In vitro models are useful tools for rapid screening for toxicity, elucidation of mechanisms of toxicity, and understanding complex interactions among environmental toxicants. These evaluations may provide useful information for ecological evaluations if the relationship between in vitro and in vivo effects is established. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the protective effect of selenium on arsenic trioxide (As2O3)–induced cytotoxicity, DNA damage, and apoptosis. N‐acetylcysteine (NAC), a free radical scavenger, was used to determine the involvement of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in As2O3‐induced DNA damage and apoptosis. Poeciliopsis lucida hepatocellular carcinoma line 1 (PLHC‐1) cells were pretreated with selenium (1, 5, and 10 µM) and NAC (50 and 100 µM) for 2 h. After pretreatment, cells were exposed to 100 µM of As2O3 for 10‐, 20‐, and 40‐h intervals. The As2O3 exposure promoted extensive DNA damage and apoptosis compared to control, while selenium‐ and NAC‐pretreated cells improved cell survival rate against As2O3‐induced cell death. Improved survival likely resulted from increasing glutathione peroxidase activity and reduction of ROS formation, reduction of mitochondrial membrane potential damage, DNA damage, and caspase‐3 activity. During As2O3 exposure, selenium played the same role as NAC. The authors conclude that As2O3‐induced DNA damage and apoptosis are mediated by oxidative stress and selenium and that, although toxic at higher concentrations, selenium provides significant protection against As2O3 effects in PLHC‐1 cells. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2012; 31: 2861–2869. © 2012 SETAC


To assess past climate variability in west-central Scandinavia, a new 972-year-long temperature reconstruction, based on adjusted delta blue intensity (ΔBIadj), was created. Presently, it is the longest blue intensity chronology in Fennoscandia and the third longest in the northern hemisphere. Measurements were obtained from 119 tree line Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) samples from Rogen, in the central Scandinavian Mountains, Sweden. Early and latewood blue intensity absorption data were used to create ΔBIadj. The data were detrended using a signal-free regional curve standardization method (RSFi) to minimize biological noise and maximize low-frequency climate information. The Rogen ΔBIadj chronology has a substantially stronger temperature signal at inter-annual timescales than the corresponding tree-ring width (RW) chronology, and it displays good spatial representation for the south-central parts of Scandinavia. The ΔBIadj summer (June through August) temperature reconstruction, extending back to 1038 CE, exhibits three warm periods in 1040–1190 CE, 1370–1570 CE and the 20th century and one extended cold period between 1570 and 1920 CE. Regional summer temperature anomalies are associated with a Scandinavian–Greenland dipole sea-level pressure pattern, which has been stable for the past several centuries. Major volcanic eruptions produce distinct anomalies of ΔBIadj indices indicating cooling of summer temperatures in the subsequent years. Our results show that ΔBIadj from Pinus sylvestris in Scandinavia is a suitable proxy providing opportunities to explore past temperature variability at various frequencies, atmospheric dynamics and variability in external forcing. Nevertheless, long-term trend differences with RW imply that further research is needed to fully understand the application of this technique in dendroclimatology.


Both the Taiwanese government and the community at large recognise that a high level of English language ability among the workforce is essential for success in virtually all walks of life, as Taiwan is heavily dependent on international business for its economic growth. A growing concern for national standards of educational achievement in a competitive global economy, together with a heightened demand for accountability in government expenditure has been reflected in tertiary institutions, where the problem of graduates' English proficiency has been addressed. An innovation, the Graduation Threshold (GT), has been proposed by some universities of technology in order to ensure higher standards of English proficiency among graduating students.
 GT is a university policy whereby students are expected to fulfil graduation requirements by obtaining a certain level in, or getting at least a certain score on, an English proficiency test. Tests have long been advocated by policymakers in diverse national contexts as one form of effective leverage of control. The phenomenon of how tests influence teaching and learning is commonly described as 'washback'. Yet while the connection between testing and learning is commonly made, it is not known whether it really exists and, if it does, it is seldom crystal clear whether tests have favourable or deleterious washback. Following a critical review of selected literature on the washback of tests, particularly English language tests, on teaching and learning, the focus of the current study is to determine whether the effort of the concerned Taiwanese universities of technology to implement the GT has changed institutional policies, teaching and learning. If so, are English proficiency tests playing any role in this? If there has not been any marked change, are English proficiency tests in any way responsible for blocking or impeding changes?
 The research sites were non-English departments of Taiwanese universities of technology, which were divided into two groups. One of the groups (Group 1) required non-English major students to pass one of a set of English proficiency tests at a specified level as a graduation requirement, whereas the other group (Group 2) did not prescribe any English graduation requirement. In each group, 27 to 28 teachers and 300 to 321 students completed questionnaires. Two teachers from each group, along with three departmental directors and three advisory committee members within the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, were interviewed. Two lessons taught by each interviewed teacher were also observed.
 Results indicated that the policy of implementing English proficiency tests as a graduation requirement had a superficial or at times no impact on teaching for both groups, with a slightly greater impact on Group 1, who complied with their university's policy of English graduation requirement. Although the majority of Group 1 teachers, departmental directors and advisory committee members had generally positive attitudes towards the policy, teachers' fundamental beliefs about English language teaching and learning were not changed. The new policy influenced what the teachers taught, but not how they taught. In addition, the teachers, departmental directors and advisory committee members pointed out several issues and problems with the diffusion and implementation of the educational innovation. The teachers and educational administrators nevertheless were aware of the problems they currently faced and appeared determined to resolve them.
 The results seem to argue against using English proficiency tests as a degree requirement or for other gatekeeping purposes. Guidelines are proposed for those universities which want to adopt the English proficiency tests for these high-stakes purposes.


