There is a relative paucity of data in the literature regarding the prevalence of meningiomas and their detection in the clinical setting of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). The primary aim of this study was to study incidentally detected meningiomas (on 68Ga-DOTATATE/18F fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography/computed tomography [18F-FDG PET/CT]) in metastatic NET patients referred for peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT). The secondary aims of this study were to evaluate the response rate of these incidentally detected meningiomas following PRRT and determine progression-free survival (PFS) in this group of patients. This was a retrospective analysis of 500 metastatic/advanced NET patients who had undergone68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT and18F-FDG PET/CT before PRRT workup. The case records were searched to identify cases of hitherto unknown meningiomas detected on PET images; subsequently, these patients underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for confirmation of diagnosis. Following177Lu-DOTATATE PRRT, posttreatment functional and structural imaging response evaluation of the meningiomas were undertaken by 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT, MRI, or CT brain, respectively, along with clinical neurological evaluation. The patients were designated as responders and nonresponders based on predefined response assessment criteria. The PFS of these incidentally detected meningiomas following PRRT was estimated using the Kaplan–Meier product-limit method. Twelve NET patients were retrospectively identified with abnormal focal brain uptake on 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT. Of these, meningiomas were finally diagnosed on brain MRI examination in six patients (M: F =3:3; age range: 30–66 years; and mean age: 45 years), with a prevalence of 1.2%. Standardized uptake value (SUVmax) of meningiomas on 68Ga-DOTATATE and18F-FDG PET/CT ranged from 7.0 to 22.0 (average 17.0) and 10.19–13.70 (mean: 12.10), respectively, and lesion-to-normal brain parenchyma SUVmax ratio ranged from 140 to 400 (mean: 340) and 1.02–1.07 (mean: 1.04), respectively. Of six patients with incidentally detected meningiomas, one patient died within 1 month and five patients received177Lu-DOTATATE PRRT, the number of cycles ranging from two to six (average: 4) and cumulative therapeutic dose ranging from 13.28 to 29.97GBq (average dose: 19.86GBq). Follow-up in these patients ranged from 8 to 36 months (mean: 19.4 months) after the first dose of PRRT. Complete disappearance of neurological symptoms was found in two of five patients (40%), partial response in one of five (20%), and worsening of symptoms in two of five patients (40%). The overall "responder" and "nonresponder" of the meningiomas after PRRT were three patients (60%) and two patients (40%), respectively. Two patients (40%) died of advanced NET at the time of analysis of these data. The observed mean PFS of the meningioma lesions following PRRT was 26.25 months (95% confidence interval, 16.65–35.84 months).No major hematological and renal toxicity were documented in any of these patients. To conclude, 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT imaging is an effective technique for the incidental identification of meningioma in NET patients. Considering the limited therapeutic options in the palliative setting of advanced or metastatic NET patients and morbidity associated with the therapeutic procedures, PRRT could be a promising targeted therapeutic approach for such cases of incidentally detected meningiomas, which is also helpful in stabilizing the disease process without any significant toxicity.


Typical Internet users today have their data scattered over several devices, applications, and services. Managing and controlling one's data is increasingly difficult. In this thesis, we adopt the viewpoint that the user should be given the means to gather and integrate her data, under her full control. In that direction, we designed a system that integrates and enriches the data of a user from multiple heterogeneous sources of personal information into an RDF knowledge base. The system is open-source and implements a novel, extensible framework that facilitates the integration of new data sources and the development of new modules for deriving knowledge. We first show how user activity can be inferred from smartphone sensor data. We introduce a time-based clustering algorithm to extract stay points from location history data. Using data from additional mobile phone sensors, geographic information from OpenStreetMap, and public transportation schedules, we introduce a transportation mode recognition algorithm to derive the different modes and routes taken by the user when traveling. The algorithm derives the itinerary followed by the user by finding the most likely sequence in a linear-chain conditional random field whose feature functions are based on the output of a neural network. We also show how the system can integrate information from the user's email messages, calendars, address books, social network services, and location history into a coherent whole. To do so, it uses entity resolution to find the set of avatars used by each real-world contact and performs spatiotemporal alignment to connect each stay point with the event it corresponds to in the user's calendar. Finally, we show that such a system can also be used for multi-device and multi-system synchronization and allow knowledge to be pushed to the sources. We present extensive experiments.


Neural networks are used in a wide number of fields including signal and image processing, modeling and control and pattern recognition. Some of the most common type of neural networks is the multilayer perceptrons and the recurrent neural networks. Most of these networks consist of large number of neurons and hidden layers, which results in a longer training time. A generalized neuron (GN) has a compact structure and overcomes the problem of long training time. Due to its simple structure and lesser memory requirements, the GN is attractive for hardware implementations. This paper presents the online training of a GN with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. A comparative study of the GN and the MLP online trained with PSO is presented for function approximations. The GN based identification of the static VAR compensator (SVC) dynamics in a 12 bus FACTS benchmark power system trained online with the PSO is also presented.


This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii) because public goods, such as environmental attributes, exhibit externalities, treatment of one unit often affects other units. To explore the implications of applying standard quasi-experimental methods to public good problems, we extend the potential outcomes framework to explicitly distinguish between unit-level source and the resulting group-level exposure of a public good. This new framework serves as a foundation for reviewing and interpreting key papers from the recent empirical literature. We formally demonstrate that two common quasi-experimental estimators of the marginal social benefit of a public good can be biased due to externality spillovers, even when the source of the public good itself is quasi-randomly assigned. We propose an unbiased estimator for the valuation of local public goods and discuss how it can be implemented in future studies. Finally, we consider how to preserve the advantages of the quasi-experimental approach when valuing global public goods, such as climate change mitigation, for which no control units are available.


Perceptions of a food's healthiness are a critical input to consumers' decision making about what to eat, and therefore understanding factors that influence these healthiness perceptions are important. We examine the role of prior exposure to other foods in impacting healthiness perceptions. We propose and find that the healthiness of foods previously encountered can influence healthiness perceptions and consumption intentions for ambiguously healthy snacks, and importantly, this influence differs based on one's self-control. Consumers who encounter a healthy food first tend to assimilate healthiness judgments and indicate increased consumption for subsequent, ambiguous foods when their personal self-control is low. This influence of prior healthy foods has implications for consumers and public policymakers since foods are often presented alongside other healthy foods (e.g., in the same grocery store aisle or on the same restaurant menu). Our work establishes the relationship between previously encountered foods and trait self-control as a driver of subsequent healthiness perceptions, and we expect that future work can further explore these patterns.


Corporate law, like all law, should be directed toward the common good. The common good requires that corporate activity be restrained, if not actively directed, by human virtue. An analysis of the corporate enterprise suggests that those corporate actors with the greatest stake in the exercise of virtue, and best positioned to influence corporate activity via the exercise of virtuous judgment, are the corporation's officers. Thus, one of the primary objectives of corporate law should be the promotion of virtue among corporate officers. Contrary to what some might assume, the promotion of virtue among corporate officers need not entail a promulgation of "thou shalls" and "thou shall nots." Indeed, the suggestions put forth in this Article would serve to broaden, rather than narrow, the liberty of corporate officers. This is because corporate law, as currently constituted and interpreted, works to inhibit the exercise of virtue. The need for virtue-directed corporate decision-making has been demonstrated repeatedly over the course of history, most recently by the recent financial crisis. Instead of focusing on virtue, however, the response of most policymakers and commentators has been on regulatory reform. This is unfortunate. Although regulatory reform certainly has its place, it holds limited promise of success, for a variety of important reasons. A wiser approach would focus more seriously on virtue - the force most capable of preventing a repeat of the fraud and dereliction of duty that marked the recent financial crisis (and most predecessor crises as well).


People can estimate the current position of an occluded moving target. This is called motion extrapolation, and it has been suggested that the performance in such tasks is mediated by the smooth-pursuit system. Experiment 1 contrasted a standard position extrapolation task with a novel number extrapolation task. In the position extrapolation task, participants saw a horizontally moving target become occluded, and then responded when they thought the target had reached the end of the occluder. Here the stimuli can be tracked with pursuit eye movements. In the number extrapolation task, participants saw a rapid countdown on the screen that disappeared before reaching zero. Participants responded when they thought the hidden counter would have reached zero. Although this stimulus cannot be tracked with the eyes, performance was comparable on both the tasks. The response times were also found to be correlated. Experiments 2 and 3 extended these findings, using extrapolation through color space as well as number space, while Experiment 4 found modest evidence for similarities between color and number extrapolation. Although more research is certainly needed, we propose that a common rate controller guides extrapolation through physical space and feature space. This functions like the velocity store module of the smooth-pursuit system, but with a broader function than previously envisaged.


The idealized Kish-Sethuraman (KS) cipher is theoretically known to offer perfect security through a classical information channel. However, realization of the protocol is hitherto an open problem, as the required mathematical operators have not been identified in the previous literature. A mechanical analogy of this protocol can be seen as sending a message in a box using two padlocks; one locked by the Sender and the other locked by the Receiver, so that theoretically the message remains secure at all times. We seek a mathematical representation of this process, considering that it would be very unusual if there was a physical process with no mathematical description and indeed we find a solution within a four dimensional Clifford algebra. The significance of finding a mathematical description that describes the protocol, is that it is a possible step toward a physical realization having benefits in increased security with reduced complexity.


