Background: Middle cerebral artery (MCA) is the larger terminal branch of the internal carotid artery. It travels through the Sylvian fissure on the insula. Objective: MCA supplies a large area of distribution than the other two cerebral arteries. Though it is so, there are very few articles in the literature describing MCA. Aim of the present work is to study the MCA regarding its origin, course, termination, branching pattern, morphometry and symmetry. Materials and Methods: 340 MCAs from 170 formalin preserved brains were dissected. Morphology, morphometry and symmetry of MCAs, were studied in detail and well photographed. The data collected in the study was analyzed. Results: Accessory MCA was found in seven specimens (2.05%). Duplicated MCA was seen in three specimens (0.88%). Aneurysm was found in three specimens (0.88%). MCA with bifurcated, trifurcated, quadrifurcated and single trunk termination was seen in 220 (64.70%), 42 (12.35%), 8 (2.35%), and in 70 (20.58%) specimens respectively. Bifurcated pattern as upper prominent trunk (type A), lower prominent trunk (type B) and both equal prominent trunks (type C) were seen in 63 (28.63%), 129 (58.63%), and 28 (12.72%) specimens respectively. Asymmetry was seen in 102 specimens (60%). Mean length and diameter of the MCA was 25.5-27.8 mm and 3 mm respectively. Conclusion: Awareness of these anatomical variations in branching patterns is important in neurovascular procedures. As very few Anatomical studies on MCA are there in the literature, this type of research work should be done by a number of scientists from a different region of the world in large scale.


Abstract. Time-series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has developed as an influential method to measure various surface deformations. One of the generations of time-series InSAR methodologies is Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) that focuses on targets with a high correlation over time. In this study, we have measured the surface deformation in Azar Oil Field utilizing time series analysis. Azar Oil Field is one of Iran's oil fields. This oil field is located in the east of the city of Mehran, Ilam province. The reservoir of this oil field is shared by Iraq oil field whose name is Badra where oil extraction started in 201409. While Iran started oil exploration in 201709, Iraq has maximized its oil exploration ever since. The subsidence is mainly observed in the vicinity of the oil field. The Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers (StaMPS) package has been employed to process 20 descending ENVISAT-ASAR images collected between 2003 and 2009, as well as 50 descending Sentinel-1A satellite images collected between 2014 and 2019. Sentinel-1 images bring new improvements due to their wide coverage and high revisiting time, which allows us to make a wide area processing. Due to the high depth of oil wells (4,300 meters), as well as the stone type of the region's bed in some areas, we needed to calculate the magnitude of subsidence. The results show the maximum displacement rate in this area is 18 mm between 2014 and 2019 in the radar line of sight direction, but no subsidence took place between 2003 and 2009 .The results of the study confirm typical patterns of subsidence induced by oil extraction. Also, since 2017, with the onset of Iran's oil extraction and the intensification of Iraq's oil exploration, subsidence has taken place with a steeper slope. The displacement of the area before and after this date is modelled with two lines.


Summary. Standard heparin, an effective treatment for antepartum thromboembolic disease, is thought to be safe for the fetus since it does not cross the placenta. Recently, a number of low molecular weight heparins have been prepared which have been shown to produce less bleeding than standard heparin for an equivalent antithrombotic effect in experimental animals. These observations suggest that the low molecular weight heparins may also provide superior antithrombotic therapy in antepartum thromboembolic disease. However, it is not known whether the low molecular weight heparins cross the placenta. To determine this, we examined the pharmacokinetics of 125I‐labelled standard heparin and a low molecular weight heparin, and their anticoagulant effects in mother and fetus, using a pregnant sheep model. Catheters were inserted into maternal and fetal femoral arteries at 108–119 d gestation (term: 147 d). 1–3 days later the mothers were given a bolus i.v. injection of 5000 anti‐Xa units of 125I‐labelled standard heparin or low molecular weight heparin, CY 222. Nine serial blood samples were collected over 4 h from both mother and fetus for measurements of radioactivity, anti‐Xa activity (chromogenic) and activated partial thromboplastin times. When therapeutic levels of standard and CY 222 heparins were achieved in the mother, there was no detectable radioactivity or anticoagulant effect in the fetus. We conclude that standard heparin and the low molecular weight CY 222 do not cross the placenta in the pregnant sheep.


Purpose: To assess the association between the polymorphism in exon-1 of the MBL2 gene and the periodontal disease in type 2 diabetic patients. Methods: The sample comprised of 100 patients, who were submitted to a clinical periodontal examination that evaluated in six sites per tooth the probing depth (PD), bleeding on probing (BOP), clinical attachment loss (CAL), plaque index (PI) and the number of teeth present. Periodontal disease was defined as at least four sites with loss of attachment of ≥5 mm, with one or more of those sites having a pocket of ≥ 4 mm. The collection of scaling cells from the oral mucosa was carried out and the detection of MBL2 polymorphism was made by real time PCR and melting temperature curve analysis. Results: In a type 2 diabetic population, no significant statistical differences in MBL2 polymorphisms genotype or allele frequencies were observed among subjects with periodontal disease. Conclusion: This study indicates that the polymorphisms in exon-1 of the MBL2 gene are not related to periodontal disease in a type 2 diabetic population.


With the spread of false and misleading information in current news, many algorithmic tools have been introduced with the aim of assessing bias and reliability in written content. However, there has been little work exploring how effective these tools are at changing human perceptions of content. To this end, we conduct a study with 654 participants to understand if algorithmic assistance improves the accuracy of reliability and bias perceptions, and whether there is a difference in the effectiveness of the AI assistance for different types of news consumers. We find that AI assistance with featurebased explanations improves the accuracy of news perceptions. However, some consumers are helped more than others. Specifically, we find that participants who read and share news often on social media are worse at recognizing bias and reliability issues in news articles than those who do not, while frequent news readers and those familiar with politics perform much better. We discuss these differences and their implication to offer insights for future research.


As scholars focus increasingly on the border of Mexico and the United States, issues related to economics, politics, health, immigration and, culture dominate. Little emphasis, however, has been placed on border communication. How peoples of the border -- both in Mexico and in the United States -- receive their knowledge and information about this vast region, of which they are a part, appears to offer rich insight into opinion formation, perceptions of the border, perceptions of one's own country and one's neighbors. There has been a considerable amount of research conducted on how the U.S. media function and on how consumers use the media. A lesser amount of research, although still considerable, has been conducted on the Mexican use of media. Little research, however, has been done on border media comparisons, an area of considerable challenge. This conspicuous absence of research may be due in part to a lack of interest of both Mexican and U.S. media scholars, but may also be the result of the difficulty of comparison of media on the two sides of the border, stemming from a lack of structure in which meaningful comparisons can be made. In an effort to gain a preliminary understanding of border media and to begin to formulate a systematic agenda for study, the focus of this article is an examination of Mexican border journalism to determine if its practitioners perceive it to be different from or similar to journalism practiced in non-border areas of Mexico. While this study does not attempt directly to address the problem of transborder media comparisons, the framework of analysis used here could be applied to the more difficult problem of transborder comparisons.


In 2009, new guidance for wildland fire management in the United States expanded the range of strategic options for managers working to reduce the threat of high-severity wildland fire, improve forest health and respond to a changing climate. Markedly, the new guidance provided greater flexibility to manage wildland fires to meet multiple resource objectives. We use Incident Status Summary reports to understand how wildland fire management strategies have differed across the western US in recent years and how management has changed since the 2009 Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. When controlling for confounding variation, we found the 2009 Policy Guidance along with other concurrent advances in fire management motivated an estimated 27 to 73% increase in the number of fires managed with expanded strategic options, with only limited evidence of an increase in size or annual area burned. Fire weather captured a manager's intent and allocation of fire management resources relative to burning conditions, where a manager's desire and ability to suppress is either complemented by fire weather, at odds with fire weather, or put aside due to other priorities. We highlight opportunities to expand the use of strategic options in fire-adapted forests to improve fuel heterogeneity.


We analyze the convergence behaviour of a recently proposed algorithm for regularized estimation called Dual Augmented Lagrangian (DAL). Our analysis is based on a new interpretation of DAL as a proximal minimization algorithm. We theoretically show under some conditions that DAL converges super-linearly in a non-asymptotic and global sense. Due to a special modelling of sparse estimation problems in the context of machine learning, the assumptions we make are milder and more natural than those made in conventional analysis of augmented Lagrangian algorithms. In addition, the new interpretation enables us to generalize DAL to wide varieties of sparse estimation problems. We experimentally confirm our analysis in a large scale l1-regularized logistic regression problem and extensively compare the efficiency of DAL algorithm to previously proposed algorithms on both synthetic and benchmark data sets.


Current conceptions regarding children's understanding of promises (and promise breaking) rely upon absolute distinction: namely, a promise versus a non-promise. The current study expands the understanding of children's judgments of broken promises to include more nuanced, refined descriptions. Utilizing a four-point rating scale—ranging from "OK" to "very bad"—forty children aged 6 to 10 judged story cards depicting characters breaking commitments not to engage in specific behaviors across three different domains (moral, social-conventional, and personal). Analyses indicated that children judge broken promises in the moral domain more severely than those in the social-conventional domain and broken promises in the social-conventional domain more severely than those in the personal domain. Therefore, children appear to judge broken commitments on a sliding scale in much the same way they judge actions from the moral, social-conventional and personal domains. Results from the current study also suggest an inverse pattern of judgment with regards to broken commitments. Specifically, it appears that the more severely an initial action is judged, the less severely its concurrent commitment condition is judged; and vice versa. These findings help refine our understanding of childhood interpretations of broken promises and engender several unique ideas for future research in this field.


