BACKGROUND
 A key challenge for health systems harnessing digital tools and services is that of digital inclusion. Typically, digital inequalities are conceptualized in relation to unequal access or usage. However, these differences do not fully explain differences in health behavior as a result of health-related internet use.

 OBJECTIVE
 Our objective was to derive a new typology of health internet users based on their antecedent motivations and enablers, to explain how individuals' different orientations influence their health behavior.

 METHODS
 We used a mixed-methods design using (1) qualitative data from 43 semistructured interviews about individuals' general and health-related internet use, and how this influenced their health perception and their help-seeking decisions, and (2) quantitative data from the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS), a household survey of 2150 adults in England about their internet use and other characteristics. We used the interview data to identify constructs that described motivations and enablers affecting how internet use shaped respondents' health perception and health service use. We then used these constructs to identify variables in OxIS, which provided a quantitative measure of these constructs. We then undertook a hierarchical cluster analysis of these constructs, using the numerical variables, to derive a proposed typology of health information seekers.

 RESULTS
 Both the qualitative findings and the subsequent cluster analysis suggested the existence of 6 types of individuals, categorized as learners, pragmatists, skeptics, worriers, delegators, and adigitals. Learners had a strong desire to understand health better. They used the internet to make decisions about whether they needed to see a professional and to learn about their and others' health. Pragmatists primarily used the internet to decide whether seeing a doctor was worthwhile. Skeptics were skeptical of physicians and the medical system and valued the internet for solving health problems that doctors may not be able to deal with. Worriers found it difficult to interpret health information online, described health information seeking online as frightening, and reported a critical attitude toward online health information despite seeking it frequently. Delegators comprised nonusers and users valuing the internet as an information source, but not necessarily wanting or being able to use the internet themselves. Adigitals comprised many nonusers, but also users, who did not see the internet as a useful information tool and presented strong views on its low suitability for health care.

 CONCLUSIONS
 This research supports a shift in the understanding of the digital divide in health, away from only access and usage issues, toward also conceptualizing an outcomes divide, whereby different types of health behavior result from the differing orientations of internet users accessing online health information. This new typology can be used to inform digital inclusion policies in health systems.


This paper describes the process followed by the UCSC School of Engineering in order to redesign its five engineering programs using a CDIO-based approach. The redesigned programs were the Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, Logistics Engineering and Aquacultural Biotechnology Engineering programs. First, we present the motivations behind this work, namely, the desire to update the curricula so as to incorporate novel teaching and learning methodologies, and to improve our performance indicators. Next, we explain the UCSC ethos, its pedagogical model and the CDIO approach that together frame our curriculum design process. Then, the different stages of this process are presented and described at length. We then present several results from the Conceive and Design phases of the CDIO approach. These results also include reports from pilot Active Learning experiences and Service Learning experiences. Our curriculum design process started in 2008, and to date we have completed the Conceive and Design phases of the CDIO approach, with the Implementation phase starting this year. This has been a slow and laborious, but ultimately very rewarding, process. The main working team members had no previous experience with curriculum design, nor were they familiarized with currently engineering education trends. A Chilean MECESUP government grant allowed team members to visit leading innovative engineering schools, and also financed workshops for local faculty by well-known international experts. Our experiences to date and the growing involvement of early adopters and other faculty members show promise, and lead us to hope for a sea change in institutional mores by instilling the culture of continuous improvement in the educational process.


Abstract The disciplining of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) by the WTO has been 'relaxed' recently as a result of the new context (the Transparency Mechanism) within which notified PTAs are being multilaterally reviewed. This is probably a blessing for a number of reasons, including the success of the multilateral trading system in bringing tariffs down over the years (and the ensuing reduced trade diversion), the fact that modern PTAs deal with many non-trade issues as well (for which no WTO disciplines exist), and the recent empirical literature suggesting overall positive welfare implications for those participating in similar schemes. This paper discusses these and other reasons to support the view that the WTO should rather focus on the multilateral agenda instead of diverting its attention towards disciplining PTAs. In more concrete terms, this paper argues in support of the thesis that the Transparency Mechanism should not be simply a de facto substitute of the previous regime (where outlawing a PTA could not a priori be excluded), but the de jure new forum to discuss PTAs within the multilateral trading system, at least for the time being. A first do-no-harm-policy is one of the rationales for the thesis advocated here.


This paper investigates how Muslims living in Brisbane live within their current Australian homes and the liveability and adaptability of these homes from the perspective of home dwellers with respect to their Islamic faiths, cultural traditions and lifestyle. A qualitative case study approach was used to gather information about Muslims' use of domestic spaces through their lived experiences, within an Australian context. Six participants were interviewed, including:

a) three Muslim families residing in one suburb of Brisbane, and;

b) three international Muslim students living in three different Brisbane suburbs.