The phylogenetic relationships of the scleractinian genus Psammocora with the other genera traditionally included in the family Siderastreidae and some Fungiidae are assessed based on combined skeletal and molecular data. P. explanulata differs from the other examined congeneric species (P. contigua, P. digitata, P. nierstraszi, P. profundacella, P. superficialis, and P. stellata) in possessing interstomatous septa between adult corallites, costae, and in having continuous buttress-like structures joining septal faces (i.e., fulturae) which typically occur in fungiids. These characters are shared with Coscinaraea wellsi but not with the remainder of the examined siderastreids (the congeneric C. columna, and Anomastraea irregularis, Horastrea indica, Pseudosiderastrea tayamai, Siderastrea savignyana) whose septa are interconnected by typical synapticulae. Most of the examined species form septa with distinct transverse groups of centers of calcification, a biomineralization pattern typical of the Robusta clade. The observations on skeletal structures corroborate the results of the ITS2 and 5.8S molecular phylogeny. C. wellsi and P. explanulata are phylogenetically very close to each other and show closer genetic affinity with the examined Fungiidae (Halomitra pileus, Herpolitha limax, Fungia paumotensis, and Podabacia crustacea) than with the other species in the genera Psammocora and Coscinaraea, or with any other siderastreid. Our results show that neither Psammocora nor Coscinaraea are monophyletic genera. The high genetic distances between the species of Siderastreidae, especially between Pseudosiderastrea tayamai and Siderastrea savignyana on one side and the other genera on the other, suggest a deep divergence in the phylogenetic structure of the family.


The latest United Nations population projection predict that the human population will expand from roughly 7.5 billion to between 8.3 and 10.9 billion by mid-century. This presents an acute need to increase agricultural productivity quickly and to do so without unduly damaging the many other kinds of organisms that share our planet. The advances of genetic engineering and genetic modification hold the promise of making it possible for us to grow more food on the same amount of land using less water, energy, and chemicals: critically important objectives if we are to live sustainably within planetary constraints. At the same time, these advances have evoked an almost unprecedented level of societal controversy quite specifically in the realm of food production, resulting in the proliferation of regulatory and legal issues that threaten to block their use in achieving a more sustainable existence for humanity on planet Earth. If modern science is to contribute to the agricultural productivity increase required in coming decades as the climate warms and the human population continues to grow, it is imperative to get beyond the cultural and political biases against molecular crop modification, acknowledge the safety record of GM crops, and ease the regulatory barriers to their development and deployment.


To speak of a secular prophet appears nowadays to be a contradiction in terms. A prophet is usually understood to be a person who, inspired by supernatural agency, speaks on behalf of that agent and predicts the future. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the philosopher and reformer, pointed out that the original Greek term referred in its extensive sense simply to a person who 'speaks out', and in a more limited extent to a person who 'foretells'. Every politician who advocated a measure that he thought was beneficial, noted Bentham, was a prophet. The term, however, had been appropriated by 'religionists', who had seized on its ambiguity in order to further their own schemes and projects. Bentham turned against religion in his early teenage years. Though born into a staunch Church of England family, and though educated at a Church of England university (Oxford), his revolt against religion became apparent when, at the age of 16, he bitterly resented being forced to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in order to take his degree. He came to advocate religious freedom, and the abolition of all formal connection between church and state. Yet he was reluctant at first to make his hostility explicit. Bentham began An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) by stating: 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.' The term 'Nature' was nicely ambiguous. For the religiously inclined, 'Nature' could be interpreted to mean God, the Creator of the Universe. For Bentham, however, 'Nature' referred to human psychology, based in turn on human physiology. In the 1810s Bentham was ready to launch a sustained attack on religion and religious establishments. Many thousands of manuscript sheets written by Bentham on this subject remain relatively unexplored. The Bentham Project has recently begun to transcribe and edit a series of about 1,000 manuscript sheets that Bentham intended for Part III of 'Not Paul, but Jesus'. The first part of this work was published in 1823 under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith. The second part, which has never been published, consists in a history of the early Christian Church. The third part is a critique of the teachings of St Paul, with a particular focus on the principle of asceticism (the doctrine that the right action is that which promotes pain and eliminates pleasure). Bentham argued that St Paul's strategy had been to instil credulity in his followers, to the extent that they would believe anything he told them. Paul had gone on to attack activities that might divert his followers from following his religion, the most important of such activities being the pleasures of the bed and the pleasures of the table. Paul had been particularly critical of homosexual relationships. Bentham argued that Jesus had not condemned such pleasures, and pointed to that Jesus had himself engaged in homosexual activity. The religion of Paul was, therefore, different from the religion of Jesus. The Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah, moreover, did not condemn homosexuality, but gang rape. Bentham proposed that all sexual activity that was consensual—whether with oneself, whether with partners of the same or the opposite sex, whether with partners of different species—should be made free from legislative interference. In the post-Malthusian age, non-prolific modes of sexual activity were rather to be welcomed than condemned. In short, Bentham saw sexual morality as a key battleground in the fight to divorce morality and legislation from the influence of religion.


Research into the relation between space and decoration in Pompeii faces three key obstacles.  First, the concept of "the Roman house," derived primarily from literary texts, has imposed a traditional vocabulary ( fauces, atrium, tablinum, oecus, etc.) that forestalls the collection and analysis of spatial data.  This means that while we may be able to give precise physical location for a given fresco or mosaic (e.g. VI.15.7-8, room d, north wall, with GPS coordinates), we are not able to place it in conceptual or cognitive space, because the traditional vocabulary is imprecise spatially and generally unsupported by artifact finds, and we have no alternative spatial database (Allison 1993, 2004; Laurence 2007; Riggsby 1997).  Second, while print resources like Pompei: pitture e mosaici (PPM) and Hauser in Pompeji (HIP) are invaluable, there is no accessible, searchable database for art in Pompeii, and therefore no way of systematically tracking its relationship to space.  Finally, 3D visualizations of Pompeii generally consist of illustrative flythroughs that do not contribute directly to research questions.  While 3D technologies have been widely used for conservation and recording, they have not yet had a major role in presenting and interpreting data. In response to these limitations, the Digital Pompeii Project (DPP) is pursuing a threefold workflow that establishes a statistically derived set of unit and room profiles, links this with an art database designed to facilitate detailed spatial research, and incorporates the game engine Unity as a visualization platform and a tool for spatial analysis in its own right.  Focusing in its initial stage on insulae 11, 15, and 16 in Regio VI, DPP combines space syntax with network connectivity analysis.  For each unit, visibility, permeability, viewshed, and agent analysis graphs are generated through UCL's Depthmap; for each room, area, convexity, depth, eccentricity, betweenness centrality, and eigenvector centrality statistics are generated through Gephi.  The result is a nuanced, multi-layered spatial profile, separate (at least temporarily) from the traditional vocabulary.  Second, DDP is creating a relational database based on images from PPM and HIP.  This database records the level of complexity (and therefore labor expenditure) found in a given wall, ceiling, or floor, in terms of perspective elaboration and degree of ornament (cf. "convex boosting" in Weilguni 2011; Fisher 2007).  Beyond more obvious features (color, style, mythological theme for central paintings), it also tracks decorative motifs found in vignettes, still lifes, and genre scenes, and their spatial location on the wall (socle, predella, middle zone, upper zone).  This permits the evaluation of the distribution of constituent elements in wall painting against the spatial profiles of units and rooms.  Unity models are then used to explore how space and art work together in realtime to articulate patterns of movement and stasis.  Unity's voxel-based occlusion culling and AI scripting features are compared with visibility graphing and agent analysis in Depthmap.  Finally, analytics in Unity are used to test the movement patterns suggested by spatial profiles against the behavior of human "players" navigating the models.


During the teachingـ learning process a lot of circumstances take place that can help or block that process, which will affect the achievement of the educational objectives. For this reason, it is a must for teachers to make their best effort so that their work in class can be effective. Teaching is a complex process that can be conceptualized in many ways. Traditionally, language teaching has been described in terms of the actions and behaviors that teachers carry out in the classroom and their effects on students. For this reason, a teacher of English needs to have a pedagogical, didactical, and methodological competence, as well as an advanced knowledge of the specialized area of the language he∕she is teaching. To fulfill all the duties related with the specialized area of English, a teacher must possess an advanced domain of the four macro skills of that language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In addition, he∕she must have some fundamentals of grammatical and linguistic aspects of it. For attaining this, the University of El Salvador and other institutions of higher education have programs for training teachers of English that included five or six courses to develop the four macro skill of the language, as well as other courses about English Grammar and Linguistics. However, in 1998, The Ministry of Education of El Salvador implemented a new curriculum that regulates all the training programs for teachers, which had to be adopted by all institutions that serve those programs (Art. 57, Law of Higher Education of El Salvador), this program did not include the English courses that were present in the former plan; instead, it had other courses about pedagogical and methodological aspects, including five teaching practice courses. For this reason MINED established new academic requirements in order to be accepted as a student of this new English teaching program. In order to analyze the impact of these new requirements on students taking the new educational program for teachers of English with regard to the results after five years of implementation, two undergraduates of "Licenciatura en Ingles" of the University of El Salvador carried out this essay at four universities of San Salvador that offer this program.