Complex event processing (CEP) over event streams has become increasingly important for real-time applications ranging from health care, supply chain management to business intelligence. These monitoring applications submit complex queries to track sequences of events that match a given pattern. As these systems mature the need for increasingly complex nested sequence query support arises, while the state-of-art CEP systems mostly support the execution of flat sequence queries only. To assure real-time responsiveness and scalability for pattern detection even on huge volume high-speed streams, efficient processing techniques must be designed. In this paper, we first analyze the prevailing nested pattern query processing strategy and identify several serious shortcomings. Not only are substantial subsequences first constructed just to be subsequently discarded, but also opportunities for shared execution of nested subexpressions are overlooked. As foundation, we introduce NEEL, a CEP query language for expressing nested CEP pattern queries composed of sequence, negation, AND and OR operators. To overcome deficiencies, we design rewriting rules for pushing negation into inner subexpressions. Next, we devise a normalization procedure that employs these rules for flattening a nested complex event expression. To conserve CPU and memory consumption, we propose several strategies for efficient shared processing of groups of normalized NEEL subexpressions. These strategies include prefix caching, suffix clustering and customized "bit-marking" execution strategies. We design an optimizer to partition the set of all CEP subexpressions in a NEEL normal form into groups, each of which can then be mapped to one of our shared execution operators. Lastly, we evaluate our technologies by conducting a performance study to assess the CPU processing time using real-world stock trades data. Our results confirm that our NEEL execution in many cases performs 100 fold faster than the traditional iterative nested execution strategy for real stock market query workloads.


I propose four stages in a semantic bleaching process of the Chinese numeral nominal phrase, da-NumP. This division of stages is based on the chronological order in which the first attested examples of each stage arise. The first stage is a lexical use, in which the morpheme da is a lexical modifier denoting the property of bigness. In the second stage, da loses its lexical status and functions as a ranking operator. More specifically, in the form [Num da N], N denotes the quantificational domain/the restrictor of a quantifier. Da combines with N and the numeral Num to rank all the members within the domain of N relative to an implicit scale, and points to members that are ranked on the upper range/bound of that scale. Combined together, [Num da N] denotes the top ||Num|| number of entities along that scale. This ranking reading is retained in a later development stage. Meanwhile, at this stage, the noun N expresses a further update property exclusively about the topranked entities, and ousts the domain of quantification from surface realization. In the final stage, the ranking reading is lost, replaced by a definite reading. I conclude my paper with a discourse-based theory of the bleaching process, in which I argue that the transition between stage 3 and stage 4 can be seen as triggered by the shift in relative discourse prominence within the elements of the da-NumP. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/


The design of a manufacturing systems is a complex and critical activity entailing decisions with an impact on a long time horizon and a major commitment of financial resources. Indeed, the modelling, simulation and evaluation of manufacturing systems are relevant activities both in the design and the operational phases of a factory. This paper grounds on the results of the Virtual Factory Framework (VFF) Project and addresses the use of an ontology based model of a production system to support the construction of a performance evaluation model. the


Critical cultural awareness as a component of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997, 2012) has received the extensive attention of scholars in the fields of language teaching, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, communication studies, etc. in the recent decades. However, no instrument has ever been developed to assess this construct among Iranian EFL teachers. To fill this gap, in the first phase of the present study a theoretical framework for critical cultural awareness and its components was developed through reviewing the literature and conducting interviews with ELT experts. In the second phase, a questionnaire was developed and piloted with 370 participants who were available and willing to participate in the study. More specifically, the 37 items of the newly-developed 'CCA' scale were subjected to principal component analysis which revealed the presence of three components. These phases led to the development of a questionnaire with three components and 37 items: (1) 'CCA in ELT Programs' including 20 items, (2) 'CCA in ELT Textbooks and Materials' including 13 items, and (3) 'CCA in General Terms' including four items. The findings of this study may shed some light on this fuzzy subject and help researchers assess Iranian EFL teachers' critical cultural awareness.


In winter 1995-1996 the RSF of AWS River-Lake Waterworks suffered from ammonium breakthrough. Research indicated that the nitrification was limited by stagnated growth of the nitrifying bacteria due to low phosphate concentrations at low temperatures (0-3°C). Phosphoric acid was dosed prior to the RSF (dose 35-50 μg PO 4 3- -P.l -1 ) to stimulate bacteria growth. Two weeks after starting the addition, ammonium removal in the RSF had recovered. AWS is conducting research on alternatives for production capacity extension. Several alternatives involve the construction of an additional RSF prior to the reservoir. Pilot experiments on RSF prior to the reservoir show that complete nitrification in these additional RSF is possible. The phosphate concentration should amount at least 10 μg PO 4 3- -P.l -1 . A model has been developed to predict nitrification in RSF. The model confirms the results from both the River-Lake Waterworks9 RSF as from the pilot RSF. The model is used for process control and scenario studies.


Evidence compellingly demonstrates — as Congress famously recognized in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) — that, in order to succeed in school, low-income children require more educational resources than other students. Yet, a half century later, many school districts continue to spend dramatically less on their high-poverty schools than on those more privileged. Districts do this by permitting their most experienced and highly salaried teachers to opt into schools with more privileged students, then failing to count teacher salaries in school funding comparisons, disguising the fact that Title I schools with less experienced, lower salaried teachers spend less on instruction than schools with more advantaged populations.To remedy this, the Department recently proposed a regulation requiring districts to account for all aspects of local funding in demonstrating compliance with the longstanding requirement that they use Title I funds to supplement and not to supplant local funds. Not surprisingly, the regulation has met stiff resistance from actors with partisan interests in maintaining the status quo. More troubling, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service ("CRS") has added a seemingly show-stopping legal objection: that the proposed regulation so clearly contravenes the ESEA that it might not deserve Chevron deference.This paper argues that the CRS Report is clearly wrong. The Education Department has crafted a reasonable regulation that adopts a long-established and well-respected strategy for identifying actions taken pursuant to an unlawful motive. Although partisans may object to making districts choose between using dollars currently spent on more privileged children to more adequately fund low-income schools, or forsaking federal dollars, that is the choice to which the law in existence for decades puts districts.


ABSTRACT Modern systems of governance are increasingly adopting measures aimed at fostering public participation in policymaking, while embedding decisions in scientific evidence under the label of Better Regulation policy. Existing research identifies tensions between participatory and evidence-based approaches. This prompts questions about one of the most ambitious reforms to combine and enhance participatory and evidence-based tools of policymaking, initiated by the European Commission in 2016. We assess the extent to which this reform successfully combined and expanded the participatory layer of supranational policymaking while also strengthening its evidence-based credentials by analysing stakeholders' evaluations. We find that stakeholders assess both sets of measures as part of a single, integrated dimension. Participatory measures received slightly better appraisals and were better known, but both sets of measures were evaluated positively and there are no significant differences in evaluations across stakeholder categories. This points to the complementarity of measures from a stakeholder perspective.


Existing wave energy converters are only based on a few ways to produce electricity from ocean waves. All of them suffer from low cost-efficiency so the proposal of new technologies is still up to date. This is a preliminary study to an innovative concept, based on wave-induced currents. As waves propagate into shallow water and break over a barrier, they dissipate their energy. The latter can be partly transformed in a hydraulic potential through the wave set-up behind the barrier and the cross-shore mass transport from waves. Electricity can then be produced by the mean of a water turbine. This study estimates qualitatively this energy potential. The 2D set-up is analyzed by the model of Calabrese et al. (2008) and is adapted to 3D for a regulated net cross-shore discharge. The 3D model of Bellotti (2004) is also used. Experiments have been carried out on a simplified lab-scale model to check qualitatively the applicability of the models, determine experimentally their calibration parameters and find the optimal combination flow rate/pressure head which gives the highest hydraulic potential. Two different barrier profiles are tested: a breakwater-like barrier with a steep seaward slope and a sandbar-like barrier with a mild slope. Despite a significant uncertainty, experimental and analytical results correlate well. The conclusions on the future of this technology are not thorough. Experimental conditions applied to full scale show a quite low efficiency compared to the main competitors, but much more perspectives of optimization are conceivable. Some of them have been studied from an analytical point of view.


Language is just one particularly highly developed form of primate communication. Recent years have seen increased attention to other forms: studies of animals in the wild, efforts to teach sign language to apes. This volume reflects perspectives from a variety of disciplines on the nature and function of primate signalling systems. Monkeys and apes, like people, live in a world in which they are constantly receiving and transmitting information. How can we interpret the ways in which they process it without imposing our own language-based categorizations? The problem is partly scientific, partly conceptual: that is, partly concerned with what language is. The authors' findings and insights will be of interest to a broad group of primatologists, linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers.