These cases indicate that apart from minor difficulties, case study participants were able to perform their daily activities within their current homes through various adaptations made to ensure their respective domestic domains provided their families with privacy and a sense of security and safety. Insight gained from these cases suggest the need for more research into the homes of Muslims homes within an Australian context and the development of culturally adaptable housing as a means of meeting the diverse needs of modern Australian multicultural society.


Ordinal classification refers to classification problems in which the classes have a natural order imposed on them because of the nature of the concept studied. Some ordinal classification approaches perform a projection from the input space to one-dimensional (latent) space that is partitioned into a sequence of intervals (one for each class). Class identity of a novel input pattern is then decided based on the interval its projection falls into. This projection is trained only indirectly as part of the overall model fitting. As with any other latent model fitting, direct construction hints one may have about the desired form of the latent model can prove very useful for obtaining high-quality models. The key idea of this letter is to construct such a projection model directly, using insights about the class distribution obtained from pairwise distance calculations. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated with 8 nominal and ordinal classifiers methods, 10 real-world ordinal classification data sets, and 4 different performance measures. The new methodology obtained the best results in average ranking when considering three of the performance metrics, although significant differences are found for only some of the methods. Also, after observing other methods of internal behavior in the latent space, we conclude that the internal projections do not fully reflect the intraclass behavior of the patterns. Our method is intrinsically simple, intuitive, and easily understandable, yet highly competitive with state-of-the-art approaches to ordinal classification.


The biosorption of Cr (III), Zn (II) and Ni (II) ions from aqueous solution by dead blue algal biomass (Cyanophyta) was investigated in single metal system and batch conditions. Experimental parameters included contact time (0-140 min), pH (2-8), sorbent dose (0.1-2.0 g), initial concentrations (10-120 mg/L), agitation speeds (50-300 rpm) and temperatures (298-232K) were investigated. The best values of pH were found 4 for Cr, Zn and 5 for Ni, respectively. The biosorption process was relatively fast and equilibrium established after 90 min. Equilibrium isotherm experiments data were analyzed by Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models and Langmuir isotherms gives the best fit to the experimental data. Biosorption kinetic models were used for the single metal system using the dead blue algal biomass, good matching was found between pseudo second order kinetic model and experimental data for Cr (III), Zn (II), and Ni (II) ions systems. Thermodynamic parameters included G; H and S during the process were calculated, the results show that the biosorption process applied to remove Cr (III), Zn (II) and Ni (II) ions using blue algal biomass (Cyanophyta) is feasible, spontaneous and exothermic at 10 – 30 °C. The results indicated that blue algal biomass (Cyanophyta) could be used as a good sorbent for treatment of industrial effluents containing Cr (III), Zn (II) and Ni (II) ions in single metal system.


Modern American tax policy is in a state of disarray. Although conservatives are not solely to blame, their anti-tax campaigns bear a heavy responsibility for this situation. It is not that they fail to discuss issues; to the contrary they, raise important questions, such as the proper distribution of tax burdens, the relationship of taxation to economic growth, and especially the connection between taxing and spending — an issue that liberals often ignore. Rather, the problem is they consistently wrap their arguments in the American flag. Americans are especially susceptible to this technique given the country's long history of anti-tax sentiment that dates back to the founding of the nation. Consequently, conservatives' century-long campaign linking seemingly objective economic arguments for low (or no) taxation to American democracy have forced tax debates into a highly emotional, patriotic framework that impedes coherent debate and limits the range of politically feasible options.My paper illustrates the consistency of conservative tax arguments — substance, style, and method — by examining conservative campaigns between 1924 and 1936 that linked opposition to a soldiers' bonus to a reduction in taxes. These campaigns are especially interesting to examine because the time period in which they occurred bears several important similarities to present times. The economic conditions during the Depression present obvious similarities to current times, but other important similarities make this a useful period of comparison. Like today, the growth of government, especially at the federal level, during this period strengthened conservative fears of unconstitutional expansion of the central government and the consequent weakening of American democracy and the sapping of American character. Like today, conservatives saw taxation as a key factor in this crisis. Since taxes funded expanded government functions, cutting taxes would help shrink government.Finally, although lobbying is co-existent with government, modern, media-driven sell-the-candidate (or policy) campaigns first matured in this era. In both eras the development of new mass media invigorated the marketplace of ideas even as the increased knowledge about human behavior enhanced opportunities to manipulate public opinion. This is especially true for grassroots organizations that frequently present themselves to the public as broadly-supported civic groups providing neutral educational information whereas, in fact, it is a small (often wealthy) number of individuals and/or companies trying to influence the public to adopt their self-interested viewpoint.