As the journal nears the end of its second official year, we are pleased to start accepting submissions to our first two Special Issues. The first Special Issue is on Resilience of complex coupled Socio-Technical-Environmental systems through the modeling lens with guest editors Tatiana Filatova, Tina Comes (4TU Resilience Engineering Centre), Christoph Hoelscher (ETH Zurich) and Juliet Mian (Resilence Shift). This Special Issue aims to bring together cutting-edge research and international practice to offer insights into the latest scientific modelling methods, gaps, challenges and opportunities and best practice examples relating to operationalising resilience across a range of socio-technical-environmental applications. The second Special Issue is on Large-scale behavioural models of land use change with guest editors Calum Brown (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Tatiana Filatova (University of Twente), Birgit Muller (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ), and Derek Robinson (University of Waterloo). This Special Issue is focussed on better understanding and modelling of temporal or spatial scales in land use dynamics.

We invite new proposals for Special Issues that fit within SESMO's aims and scope. Our Special Issues are cohesive collections of articles focussed on a specific contemporary theme related to socio-environmental systems modelling. The Special Issue can build on previous work and research gaps, but can also explore new and emerging terrain relevant to our aims. Although the conceptualisation of a Special Issue may be initiated in a conference or workshop, it is critical that such a proposal also builds on the original dialogue. Articles should also be canvassed from across the globe. SESMO is an open access journal with no article processing or publication charges for authors. If you have a topic to propose, please contact us to discuss further.


A Catholic Looks at Quakerism Michael Mullett Lancaster University Quaker Studies 2 (1997):57-64 In this article Michael Mullet first sketches the well-advertised dissimilarities between Catholicism, the epitome, for many, of 'conservative' Christianity, and Quakerism, which brought to a high point of development the religious radicalism implicit in the Reformation. However, Mullett argues that, underlyingly, relatively superficial dissonances over such issues as church order and (more significantly) sacrament, Tridentine Catholicism and Quakerism shared, in opposition to the Reformation's key principles of justification by faith alone and its corollary predestination, an abiding, soteriological and anthropological acceptance (grounded in the Epistle of James) of the role of free will and of justification and sanctification by works as well as faith and grace. Comparisons of texts from Robert Barclay (1676) and the Canons of the Council of Trent (1545) sustain his argument.


Nanotechnology is a rapidly expanding field seeking to utilize nano‐scale structures for a wide range of applications. Biologically derived nanostructures, such as viruses and virus‐like particles (VLPs), provide excellent platforms for functionalization due to their physical and chemical properties. Plant viruses, and VLPs derived from them, have been used extensively in biotechnology. They have been characterized in detail over several decades and have desirable properties including high yields, robustness, and ease of purification. Through modifications to viral surfaces, either interior or exterior, plant‐virus‐derived nanoparticles have been shown to support a range of functions of potential interest to medicine and nano‐technology. In this review we highlight recent and influential achievements in the use of plant virus particles as vehicles for diverse functions: from delivery of anticancer compounds, to targeted bioimaging, vaccine production to nanowire formation. WIREs Nanomed Nanobiotechnol 2017, 9:e1447. doi: 10.1002/wnan.1447 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.


This study draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hong Kong with a large sample of ethnically diverse asylum seekers to advance understanding of the nature of their experiences in the global city and the extent to which these experiences are impacted by both structural and individual agency factors. The aim is to tackle the lack of detailed knowledge that affects asylum debates in Hong Kong, by providing well-documented, unbiased accounts of the circumstances surrounding asylum seekers' decision-making, the factors that at various levels enable or constrain their livelihoods and the contribution they make in contexts of increasing border securitisation and social inequality between legal and illegal populations in Hong Kong. This study is framed around the notion of social polarisation and growing informalisation of labour markets in the 'global city' (Sassen, 2001). On one level, findings pertain to policy-oriented research in the field of forced migration and urban studies, while developing conceptual and theoretical ground from a criminological perspective. The current body of knowledge is advanced in relation to the changing geographies of arrival for increasing numbers of travellers whose movement is constrained by border controls in countries of the Global North. In this regard, it is argued that 'global' Hong Kong provides a core alternative destination to coveted Western countries; and in doing so, the social networks of asylum seeking are changed, impacting travellers' vulnerability. On another level, processes of illegalisation of some migrant flows are revealed as being advantageous for specific economic sectors. An argument is made that the legal exclusion of certain categories of traveller relates to the agency that these people exert within the spaces that confine them. As asylum seekers are denied legal and economic rights by government authorities that use asylum as a tool of migration control, asylum seekers are consequently limited to procuring capital in specific areas of the host society, and in so doing they plausibly turn into instruments to benefit specific strata of the local resident population.


Picture the life of a modern person in the western world: They wake up in the morning and check their social networking sites; they drive to work on roads that connect cities to each other; they make phone calls, send emails and messages to colleagues, friends, and family around the world; they use electricity flowing through power-lines; they browse the Internet, searching for information. All of these typical daily activities rely on the structure of networks. A network, in this case, is a set of nodes (people, web pages, etc) connected by edges (physical connection, collaboration, etc). The term graph is sometimes used to represent a more abstract structure - but here we use the terms graph and network interchangeably. The field of network analysis concerns studying and understanding networks in order to solve problems in the world around us. Graph models are used in conjunction with the study of real-world networks. They are used to study how well an algorithm may do on a real-world network, and for testing properties that may further produce faster algorithms. The first piece of this dissertation is an experimental study which explores features of real data, specifically power-law distributions in degrees and spectra. In addition to a comparison between features of real data to existing results in the literature, this study resulted in a hypothesis on power-law structure in spectra of real-world networks being more reliable than that in the degrees. The theoretical contributions of this dissertation are focused primarily on generating realistic networks through existing and novel graph models. The two graph models presented are called HyperKron and the Triangle Generalized Preferential Attachment model. Both of the models incorporate higher-order structure - leading to more sophisticated properties not examined in traditional models. We use the second of our models to further validate the hypothesis on power-laws in the spectra. Due to the structure of our model, we show that the power-law in the spectra is more resilient to sub-sampling. This gives some explanation for why we see power-laws more frequently in the spectra in real world data.


Abstract. Transport into the extratropical lowermost stratosphere (LMS) can be divided into a slow part (time-scale of several months to years) associated with the global-scale stratospheric residual circulation and a fast part (time-scale of days to a few months) associated with (mostly quasi-horizontal) mixing (i.e. two-way irreversible transport, including extratropical stratosphere-troposphere exchange). The stratospheric residual circulation may be considered to consist of two branches: a deep branch more strongly associated with planetary waves breaking in the middle to upper stratosphere, and a shallow branch associated with synoptic and planetary scale waves breaking in the subtropical lower stratosphere. In this study the contribution due to the stratospheric residual circulation alone to transport into the LMS is quantified using residual circulation trajectories, i.e. trajectories driven by the (time-dependent) residual mean meridional and vertical velocities. This contribution represents the advective part of the overall transport into the LMS and can be viewed as providing a background onto which the effect of mixing has to be added. Residual mean velocities are obtained from a comprehensive chemistry-climate model as well as from reanalysis data. Transit times of air traveling from the tropical tropopause to the LMS along the residual circulation streamfunction are evaluated and compared to recent mean age of air estimates. A time-scale separation with much smaller transit times into the mid-latitudinal LMS than into polar LMS is found that is indicative of a separation of the shallow from the deep branch of the residual circulation. This separation between the shallow and the deep circulation branch is further manifested in a distinction in the aspect ratio of the vertical to meridional extent of the trajectories, the integrated mass flux along the residual circulation trajectories, as well as the stratospheric entry latitude of the trajectories. The residual transit time distribution reproduces qualitatively the observed seasonal cycle of youngest air in the extratropical LMS in fall and oldest air in spring.


The latent variable "δ" (for "dementia") appears to be uniquely responsible for the dementing aspects of cognitive impairment. Age, depression, gender and the apolipoprotein E (APOE) e4 allele are independently associated with δ. In this analysis, we explore serum proteins as potential mediators of APOE's specific association with δ in a large, ethnically diverse longitudinal cohort, the Texas Alzheimer's Research and Care Consortium (TARCC). APOE was associated only with C-Reactive Protein (CRP), Adiponectin (APN) and Amphiregulin (AREG), although the latter two's associations did not survive Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. All three proteins were associated with δ and had weak potential mediation effects on APOE's association with that construct. Our findings suggest that APOE's association with cognitive performance is specific to δ and partially mediated by serum inflammatory proteins. The majority of APOE's significant unadjusted effect on δ is unexplained. It may instead arise from direct central nervous system effects, possibly on native intelligence. If so, then APOE may exert a life-long influence over δ and therefore all-cause dementia risk.