Alkali marshes and wetlands are among the few natural open ecosystems in CentralEurope. Inland alkali marshes of the European steppe zone are typical only for the Pannonian biogeographical region. They are characterized by shallow water cover, high seasonal fluctuations in water availability and by considerable salt-content in water and soil. Even small changes in the above parameters can result in significant differences in habitat structure and species composition. Alkali marshes are usually characterised by a species-poor vegetation, characterised by a few bulrush species (Bolboschoenus maritimus, Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani and S. littoralis). As indicators of the alkali character of these wetlands several halophytes and salt-tolerant species are present in the vegetation, like Aster tripolium ssp. pannonicus, Atriplex littoralis, Chenopodium chenopodioides and Plantago maritima. In sites with moderate salinity Phragmites australis, Schoenoplectus lacustris and Typha spp. can reach high cover scores. Several Pannonian endemic species are also present in alkali wetlands, like Cirsium brachycephalum, Acorellus pannonicus and Puccinellia limosa. Due to the uneven pattern of the soil salt-content and dynamic changes in water regime different types of alkali marshes compose a diverse mosaic pattern even in the small scale. This natural mosaic structure contributes to the maintenance of landscape-scale biodiversity, and also provides favourable habitats for several animal taxa, especially for breeding and migrating birds. These wetlands are also important as green corridors and stepping stones in fragmented agricultural landscapes. Alkali marshes are especially important in European nature conservation; they are included in the Natura 2000 system as priority


The aim of this paper is to give an inside view to the REXUS/BEXUS programme from the perspective of a student who has been involved in the project. Each year, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB), in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), offer the opportunity to European University Students to fly an experiment on board sounding rockets or stratospheric balloons in the frame of the REXUS/BEXUS programme. From December 2012 to May 2014 a team of master students from KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, worked on ISAAC project, an atmospheric experiment launched on board REXUS 15. The author was part of this student team and was involved in the whole process of the ISAAC project from design building and testing phases to the launch campaign and results analysis. The points raised in this article were presented on the occasion of a keynote speech during the 22nd ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programmes and Related Research, in Tromso (Norway) from the 7th to the 12th of June 2015. The aim of this presentation was to demonstrate the benefits of hands-on Education programme at University level. In addition to the research opportunities, future space engineers and scientists can profit from a first practical experience under the supervision of experimented experts. The results of the ISAAC project were also presented in the frame of this conference [1].


Objective: Recent studies indicate that macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is a potent proinflammatory cytokine which mediates the inflammatory process during atherosclerosis. The purpose of the study was to investigate an association between MIF gene polymorphism and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and coronary artery disease (CAD) in the Turkish population. Methods: A total of 139 unselected Turkish patients with significant CAD (coronary lesion with 50–100% stenosis) and 120 control participants (coronary lesion with <30% stenosis) were genotyped for MIF rs755622 polymorphisms using hybridization probes in a Roche LightCycler 480 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction 480 device. Blood samples were drawn before coronary angiography. Gensini and SYNTAX scores were used to determine the angiographic extent and severity of CAD. Results: When the groups were stratified according to T2DM, polymorphism of MIF was not associated with T2DM in CAD patients (p>0.05). In the same subgroups, carriers of the MIF common allele in the control group demonstrated a protection against developing T2DM compared with noncarriers (p<0.05). In addition, MIF C allele carriage was associated with higher glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) in the T2DM group (p=0.038). Conclusion: The MIF rs755622 polymorphism was associated with HbA1c. This result suggests that the MIF gene variant may contribute to CAD risk through diabetes in the Turkish population. ABSTRACT


3D printing of adaptive and dynamic structures, also known as 4D printing, is one of the key challenges in contemporary materials science. The additional dimension refers to the ability of 3D printed structures to change their properties—for example, shape—over time in a controlled fashion as the result of external stimulation. Within the last years, significant efforts have been undertaken in the development of new responsive materials for printing at the macroscale. However, 4D printing at the microscale is still in its early stages. Thus, this progress report will focus on emerging materials for 4D printing at the microscale as well as their challenges and potential applications. Hydrogels and liquid crystalline and composite materials have been identified as the main classes of materials representing the state of the art of the growing field. For each type of material, the challenges and critical barriers in the material design and their performance in 4D microprinting are discussed. Importantly, further necessary strategies are proposed to overcome the limitations of the current approaches and move toward their application in fields such as biomedicine, microrobotics, or optics.


ABSTRACT This paper examines the stock market reactions to announcements regarding employment discrimination. The study finds that there are no statistically significant excess returns associated with settlement announcements and decision announcements. Announcements of new lawsuits, however, are accompanied by a weak and barely significant negative excess return. These findings are contrary to earlier reported findings of strongly negative excess returns for all three types of announcements. The paper suggests that the different results arise from changes in the discriminatory behavior of the firms over the study period. Additionally, the paper finds that despite provisions for punitive damages in The Civil Rights Act of 1991, excess returns associated with announcements regarding employment discrimination lawsuits subsequent to the change in the law are not significantly lower than those prior to the law. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the extent to which employment discrimination litigation affects the stock price and returns of publicly traded companies. Research examining discrimination litigation announcements through the mid 1980's have shown that employment discrimination lawsuits are associated with significantly negative stock returns. This study however, shows that more recently, the impact of such announcements have attenuated. This study shows that during the period 1980 through 1995 that announcements of settlements or decisions regarding such lawsuits are accompanied by returns insignificantly different from zero. Announcements of new lawsuits are accompanied with weak but significantly negative excess returns. The paper suggest, reasons for the disparate findings between this study and earlier findings. Announcements of discrimination lawsuits involving seven or eight figure claims make impressive headlines. However, do these lawsuits have a meaningful impact on the value of the company? Surely, large settlements have a clear influence on shareholder wealth. Take for example, the high profile settlements at Shoney's and Texaco. In 1993 Shoney's agreed to distribute $105 Million in damages and back pay to approximately 10,000 African Americans who either worked for Shoney's or were denied employment over a seven year period. This was in addition to a $30 million agreement in 1989 to recruit more minorities, employ more black vendors, and help blacks acquire franchises. In addition, Shoney's agreed to commit itself to a "top-to-bottom" transformation of its EEO policies. Texaco held the headlines in 1996 with the now famous tape of Texaco executives referring to minority employees with racial epithets. Texaco, confronted with adverse publicity on many fronts including threats of a boycott by major civil rights groups, agreed to a $176 million settlement in January of 1997. Since the shareholder bears the costs of these awards, such lawsuits can be expected to have a substantial impact on the affected companies' stock prices. These examples demonstrate that the cost of employment discrimination lawsuits can be substantial. Damage awards get the headlines, but there are additional costs to firms faced with these types of problems. These include legal fees and loss of customers and business arising from the bad publicity (Cox & Blake, 1991). Also, firms that violate anti-discrimination and harassment regulations may have difficulty attracting and retaining talented employees (Johnston, 1991). Additionally, firms with discriminatory practices tend to have higher operating cost due to high absenteeism, turnover, and job dissatisfaction (Swartz, 1981). These collateral costs may be suffered by firms even if the lawsuit ultimately is unsuccessful or results in minimal awards. LITERATURE REVIEW Previous research present mixed results regarding the effect of announcement of discrimination related lawsuits. Hersch (1991) examined excess returns for 260 announcements over the period from 1964 through 1986, a period encompassing 23 years. …