Many changes have occurred in software engineering research and practice since 1968, when software engineering as a research domain was established. One of these research areas is traceability, a key aspect of any engineering discipline, enables engineers to understand the relations and dependencies among various artifacts in a system. It is a well-known fact that even in organizations and projects with mature software development processes, software artifacts created as part of these processes end up being disconnected from each other. This lack of traceability among software artifacts is caused by several factors, including: (1) the fact that these artifacts are written in different languages (natural language vs. programming language); (2) they describe a software system at various abstraction levels (requirements vs. implementation); (3) processes applied within an organization do not enforce maintenance of existing traceability links; and (4) a lack of adequate tool support to create and maintain traceability. Consequently, one of the major challenges for maintainers while performing a maintenance task is the need to comprehend this multitude of often disconnected artifacts created originally as part of the software development process. From a maintainer's perspective, it therefore becomes essential to establish and maintain the semantic connections among these artifacts. The research community's focus has been initially on developing new process models and tools to support the development of monolithic applications written in third generation procedural languages. More recently, the focus has switched to developing and maintaining modern distributed systems deployed across a networked infrastructure using a variety of methods that must address the heterogeneous nature of today's Web-based systems. However, this lack of traceability among software artifacts becomes a major challenge for many software maintenance activities. As a result, during the comprehension of existing software systems, software engineers are required to spend a large amount of effort on synthesizing and integrating information from various sources to establish links among these artifacts. Existing and current research in software traceability focuses on reducing the cost associated with this manual effort by developing automatic assistance in establishing and maintaining traceability links among software artifacts. This half-day working session was structured into three parts: past, present and future. The first half contained four talks introducing different aspects of traceability, while the second half was devoted to an interactive discussion section involving the workshop's participants.


The complete guide to provisioning and managing cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data center solutions Cloud computing will revolutionize the way IT resources are deployed, configured, and managed for years to come. Service providers and customers each stand to realize tremendous value from this paradigm shiftif they can take advantage of it. Cloud Computing brings together the realistic, start-to-finish guidance they need to plan, implement, and manage cloud solution architectures for tomorrows virtualized data centers. It introduces cloud newcomers to essential concepts, and offers experienced operations professionals detailed guidance on delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). This books replicable solutions and fully-tested best practices will help enterprises, service providers, consultants, and Cisco partners meet the challenge of provisioning end-to-end cloud infrastructures. Drawing on extensive experience working with leading cloud vendors and integrators, the authors present detailed operations workflow examples, proven techniques for operating cloud-based network, compute, and storage infrastructure; a comprehensive management reference architecture; and a complete case study demonstrating rapid, lower-cost solutions design. Cloud Computing will be an indispensable resource for all network/IT professionals and managers involved with planning, implementing, or managing the next generation of cloud computing services. Venkata (Josh) Josyula, Ph.D., CCIENo. 13518 is a Distinguished Services Engineer in Cisco Services Technology Group (CSTG) and advises Cisco customers on OSS/BSS architecture and solutions. Malcolm Orr, Solutions Architect for Ciscos Services Technology Solutions, advises telecoms and enterprise clients on architecting, building, and operating OSS/BSS and cloud management stacks. He is Ciscos lead architect for several Tier 1 public cloud projects. Greg Page has spent the last eleven years with Cisco in technical consulting roles relating to data center architecture/technology and service provider security. He is now exclusively focused on developing cloud/IaaS solutions with service providers and systems integrator partners. Review the key concepts needed to successfully deploy clouds and cloud-based services Transition common enterprise design patterns and use cases to the cloud Master architectural principles and infrastructure designs for real-time managed IT services Understand the Cisco approach to cloud-related technologies, systems, and services Develop a cloud management architecture using ITIL, TMF, and ITU-TMN standards Implement best practices for cloud service provisioning, activation, and management Automate cloud infrastructure to simplify service delivery, monitoring, and assurance Choose and implement the right billing/chargeback approaches for your business Design and build IaaS services, from start to finish Manage the unique capacity challenges associated with sporadic, real-time demand Provide a consistent and optimal cloud user experience This book is part of the Networking Technology Series from Cisco Press, which offers networking professionals valuable information for constructing efficient networks, understanding new technologies, and building successful careers. Category: Cloud Computing Covers: Virtualized Data Centers


Internet memes have become a popular form through which northern Chileans express frustrations with their marginalization on global, national, and local levels. At the same time, many of these memes criticize Bolivian immigrants for using resources and taking jobs from "true Chileans." The humorous nature of these texts mitigates the extremity of embedded racial and nationalist ideologies, which are more explicitly expressed in political speech, news media, and quotidian language. This article uses critical discourse analysis to trace ideological formations across multiple online and offline instantiations, making visible a continuum of extreme speech. Through these connections, we see how anti-immigrant discourses position northern residents in a formation of nested marginality. Memes are thus a central way that disenfranchised Chilean citizens reinforce a worldview in which they consider themselves deserving of greater access to resources than Bolivians, precisely because of their marginalized position in relation to the nation.


Spatiotemporal data is a part of geographical data required in Geographical Information System (GIS). Generally, the existing GIS are not suited to manage changes occurring in the data with time. The capability of managing geographic data with time depends on the underlying data model in which the data model has to take into account the spatiotemporal aspects of the geographic data. Thus, a Spatiotemporal Data Model is required to manage changes in GIS data. Spatiotemporal Data Model represents the abstraction of data management in GIS. Surface movement on three dimensional objects is one of the spatiotemporal data which represents changes of the surface taking place in geographic phenomena. However, current Spatiotemporal Data Model and current GIS software are not adequate for managing the surface movement of three dimensional objects while representing the data. Most of the existing data models brought us to the conclusion that a new Spatiotemporal Data Model is needed to improve the management of three dimensional data with temporal element. Therefore, a new Spatiotemporal Data Model, Surface Movement Spatiotemporal (SMST) Data Model is proposed, which supports the management and visualization of surface movement data in three dimensional objects such as terrain model. The data model were developed under consideration of real world events together with current data collection, for example, a terrain model in the geographic phenomena which deals with changes from time to time based on natural phenomena and human activity. The data were collected by capturing images from time to time. Formalization of the surface movement reconstruction is a fundamental knowledge to develop the SMST Data Model. Currently, in many fields, surface reconstruction does not consider the temporal element. Therefore, the surface movement of three dimensional objects is formalized by enhancing the surface reconstruction method; that is by integrating it with temporal element. In order to test and evaluate the SMST Data Model, a database management system with a loading and a retrieval algorithm suitable to this model were developed. The retrieved data from the database system is saved in the proposed data format for surface movement visualization. In developing the visualization tool, visualization algorithm was used by employing the morphing technique which uses parametric equation. The proposed model was tested using digital terrain model digitized from a series of aerial photos. The model can store and manage surface movement data while reducing the redundancy of data in the database system. Percentage of reduced data redundancy is based on the number of points involved in the movement process. The model stores only the movement points in the surface. Besides, the proposed model can retrieve data for simulating surface movement on the three dimensional object. Therefore, the major contributions of this research are the formalization of surface movement data and the proposed SMST Data Model which can manage surface movement data on three dimensional objects with respect to time.


Demand-based scheduling refers to the set of transportation problems that explicitly take into account individual behaviour. In particular, performance indicators of operational decisions combine the actual cost of the operations with an explicit measure of passenger satisfaction. Moreover, it is necessary to account for the uncertainty related to behavioral aspects. In this presentation, we present the structure of these problems and distinguish them from other demand-based problems. We also demonstrate some of its applications in railway industries. Also, we discuss about passengers itinerary choice and how it could be affected by train schedule..


Practical experiments with deliberative democracy, instituted with random samples of the public, have had success in many countries. But this approach has never before been tried in Sub-Saharan Africa. Reflecting on the first two applications in Uganda, we apply the same criteria for success commonly used for such projects in the most advanced countries. Can this approach work successfully with samples of a public low in literacy and education? Can it work on some of the critical policy choices faced by the public in rural Uganda? This essay reflects on quantitative and qualitative results from Uganda's first Deliberative Polls. We find that the projects were representative in both attitudes and demographics. They produced substantial opinion change supported by identifiable reasons. They avoided distortions from inequality and polarization. They produced actionable results that can be expected to influence policy on difficult choices.


Harnad (2016) presents an engaging and persuasive argument that stakes out the aims and domain of the fledgling journal, Animal Sentience. As an inaugural editorial, it does this job masterfully, but it does so from a perspective that tends to treat mental states in an overly general manner and that makes hard distinctions between mental and behavioral phenomena. I argue that when it comes to animal minds, it might be more helpful to think of mental concepts in a more piecemeal way that also retains the intrinsic relation between mind and behavior.


Background Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common behavioral disorder in children that may persist into adulthood. Insufficient nutritional supply and deficiency of trace elements and other components including various minerals have been suggested to play a role in the development of ADHD symptoms. Zinc in particular was found to be significantly deficient in patients with ADHD compared with healthy controls, so it was concluded that zinc deficiency might play a role in the etiopathogenesis of ADHD. Objectives The aim of the work is to investigate the association of serum zinc levels with ADHD diagnosis, its symptom domains, and severity. Patients and methods A total of 75 children aged from 6 to 14 years with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV) diagnosis of ADHD were enrolled in this study. All children were assessed using Colored Progressive Matrices IQ test, Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School Age Children Present and Lifetime version (K-SADS-PL), the Working Memory Index (WMI) of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III), and Conner's Parent Rating Scale − Revised − Long version (CPRS-R-L). Serum zinc level was measured in all children using atomic absorption spectroscopy. Results Overall, 52% of children with ADHD (n=39) had forthright zinc deficiency with serum zinc levels less than 60 μg/dl. Five children only had marginal zinc levels, with serum zinc level ranging between 60 and 80 μg/dl. Serum zinc levels were lower in children living in rural areas. Zinc-deficient children showed lower IQ scores than non-zinc-deficient group.