The status of the two subgenera Eulepidina and Nephrolepidina of the genus Lepidocyclina is debated by many. The nature and arrangement of periembryonic chambers are considered to be features of primary importance in classification. These, however, are not often visible for several reasons. In view of this, in the present study the nucleoconch shapes of the two subgenera are analyzed for comparison. Well-prepared, oriented sections with periembryonic chambers clearly visible in the two subgenera are used for shape analysis of nucleoconchs. The examined species include L. (E.) ephipoides, L. (N.) isolepidinoides and L. (N.) sumatrensis from the Oligocene-Miocene succession of Kutch. Results from closed from Fourier analysis revealed that the nucleconchs of the two subgenera distinctly differ in shape. The 3rd, 4th and 5th harmonics are found to be significantly different in the power spectrum of the two subgenera. It is therefore concluded that Eulepidina and Nephrolepidina are taxonomically valid subgenera. The Fourier shape analysis is also carried out for the nucleconchs of phylogenetically related species Lepidocyclina (Nephrolepidina) isolepidinoides, and Lepidocyclina (Nephrolepidina) sumatrensis. The results show that this method is also effective at species level differentiation.


Clinical trials and epidemiological evidence show that combined estrogen (E) and progestin (P) hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases the risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women, whereas HRT containing E alone does not. Tumor progression is dependent on angiogenesis, which provides nutrients vital to the developing cancer. We previously showed, both in vitro and in vivo, that natural and synthetic P (including the widely used progestin Medroxyprogesterone acetate, MPA), increase production of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a potent angiogenic factor, in human breast cancer cells (Cancer Res., 1998, 58:392). This effect is blocked by the anti-progestin RU-486, suggesting involvement of progesterone receptors in the process (Int J Cancer, 2001, 92:469). Evidence from our laboratory using in vivo breast cancer models suggests that P accelerates the development of tumors from latent tumorigenic cells. This leads to the formation of palpable tumors and tumor metastasis, processes that may be attributed to increased production of VEGF (Cancer Res., 2007, 67:9929; Menopause, 2010, 17:1040). RU-486 blocks P-dependent VEGF production and thereby reduces tumor growth; however, the anti-progestin has severe side-effects averting its long-term use. Recently, we have studied less toxic naturally-occurring compounds for their ability to antagonize P-dependent VEGF induction and block tumor progression. In this study, we tested the effects of luteolin, a flavonoid commonly found in fruits and vegetables, on proliferation of BT-474 and T47-D breast cancer cells and their P-dependent production of VEGF. Luteolin treatment (25-100 μM) for 24-48 h reduced in vitro tumor cell viability and induced apoptosis. Interestingly, treatment with a lower concentration of luteolin (10 μM) blocked the production of P-dependent VEGF, indicating that VEGF suppression precedes luteolin-mediated loss of cell viability. Furthermore, luteolin (20 mg/kg, i.p.) suppressed the growth of MPA-dependent T47-D human xenograft tumors in nude mice. Immunohistochemical analysis showed that luteolin reduced P-induced VEGF in tumor sections (p Supported by a COR award from the College of Veterinary Medicine and in part by funds from generous donors to the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center, University of Missouri. Citation Format: Hyder SM, Cook MT, Besch-Williford C, Liang Y. Luteolin inhibits progestin-dependent VEGF induction, stem-cell like characteristics, and tumor progression of human breast cancer cells. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium: 2015 Dec 8-12; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P1-16-06.


Warming air and sea temperatures, longer open-water seasons and sea-level rise collectively promote the erosion of permafrost coasts in the Arctic, which profoundly impacts organic matter pathways. Although estimates on organic carbon (OC) fluxes from erosion exist for some parts of the Arctic, little is known about how much OC is transformed into greenhouse gases (GHGs). In this study we investigated two different coastal erosion scenarios on Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island (Canada) and estimate the potential for GHG formation. We distinguished between a delayed release represented by mud debris draining a coastal thermoerosional feature and a direct release represented by cliff debris at a low collapsing bluff. Carbon dioxide (CO2) production was measured during incubations at 4°C under aerobic conditions for two months and were modeled for four months and a full year. Our incubation results show that mud debris and cliff debris lost a considerable amount of OC as CO2 (2.5 ± 0.2 and 1.6 ± 0.3% of OC, respectively). Although relative OC losses were highest in mineral mud debris, higher initial OC content and fresh organic matter in cliff debris resulted in a ∼three times higher cumulative CO2 release (4.0 ± 0.9 compared to 1.4 ± 0.1 mg CO2 gdw–1), which was further increased by the addition of seawater. After four months, modeled OC losses were 4.9 ± 0.1 and 3.2 ± 0.3% in set-ups without seawater and 14.3 ± 0.1 and 7.3 ± 0.8% in set-ups with seawater. The results indicate that a delayed release may support substantial cycling of OC at relatively low CO2 production rates during long transit times onshore during the Arctic warm season. By contrast, direct erosion may result in a single CO2 pulse and less substantial OC cycling onshore as transfer times are short. Once eroded sediments are deposited in the nearshore, highest OC losses can be expected. We conclude that the release of CO2 from eroding permafrost coasts varies considerably between erosion types and residence time onshore. We emphasize the importance of a more comprehensive understanding of OC degradation during the coastal erosion process to improve thawed carbon trajectories and models.


The main aim of this thesis is to explore what members of volunteer sporting organisations understand as governance for their organisations and how and why they implement particular governance structures and to use the findings to begin the development of a theoretical explanation of governance in these organisations. Voluntary sporting organisations in Australia have undergone significant change in the emphasis placed on governance structures (historically the sole domain of volunteers). Demands placed on the sector to become more "accountable" by incorporating and adopting business practices has led to a need to employ professional staff such as general managers, and to a need to seek business skills in the volunteer board members. The changes required in governance and in the behaviour of the volunteers have resulted in governance structures that have received little research attention and therefore lack a cohesive theoretical explanation.
In order to understand the "what, how and why", an in-depth qualitative analysis using a grounded theory approach of four different Tasmanian voluntary sporting organisations was undertaken. Grounded theory is particularly useful in an area that lacks both theory development and incorporates terms such as "governance" and "effectiveness" derived from social constructs. It enables the data to be examined and theories to emerge from the data without trying to force the data to fit the literature. In this way unique features of the sector that were previously ignored or not given prominence may be identified. This was the case: the theme of volunteer management
(labelled human resource management) should be recognised as a theme, not a sub-category of board operations and stewardship theory offered the strongest explanations for the findings.
With the understanding that volunteers and their management was a central theme came the understanding of the high level of communication needed to maintain strong relationships linked to a high level of informality in governance processes. The pivotal role of a general manager (or board member) in this communication process through bridging an accountability gap by linking the volunteers (not-for-profit culture with utility derived from the sport) with the legal requirements and expectations (derived from the for-profit culture with a control and external reporting focus) enables the sporting organisation to remain autonomous. It is able to continue to fulfil its legal requirements and retain its incorporated status while being able to continue to run the sport at its particular level of the organisation without interference from higher levels of the organisation. This emerging theory explained how and why the sporting organisations interviewed in this research governed their sport, and identified that with the reliance on volunteers there should be explicit acknowledgement of their role within any theory development along with an understanding of the difference in the concept of accountability and what that entails. Volunteers and their strong stewardship role in governance had not been fully recognised in previous governance studies.


The net energy (NE) content of the feed strongly determines pig performances, so that an accurate and rapid estimation is very important. We designed an experiment to evaluate the use of the Dutch feed tables (CVB, 2016), chemical analyses and in vitro organic matter digestibility (OMd) for the prediction of the in vivo NE. Twenty compound feeds with variable nutrient and ingredient composition were formulated and each feed was fed to six pens of three pigs in three weight intervals at an initial mean life weight of 52, 72 and 94 kg, respectively. The faeces were spot-sampled during five days and nutrient digestibility was determined using acid insoluble ash as marker. The compound feeds as well as their ingredients were analysed for chemical composition and in vitro OMd according to Boisen and Fernandez (1997). Besides, the NE content of the 20 feeds was calculated from the NE of the composing ingredients, using either directly the tabular NE-values (CVB, 2016) or the analyzed proximate composition in combination with the tabular digestion coefficients (CVB, 2016), which resulted in a prediction error of 0.34 and 0.19 MJ/kg DM, respectively. Further, multiple regression equations were developed using chemical parameters and in vitro OMd. The in vivo NE content of the feeds was calculated according to the Dutch feed evaluation system (CVB, 2016) and amounted to 10.8 ± 0.9 MJ/kg DM (mean ± sd), varying from 8.3 to 12.0 MJ/kg DM. The sd of the NE due to variation between pens averaged 0.08 MJ/kg DM. The calculated NE content increased with 0.0021 MJ/kg DM per kg higher bodyweight.
The best equation based on chemical parameters (crude fat, starch, ADL and crude ash) resulted in an error of 0.13 MJ/kg DM, and incorporating in vitro OMd slightly decreased this error (0.11 MJ/kg DM).


BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE STUDY
Aortic valve replacement (AVR) in patients with a heavily calcified ascending aorta and aortic root, or with conditions that preclude a median sternotomy, poses a formidable challenge. A left ventricle apical-aortic conduit (AAC) is an alternative in these situations. Herein, the authors' experience with AAC in adult patients with acquired aortic stenosis is reported.

METHODS
Between 1995 and 2003, 13 patients (mean age 71 years) underwent AAC for severe symptomatic aortic stenosis (mean valve area 0.65 +/- 0.02 cm2). Indications for AAC were heavily calcified ascending aorta and aortic root (n = 5), patent retrosternal mammary grafts (n = 4), calcified ascending aorta and aortic root plus patent retrosternal mammary graft (n = 1), retrosternal colonic interposition (n = 1) and multiple previous sternotomies (n = 2). Seven patients had previous coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). The mean preoperative left ventricular ejection fraction was 50 +/- 4%.