One common assumption of existing models of load balancing is that the weights of resources and I/O buffer size are statically configured and cannot be adjusted based on a dynamic workload. Though the static configuration of these parameters performs well in a cluster where the workload can be modeled and predicted, its performance is poor in dynamic systems in which the workload is unknown. In this paper, a new feedback control mechanism is proposed to improve overall performance of a cluster with a general and practical workload including I/O-intensive and memory-intensive load. This mechanism is also shown to be effective in complementing and enhancing the performance of a number of existing dynamic load-balancing schemes. To capture the current and past workload characteristics, the primary objectives of the feedback mechanism are: (1) dynamically adjusting the resource weights, which indicate the significance of the resources, and (2) minimizing the number of page faults for memory-intensive jobs while increasing the utilization of the I/O buffers for I/O-intensive jobs by manipulating the I/O buffer size. Results from extensive trace-driven simulation experiments show that compared with a number of schemes with fixed resource weights and buffer sizes, the feedback control mechanism delivers a performance improvement in terms of the mean slowdown by up to 282% (with an average of 125%).


This paper examines the extent to which economic crises facilitate the development of more effective regional institutions and whether such institutions can shield regions from crises. It compares six regional economic crises over the last four decades and the institution building—or decay—that followed. The analysis concludes that five conditions are especially important in generating a constructive regional response: (i) a significant degree of regional economic interdependence; (ii) an independent secretariat or intergovernmental body charged with cooperation; (iii) webs of interlocking economic agreements; and, as elements of the multilateral context, (iv) conflict with the relevant international organization (such as the International Monetary Fund [IMF]); and (v) the support of the United States. The paper then reviews three episodes of crises in Europe, concluding that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has deflected balance of payments and currency crises but not crises of other types, such as sovereign debt crises. Asian regionalism would be well served by heads of government taking the lead and delegating tasks to intergovernmental networks and secretariats, central banks and finance ministries retaining substantial collective autonomy in their fields of responsibility, and the use of concentric circles to accommodate countries with different levels of commitment to regionalism.


This review was undertaken to determine the efficacy of using dorsal root entry zone (DREZ) lesions to treat intractable pain caused by trauma to the conus medullaris and cauda equina. Traumatic lesions of this area are unique in that both the spinal cord and the peripheral nerve roots are injured. Although DREZ lesions have been shown to relieve pain of spinal cord origin in many patients, they have been shown not to relieve pain of peripheral nerve origin. Therefore, 39 patients with trauma to the conus medullaris and cauda equina who underwent DREZ lesioning for intractable pain were reviewed retrospectively. The results of this review demonstrate the efficacy of DREZ lesions in these patients. At a mean follow-up period of 3.0 years, 54% of patients were pain-free without medications, and 20% required only nonnarcotic analgesic drugs for pain that no longer interfered with their daily activities. Better outcomes were noted in patients with an incomplete neurological deficit, with pain having an "electrical" character, and with injuries due to blunt trauma. Operative complications included weakness (four patients), bladder or sexual dysfunction (three), cerebrospinal fluid leak (two), and wound infection (two), but overall, 79.5% of patients (31 of 39) were without serious complications. Complications were limited to patients with prior tissue damage at the surgical exploration site and were most prevalent in patients who underwent bilateral DREZ lesions. In conclusion, this preliminary report suggests that DREZ lesions may be useful in combating intractable pain from traumatic injuries to the conus medullaris and cauda equina, with some risk to neurological function that may be acceptable in this group of patients.


Philip, a Hellenistic Jew, preached the gospel to the Samaritans who were despised by the Jews. The Samaritans were oppressed by evil spirits. They suffered from various kinds of diseases and were in the bondage of Simon the magus. The Samaritans lived in a pluralistic religious community. The confrontation of this community with the gospel produced visible results: people were healed and delivered. Believers were baptized and there was great joy in the city. Transformation took place because Philip preached Christ. This seems to have been the apostolic pattern. The same Christ-centered preaching and communication of the gospel should be followed by ministers of the gospel in today's pluralistic religious world.