Abstract : HQ USAF/LET (Air Force Transportation) tasked the AFLMC (Logistics Management Center) to initiate a project to determine the cost effectiveness of procuring long-term warranted handtools to help eliminate reported problems with deficient, poor quality tools in vehicle maintenance. A previous LMC study proved warranted handtools for aircraft maintenance was economically beneficial. Vehicle mechanics claimed their tools had the same problem: a high breakage rate due to poor design, weak metal, or plastic parts; loss of productivity, time, and effectiveness when tools break, and ultimately reduced morale. This study evaluatied GSA tool failure rates at 12 selected bases in 6 MAJCOMS. Data was collected over a 6-month period beginning December 1984. The field evaluation measured tool failures and losses for 309 selected high-use tools in vehicle maintenance. We then performed an analysis to determine if the use of warranted tools in vehicle maintenance would result in an economic savings to the Air Force. The conclusion of the evaluation revealed a 3.3 percent breakage rate for GSA tools compared to the 25 percent rate found in the aircraft maintenance study. At a 4 to 1 cost ratio of warranted tools to GSA tools, the cost comparison payback rate for the 3.3 percent breakage in vehicle maintenance exceeds 30 years compared to 3.8 year payback found for aircraft maintenance. Thus, breakage rates and ultimate cost savings to the Air Force do not justify purchasing warranted handtools for vehicle maintenance.


The plastic response of a sheet metal is governed by the collective response of the underlying grains. Intragranular plasticity depends on intrinsic variables such as crystallographic orientation and on extrinsic variables such as grain interactions; however, the role of the latter is not well understood. A finite element crystal plasticity formulation is used to investigate the importance of grain interactions on intragranular plastic deformation in initially untextured polycrystalline aggregates. A statistical analysis reveals that grain interactions are of equal (or more) importance for determining the average intragranular deviations from the applied strain as compared to the orientation of the grain itself. Furthermore, the influence of the surrounding grains is found to extend past nearest neighbor interactions. It is concluded that the stochastic nature of the mesoscale environment must be considered for a proper understanding of the plastic response of sheet metals at the grain-scale.


This study attempts to answer the question, What is the mathematical knowledge required by teachers of elementary mathematics content courses in the area of multiplication and division of fractions? Beginning in the mid-1980s, when Shulman (1986) introduced the idea of pedagogical content knowledge, researchers have been looking at the knowledge needed to teach in a variety of different content areas. One area that has garnered much of the research is that of mathematics. Researchers have developed frameworks for what they call mathematical knowledge for teaching, but there has been little work done looking at the knowledge requirements for teachers of teachers. This study attempts to fill this gap by determining some aspects of a framework for the mathematical knowledge required to teach prospective elementary teachers multiplication and division of fractions. In order to determine aspects of a framework for mathematics teacher educator knowledge in relation to multiplication and division of fractions, I interviewed, observed, and audiotaped three experienced teacher educators in different educational settings to determine the mathematical work of teaching prospective teachers fraction multiplication and division. My analysis focused on three of major tasks that came out of the work: introducing fraction multiplication, helping students make sense of fraction division, and assessing student understanding. Each of these tasks played a major role in the work of the teacher educators, and the knowledge required to perform these tasks was evident in varying degrees in each teacher educator. After analyzing the three mathematical tasks and the knowledge required by them, I was able to determine some components of a framework for the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching teachers multiplication and division of fractions. These aspects include: understanding multiple representations of fraction multiplication and division and how these representations relate to each other, to whole number ideas, and to the algorithms, deciding which aspects of the topics will help prospective teachers make the connections that they will need in order to teach these topics, especially since time often plays a factor in what gets taught in mathematics content classes for prospective teachers, setting specific goals of exactly what one wants one's students to know, rather than having a general goal of wanting prospective teachers to develop conceptual understanding of a topic, and being able to design and use assessments effectively to help decide if one is achieving one's goals. While each of the aspects described above are components of a framework for the mathematical knowledge needed by teacher educators, the three teacher educators in my study all lacked or were unable to demonstrate some of the knowledge components that would have helped them to meet their goals, despite having a wealth of experience teaching and designing mathematics content courses for prospective elementary teachers. One possible reason for this is that each of the teacher educators in my study were basically alone in their departments, without opportunities to collaborate or discuss these ideas with anyone else. These results suggest a need for better professional development for teacher educators in the field of mathematics education. Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Teachers: The Case of Multiplication and Division of Fractions By Dana E. Olanoff B.A. William Smith College, 1999 M.S. Michigan State University, 2003 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics Education in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2011 Copyright 2011 Dana E. Olanoff All rights reserved


Abstract. The taxonomic and ecologic composition of Earth's biota has shifted dramatically through geologic time, with some clades going extinct while others diversified. Here, we derive a metric that quantifies the change in biotic composition due to extinction or origination and show that it equals the product of extinction/origination magnitude and selectivity (variation in magnitude among groups). We also define metrics that describe the extent to which a recovery (1) reinforced or reversed the effects of extinction on biotic composition and (2) changed composition in ways uncorrelated with the extinction. To demonstrate the approach, we analyzed an updated compilation of stratigraphic ranges of marine animal genera. We show that mass extinctions were not more selective than background intervals at the phylum level; rather, they tended to drive greater taxonomic change due to their higher magnitudes. Mass extinctions did not represent a separate class of events with respect to either strength of selectivity or effect. Similar observations apply to origination during recoveries from mass extinctions, and on average, extinction and origination were similarly selective and drove similar amounts of biotic change. Elevated origination during recoveries drove bursts of compositional change that varied considerably in effect. In some cases, origination partially reversed the effects of extinction, returning the biota toward the pre-extinction composition; in others, it reinforced the effects of the extinction, magnifying biotic change. Recoveries were as important as extinction events in shaping the marine biota, and their selectivity deserves systematic study alongside that of extinction.


Whilst internationally, the Mittelstand in Germany is admired and many countries try to emulate it, the current debate in Germany praises the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship, contrasting the Mittelstand as low-growth, low-tech and non-innovative - in short: as a hindrance to Germany's economic future. We therefore ask whether the Mittelstand actually is the antithesis to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship model. We show that Mittelstand is more than a small and medium enterprise size, identifying its distinctive features (identity of ownership and management, sense of belonging). In this regard, we also discuss the influence of historical paths and current institutional settings on the Mittelstand model. Asking to what extent the Mittelstand is distinctive, we address its diverse contributions to economy and society. We suggest that the Mittelstand is an excellent example of everyday entrepreneurship and a vibrant segment of economy which is also competitive, innovative, and growth orientated; albeit in different ways compared to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. In concluding, we outline ideas for future research and implications for policymakers. In our view, future research and policies should stand back from dichotomies such as "Mittelstand versus Silicon Valley entrepreneurship" and acknowledge the diversity and heterogeneity of entrepreneurship.


The purpose and parameters of director liability lack a clear articulation, particularly with respect to indemnification. Corporate statutes and actual practice retain both liability and constraints on indemnification, but there is substantial scope for directors to contract for protection. Thus, neither a regulatory nor a contract model provides a particularly robust explanation for the form of the statutes. Alternative theories to account for the form of director liability and exoneration might include rent-seeking by lawyers for corporations, the team production model, or post modern readings that accept the text as an expression of discontinuities in the official legal narrative about corporations. Practically, policy alternatives include deregulation that subjects indemnification decisions to the normal default rules of corporate law, classifying indemnification decisions as conflict of interest transactions, or treating them as grants of compensation. The textual artifacts in which are embedded contradictory impulses about director liability could be used as a means of conditioning contracts for indemnification on the production of corporate narratives by those seeking indemnification. The result would be to give effect to a dual voice of monetary bargain and entity narrative.