RESULTS
AAC were performed under cardiopulmonary bypass through a left thoracotomy (n = 10), median sternotomy (n = 2) or bilateral thoracotomy (n = 1). Hearts were kept beating (n = 5) or fibrillated (n = 7). Circulatory arrest was used in one patient. Composite Dacron conduits with biological (n = 6), mechanical (n = 4) or homograft (n = 2) valves were used. Distal anastomoses were performed in the descending thoracic aorta (n = 12) or in the left iliac artery (n = 1). Two patients underwent simultaneous CABG. Three patients died in-hospital from ventricular failure (n = 1), intravascular thrombosis (n = 1) and multi-organ failure (n = 1). The mean hospital stay was 26 days. Complications included respiratory failure requiring tracheostomy (n = 2), stroke (n = 1) and re-exploration for bleeding (n = 2). At a mean follow up of 2.1 years, there have been four late deaths; causes of death were congestive heart failure (n = 2), ischemic cardiomyopathy (n = 1) and cancer (n = 1).

CONCLUSION
AAC provides an acceptable alternative to AVR in selected patients who are at exceedingly high risk for the standard procedure.


Introduction Simon Ville and Glenn Withers Part I. Framework: 1. The historiography of Australian economic history William Coleman 2. Economic growth and its drivers since European settlement Jakob Madsen 3. Analytical frameworks of economic history Chris Lloyd Part II. Transition: 4. The Aboriginal legacy Boyd Hunter 5. The convict economy Debbie Oxley and David Meredith Part III. Economic Expansion of the Colonies: 6. Technological change Gary Magee 7. Industrialising Australia's natural capital David Greasley 8. Labour, skills and migration Andrew Seltzer 9. Colonial enterprise Simon Ville 10. Infrastructure and colonial socialism Jonathan Pincus and Henry Ergas 11. Urbanisation Lionel Frost Part IV. A National Economy: 12. Capital markets Rodney Maddock 13. Manufacturing Diane Hutchinson 14. Big business and foreign firms David Merrett 15. Government and the evolution of public policy John Wilson 16. The labour market Tim Hatton and Glenn Withers 17. The service economy Monica Keneley Part V. Building the Modern Economy: 18. Reorientation of trade, investment, migration Richard Pomfret 19. Microeconomic reform Jeff Borland 20. The evolution of macroeconomic strategy Mike Keating Part VI. Looking Backwards and to the Future: 21. A statistical narrative: Australia 1800-2010 Matthew Butlin, Robert Dixon and Peter Lloyd 22. Wealth and welfare Martin Shanahan 23. Property right regimes and their environmental impacts Edwyna Harris 24. Refiguring indigenous economies: a 21st century perspective John Altman and Nicholas Biddle Appendix Matthew Butlin, Robert Dixon and Peter Lloyd.


The phylogeny and proteins of chemolithoautotrophic growth of thermoacidophilic Sulfolobus-like archaea were investigated.

Sulfolobus-like strain HT is a high growth temperature chemolithotrophic isolate with potential application in mineral sulphide bioleaching. The gene encoding its 16S rRNA was cloned and sequenced. Phylogenetic analysis of this sequence showed strain HT segregating within the genus Sulfolobus. It showed greater similarity to the sequence of Sulfolobus shihatae, a facultative chemolithotroph, than to the sequence of Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, an obligate heterotroph. Flanking regions of the 16S rRNA gene were also sequenced, showing secondary structure similarity to those of S. acidocaldarius, implying a similar excision and processing pathway.

A protein of 330 kDa, consisting of 59 kDa and 19 kDa subunits, was overexpressed during CO2-limited autotrophic growth of Sulfolohus strain LM and had previously been shown to co-purify with ATP and acetyl-CoA dependent CO2 uptake. The 59 kDa subunit was partially purified and its N-terminal amino acid sequence obtained. The gene encoding this polypeptide was cloned and sequenced. An open reading frame likely to encode the 19 kDa subunit was adjacent to this gene, forming a possible operon. Homology searches revealed that the predicted amino acid sequence of the 59 kDa subunit was similar to those of ATP-dependent biotin carboxylase enzymes, predicted active site residues being conserved. Homology searches of the predicted amino acid sequence of the ORF likely to encode the 19 kDa subunit revealed similarity to biotin carboxyl carrier proteins, with a biotin binding motif being conserved.

In Sulfolobus LM, a polypeptide of 27 kDa molecular weight was overexpressed during autotrophic growth on ferrous iron in comparison with autotrophic growth on tetrathionate. This polypeptide was partially purified and its N-terminal amino acid sequence obtained. After the cloning and sequencing of the gene encoding this protein by a co-worker, homology searches were carried out. It showed homology to the alkyl hydroperoxide reductase / thiol specific antioxidant (AbpCrrSA) family of proteins, members of which are thought to play a role in protection against oxidative stress. The predicted amino acid sequence was phylogenetically analysed, segregating within a group of sequences derived from eukaryotes and archaea, which possess one conserved cysteine residue, as opposed to a group consisting of eukaryotes and eubacteria, possessing two conserved cysteine residues.

A membrane bound cytochrome showing a difference spectrum alpha absorbance peak at 572 nm had previously been found to be present only during ferrous iron oxidation in thermoacidophilic archaea. This novel cytochrome was partially purified from the membrane fraction of Sulfolohus strain LM autotrophically grown on ferrous iron. It was shown to retain haem staining activity after SDS treatment, thus allowing its identification as a polypeptide of approximately 66 kDa. A procedure which may allow the N-terminal sequencing of this protein and the initiation of its molecular biological study was identified.


The influence of farming type (conventional or organic) and production system (low-and high-input) on various quality characteristics of milk have been in the focus of studies over the last decade. The aim of this work was to evaluate the impact of different dairy management and production systems on carbon stable isotopes ratio (δ13C) and milk urea content. The samples of raw milk were collected each two weeks at certified organic high-input and low-input farms, conventional high-input and low-input farms in late indoor period and outdoor period. Data analysis showed clear difference between milk from organic high- and low-input farms with non-overlapping range between -22.90 ‰ and -24.70‰ for δ13С in protein fraction (equal 1.80‰) and between -25.90‰ and -28.20‰ (equal 2.30‰) for δ13С in fat fraction independently from season factor, as for Δδ13С (protein-fat) values in milk from high-input (1.50-3.00‰) and low-input (3.20-6.30‰) organic farms. Analysis of correlation between δ13С in protein fraction and milk urea content values showed that during late indoor period the most significant difference was detected between milk from organic low-input and conventional high-input farms (5.85‰ for δ13С in protein fraction and 4.65 mg/100 g of milk urea content). During outdoor period, the non-overlapping range was established for low-input and high-input organic farms (3.40‰ for δ13С in protein fraction and 10.77 mg/100 g of milk urea content). Results of δ13С values in fat and protein milk fractions, as combination of δ13С in protein fraction and milk urea content could be a potential tool for the distinguish of milk from different farming types, based on different feed composition.


A search for the dimuon decay of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson is performed using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb − 1 collected with the ATLAS detector in Run 2 pp collisions at √ s = 13 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider. The observed (expected) significance over the background-only hypothesis for a Higgs boson with a mass of 125 . 09 GeV is 2 . 0 σ (1 . 7 σ ). The observed upper limit on the cross section times branching ratio for pp → H → μμ is 2 . 2 times the SM prediction at 95% confidence level, while the expected limit on a H → μμ signal assuming the absence (presence) of a SM signal is 1 . 1 (2 . 0). The best-fit value of the signal strength parameter, defined as the ratio of the observed signal yield to the one expected in the SM, is μ = 1 . 2 ± 0 . 6. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This


Whether you're writing a speech, a job application, or a love poem, Collins Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms is the ideal reference. Comprising over 150,000 alternatives and opposites, it also boasts an invaluable supplement, "Literally Speaking", designed to help you steer clear of cliches and embarrassing clangers. This handy paperback has been developed using Collins Word Web, an unparalleled and constantly updated 2.5-billion-word database of lexical data, so you can be sure you're up to speed with the very latest developments in language. Even writers of the best prose get stumped occasionally. So whenever you need a level of vocabulary above the ordinary, beyond the humdrum, ahead of the pedestrian, the Collins Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms provides all the help you require.


The purpose of the PhD research was the identification of new strategies of farming and processing, with the aim to improve the nutritional and technological characteristics of poultry meat. Part of the PhD research was focused on evaluation of alternative farming systems, with the aim to increase animal welfare and to improve the meat quality and sensorial characteristics in broiler chickens. It was also assessed the use of innovative ingredients for marination of poultry meat (sodium bicarbonate and natural antioxidants)
The research was developed by studying the following aspects:
- Meat quality characteristics, oxidative stability and sensorial traits of chicken meat obtained from two different farming systems: free range vs conventional;
- Meat quality traits of frozen chicken breast pre-salted using increasing concentrations of sodium chloride;
- Use of sodium bicarbonate in comparison with sodium trypolyphosphate for marination of broiler breast meat and phase;
- Marination with thyme and orange essential oils mixture to improve chicken meat quality traits, susceptibility to lipid oxidation and sensory traits.
The following meat quality traits analyseswere performed:
Colour, pH, water holding capacity by conventional (gravimetric methods, pressure application, centrifugation and cooking) and innovative methods (low-field NMR and DSC analysis) ability to absorb marinade soloutions, texture (shear force using different probes and texture profile analysis), proximate analysis (moisture, proteins, lipids, ash content, collagen, fatty acid), susceptibility to lipid oxidation (determinations of reactive substances with thiobarbituric acid and peroxide value), sensorial analysis (triangle test and consumer test).