Thirty two swamp buffalo bulls (Bubalus bubalis) ranging in age from 18 months to 72 months with body weights of 300 kg to 470 kg were electroejaculated to study seminal characteristics and age at onset of puberty. First ejaculates could be obtained at 29±3 months at body weights of 380±20 kg with mean values for sperm concentration of 53.9±30.1 x 10 6 cells/ml, motility (50.1±24.1%), live sperm (67.2±15.2%) and total abnormal sperm (10.1±0.9%)at this age. Four bulls younger than 29 months did not give semen on several attempts at electroejaculation. Mean values of semen parameters for ages 30 to 72 months (140 ejaculates from 28 bulls) were : volume 2.5±0.4 ml; general motility 57.9±8.0%; live (unstained) sperm 67.2±1.4% abnormal sperm 11.1±1.8%; sperm concentration 113.0±77.1 x 10 cells/ml and total sperm ejaculate 205.1±51.0 x 10 cells/ml. Volume, motility and sperm concentration increased with age from 29 months to 66 months. Mean (±S.D.) plasma testerone levels for 24 of the same bulls electroejaculated for age groups between 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5 and >5 years were 82±19, 82±81, 105±55, 63±13 and 90±37 pg/ml respectively, with no apparent trend. When injected with 500ug GnRH or 1000 i.u. H.C.G., peak testosterone levels reached 224±105, 305±293, 377±183, 393±158 and 708±335 pg/ml for the same age groups respectively. Although plasma testosterone was detectable by 1-2 years of age, the results suggest that age - dependent changes (in Ledying cell function) were only evident upon gonadotrophic stimulation, in contrast to half hourly sampling over 6 to 8 hours without GnRH or HCG stimulation. The age at which semen with normal characteristics was first observed (29 months) closely followed the age at which maximum scrotal circumference and maximum seminiferous tubular diameter (32 months) was observed. It thus appears, that while spermatogenesis in completed histologically at 16 months, testosterone secretion is evident as early as 12 months to support spermatogenesis, and ejaculates could be obtained at 29 months. The semen of swamp buffalo bulls could therefore be used for breeding at around 2 1/2 years.


The recognition of human behaviours is a key challenge in several contexts, such as healthcare and surveillance, providing support for various applications. In particular in the healthcare domain the development of automated techniques for the recognition of human activity allows the improvement of quality of life of elderly people, monitoring their behaviours and preventing dangerous situations. Advances in technologies allow the introduction of information sources into everyday objects, however, the data gathered from these pervasive devices may contain sensible user information, arising privacy and security issues. Furthermore, a semantic gap exists between these data and the information needed for the recognition process. We propose ARA (Automated Recogniser of ADLs), a system for the automated and real-time recognition of human activities in sensorised environment, guaranteeing the user's privacy and the data security.


OBJECTIVE
To examine how "travel by walking" before and after school contributes to total physical activity of adolescent girls.

DESIGN
Cross-sectional sample.

SETTING
Thirty-six middle schools from Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, Louisiana, California, and South Carolina participating in the Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG).

PARTICIPANTS
Seventeen hundred twenty-one sixth-grade girls consented to participate; adequate information was available for 1596 participants (93%).

MAIN EXPOSURE
Travel by walking before school, after school, and before and after school combined assessed from the 3-Day Physical Activity Recall.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
Mean minutes of physical activity measured by accelerometry were estimated for total physical activity (light, moderate, vigorous), moderate to vigorous activity (MVPA), and MVPA of 3 metabolic equivalents.

RESULTS
Travel by walking was reported by 14% of participants before school and 18% after school. Girls who reported travel by walking before and after school (combined) had 13.7 more minutes (95% confidence interval, 1.2-26.3) of total physical activity and 4.7 more minutes (95% confidence interval, 2.2-7.2) of MVPA than girls who did not report this activity. Before-school and after-school walkers (but not both) accumulated 2.5 more minutes (95% confidence interval, 0.10-4.9) and 2.2 more minutes (95% confidence interval, 0.24-4.2) of MVPA on an average weekday, respectively, than nonwalkers.

CONCLUSION
Our results provide evidence that walking to and from school increases weekday minutes of total physical activity and MVPA for middle-school girls.


A generative recurrent neural network is quickly trained in an unsupervised manner to model popular reinforcement learning environments through compressed spatiotemporal representations. The world model's extracted features are fed into compact and simple policies trained by evolution, achieving state of the art results in various environments. We also train our agent entirely inside of an environment generated by its own internal world model, and transfer this policy back into the actual environment. Interactive version of paper: https://worldmodels.github.io


Founded in September 1790 by former Jesuit Cerutti the «Feuille Villageoise» is one of the most successful examples of revolutionary newspapers addressed to the peasants. It intended not only to mobilize them politically, but also to educate them to politics («eduquer a la liberte»). The article discusses the newspaper's content, its cultural underpinnings and civic mission, exploring the pedagogical assumptions that inspire it. It does so by highlighting the evolution of its language and the role of the leading journalist. Furthermore, it examines the limits and contradictions of the new model of citizenship that it proposed, and the basic contradictions provoked by the celebration of the new man of the revolution and the implicit denial of the specificity of the peasant on which the newspaper was however based. Although its publications continued during the Republican era, the «Feuille» lost inevitably its originality, if not its raison d'etre


The median survival of patients with truncus arteriosus is five weeks of age with rare cases reaching adulthood. The longest reported survivor with balanced ventricles, as the index case has, is 38 years of age. The index case is a 46-year old male with Type 3 truncus arteriosus. His case has never been documented in the English Literature as far as the author is aware.


We propose a novel learnable representation for detail preserving shape deformation. The goal of our method is to warp a source shape to match the general structure of a target shape, while preserving the surface details of the source. Our method extends a traditional cage-based deformation technique, where the source shape is enclosed by a coarse control mesh termed cage, and translations prescribed on the cage vertices are interpolated to any point on the source mesh via special weight functions. The use of this sparse cage scaffolding enables preserving surface details regardless of the shape's intricacy and topology. Our key contribution is a novel neural network architecture for predicting deformations by controlling the cage. We incorporate a differentiable cage-based deformation module in our architecture, and train our network end-to-end. Our method can be trained with common collections of 3D models in an unsupervised fashion, without any cage-specific annotations. We demonstrate the utility of our method for synthesizing shape variations and deformation transfer.