Kent E. Calder is Director of the Princeton University Program on US-Japan Relations and Special Advisor to the US Ambassador to Japan. Global energy markets stand amidst quiet, steady, and historic transformation. Traditionally, most of the fuel supplied by these markets has gone to Western consumers, whose appetite for imports has been relatively static for the past decade. East Asia, however, is rapidly emerging as a major claimant in global energy markets, especially in the market for oil. Indeed, between today and 2010, East Asian economies will experience a larger increase in oil demand than all those of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) combined. The impact of an extra 10 million barrels per day (mmbd) of new East Asian oil demand on finely balanced world markets will doubtless be substantial and will have complex implications for international security--both in East Asia and in the world as a whole. A fundamental reality of East Asia's energy situation is the substantial and increasing gap between production potential and consumption in the major nations of the region. This resource gap is most pronounced in Northeast Asia. Japan, whose gross national product (GNP) is well over 15 percent of the global total, has no significant domestic oil or gas fields. Indeed, it imports 99 percent of its oil, amounting to more than 5.7 mmbd. North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan are in similarly vulnerable circumstances. China, in contrast to the Northeast Asian periphery, has massive domestic energy resources, including the largest coal reserves on earth. Yet infrastructural, environmental, technical, and financial difficulties combine to sharply complicate the exploitation of those resources. Energy demand in China is growing explosively along the southern and eastern coasts, particularly in Guangdong, Fujian, and the Shanghai area. Yet oil, coal, and hydroelectric reserves are concentrated in the North and West. China's aging, decrepit railroads and pipelines are grossly inadequate to deliver energy across China to meet rapidly rising demand along the coast. In addition, the prospectively major oil reserves in Xinjiang and possibly offshore are difficult to extract, particularly in the absence of sophisticated foreign technology. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have recently been significant energy exporters to other parts of Asia. Yet surging domestic consumer demand, intensified by political pressure to keep gasoline prices and electric-power rates low, is limiting their potential to alleviate broader Asian regional energy shortages. Indonesia, long the largest oil exporter of the region, appears likely to become a net oil importer between 2000 and 2005. Thirsty Tigers Asia's energy situation--already precarious due to underlying resource insecurities in Northeast Asia--is being sharply complicated by explosive economic growth. Japanese growth, to be sure, remains stagnant. Yet Asian economies outside Japan averaged 7.9 percent real GNP growth in 1995, with China growing at 10.2 percent, Malaysia at 9.5 percent, South Korea at 9 percent, and Thailand at 8.7 percent. These figures reflect a pattern of East Asian vitality that has persisted for nearly a generation, a pattern that shows no sign of changing. The adverse energy implications of Asia's rapid, sustained growth are compounded by three aggravating factors: the energy-intensive structure of Asian industry, a consumer revolution stirring explosive demand for automobiles and appliances, and energy-inefficient practices in many nations of the region. Petrochemicals, shipbuilding, and steel, for example, are high-growth sectors in nations like South Korea and China, and all these industries make intensive use of energy. The automobile revolution is precipitating heavy gasoline demand, demand which is rising at over 20 percent annually in nations such as South Korea and Thailand. …


OBJECTIVE
Infratemporal fossa (ITF) tumors are unique in histological characteristics and difficult to treat. Predictors of patient outcomes in this context are not known. The objective of this study was to identify independent predictors of outcome and to characterize patterns of failure in patients with ITF carcinoma.

METHODS
All patients who had been surgically treated for anterolateral skull base malignancy between 1999 and 2017 at the authors' institution were retrospectively reviewed. Patient demographics, preoperative performance status, tumor stage, tumor characteristics, treatment modalities, and pathological data were collected. Primary outcomes were disease-specific survival (DSS) and local progression-free survival (LPFS) rates. Overall survival (OS) and patterns of progression were secondary outcomes.

RESULTS
Forty ITF malignancies with skull base involvement were classified as carcinoma. Negative margins were achieved in 23 patients (58%). Median DSS and LPFS were 32 and 12 months, respectively. Five-year DSS and OS rates were 55% and 36%, respectively. The 5-year LPFS rate was 69%. The 5-year overall PFS rate was 53%. Disease recurrence was noted in 28% of patients. Age, preoperative performance status, and margin status were statistically significant prognostic factors for DSS. Lower preoperative performance status and positive surgical margins increased the probability of local recurrence.

CONCLUSIONS
The ability to achieve negative margins was significantly associated with improved tumor control rates and DSS. Cranial base surgical approaches must be considered in multimodal treatment regimens for anterolateral skull base carcinomas.


Generational Mark-Sweep Garbage Collection is a widely used garbage collection technique. However, the garbage collector has poor execution efficiency for large programs. Aggressive collection causes execution pauses in the program, while reducing the collection frequency leads to memory wastage. In this work, we develop FastCollect, a parallel version of the generational mark-sweep garbage collector running on a graphics processing unit (GPU). At the core of our parallel implementation lies a parallel Depth First Search using a space-efficient concurrent stack, which we develop for the young and the mature garbage collection. To further improve performance, (i) we reduce thread-divergence and improve load-balancing by devising a distributed work-stealing approach, (ii) we optimize our garbage collection algorithm to reduce the number of atomic instructions, (iii) we exploit the memory hierarchy to design a hybrid stack, and (iv) we extract multiple adjacent objects simultaneously by exploiting vectorized memory accesses. We implemented FastCollect in Java Hotspot VM and evaluated our results by executing DaCapo benchmarks. FastCollect is 4-5× faster than the Parallel Hotspot garbage collector and 42% faster than a previous GPU implementation. In addition, while the existing GPU version requires memory linear in the number of compute units, FastCollect's memory requirement is fixed and low. FastCollect not only improves execution time of garbage collection, but also relieves the CPU for improved user interaction.


In chiral perturbation theory, the leading-order contribution to reactions with pions in the sector of odd intrinsic parity is defined by the Wess-Zumino-Witten structure. This structure is supplemented by a simple vector-meson Lagrangian where the vector mesons are described by antisymmetric tensor fields. With the rho-omega-pion coupling as the only parameter in the sector of odd intrinsic parity, i.e. without additional contact terms, one can achieve a proper description of the single- and double-virtual pion transition form factor and the three-pion production in electron-positron collisions.


The earned income tax credit and the child tax credit lift millions of families out of poverty each year, and are found to increase employment and improve health and education outcomes among recipients. Supporters of these programs also ascribe them with reducing average tax burdens for low-income taxpayers and increasing the progressivity of the tax and fiscal system. Although these results are broadly true, expanding the analysis to include those disadvantaged by the programs' design reveals a more complex story. This Article highlights how structural features of these tax benefits create a distribution of taxes and transfers that disadvantages childless workers and families in deep poverty relative to better-off poor and middle-class families. As a result, relatively poorer taxpayers face higher average tax rates compared to better-off households, a phenomenon this Article defines as "low-end regressivity." This Article argues that low-end regressivity subverts principal goals of progressive redistribution, reducing the system's ability to maximize aggregate utility and to combat poverty and inequality. To make this claim, the Article identifies primary progressive goals of redistribution under both welfarist and nonwelfarist paradigms, and demonstrates how low-end regressivity undermines key objectives under diverse distributive justice frameworks. The Article then builds on this analysis by offering policy reforms that seek to reduce low-end regressivity—including eliminating the credits' floors and phase-ins, and implementing state-level offsetting tax credits.


A productivity estimation of tree, shrub and herb layer biomass was undertaken in Uttara Kannada, a Western Ghats district in Karnataka in differentially managed forests. In addition to biomass, light gap in these sample sites was also estimated to understand the relationship between the light interception pattern at different canopy layers and their productivity. The studies indicate that tree biomass productivity decreases and herb productivity increases with increasing light gap. However, the herb biomass productivity attains maximum height at 40–60% light gaps than in plots with no trees or 100% light gap indicating that highest herb biomass is found in forests managed for leaf manure than in grasslands. This further indicates that partial shading enhances herb layer productivity. Thus, a strategy of undertaking agroforestry in villages to enhance the total biomass productivity to meet the needs of the villages was suggested.


William D. Cohan's "The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co." is the astonishing story of the world's most elite and legendary investment bank - and the men who reigned over it all. For over 150 years Lazard Freres had stood apart from other Wall Street firms by offering ultra-wealthy clients the wisdom of its 'Great Men': from Felix Rohatyn, the escapee from Nazi-occupied France turned financial genius, to Michel David-Weill, the inscrutable French billionaire 'Sun King'; from Steve Rattner, the boy wonder from Long Island who clashed violently with the old guard, to larger-than-life CEO Bruce Wasserstein, 'Bid-Em-Up-Bruce', who broke with the bank's traditions and made himself billions in the process. They amassed unimaginable fortunes and would stop at nothing to make a deal, until their titanic egos started to jeopardize everything. In "The Last Tycoons" William Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes us into their mysterious and secretive world, telling a story of ruthless ambition, whispered advice, explosive feuds, glamorous mistresses, decadent excesses and unimaginable wealth. "Spellbinding". ("Financial Times"). "A definitive account ...it lives up to the billing". ("The Times"). "Has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street". ("Wall Street Journal"). William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. His first book, "The Last Tycoons", about Lazard, won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was a "New York Times" bestseller. His second book, "House of Cards", also a bestseller, is an account of the last days of Bear Stearns & Co. He is also the author of "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World".


Face-to-face social interactions among strangers today are becoming increasingly rare as people turn towards computer-mediated networking tools. Today's tools, however, are based on the following assumptions: increased information encourages interaction, profiles are good representations of users to other users, and computer-mediated communications prior to face-to-face meetings lead to better outcomes. This paper describes CommonTies, a gentle technological in the form of a wearable accessory, that encourages immediate, face-to-face, organic social interactions among strangers at conferences. By not exposing any profile information, CommonTies preserves an element of mystery and enables self-disclosure of information through conversation. We evaluate our system through a field study at a three-day research conference - CSCW 2014. We find that despite our information-scarce design, users were willing to interact with strangers and 74% of the interactions initiated by CommonTies were reported as novel and useful.