Robots had a great impact on the manufacturing industry ever since the early seventies when companies such as KUKA and ABB started deploying their first industrial robots. These robots merely performed very specific tasks in specific ways within well-defined environments. Still, they proved to be very useful as they could exceed human performance at these tasks. However, in order to enable robots to enter our daily life, they need to become more versatile and need to operate in much less structured environments.
This thesis is partly devoted to stretching these limitations by means of learning, namely imitation learning (IL) and inverse reinforcement learning (IRL).

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to enable robots to solve a task in an unknown environment. The practitioner describes a desired behavior by specifying a reward function and the robot autonomously interacts with the environment in order to find a control policy that generates high accumulated reward. However, RL is not suitable for teaching new tasks by non-experts because specifying appropriate reward functions can be difficult. Demonstrating the desired behavior is often easier for non-experts. Imitation learning can be used in order to enable the robot to reproduce the demonstrations. However, without explicitly inferring and modeling the intentions of the demonstrations, it can become difficult to solve the task for unseen situations. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) therefore aims to infer a reward function from the demonstrations, such that optimizing this reward function yields the desired behavior even for different situations.

This thesis introduces a unifying approach to solve the inverse reinforcement learning problem in the same way as the reinforcement learning problem. This is achieved by framing both problems as information projection problems, i.e., we strive to minimize the relative entropy between a probabilistic model of the robot behavior and a given desired distribution. Furthermore, a trust region on the robot behavior is used to stabilize the optimization.
For inverse reinforcement learning, the desired distribution is implicitly given by the expert demonstrations. The resulting optimization can be efficiently solved using state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods.
For reinforcement learning, the log-likelihood of the desired distribution is given by the reward function. The resulting optimization problem corresponds to a standard reinforcement learning formulation, except for an additional objective of maximizing the entropy of the robot behavior. This entropy objective adds little overhead to the optimization, but can lead to better exploration and more diversified policies.

Trust-region I-projections are not only useful for training robots, but can also be applied to other machine learning problems. I-projections are typically used for variational inference, in order to approximate an intractable distribution by a simpler model. However, the resulting optimization problems are usually optimized based on stochastic gradient descent which often suffers from high variance in the gradient estimates. As trust-region I-projections where shown to be effective for reinforcement learning and inverse reinforcement learning, this thesis also explores their use for variational inference. More specifically, trust-region I-projections are investigated for the problem of approximating an intractable distribution by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with an adaptive number of components. GMMs are highly desirable for variational inference because they can yield arbitrary accurate approximations while inference from GMMs is still relatively cheap. In order to make learning the GMM feasible, we derive a lower bound that enables us to decompose the objective function. The optimization can then be performed by iteratively updating individual components using a technique from reinforcement learning. The resulting method is capable of learning approximations of significantly higher quality than existing variational inference methods.

Due to the similarity of the underlying optimization problems, the insights gained from our variational inference method are also useful for IL and IRL. Namely, a similar lower bound can be applied also for the I-projection formulation of imitation learning. However, whereas for variational inference the lower bound serves to decompose the objective function, for imitation learning it allows us to provide a reward signal to the robot that does not depend on its behavior. Compared to reward functions that are relative to the current behavior of the robot---which are typical for popular adversarial methods---behavior-independent reward functions have the advantages that we can show convergence even for greedy optimization. Furthermore, behavior-independent reward functions solve the inverse reinforcement learning problem, thereby closing the gap between imitation learning and IRL. However, algorithms derived from our non-adversarial formulation are actually very similar to existing AIL methods, and we can even show that adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) is indeed an instance of our formulation. AIRL was derived from an adversarial formulation, and we point out several problems of that derivation. In contrast, we show that AIRL can be straightforwardly derived from out non-adversarial formulation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the non-adversarial formulation can be also used to derive novel algorithms by presenting a non-adversarial method for offline imitation learning.


Human control of high degree-of-freedom robotic systems is often difficult due to the overwhelming number of variables that need to be specified. Instead, we propose the use of sparse subspaces embedded within the pose space of a robotic system. Driven by human motion, we addressed this sparse control problem by uncovering 2D subspaces that allow cursor control, or eventually decoding of neural activity, to drive a robotic hand. Considering the problems in previous work related to noise in pose graph construction and motion capture, we introduced a method for denoising neighborhood graphs for embedding hand motion into 2D spaces. Such spaces allow for control of high-DOF systems using 2D interfaces such as cursor control via mouse or decoding of neural activity. We present results demonstrating our approach to interactive sparse control for successful power grasping and precision grasping using a 13 DOF robot hand.


Creativity, that is the creation of ideas or objects considered both novel and valuable, is among the most important and highly valued of human traits, and a fundamental aspect of the sciences. Dreams and hypnagogic states have been highly influential in promoting scientific creativity and insight, contributing to some important scientific breakthroughs. Phenomenologically, the latter states of consciousness share a great deal of overlap with the psychedelic state, which has also been associated with facilitating scientific creativity on occasion. The current article proposes that the dream, hypnagogic and psychedelic states share common features that make them conducive to supporting some aspects of scientific creativity and examines the putative underlying neurophenomenological and cognitive processes involved. In addition, some notable occurrences of scientific insights that have emerged from these types of altered states are reviewed and shared common features are presented, providing a ground for future research. The psychedelic state may have its own characteristic features making it amenable to creativity enhancement, such as brain hyperconnectivity, meta-cognitive awareness, access to a more dependable and sustained altered state experience, and potential for eliciting sustained shifts in trait openness. The contextual factors which may contribute to enhancement of scientific creativity and insight will be evaluated. While research in this area is limited, further work to elucidate how psychedelics may best contribute to scientific creativity enhancement is warranted.


Abstract : Scans are often used by adversaries to determine the potential weaknesses in a target network or system prior to an intrusion attempt. In other eases, exploits are packaged with the scans themselves. This report presents a novel approach to detecting scans (including very stealthy scans) against, or passing through, very large networks. It meets operational requirements that are particular to detecting scans in ISP level networks. This scan-detection approach performs an ongoing, incremental analysis of flow-level data regarding traffic inbound to a network. It is multi-dimensional and flexible, based on up to 21 characteristics describing traffic collected from any single source. The report describes in detail a method developed to provide a probability that a particular traffic sample contains a scan. In validation testing using a manual analysis of traffic collected from a high-volume network, this method correctly classified 99.3% of TCP traffic samples. This report also compares this new approach to other scan approaches, particularly a naive scan approach, based on simple thresholding, and a modified version of the threshold random walk approach, to which it performed comparably. Combining the radom walk approach with the new approach produced very good results, reducing the number of false negatives to zero.


Neighborhood aggregation algorithms like spectral graph convolutional networks (GCNs) formulate graph convolutions as a symmetric Laplacian smoothing operation to aggregate the feature information of one node with that of its neighbors. While they have achieved great success in semi-supervised node classification on graphs, current approaches suffer from the over-smoothing problem when the depth of the neural networks increases, which always leads to a noticeable degradation of performance. To solve this problem, we present graph convolutional ladder-shape networks (GCLN), a novel graph neural network architecture that transmits messages from shallow layers to deeper layers to overcome the over-smoothing problem and dramatically extend the scale of the neural networks with improved performance. We have validated the effectiveness of proposed GCLN at a node-wise level with a semi-supervised task (node classification) and an unsupervised task (node clustering), and at a graph-wise level with graph classification by applying a differentiable pooling operation. The proposed GCLN outperforms original GCNs, deep GCNs and other state-of-the-art GCN-based models for all three tasks, which were designed from various perspectives on six real-world benchmark data sets.


"The Google Story" is the definitive account of one of the most remarkable organizations of our time. Every day over sixty-four million people use Google in more than one hundred languages, running billions of searches for information on everything and anything. Through the creative use of cutting-edge technology and a series of groundbreaking business ideas, Google's thirty-five year old founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have in ten years taken Google from being just another internet start-up to a company with a market value of over US$80 billion. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to the inner workings of Google, this book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company that has become so familiar its name is used as a verb around the world. But even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult challenges in a business that changes at lightning speed. In this new and updated edition to celebrate Google's 10th birthday, David A. Vise has written a new preface and new final chapter which look at further developments since 2005 and how Google will continue to expand and innovate while trying to follow its founders' mantra: Do No Evil. 'If you want to know how the Google boys became wealthy and powerful beyond dreams, then David Vise's assiduously researched "The Google Story" is for you' - "Sunday Telegraph". 'If Google were to take on critical faculties as well as its other attributes Vise's book would probably come out on top' - "The Times".