Strengths-Based Nursing (SBN) is both a philosophy and value-driven approach that can guide clinicians, educators, manager/leaders, and researchers. SBN is rooted in principles of person/family centered care, empowerment, relational care, and innate health and healing. SBN is family nursing yet not all family nursing models are strengths-based. The challenge is how to translate a philosophy to change practice. In this article, we describe a process of implementation that has organically evolved of a multi-layered and multi-pronged approach that involves patients and families, clinicians, educators, leaders, managers, and researchers as well as key stakeholders including union leaders, opinion leaders, and policy makers from both nursing and other disciplines. There are two phases to the implementation process, namely, Phase 1: pre-commitment/pre-adoption and Phase 2: adoption. Each phase consists of distinct steps with accompanying strategies. These phases occur both sequentially and concurrently. Facilitating factors that enable the implementation process include values which align, readiness to accept SBN, curiosity–courage–commitment on the part of early adopters, a critical mass of early adopters, and making SBN approach both relevant and context specific.


What happens to the Palestinian novel after the national dispossession of the nakba, and how do Palestinian novelists respond to this massive crisis? This is the first study in English to chart the development of the Palestinian novel in exile and under occupation from 1948 onwards. By reading the novel in the context of the ebb and flow of Arab and Palestinian revolution, Bashir Abu-Manneh defines the links between aesthetics and politics. Combining historical analysis with textual readings of key novels by Jabra, Kanafani, Habiby, and Khalifeh, the chronicle of the Palestinian novel unfolds as one that articulates humanism, self-sacrifice as collective redemption, mutuality, and self-realization. Political challenge, hope, and possibility are followed by the decay of collective and individual agency. Genet's and Khoury's unrivalled literary homages to Palestinian revolt are also examined. By critically engaging with Lukacs, Adorno, and postcolonial theory, questions of struggle and self-determination take centre stage.


We present reliable measurements of the metallicity distribution function (MDF) at different points along the tidal stream of the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy, based on high-resolution, echelle spectroscopy of candidate M giant members of the Sgr system. The Sgr MDF is found to evolve significantly from a median [Fe/H] ~ -0.4 in the core to ~-1.1 dex over a Sgr leading arm length representing ~2.5-3.0 Gyr of dynamical (i.e., tidal stripping) age. This is direct evidence that there can be significant chemical differences between current dSph satellites and the bulk of the stars they have contributed to the halo. Our results suggest that Sgr experienced a significant change in binding energy over the past several gigayears, which has substantially decreased its tidal boundary across a radial range over which there must have been a significant metallicity gradient in the progenitor galaxy. By accounting for MDF variation along the debris arms, we approximate the MDF Sgr would have had several gigayears ago. We also analyze the MDF of a moving group of M giants we previously discovered toward the north Galactic cap. These objects have the opposite radial velocities to the infalling Sgr leading arm stars there, and we propose that most of them represent Sgr trailing arm stars overlapping the Sgr leading arm in this part of the sky. If so, these trailing arm stars further demonstrate the strong MDF evolution within the Sgr stream.


This study aims to evaluate the response of a decrease in the concentration of Cr in the culture medium and to determine the effect of Cr concentration on the growth of Chlorella vulgaris . This study used a completely randomized design (CRD) with 4 treatments and 3 repetitions. These treatments include, K treatment (control), treatment of Cr 1 (addition of chromium concentration of 1 mg / L), treatment of Cr 3 (addition of chromium concentration of 3 mg / L) and treatment of Cr 5 (addition of chromium concentration of 5 mg / L). Each sample was analyzed by AAS. Analysis of the data is using analysis of variance followed by Duncan test. The results of the analysis of metal concentrations decrease of Cr in the culture medium is Cr 3 (1.2834 mg / l), Cr 1 (0.4360 mg / l), Cr 5 (0.4276 mg / l), and K (0.0126 mg / l). Results of analysis of variance F test showed that Chlorella vulgaris gives highly significant effect on decreasing the concentration of Cd metal. While the results of the growth of Chlorella vulgaris during culture is Cr 3 (909.55 cells / ml), Cr 1 (864.28 cells / ml), Cr 5 (659.20 cells / ml), and K (647.15 cells / ml). Results of analysis of variance showed that different concentrations of Cd metal gives highly significant effect on the growth of Chlorella vulgaris . The conclusion is Chlorella vulgaris has the ability as bioremediator chromium with different concentrations, as shown by the reduction of Cd content in the culture medium. Chlorella vulgaris has a polyamine whose role is to protect or as a protection in a contaminated environment.


Governments around the world are under constant pressure to reduce deficits and balance their national budgets. The previous heterodoxy of suggesting new or higher taxes has now become orthodoxy. A recent example is the returned Barack Obama administration, which is emboldened to the task of addressing ways to increase tax receipts. This study covers the period just prior to and immediately after the introduction of new tax legislation in Australia in an era of partisan, polarised politics. Four theories (grounded in data collected) provide explanations from contextual elements, conditions and events, all of which have an effect on the success of a new tax.The Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) took effect in July 2012. The MRRT is the subject of this qualitative research study, which utilises theories from an analysis of print media data relating to the tax. The study contributes to an understanding of the issues that require consideration when a new tax is implemented as well as the politics of tax policy. The findings have lessons for Australia as well as other jurisdictions when considering new tax legislation.


Observations of whales and dolphins in the Cape Verde Islands obtained in 1995 and 1996 are reported and data on the occurrence of 14 taxa are given, including four not previously reported from the region, viz. Bryde's Whale Balaenoptera edeni, Killer Whale Orcinus orca, Rough-toothed Dolphin Steno bredanensis, and Striped Dolphin Stenella coeruleoalba. An earlier report of Fin Whale B. physalus is reviewed and re-identified as B. cf. borealis. Status and occurrence of the Humpback Whale Megaptera novaeangliae are discussed at some length. Unpublished observations from other observers are also included and a short account on the history of whaling in the islands is given. A list of all cetacean taxa reliably recorded in the Cape Verde region is presented and unsubstantiated reports are briefly discussed.