AN EASY ASSUMPTION THAT the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) worries only the foreign policy elite in Moscow has been a characteristic of Western explanations of Russia's response to enlargement since 1996. This view, often supported by references to public opinion polls showing that Russians are more concerned about economic and social issues, is dangerously misleading. Russia's signature on the NATO-Russian Federation Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security of 27 May 1997, and official acquiescence in the formal invitations offered to prospective new NATO members at Madrid two months later, seem to have lulled Western leaders into believing that the Russia 'problem' has been resolved.The idea that the Russian public has scant interest in NATO's ambitions in the East has been advanced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a prominent adviser on Russian affairs to American policy makers,(f.1) even if every political leader in Russia, from President Boris Yeltsin and members of his government to strident opposition faction heads, has spoken out strongly and consistently against NATO expansion to the east. They have all called it, in one way or another, a mistake of historic proportions and continue to express that opinion, even while accepting the inevitable. Leaders of every organized political party portray expansion as a potential threat to Russia. Although the two largest parties - the Communist party and Our Home is Russia, the 'government' party - are virulent adversaries, both include opposition to NATO expansion in their official platforms. Every obvious candidate for the presidency has decried expansion. A clear majority of the popularly elected State Duma deputies are hostile to NATO's inclusion of former Warsaw pact countries and adamantly against the admission of former Soviet republics. Their stance has the support of all the mainstream newspapers. Indeed, expansion to the east is a subject on which there is a very rare consensus in the extremely diverse and often mutually incompatible political landscape.If one takes Russian commentary on NATO expansion at face value, the question of membership for former Soviet republics is the matter on which Moscow has drawn its final 'line in the sand.' The degree to which the line is taken seriously in the West, furthermore, may well determine the success or failure of NATO's enlargement enterprise. An analysis of Russian discourse on the Baltic republics as it relates to NATO expansion can shed some light on the possible consequences for the Founding Act if one or more of those states are included in enlargement's 'second wave.'Russian expectations of a vigorous Baltic campaign to join NATO have a long history. A prominent Russian journalist predicted as much in September 1991, a few weeks after the failed coup against the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the subsequent Baltic declarations of independence from the USSR.(f.2) By 1998 Russian foreign policy analysts were speaking of the absorption of the Baltic states by NATO as the 'most acute issue' facing Moscow and predicting bitterly that Russia's strategic interests in the Baltic region would be ignored by Western leaders.(f.3)Until recently, Moscow comfortably thought of the Baltic Sea as its rightful sphere of influence. But Russia has only two remaining bases for its once huge Baltic fleet: Kronstadt near St Petersburg and Baltiisk in Kaliningrad. Its sense of vulnerability was reinforced in 1997 when all three Baltic countries applied and were formally accepted as candidates for NATO membership. Early in that year, the possibility of Estonian entry drew the first words of warning from Yeltsin and his government.(f.4) On 20 February 1997, despite assertions by the Estonian president, Lennart Meri, that his country's aspirations were not anti-Russian, Moscow's diplomats in Tallinn threatened Estonia with economic sanctions if it persisted in its efforts to join NATO. …


As construction practices improve and people become more conscious of energy usage, space conditioning and water heating bills have declined in many residential homes. Under these circumstances it becomes harder to justify the added cost of two high efficiency mechanical systems. One solution is to use a single water heater or boiler for both space conditioning and water heating. While combined systems have been available for years, the design and installation must be optimized to achieve the expected efficiency for the new generation of systems that use condensing equipment. Installed efficiencies of greater than 90% and energy savings of 20% have been shown with combination systems. However, testing has shown that poorly chosen set points or undersized hydronic air handlers will reduce the system efficiency from 90% to 77%. Guidelines for the implementation, installation and operation of these systems were generated from laboratory tests, a 200 home implementation project, and detailed field monitoring in 20 homes. An additional hurdle to implementation is the lack of a common rating method and or performance metric. A simple strategy has been developed to ensure quality installation and high performance of these systems, allowing for improved implementation. Following these guidelines and strategy would allow many homeowners the benefits of high efficiency space conditioning and water heating systems using only one heating plant.


Graphene is reported to possess a range of unique and highly desired properties and
consequently has potential to revolutionise the field of electrochemistry if diligently
employed as a new-generation electrode material. Graphene potentially represents the
world's thinnest electrode material, but there are experimental parameters to be overcome:
the first problem is how to electrically wire/connect to the graphene sample(s) as to obtain the
reported benefits; the second issue is how to reduce aggregation of graphene sheets back to
their lowest energy conformation, that is, graphite, due to the strong π–π interactions between
the graphene sheets; the third and final limitation is that various fabrication routes produce
graphene to differing qualities, a factor that must be considered when exploring its
fundamental electrochemical properties and electroanalytical implementation.
This thesis reports on the fundamental electrochemical characterisation and resultant
electroanalytical applicability of utilising graphene as a novel electrode material.
The thesis consists of four key contributions, each developing on the knowledge gained from
the previous.
Chapters 1 through to 3 give an overview of the relevant fundamental electrochemical
concepts with which this thesis is concerned. Chapter 4 provides a 'snap-shot' of the state of
the graphene literature from 2010 (upon the commencement of this work), from which
successive chapters follow the chronological development and investigation of graphene as
produced through a variety of synthesis methods, gradually building a complete picture and
understanding of the electrochemistry of graphene and the implications of its properties
towards the fabrication and implementation of graphene as an electroanalytical
sensor substrate.
IV | P a g e
Chapter 5 details the relevant experimental information and the full physicochemical
characterisation of the various graphene materials utilised within this work.
Chapters 6 and 7 utilise graphenes that are fabricated via a 'top-down' approach,
which is most commonly employed in the literature, where in order to 'connect to' the
graphene a liquid suspension is immobilised onto a suitable electrode surface. Chapter 6 uses
surfactant-modified graphene and investigates, for the first time, the influence that such
surfactants have on the observed electrochemistry. Chapter 7 uses pristine graphene in
solution and considers; the aspects of various 'coverages' of graphene, the supporting
electrode substrate, and how the formation of few and multiple layered graphene structures
can influence the observed response. These parameters are overlooked within the
current literature.
Chapter 8 utilises graphene that is fabricated via a 'bottom-up' Chemical Vapour
Deposition approach, which gives rise to high quality single layer graphene domains that,
once efficiently 'housed' in order to connect to the graphene, allow the electrochemical
exploration of monolayer graphene to be realised and be compared to quasi-graphene and
defect abundant graphene structures for the first time. This approach allows the structure of
graphene to be correlated with that of the electrochemical response for the first time.
Critically, this work unambiguously demonstrates that the electrochemical response is
edge plane like defect dependent.
The final part of this thesis (Chapter 9) utilises a range of modified graphenes
including novel three-dimensional (3D) structures (a graphene foam and graphene paste) and
functionalised graphene (graphene/graphitic oxide), with the effects of said modifications
explored towards the fundamental electrochemical and electroanalytical properties obtained.
The first part of this chapter reports the electrochemistry of a novel freestanding 3D graphene
V | P a g e
foam and, for the first time, critically compares this to a freestanding 3D carbon foam
alternative. It is demonstrated that the graphene foam gives rise to beneficial voltammetric
responses in non-aqueous media, namely ionic liquids. This chapter also explores the use of a
graphene paste electrode and demonstrates that the voltammetric response is no better than
that of a graphite based paste electrode. Last, the use of graphene/graphitic oxide as an
electrode material is explored and shown to give rise to unique voltammetric signatures,
which are coverage dependant and can be utilised as a means of characterising the successful
production of graphene through the reduction of graphene/graphitic oxide (as commonly
utilised within the current electrochemical literature). Furthermore, it is shown that the unique
voltammetry observed at graphene/graphitic oxide modified electrodes can be used
beneficially for electrocatalytic processes.
This thesis demonstrates that, within the graphene electrochemical literature, control
experiments are often an overlooked comparison, which are needed for the electrochemical
response of graphene to be understood and before the benefits of graphene can be claimed in
such instances where superiority is 'demonstrated'.


Uncertainty around age at death, or lifetime uncertainty, is a key public health indicator and a marker of inequality in survival. How does the extent of violence affect lifetime uncertainty? We address this question by quantifying the impact of violence on dispersion in the ages at death, the metric most used to measure lifetime uncertainty. Using mortality data from the Global Burden of Disease Study and the Internal Peace Index between 2008 and 2017, we find that the most violent countries are also those with the highest lifetime uncertainty. In the Middle East, conflict-related deaths are the largest contributor to lifetime uncertainty. In Latin America, a similar pattern is attributable to homicides. The effects are larger in magnitude for men, but the consequences remain considerable for women. Our study points to a double burden of violence on longevity: Not only does violence shorten individual lives, but it also makes the length of life less predictable.


The purpose of this study is to examine the literature on the typologies and taxonomies of business strategies in order to find generic business strategies that a company can follow and to assess whether Porter's typology shares characteristics with previous studies. For this purpose, we analyze 21 typologies and eight taxonomies in journals and strategic textbooks. This analysis allows us to identify four generic strategies that are commonly accepted in the literature. These generic strategies are differentiation strategies, which consist of three sub-strategies (market, general and innovation differentiation), cost strategies, which consist of the cash flow maximizing and cost leadership sub-strategies, focus strategies which contain the focus cost, focus differentiation, general focus sub-strategies and hybrid strategy. Furthermore, we observe another category in which firms follow no specific strategy. In the second part of this paper, we compare our findings with Porter's typology. This comparison shows that Porter's typology is insufficient for explaining other typologies and taxonomies of business strategies.