Abstract. The terrestrial biosphere has experienced dramatic changes in recent decades. Estimates of historical trends in land carbon fluxes remain uncertain because long-term observations are limited on the global scale. Here, we use the Yale Interactive terrestrial Biosphere (YIBs) model to estimate decadal trends in land carbon fluxes and emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) and to identify the key drivers for these changes during 1982–2011. Driven by hourly meteorology from WFDEI (WATCH forcing data methodology applied to ERA-Interim data), the model simulates an increasing trend of 297 Tg C a−2 in gross primary productivity (GPP) and 185 Tg C a−2 in the net primary productivity (NPP). CO2 fertilization is the main driver for the flux changes in forest ecosystems, while meteorology dominates the changes in grasslands and shrublands. Warming boosts summer GPP and NPP at high latitudes, while drought dampens carbon uptake in tropical regions. North of 30° N, increasing temperatures induce a substantial extension of 0.22 day a−1 for the growing season; however, this phenological change alone does not promote regional carbon uptake and BVOC emissions. Nevertheless, increases of leaf area index at peak season accounts for ~ 25 % of the trends in GPP and isoprene emissions at the northern lands. The net land sink shows statistically insignificant increases of only 3 Tg C a−2 globally because of simultaneous increases in soil respiration. Global BVOC emissions are calculated using two schemes. With the photosynthesis-dependent scheme, the model predicts increases of 0.4 Tg C a−2 in isoprene emissions, which are mainly attributed to warming trends because CO2 fertilization and inhibition effects offset each other. Using the MEGAN (Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature) scheme, the YIBs model simulates global reductions of 1.1 Tg C a−2 in isoprene and 0.04 Tg C a−2 in monoterpene emissions in response to the CO2 inhibition effects. Land use change shows limited impacts on global carbon fluxes and BVOC emissions, but there are regional contrasting impacts over Europe (afforestation) and China (deforestation).


Adaptability and advanced services for ambient intelligence require an intelligent technological support for understanding the current needs and the desires of users in the interactions with the environment for their daily use, as well as for understanding the current status of the environment also in complex situations. This infrastructure constitutes an essential base for smart living. Computational intelligence can provide additional flexible techniques for designing and implementing monitoring and control systems, which can be configured from behavioral examples or by mimicking approximate reasoning processes to achieve adaptable systems. This talk will analyze the opportunities offered by computational intelligence to support the realization of adaptable operations and intelligent services for smart living in an ambient intelligent infrastructure.


This article defends the view that Mark's sayings on the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 8:38; 13:24-27; 14:62) refer to Jesus' parousia, against claims made by R. T. France and N. T. Wright. According to France and Wright, these sayings call attention to the vision of Daniel 7:9-14, in which 'one like a son of man' comes into the presence of God for the purpose of enthronement, and point to Jesus' post-mortem vindication, not his second coming. It is argued here that the Markan passages in question link Daniel 7:13 with other Old Testament texts and motifs, in particular, texts (such as Zechariah 14:3) and images about God's future coming to earth; the selective combination of Scriptures and scriptural images and their application to Jesus generates the essential concept of his parousia – his coming as exalted Lord from heaven to earth at the end of history.


Conservation organizations must adapt to respond to the ecological impacts of global change. Numerous changes to conservation actions (eg facilitated ecological transitions, managed relocations, or increased corridor development) have been recommended, but some institutional restructuring within organizations may also be needed. Here we discuss the capacity of conservation organizations to adapt to changing environmental conditions, focusing primarily on public agencies and nonprofits active in land protection and management in the US. After first reviewing how these organizations anticipate and detect impacts affecting target species and ecosystems, we then discuss whether they are sufficiently flexible to prepare and respond by reallocating funding, staff, or other resources. We raise new hypotheses about how the configuration of different organizations enables them to protect particular conservation targets and manage for particular biophysical changes that require coordinated management actions over d...


Nicolas Sarkozy took office as president of France with a broad agenda of sweeping economic reform. Unlike Britain and the United States, both of which began the process of economic liberalization around 1980, France had largely maintained its post-war bipartisan consensus of dirigisme, or relatively tight state control of the economy. As of Sarkozy's 2007 election, France was consistently among the world's most productive economies, but tight labor laws, generous pensions, and reduced working hours drew great criticism for retarding economic growth. In this setting, Sarkozy promised economic modernization while urging his citizens toward hard work and progress: he pledged to restore values of "work, authority, merit, and respect for the nation." His program may have aggravated a number of leftists, but it attracted the support of over 55 percent of French voters. Citizens were keen to match the economic growth of their fellow Western countries, and many expressed concern at the spiraling national debt, which had risen from 20 percent of France's GDP in 1981 to over 60 percent when Sarkozy took office. Yet less than halfway through his term, Sarkozy's original agenda lies largely in tatters. In response to the global economic crisis of 2008, the French people have begun to look to the left. Surprisingly, the main benefactor of this backlash against market capitalism has not been the Socialist Party (PS), the traditional rival of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), but rather the radical politician Olivier Besancenot. Sarkozy's reaction to this development has been to rapidly roll back his plans for modernization in exchange for, essentially, a reaffirmation of dirigisme. Unlike Sarkozy, who is sometimes derided by his rivals as an elitist and a foreigner for being descended from Greek and Hungarian aristocracy, Besancenot's credentials are immaculately French and working-class: he has spent much of his working life as a postman. Sarkozy aided his rise by presenting himself as a youthful, modernizing alternative to the septuagenarian "dinosaurs" who had preceded him. Until Sarkozy took office, the presidency was widely seen as a preserve of elder statesmen who were disconnected from the public. Advocates of these presidents regarded them as wise, but critics accused men such as Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac of being resistant to positive change. Sarkozy's fresh-faced image has now been overtaken by Besancenot, who at 35 is nearly 20 years his junior and is a truly radical leader. Besancenot was for several years the leader of the Revolutionary Communist League, (LCR) a party comprised largely of middle-aged union workers, which supports a definitively Trotskyist ideology. The LCR has historically had minimal electoral success during its existence. Besancenot ran for the presidency in 2007, but attracted less than 5 percent of the vote. This was enough, however, for him to be noticed as a charismatic political figure on the rise. The economic crisis of 2008 presented an opportunity for him to expand the base and ambitions of his movement. In February 2009, Besancenot disbanded the LCR and founded a new party, the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA). …


This thesis sets out to test Lakoff's (1975) hypothesis that women's speech is more polite or tentative than men's through a detailed analysis of the usage, in a sample of contemporary spoken French, of parenthetical remarks (PRs) and the pragmatic particles (PPs) c'est-a-dire, enfin, hein and quoi. PRs and PPs serve both the repair requirements and the social interactional 'face-work' which are characteristic of spontaneous speech. Qualitative and quantitative investigations were conducted on the seventeen-hour corpus of orthographically-transcribed spontaneous speech. The aim of the qualitative analysis was to evaluate the contextual factors which may motivate the use of PRs and PPs. The quantitative analysis, by contrast, set out to measure the distributional frequencies of their usage according to the sex, age and educational background of the speakers. Whilst the detailed exploration of contingent factors such as the social roles adopted by the speakers demonstrates the value of a qualitative account, the fact that it is possible to make generalisable or falsifiable pronouncements on the basis of results found to be statistically significant in the data legitimises the adoption of a quantitative account. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses presume a prior sub-categorisation of the pragmatic usages of the linguistic item under investigation. The thesis arrives at the conclusion that, if men's and women's usage of PRs and PPs differs in the corpus, the asymmetry lies not in the degree of tentativeness displayed but rather in the use made of such expressions to introduce explanatory ramification and to mediate repair, both of which are favoured to a greater extent by the male speakers in our corpus. If the female speakers display greater politeness, it lies in their more adroit usage of the PPs to structure discourse and to maintain contact with their interlocutor.


This double blind, randomised, placebo controlled study investigated the efficacy of ProgestoNat® cream in the treatment of menopausal syndrome in terms of subjective and objective data. Menopause is defined as that point in time when permanent cessation of menstruation occurs following the loss of ovarian follicular activity. The perimenopause is the period just prior to the final menstrual period and is associated with the development of typical oestrogen deficiency symptoms such as hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings and loss of libido, to mention a few. The most widely used treatment for these symptoms is hormone replacement therapy. This form of treatment is effective for many women, but there are many risks and side effects associated with its use and there is a growing demand for natural alternatives, like natural progesterone creams. It is for this reason that the efficacy of ProgestoNat® cream was investigated as a natural alternative to hormone replacement therapy.


This most widely used textbook in the field has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect changes in the health care industry and the renewed focus on health care information technology initiatives. Two new chapters cover Federal efforts to enhance quality of patient care through the use of health care information technology and strategy considerations. Additionally, reflecting the increased focus on global health, the book features an international perspective on health care information technology. Case studies of organizations experiencing management-related information system challenges have been updated and several new cases have been added. These reality-based cases are designed to stimulate discussion among students and enable them to apply concepts in the book to real-life scenarios. The book's companion Web site features lecture slides, a test bank, and other materials to enhance students' understanding.


Query personalization is the process of dynamically enhancing a query with related user preferences stored in a user profile with the aim of providing personalized answers. The underlying idea is that different users may find different things relevant to a search due to different preferences. Essential ingredients of query personalization are: (a) a model for representing and storing preferences in user profiles, and (b) algorithms for the generation of personalized answers using stored preferences. Modeling the plethora of preference types is a challenge. In this paper, we present a preference model that combines expressivity and concision. In addition, we provide efficient algorithms for the selection of preferences related to a query, and an algorithm for the progressive generation of personalized results, which are ranked based on user interest. Several classes of ranking functions are provided for this purpose. We present results of experiments both synthetic and with real users (a) demonstrating the efficiency of our algorithms, (b) showing the benefits of query personalization, and (c) providing insight as to the appropriateness of the proposed ranking functions.