Urban regeneration projects often deal with activation of public space and pedestrian-oriented envi-ronments. That activation is based on idealisation of a good public space. It could be argued that our understanding of public space is deriving from the utopian ideas of democracy, ancient Greek agora and Roman forum. When we think about public space we usually imagine it as urban open space, acces- sible to all citizens, with ideal enclosed form of plaza of a particular size and scale, which welcomes everybody and demonstrates ultimate level of urbanity. This paper uses the example of Garema Place in Canberra to discuss the interdependence of public space and place identity and their role in the regeneration of Canberra City Centre. Canberra is a planned city, with dominantly low density, dispersed town-centres, and nature as main element of its identity. The notion of public space and urban life differs from utopian ideas of agora and forum. The main character of Garema Place is noted within the nature. Yet the process of regeneration of Canberra city centre has been attempted within number of artistic and other public events, bringing people to the public space. The efforts to create a notion of plaza have not done much in generating the process of revitalisation. Garema still remains mainly vacant with low levels of street activities. Because of different understanding of public space and place identity in Canberra, the paper hypoth- esises the need for a different kind of regeneration scenario. The discussion is drawn from an analysis of the character of Garema Place and history of public events in recent years in relation to the data of vacancy of built environment and everyday activities. The conclusion argues for importance of the place identity in the process of regeneration for more sustainable future of Canberra and its city centre.


The thesis is an investigation of the relation between generic indeterminacy, narrative time and figuration through a comparative analysis of three generically ambiguous texts: Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory(1951/1966), Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood (1975) and Javier Marias's Dark Back of Time(1998). Those issues will be examined with the help (or the hindrance) of a metaphor —the "curiosity". Although it was initially employed by Brian Richardson to describe the non-mimetic temporal structure of Speak, Memory, the figure is used here not only in relation to narrative time but also as an alternative way of exploring the critical debates around the definition of autobiography as a literary genre.
The "curiosity" metaphor is first considered in relation to other figures of definition and indefinition employed in critical discourses about autobiography. The metaphor articulates the tensions between boundary-based definitional models (such as Philippe Lejeune's), hybrid "renaming" approaches (as evidenced in portmanteau tags such as 'autobiografiction' or 'autofiction') and anti-models such as Paul De Man's, suspicious about the possibility of containing, defining or naming autobiography (highlighted by their use of temporallyimpossible or paradoxical figures). Through the curiosity (a figure of generic oddity defined against a norm it disturbs), the thesis explores the problematic nature of boundary-based definitional approaches and argues that it is only by an explicit and immersive mirroring of the circular and seemingly paralysing nature of autobiography (and its definition) that the genre can be described and kept alive.
The thesis's "curious" approach to autobiography involves a joint study of the metaphor not only in relation to genre but also to questions of narrative time and temporal indeterminacy (the "origin" of the figure). It seeks to explore this twinned process of indefinition through the medium of figurative mirrors—in particular, through self-referential and paradoxical devices such as mise en abyme. The procedure for this study involves a series of obsessive and patient readings of three "curiosities": Speak, Memory, W or the Memory of Childhood, and Dark Back of Time. Their use of mise en abymedevices will be examined in parallel to their generic indefinition and their temporal structure. Narrative time will be analysed both through classical narratological models (such as the fabulaand sjuzhetdistinction) and "fuzzier" approaches to narrative temporality (as David Herman's concept of polychrony). The thesis thus seeks to gather together a series of ambiguous figural and temporal motifs in the three texts (some of them left "uncollected" by previous critical approaches) in order to determine whether it mightbe possible to approach autobiography through less confining frames than those of the frontier/boundary/hybrid models.


While most research on elite sport success focuses on sport policy factors or the explanatory powers of macro-level factors such as wealth and population, sporting success of countries is also determined by the competitive environment of a sport. This paper identified trends in competitive balance in athletics at world championships and Olympic Games between 2000 and 2015. Using Spearman rank correlations between multiple indicators of competitive balance and the passage of time, a systematic decrease in competitive balance was found for athletics in general, men's and women's competition. At discipline-specific level, divergent trends in competitive balance were identified. Based on top-8 point market shares, women's sprint/hurdles, long-distance running and race walking became systematically more unbalanced, while the medal competition in men's long-distance running became significantly more balanced. This study informs policy-makers on shifting opportunities for success caused by dynamic changes in the competition and the systematic reduction of competitive balance in specific disciplines.


The structure of planetary surfaces unveils basic formation processes and evolution lines of different objects in the solar system, and often the view on the top of a planet is the only available information about it. Advanced remote sensing technologies on deep space missions are aimed at accessing a maximum of relevant data to characterize a planetary object holistically. This approach requires concert strategies in planetary and engineering science. In this framework VIS/IR spectroscopic remote sensing methods are key technologies for imaging planetary atmospheres and surfaces, for studying their composition, texture, structure and dynamics. Basing on these analyses it succeeds to observe the single objects in more global geo-scientific content. The paper focuses on main geo-scientific output coming from spectroscopic studies of planetary surfaces in conjunction with their interiors, atmospheres, and the interplanetary space. It summarizes selected results of spectral studies onboard of the ESA deep space missions BepiColombo, Venus Express, Mars Express, and Rosetta. The corresponding spectral instruments are introduced. The complex conflation of special knowledge of the disciplines planetology, optical and IR measuring techniques, and space flight engineering is demonstrated in several examples. Finally, the paper gives an outlook of current developments for spectral studies in planned missions, and sums up some of the driving questions in planetary science.