The paper expounds on the challenges confronting institutions of higher agricultural education (HAE) in the context of the significant role of education in alleviating poverty, especially in rural areas, and in light of the changing needs of rural areas and economies. Specifically, HAE institutions are called upon to initiate and lead in articulating a vision for the future that serves the needs not only of agriculture but also of all who inhabit the rural areas. They can step beyond their traditional role by merging forces with other stakeholders to enrich and support other levels of education with critical knowledge and information on agriculture and natural resources management (NRM), the latter being crucial in the pursuit of rural development, poverty reduction, and food security. To perform an active and constructive role in rural development, agricultural universities need to adjust their programs to accommodate new topics, as well as teaching and learning models; forge new partnerships with schools, academia and rural space stakeholders; expand its representation in governance; and hold continuous dialogue with policymakers. Their extension services could include support to education for rural people that encompasses primary, secondary, vocational, and adult education. University-school linkages are perceived to be illustrative of a decentralized, democratic, and community-based response to rural development problems. It is noted that universities can potentially become showcases of local traditions and knowledge, reflecting the regional, cultural, and ethical traditions of their society, as well as global movements and forces. In reinforcing their roles as contributors to a culture of learning and rural development, it is emphasized that HAE institutions need to engage more directly and more effectively in partnerships and dialogue with other local educational institutions and their surrounding communities. Findings of the ongoing IIEP-UNESCO/FAO program of research on HAE institutions in Asia are expected to provide information on how higher education institutions contribute to learning and rural development, and insights on how their strategic role in this field could be strengthened and further developed.


Polymer matrix composites (PMCs) are increasingly being used in aerospace structures that are expected to experience complex dynamic loading conditions throughout their lifetime. As such, a detailed understanding of the high strain rate behavior of the constituents, particularly the strain rate, temperature, and pressure dependent polymer matrix, is paramount. In this paper, preliminary efforts in modeling experimentally observed temperature rises due to plastic deformation in PMCs subjected to dynamic loading are presented. To this end, an existing isothermal viscoplastic polymer constitutive formulation is extended to model adiabatic conditions by incorporating temperature dependent elastic properties and modifying the components of the inelastic strain rate tensor to explicitly depend on temperature. It is demonstrated that the modified polymer constitutive model is capable of capturing strain rate and temperature dependent yield as well as thermal softening associated with the conversion of plastic work to heat at high rates of strain. The modified constitutive model is then embedded within a strength of materials based micromechanics framework to investigate the manifestation of matrix thermal softening, due to the conversion of plastic work to heat, on the high strain rate response of a T700/Epon 862 (T700/E862) unidirectional composite. Adiabatic model predictions for high strain rate composite longitudinal tensile, transverse tensile, and in-plane shear loading are presented. Results show a substantial deviation from isothermal conditions; significant thermal softening is observed for matrix dominated deformation modes (transverse tension and in-plane shear), highlighting the importance of accounting for the conversion of plastic work to heat in the polymer matrix in the high strain rate analysis of PMC structures. _____________________________________________________________________ Christopher Sorini, Graduate Research Associate, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287 Aditi Chattopadhyay, Regents Professor & Ira. A Fulton Professor of Engineering, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287 Robert K. Goldberg, Research Aerospace Engineer, NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, 44135


Given a graph $G$ and positive integers $d,k$, let $f_d^k(G)$ be the maximum $t$ such that every $k$-coloring of $E(G)$ yields a monochromatic subgraph with diameter at most $d$ on at least $t$ vertices. Determining $f_1^k(K_n)$ is equivalent to determining classical Ramsey numbers for multicolorings. Our results include $\bullet$ determining $f_d^k(K_{a,b})$ within 1 for all $d,k,a,b$ $\bullet$ for $d \ge 4$, $f_d^3(K_n)=\lceil n/2 \rceil +1$ or $\lceil n/2 \rceil$ depending on whether $n \equiv 2 (mod 4)$ or not $\bullet$ $f_3^k(K_n) > {{n}\over {k-1+1/k}}$ The third result is almost sharp, since a construction due to Calkin implies that $f_3^k(K_n) \le {{n}\over {k-1}} +k-1$ when $k-1$ is a prime power. The asymptotics for $f_d^k(K_n)$ remain open when $d=k=3$ and when $d\ge 3, k \ge 4$ are fixed.


An exploration of limited participation models reviews the literature and plots some new directions of research in this area. I constructed and modified a baseline cash-in-advance model to illustrate the main ideas. The model shows how limited participation can explain the liquidity effect and nonneutralities of money arising from the distribution effects of monetary policy actions.


A simple numerical method has been developed to study the propagation characteristics of a nonlinear optical waveguide. The method is applicable to planar waveguides as well as fibers. In this method, second-order differential equation is converted into first-order differential equation which is solved by standard fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. Numerical results for nonlinear planar waveguide and optical fibers with power law profiles and Kerr-like nonlinearity have been presented. The results for planar waveguides match very well with the exact results. Present method can be applied to arbitrary refractive index profiles with any kind of nonlinearity.


Freshwater-dominated estuaries experience large fluctuations in their physical and chemical environments which may influence larval dispersal, settlement, and connectivity of populations with pelagic larval stages. We used settlement patterns and natural tagging along with numerical hydrodynamic model results to assess settlement and connectivity among oysters across the freshwater-dominated Mobile Bay−eastern Mississippi Sound (MB−EMS) system. Specifically, we (1) tested how freshwater inputs and associated environmental attributes in fluenced settlement patterns during high and low discharge conditions in 2014 and 2016, respectively, and (2) analyzed trace element (TE) ratios incorporated into multiple shell types (larval and settled shell of spat and adult shells) to determine if shells collected in situ incorporate temporally stable site-specific signatures. We also assessed if TE ratios compared between adult (TE natal signature proxy) and larval shells could infer connectivity. Larval settlement was 4× higher during low discharge than during high discharge when oyster larvae only settled in higher salinity regions (EMS). Spat and adult shells incorporated site-specific TE ratios that varied from weeks to months. Connectivity results (May−June 2016 only) suggest that EMS is an important larval source to EMS and lower MB. While we were able to infer probable connectivity patterns using adult and larval shells, more study is needed to assess the utility of adult shells as proxies for natallocation TE signatures. Results provide a baseline for measuring future larval connectivity and adult distribution changes in the MB−EMS system. Biological and geochemical data demonstrate the potential to identify environmental attributes that spatiotemporally mediate settlement and connectivity in dynamic systems.


Climate change policies must trade off uncertainties about future warming, about the social and ecological impacts of warming, and about the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We show that laxer carbon targets produce broader distributions for climate damages, skewed towards severe outcomes. However, if potential low-carbon technologies fill overlapping niches, then more stringent carbon targets produce broader distributions for the cost of reducing emissions, skewed towards high-cost outcomes. We use the technology-rich GCAM integrated assessment model to assess the robustness of 450 and 500 ppm carbon targets to each uncertain factor. The 500 ppm target provides net benefits across a broad range of futures. The 450 ppm target provides net benefits only when impacts are greater than conventionally assumed, when multiple technological breakthroughs lower the cost of abatement, or when evaluated with a low discount rate. Policy evaluations are more sensitive to uncertainty about abatement technology and impacts than to uncertainty about warming.


The over-exploitation of African elephants for their ivory has led to a dangerous decline in their overall population. As a result, they were granted protection under the CITES international trade agreement and given an Appendix I listing, which completely bans their international trade. I investigate the following question: under what circumstances is the limited trade allowed under the CITES ivory trade ban an effective strategy to stall the illicit trafficking of elephant ivory? Using Kenya and Zimbabwe as case studies, the feasibility of the preservationist and utilitarian viewpoints on elephant conservation are explored. This paper argues that the CITES ban on trade in elephant ivory is not the most effective way to protect elephant populations. Instead, limited and regulated trade should be instituted to ensure that African range states receive tangible benefits from elephant conservation. This could be achieved through keeping the more endangered forest elephants classified under Appendix I while moving the more stable savannah elephants to Appendix II. Community-based rights to elephants, specifically, should be put in place to ensure that locals living in close proximity to elephants have significant incentives to actively participate in elephant conservation, rather than participating in poaching or turning elephant habitat into agricultural land. While communitybased wildlife rights under an Appendix II listing for savannah elephants are in no way perfect, they are a more effective and realistic means of conserving elephants than the alternative of a blanket ban.


Since the end of the Second World War the map of the Americas has changed dramatically. Not only were many former European colonies turned into sovereign states, there was also an ongoing process of region-making recognizable throughout the hemisphere and obvious through the establishment of several regional agreements. The emergence of political and economic regional integration blocs is a very timely topic analyzed by scholars in many disciplines worldwide. This book looks at remapping the recent trends in region-making throughout the Americas in a way that hasn't been at the center of academic analyses so far. While examining these regionalisation tendencies with a historical background in mind, the authors also answer fundamental questions such as: What influences does globalization have on region-making, both on normative regionalism plans as well as on actual economic, political, cultural, military and social regionalization processes driven by state and non-state actors? What ideas or interests lead states in the Americas to cooperate or compete with one another and how is this power distributed? How do these regional agreements affect trade relations and have there been trade barriers set up to protect national economies? What agreements exist or have existed and how did they change with regard to contents and for what reason? The book informs academic as well as non-academic audiences about regional developments in the Americas, in particular those dating back to the last twenty years. Beyond the primary purpose of summarizing the hemisphere's recent trends, the book also brings clarification in a detailed but easy to understand way about timely issues regarding the institutionalisation, or lack thereof, of the plethora of regional and sub-regional bodies that have emerged in this hemisphere over the past couple of decades.