As large repositories of 3D shape collections continue to grow, understanding the data, especially encoding the inter-model similarity and their variations, is of central importance. For example, many data-driven approaches now rely on access to semantic segmentation information, accurate inter-model point-to-point correspondence, and deformation models that characterize the model collections. Existing approaches, however, are either supervised requiring manual labeling; or employ super-linear matching algorithms and thus are unsuited for analyzing large collections spanning many thousands of models. We propose an automatic algorithm that starts with an initial template model and then jointly optimizes for part segmentation, point-to-point surface correspondence, and a compact deformation model to best explain the input model collection. As output, the algorithm produces a set of probabilistic part-based templates that groups the original models into clusters of models capturing their styles and variations. We evaluate our algorithm on several standard datasets and demonstrate its scalability by analyzing much larger collections of up to thousands of shapes.


The purpouse of this work is to introduce the new patented Hygrobrid technology for moisture variable control layers. The new variable membrane has directional permeability capabilities. The tecnology ensures better safety for every construction even when the moisture levels are high during construction phase and also when the structure is subjected to extreme moisture during use. The technology minimises moisture development within the structure and maximises moisture transport out of the structure. This work is presenting the performance difference between first, second and third generation moisture variable membranes based on the computer simulation.


The degree to which lower–income residents are displaced by the process of gentrification has been the subject of considerable debate. Displacement is generally framed as a possible, and potentially remediable, outcome of gentrification. This portrayal of the link between gentrification and displacement is problematic, though, because gentrification can proceed without substantial displacement, while displacement frequently occurs in the absence of gentrification. In this article, I use a historical case study to examine the link between displacement and gentrification. Drawing on archival research and media accounts of redevelopment over the course of 50 years in Wichita, Kansas, I demonstrate how a displacement–first strategy has characterized all attempts to transform the city's "skid row" into the hub of a gentrified downtown core, and I describe how, despite widespread displacement, the gentrification of downtown Wichita has been largely unsuccessful. I discuss the implications of these findings for sociological theories of gentrification and displacement.


At the outset, this article describes in detail how the European Union has replaced the nation-state concept of equality with a transnational idea of equality for all European citizens. It then investigates the extent to which German respondents support the idea of non-discrimination between German nationals and other Europeans. The existing literature argues that the process of opening up the borders of the nation-states will challenge the traditional symbolic code of equality held by citizens, and impact negatively on the existing distribution of resources. In particular, those people who lack economic resources and hold more traditional or right wing political orientations are likely to oppose the notion of Europe-wide equality. However, the empirical results show that the majority of the German population supports the idea that citizens from other European countries should enjoy the same rights as nationals. Most of this paper's hypotheses are either falsified or correlations are rather weak, and these findings bring us to the conclusion that, at least as far as the German population is concerned, there is no evidence for a strong socio-structural or value-orientated cleavage with regard to equal rights for all Europeans.


Youth clothing and exchange shape cosmopolitan identities, the city, and global flows in Dakar, Senegal. How Dakarois youth use dress to shape the city and urban identity is puzzling. Despite the declining economy and for many, extreme poverty, youth dress up in stylish and provocative outfits. In Dakar, youth are increasingly entrepreneurial individuals who base the authenticity of their cosmopolitan identity on an ability to buy and sell (trade) in the urban/global informal economy. Because the informal economy is intensely competitive for both buyers and sellers, youth rely on social networks, various forms of reciprocity, and trust in order to perform their work. At times, youth engage in dishonest acts and banditry in order to sell and procure clothing. These strategies highlight the uncertainty of life in Dakar, the relativity of morality, and the creativity that youth employ to make their lives and a life for the city. In these often hidden and subtle ways, youth steer the economic cultural life of the city and keep it hooked in to the global economy. This research is based on fieldwork conducted in Dakar and New York City between 1996 and 2005. Research methods include interviews, participant observation, focus groups and engaging youth in authoring informal fashion magazines which feature their own photography and stories about contemporary clothing trends in Dakar.


Southernists might well re-elevate the life and work of Blyden Jackson to its rightful place. However distant the exploration away from home, his life has remained rooted in the land. Born in Paducah, Kentucky on October 12, 1910, he earned the bachelor's degree (1930) at Wilberforce University. Eight years later (1938), he took the Master's at The University of Michigan, and fourteen years afterwards (1952), the Ph.D. there as well. Though his years at Madison Jr. High school in Kentucky (1934-45) temporarily deferred him, he rededicated himself to the enhancement of teaching and scholarship in higher education. He began at predominantly Black institutions. Once an Assistant and Associate Professor of English at Fisk University (1945-54), he later served as Professor of English at Southern (1954-56). During his last years there, he was Dean of the Graduate School. Subsequently he became Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969-73) as well as a Special Assistant (1973-81) to the Dean of the Graduate School. For over forty years, he has contributed invaluably to public life. Formerly the Vice-President for the Louisville Association for Teachers in Colored Schools (1940-42), he later served as the President there. After the advance into higher education, he became the Vice-President of the College Language Association (CLA, 1955-57), which was then the official voice of Black American literary history and remains even today a self-revitalizing institution. Following his years as President of CLA (1957-59), he became Vice-President (1968-69) for the Southern Association of State University and Land Grant Colleges. The Chair for the English Section of NCTE (1972-74), he participated as well (1973-76) in the Committee on Academic Affairs for the American Council on Education. Almost concurrently (1974), he became a member of the Post-Secondary Task Force for the same body. Recently he has served in the Delegate Assembly for the Modern Language Association (1973-76) and been active in the Study of Afro-American Life and History. Whatever his public accomplishments, his sensitive essays are perhaps his most significant contributions to scholarship. Written over a period of nearly four decades, the studies range from the mid-1940s to the present. As polished narratives in literary history (such as Black Poetry in America, coauthored with Louis D. Rubin, Jr., LSU, 1974), the essays reveal a scholarly method for the critical evaluation of Afro-American writing. While the posture is often self-effacing, it is sometimes explicit as well. The Waiting Years (LSU, 1976), Jackson's collected works, emerges as both a public and private communion. A revealing artifact, it displaces monolithic illusions about Southern Literature and culture. First one must extrapolate Blyden Jackson's applied theory of literature. For Jackson, in the world of absolute truths, Black ("Negro") critics must improve racial standards as well as integration. (1) They must maintain compassion and integrity. Though they must address both the racial and the universal, the latter ought to receive emphasis. The artist must transcend. An outward movement signifies "honest racism" rather than "false racism," but social protest bolsters a Black literary tradition. (2) At issue is color caste. Jackson feels that Countee Culten opposed it well but failed in self-knowledge and in intellectual depth. He could not, at once, be true to both himself and his art. The poet parallels the critic, for great criticism is an art in itself. It is an art, moreover, with the direct social bearing imperative for art now, "for the complete critic must have, not only a feeling for art as art, but also a sense of history ... a creative philosophy, not merely for the future but for the present.... He must have, also, the integrity that comes from the capacity to live ..." (pp. 61-62). The critic, like the artist, responds to his environment. …


The rate coefficients of the CHF2CHFCHF2 (HFC-245ea) + OH reaction were computed using G3B3 theory in the temperature range 200 and 400 K. Geometries were optimized for all reactants, transition states, and products at the B3LYP level of theory using 6-31G* and 6-311++G** basis sets. Three rotamers (R1, R2, and R3) of CHF2CHFCHF2 were identified using a potential energy surface scan. Thirteen independent transition states were identified and confirmed by intrinsic reaction coordinate calculations. The kinetic parameters due to all different transition states are presented in this paper. All the three rotamers were taken into account in computing the rate coefficients. Throughout the temperature range of this study, rotamer R3 contributes significantly (more than 90%), whereas the other two rotamers R1 and R2 contribute less to the total rate coefficient. The rate coefficients for the title reaction were computed to be k = (1.86 ± 0.17) × 10−13 exp[−(748±26)/T] cm3 molecule−1s−1 and (1.25 ± 0.23) × 10−13 exp[−(587±50)/T] cm3molecule−1 s−1 with Wigner's and Eckart's unsymmetrical tunneling methods, respectively, and they are in reasonable agreement with the experimentally measured ones. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Chem Kinet 43: 418–430, 2011


Abstract:The paper is devoted to the presentation of Chwistek's philosophical ideas concerning logic and mathematics. The main feature of his philosophy was nominalism, which found full expression in his philosophy of mathematics. He claimed that the object of the deductive sciences, hence in particular of mathematics, is the expression being constructed in them according to accepted rules of construction. He treated geometry, arithmetic, mathematical analysis and other mathematical theories as experimental disciplines, and obtained in this way a nominalistic interpretation of them. The fate of Chwistek's philosophical conceptions was similar to the fate of his logical conceptions. The system of rational meta-mathematics was not developed by him in detail. He worked on his own ideas without any collaboration with other logicians, mathematicians or philosophers. His investigations were not in the mainstream of the development of logic and philosophy of mathematics.