OBJECTIVE To assess the risk of psychiatric disorders and suicide attempts in children with type 1 diabetes and their healthy siblings. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We performed a population-based case-cohort study of individuals born in Sweden between 1973 and 2009. Children with type 1 diabetes (n = 17,122) and their healthy siblings (n = 18,847) were identified and followed until their 18th birthday. Their risk of psychiatric disorders was compared with that of matched control subjects. RESULTS The risk of psychiatric morbidity in children with type 1 diabetes compared with the general population was tripled within 6 months after the onset of diabetes (hazard ratio [HR] 3.0 [95% CI 2.7–3.4]) and doubled within the total observation period (HR 2.1 [95% CI 2.0–2.2]). An increased risk was noted in suicide attempts (HR 1.7 [95% CI 1.4–2.0]) and in most categories of psychiatric disorders. The risk of psychiatric disorders in probands declined from HR 2.7 (95% CI 2.2–3.3) for those in the cohort born 1973–1986 to 1.9 (95% CI 1.8–2.0) in those born 1997–2009. The risk for any psychiatric disorders among siblings of patients with type 1 diabetes was estimated to be HR 1.1 (95% CI 1.0–1.1), and there was no increased risk in any of the specific category of disorders. CONCLUSIONS Children with type 1 diabetes are at high risk of psychiatric disorders, which seems to be a consequence of the disease rather than due to a common familial etiology. The results support recommendations on comprehensive mental health surveillance in children with type 1 diabetes, especially in recently diagnosed children.


Sparse data computations are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Unlike their dense data counterparts, sparse data computations have less locality and more irregularity in their execution, making them significantly more challenging to parallelize and optimize. Many of the existing formats for sparse data representations on parallel architectures are restricted to static data problems, while those for dynamic data suffer from inefficiency both in terms of performance and memory footprint. This work presents Hornet, a novel data representation that targets dynamic data problems. Hornet is scalable with the input size, and does not require any data re-allocation or re-initialization during the data evolution. We show a Hornet implementation for GPU architectures and compare it to the most widely used static and dynamic data structures.


USING SCRIPTURE IN CHRISTIAN ETHICS: INTERACTING WITH RICHARD HAYS'S THE MORAL VISION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT Christopher Archie Vinson, Ph.D. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008 Chairperson: Dr. E. David Cook One of the fundamental issues at the core of evangelical ethical debates involves the use of Scripture. Rejecting historical-critical methods on the one hand, and simplistic prooftexting on the other, Richard Hays wrote The Moral Vision of the New Testament in order to deal with this very problem. By most accounts, Hays's approach succeeds. This dissertation explores the method proposed by Hays in The Moral Vision, seeking to locate the strengths of his approach while noting its primary weaknesses. Upon finding Hays's method wanting, the dissertation posits a constructive proposal, in conversation with Hays, for using Scripture in ethics. The first chapter of the dissertation introduces the problem and suggests The Moral Vision as an ethical text which has garnered sufficient accolades as to make it worthy of examination. Chapter 2 seeks to describe in detail the major lines of argument, giving specific attention to the method Hays proposes to use Scripture in ethics. Chapter 3 offers a critique of The Moral Vision, beginning with several strengths. The thrust of the chapter, however centers on the following four weaknesses of Hays's method: first, Hays's program of appropriating Scripture is built on his view that Scripture speaks in disunity; second, that view of the canon necessitates that Hays identify three focal images to locate a coherent moral voice. The focal images serve to develop, despite Hays insistence to the contrary, a canon within the canon; third, Hays gives priority to narrative in his system, which opens his method up to greater subjectivity and personal bias; and lastly, Hays's approach provides no criteria for judging whether an appropriation is faithful, it unwittingly relies on transcendent ethical principles, and it fails to distinguish between interpretation and application. After offering a critique of The Moral Vision, chapter 4 proposes an original method for appropriating Scripture in ethics. That proposal seeks first to establish foundational convictions regarding Scripture and ethics. Building on those presuppositions, the dissertation prescribes how one might rightly read the ancient text of Scripture and from there draw conclusions about how the Bible gives ethical instructions today. At every turn, the dissertation's interest is concerned primarily with methodology rather than specific ethical conclusions. The chapter closes by drawing conclusions about one contemporary ethical issue (in vitro fertilization) in order to test the method prescribed and help the reader see how such a proposal might proceed. The final chapter proposes application for the church that arises from the method proposed by this dissertation. The chapter also raises tensions for further research which lay outside the scope of this dissertation's purposes.


Parallelizing of software improves its effectiveness and productivity. To guarantee correctness, the parallel and serial versions of the same code must be formally verified to be equivalent. We present a novel approach, called GRASSP, that automatically synthesizes parallel single-pass array-processing programs by treating the given serial versions as specifications. Given arbitrary segmentation of the input array, GRASSP synthesizes a code to determine a new segmentation of the array that allows computing partial results for each segment and merging them. In contrast to other parallelizers, GRASSP gradually considers several parallelization scenarios and certifies the results using constrained Horn solving. For several classes of programs, we show that such parallelization can be performed efficiently. The C++ translations of the GRASSP solutions sped performance by up to 5X relative to serial code on an 8-thread machine and Hadoop translations by up to 10X on a 10-node Amazon EMR cluster.


This review describes how the dissembling strategies of the former President in the Jones case and impeachment proceeding, so widely reviled at the time, were in fact simply the advocacy techniques commonly employed by lawyers representing clients in our current (exaggerated) version of the adversary system. The comparison is pointedly not meant as a defense or apologia for Clinton, but as a criticism of lawyers and their "ethics." The core vice that Posner finds in Clinton's efforts to contain the truth of the Lewinsky affair is very similar to a fault the public perceives in the behavior of lawyers generally. Namely, lawyers often try to obscure or distract from factual truth order to prevent the law from applying as intended. Most of this avoidance behavior is technically lawful because, for pragmatic reasons, allowances for such avoidance have been deliberately built into the criminal laws against perjury, obstruction of justice and the like. These allowances are a compromise that the law makes with morals so its criminal prohibitions will not unduly chill the advocacy zeal on which the adversary system depends. Because of these allowances, however, it may be problematic to make a legal case against Clinton for his efforts to conceal the Lewinsky affair. Nonetheless, Clinton's manner of defense discloses unmistakably the serious discrepancy that exists between the standards of honesty that lawyers apply to themselves and those that the public expects of honest people in general and of a legitimate system of law in particular. In his report and analysis of the events, Judge Posner seems to recognize the problems, as did the public generally, but he does not take the opportunity to draw the consequent conclusions about certain widely accepted norms of adversarial practice today.