Figure 4. It has recently been noted that micrographs in Fig 4 contain inconsistent background signals. The corrected figure is shown here with different images from the same experiment in panels A and B, which were derived from the same dataset underlying Fig 4 in the original paper. The source data for the new figure 4 can be found online. This change does not affect our conclusion that AGB1 interacts with RPK2 on the cell surface. All authors agree with this statement, apart from Ko Shimamoto (deceased) and Masayuki Higuchi (not available for comment).


We suggest an ethno-biological approach to analyze the cultural and social drivers of hunting activities and assess sustainability in villages near Makokou, northeast Gabon, based on interviews with hunters, participatory mapping of hunting territories, and daily records of offtakes for 1 yr. Hunting in villages of northeast Gabon is practiced for both local consumption and cash income to cover basic family expenses. There appears to be no clear tendency to abandon subsistence hunting for commercial hunting as in other regions of Africa. Cultural and socioeconomic factors explain the temporal and spatial variation in hunting activities. Hunting increases in the dry season during circumcision ceremonies, when it is practiced mainly at > 10 km from villages, and decreases during the rainy season because most hunters are occupied by other economic activities. Degraded forest such as secondary regrowth supplies 20% of the animals killed and the greatest diversity of species at short distances from villages. Mature forest supplies the species with the greatest commercial value, e.g., red river hog ( Potamochoerus porcus), and is the preferred source of meat for traditional ceremonies. In the last 15 yr, hunting patterns have changed rapidly, mainly because of the spread of gun hunting, which had serious implications for the nature of offtakes. Our results suggest that there is potential to allow hunting for resistant species such as blue duiker (Cephalophus monticola) and African brush-tailed porcupine ( Atherurus africanus). Other species such as red river hog and small diurnal monkeys require more attention. Specific management systems could be discussed in participatory hunting management plans to identify possible solutions to maintain the population levels of the more critical species.


A B S T R A C T Objective: It has been shown that deferasirox can reduce blood and tissues lead content in animal models. In this study the effect of deferasirox alone or combined with glycine as an antioxidant was evaluated in chronic cadmium toxicosis in rat. Methods: Male wistar albino rats were exposed to 200 ppm cadmium in the drinking water for 3 weeks and treated thereafter with deferasirox (140 mg/kg), glycine (1000 mg/kg) and deferasirox (140 mg/kg) + glycine (1000 mg/kg) by oral gavages, twice daily for 7 days. The effect of these treatments on blood, liver, kidney, bone and testis cadmium values and parameters indicative of oxidative stress (superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidase and total antioxidant capacity in blood) were investigated. Results: Deferasirox was found to be effective in reducing cadmium level in blood, liver and kidney and glycine reduced cadmium levels in bone. Individual administration of deferasirox or glycine mitigated the effects of cadmium on some indicative parameters of oxidative stress in blood. But the best results were obtained following co-administration of both drugs.


Construction practice of reinforced concrete (RC) frames infilled with unreinforced masonry is quite common now-days in urban cities in Nepal and elsewhere. Previous study shows the lateral load transfer mechanism is different than that of bare frames in infill buildings. Because of the unavoidable circumstances like elimination of central columns, elimination of infill wall in basement for parking purpose and reducing the size of frame members etc. may cause the particular story to be soft.In this study the infill RC frames with stiffness irregularity has been analysed with linear time history method using Gorkha-2015 earthquake as ground motion using structural analysis and design software (ETABS 2000 V.16). In total 8-numbers of 6-story RC infilled frames were analysed introducing the soft story in each story level respectively from basement to top. Regular frame was designed as per IS 1893:2002 load combination considering torsional effect. After analyse of bare frame, regular frame and irregular frames the global and story level seismic demand parameters were studied comparatively. Base/Story shear, Story displacement, inter-story drift and fundamental time period were the parameters compared taking regular frame as reference case.Results showed that, there is significant effect of location of irregularity on the seismic demand. The global and story level seismic demand is higher when the irregularity is introduced in bottom part of the buildings and further it showed that the lateral strength of RC frames get highly enhanced due to introductions of infill in analytical models.Kathmandu University Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyVol. 13, No. 2, 2017, page:79-91


Abstract. Many coastal monitoring programmes have been carried out to investigate in situ hydrodynamic patterns and correlated physical processes, such as sediment transport or spreading of pollutants. The key point is the necessity to transform this growing amount of data provided by marine sensors into information for users. The present paper aims to outline that it is possible to recognize the recurring and typical hydrodynamic processes of a coastal basin, by conveniently processing some selected marine field data. The illustrated framework is made up of two steps. Firstly, a sequence of analysis with classic methods characterized by low computational cost was executed in both time and frequency domains on detailed field measurements of waves, tides, and currents. After this, some indicators of the hydrodynamic state of the basin were identified and evaluated. Namely, the assessment of the net flow through a connecting channel, the time delay of current peaks between upper and bottom layers, the ratio of peak ebb and peak flood currents and the tidal asymmetry factor exemplify results on the vertical structure of the flow, on the correlation between currents and tide and flood/ebb dominance. To demonstrate how this simple and generic framework could be applied, a case study is presented, referring to Mar Piccolo, a shallow water basin located in the inner part of the Ionian Sea (southern Italy).


Abstract Trace concentrations of iron oxide minerals in carbonate sediments can preserve fine details about Earth processes, from high-resolution recordings of the Earth's ancient magnetic field to microscopic remnants of extraterrestrial impacts. This paper presents a novel flask extraction method which uses a neodymium magnet and an orbital shaker for simple and efficient separation of magnetic minerals from carbonate sediments. A mineral assemblage of magnetic standards (titanomagnetite, magnetite, goethite, and hematite) combined with other mineral standards (kaolinite, quartz, and nanoscale TiO2) was subjected to the extraction procedure and compared to a natural speleothem sample. Exposure of the magnetic standards to a mildly acidic acetate buffer (pH ∼ 4) did not cause physical or chemical alteration. The strongly magnetic minerals were reproducibly extracted, with greater than 90% efficiency (by mass), from mixtures of the mineral standards. XRD and low-temperature magnetic characterization demonstrated phase purity of the extracts. Quantitative comparison with two commonly used literature methods showed that the flask extraction method was more reproducible and efficient. The addition of surfactant (Na(PO3)6) did not significantly improve extraction efficiency. Sequential dissolution and flask extraction of a simulated speleothem containing magnetic particles resulted in consistent extraction efficiencies for samples containing large (> 1 µm) strongly magnetic grains, but a reduction in efficiency was observed for smaller (< 1 µm) grain sizes. No method successfully extracted the weakly magnetic goethite and hematite. However, unprecedented, representative characterization of these minerals was possible through quantitative analysis of the remainder after the collection of the magnetic extract. This approach may facilitate detailed characterization of a wide range of carbonates, such as pelagic limestone, dolostone, unlithified carbonate ooze, speleothems, and freshwater and pedogenic carbonates. Such mineral extractions can lead to new insights into paleoenvironmental processes as well as an improved understanding of the recording of the Earth's magnetic field.


This book covers in detail programs and technologies for converting traditionally landfilled solid wastes into energy through waste-to-energy projects. Modern Waste-to-Energy plants are being built around the world to reduce the levels of solid waste going into landfill sites and contribute to renewable energy and carbon reduction targets. The latest technologies have also reduced the pollution levels seen from early waste incineration plants by over 99 per cent. With case studies from around the world, Rogoff and Screve provide an insight into the different approaches taken to the planning and implementation of WTE. The second edition includes coverage of the latest technologies and practical engineering challenges as well as an exploration of the economic and regulatory context for the development of WTE.


Print of Godey's Fashions from January 1869. The colored print depicts five women wearing very ornate gowns. The floor-length gowns include long sleeves and high collars. Each gown has either ruffles, bows, buttons, pleats, draping, or fringe or a combination of these. The women all appear to have long hair styled up on their heads. Several of the women wear ornately adorned bonnets. The gowns, bonnets and background are colored blue, yellow, green, red, black and white. A young boy wearing a blue suit stands at the front of the women. The group appears to be standing in an elegant room, such as a parlor. There is a hutch on the right side of the print with shelves with vases, a chair on the left and drapes hanging against the wall behind the group.


ABSTRACT Continuous Commissioning®* technology has been proven to be highly cost-effective in reducing building energy consumption. This article illustrates a successful continuous commissioning project that has been recently completed in a commercial building in Austin, Texas. Even though the building's HVAC systems were well maintained and their operations had been tuned by an experienced facility management team, the CC® project was still able to achieve an annual cost saving of $287,400 (14 percent of the total utility costs, or 60¢ per square foot per year) by further optimizing the operations of various HVAC components, the chilled water and hot water loop systems, and identifying malfunctioning control devices. The simple payback of the CC project was estimated to be less than 7 months.