Writing-Pal is an intelligent tutoring system designed to offer high school students writing strategy instruction and guided practice to improve their essay-writing skills. Students are taught to use writing strategies via interactive lessons, games, and essay-writing practice. This paper presents an overview of Writing-Pal's foundations and design, which are based on key pedagogical and educational-technology, and design principles. These considerations are important for the efficacy of the system, as well as its stability and portability in diverse settings, such as the laboratory, classroom, or students' homes. We expect this paper to be of interest to educational developers, as well as other developers who may face similar goals and challenges.

 Key words: Writing-pal, writing strategy training, architecture, design, intelligent tutoring system, essay-writing skills, vicarious learning, pedagogy, strategy instruction


This article presents a gesture detection and analysis framework for modelling multimodal interactions. It is particulary designed for its use in Virtual Reality (VR) applications and contains an abstraction layer for different sensor hardware. Using the framework, gestures are described by their characteristic spatio-temporal features which are on the lowest level calculated by simple predefined detector modules or nodes. These nodes can be connected by a data routing mechanism to perform more elaborate evaluation functions, therewith establishing complex detector nets. Typical problems that arise from the time-dependent invalidation of multimodal utterances under immersive conditions lead to the development of pre-evaluation concepts that as well support their integration into scene graph based systems to support traversal-type access. Examples of realized interactions illustrate applications which make use of the described concepts.


In this thesis we investigate the impact of preferences, income and regulation on PM2.5 levels. The thesis uses a combined data set of income, population weighted concentration levels of PM2.5 for 157 countries from 1990 to 2017. Using a fixed effects model, we find evidence for an inverted U-shaped relationship between income and pollution, supporting the hypothesis of an Environmental Kuznet Curve for PM2.5. Furthermore, the curve has changed in recent time and pollution is more sensitive to income in from 2011 to 2017 than for the period as a whole. The estimated turning points are $6,015 for the full period and $2,860 for 2011-2017. Income is not found to have different effects on PM2.5 pollution in developed and developing countries. Assuming preferences to be constant, we find relationships between patience, negative reciprocity, risk taking and PM2.5 pollution. Greater levels of patience are seen with lower levels of estimated time invariant PM2.5 pollution, while higher levels of negative reciprocity and risk taking are seen with lower levels of PM2.5. Negative reciprocity also seems to have an effect on the relationship between income and pollution. Countries with higher levels of negative reciprocity have a different estimated EKC and reaches the turning point faster ($4,620) than countries with lower levels ($12,094). Though the results indicate preferences and income to have effects on PM2.5 pollution, the analysis does not propose causality. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we analyse how regulations and policy can have an effect through the EU' Directive 50/2008. The isolated effect of the directive is estimated to be a reduction in PM2.5 levels of 6 %. This effect is robust to inclusions of EKC-relationships in the estimation.


To properly evaluate initiatives targeting children's fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption, we need feasible and valid dietary assessment methods that are time, cost, and resource effective. The objectives of this study were to test the feasibility and validity of two methods, digital imaging (DI) and aggregate plate waste (APW), for assessing children's FV consumption. UVM dietary assessment team graduate students prepared and distributed FV snacks in two pre-school classrooms over 30 consecutive school days. Feasibility of APW was tested by recording the frequency and weight of waste sorting errors by pre-school children and performing paired t-tests comparing uncorrected and corrected FV waste. Feasibility was tested for DI by determining the total number of individual FV snacks from which FV consumption could be estimated using the digital images. Validity was tested for DI using paired t-tests to compare FV consumption as assessed by DI against actual consumption as assessed by weighed plate waste (WPW). A total of 159 cluster APW weights were recorded during the 20 days of APW collection, with an overall mean difference of 0.57 grams (p=0.440) between uncorrected and corrected FV waste. Researchers were able to capture 100-percent usable digital images, effectively displaying 214 individual FV snack servings over the 10-day DI study period. Percent agreement between the two digital image coders was 99.1-percent. DI estimations for individual FV item and cumulative consumption were strongly correlated with WPW (all above r=0.97). Overall FV consumption as estimated by DI differed from WPW by less than one gram, and DI estimations for individual FV items differed from WPW by no more than two grams. Paired t-tests revealed no significant difference between DI estimations of clementine (p=0.954) and peapod (p=0.806) consumption and WPW measurements. However, paired t-tests indicated statistically significant differences between DI and WPW measurements for overall (p=0.001), grape (p=0.031), carrot (p=0.008), and pepper (p=0.027) consumption. Both methods were feasible for assessing mean FV consumption. DI estimations for individual FV items and cumulative consumption were strongly correlated with WPW, suggesting that despite statistical significance between DI and WPW measurements in some cases, the DI method is still precise for mean FV consumption evaluation. APW may be especially advantageous for rapid and efficient evaluation of behavior change in response to interventions targeting children's FV consumption. Due to ease of administration and instantaneous results, the APW method reduces the need for trained research staff to be present, drastically increasing accessibility to group-level dietary assessment.


Debt relief is unlikely to stimulate investment and growth in the world's highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs). This is because the HIPCs do not suffer from debt overhang. The principal obstacle to investment and growth in the world's poorest countries is a lack of basic economic institutions that provide the foundation for profitable economic activity. If the goal is to help poor countries build the institutions that best suit their development needs, then the energy and resources currently devoted to the HIPC initiative could be more effectively employed as direct foreign aid.