This paper explains why electronic broadcasting devices, including both video and audio, should be standard equipment in any courtroom given that newspaper readership is declining sharply and newspapers are cutting staff. The public now looks to so-called reality courts such as Judge Judy for how the legal system operates. It begins with an introduction discussing what many consider the trial that quashed momentum on broadcasting court proceedings: the O.J. Simpson trial. The article then considers a brief legal history of cameras in the courts, recent legislation on the topic, and arguments against cameras in the courts, including why those arguments fail. It concludes with the rationales for why broadcasting court proceedings is important to the public interest.


Abstract. An externalised surface scheme like SURFEX allows computationally cheap offline runs. This is a major advantage for surface assimilation techniques such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF), where the offline runs allow a cheaper numerical estimation of the observation operator Jacobian. In the recent past an EKF has been developed within SURFEX for the initialisation of soil water content and soil temperature based on screen-level temperature and relative humidity observations. In this paper we make a comparison of the Jacobian calculated with offline SURFEX runs and with runs coupled to the atmospheric ALARO model. Comparisons are made with respect to spatial structure and average value of the Jacobian, gain values and increments. We determine the optimal perturbation size of the Jacobian for the offline and coupled approaches and compare the linearity of the Jacobian for these cases. Results show that the offline Jacobian approach gives similar results to the coupled approach and that it allows for smaller perturbation sizes that better approximate this linearity assumption. We document a new case of non-linearities that can hamper this linearity assumption and cause spurious 2Δ t oscillations in small parts of the domain for the coupled as well as offline runs. While these oscillations do not have a detrimental effect on the model run, they can introduce some noise in the Jacobian at the affected locations. The oscillations influence both the surface fluxes and the screen-level variables. The oscillations occur in the late afternoon in summer when a stable boundary layer starts to form near the surface. We propose a filter to remove the oscillations and show that this filter works accordingly.


The special objective and scope of this paper is to highlight the different higher education perspectives to inspire confidence in students that will lead them to professionalism. Nurturing learners' curiosity is one of the most important ways to help them become a lifelong learner. Encouraging them with intellectually stimulating questions can actually help develop their thoughts, ideas and ideologies. Creating an interesting learning environment will guide them towards developing
creative problem solving skills and higher education is an approach to maintain overall wellbeing of society. Application of an appropriate, positive attitude keeps
professional work in proper perspective and it is a way to greater personal, social and business success. It is important to develop interesting high impact higher education to inspire, motivate, energize and empower the younger generation to bring about a remarkable change in various spheres to transform the society. The upgradation
of specialized knowledge and skills of university teachers is required in finetuning their teaching skills to deliver lively, energetic and dynamic teaching. The most enduring impact of higher education depends on the extent to which this will lead to the unlocking of people's potential and raise their self-confidence to a higher level. It requires a collective effort in several sectors to create new awareness across the world that eventually leads to scientific, technological and economic progress. A
centralized system to collect and analyze information about actual research conditions in various public and private organizations and then build scientific manpower
and technically qualified human resources on those intricate details is essential to make significant contribution in their area of expertise. There is a need for decentralized decision making at higher educational institutions and universities without any political interference and following certain centralized norms to reignite the fire of higher education reforms. An insider's insights is needed for effective and comprehensive higher education policy making and implementing the globally established education practices will lead to strategic achievement.


Percoll-purified rat liver mitochondria were shown to contain BAX dimer and rapidly (<2 min) release 5-10% of their cytochrome c when incubated in a standard KCl incubation medium under energized conditions. This release was not accompanied by release of adenylate kinase (AK), another intermembrane protein, and was not inhibited by Mg(2+), dATP, inhibitors of the permeability transition or ligands of the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor. However, release was greatly reduced by the presence of 5% (w/v) dextran (40 kDa), which caused a decrease in the light scattering (A(520)) of mitochondrial suspensions. Dextran also inhibited both mitochondrial oxidation of exogenous ferrocytochrome c in the presence of rotenone and antimycin, and respiratory-chain-driven reduction of exogenous ferricytochrome c. Hypo-osmotic medium or digitonin treatment of mitochondria caused a large additional release of both cytochrome c and AK that was not blocked by dextran. Polyaspartate, which stabilizes the low conductance state of the voltage-dependent anion channel (VDAC), increased cytochrome c release. VDAC and BAX are both found at the contact sites between the inner and outer membranes and dextran is known to stabilize these contact sites in isolated mitochondria. Thus our data suggest that regulation of a specific permeability pathway for cytochrome c may be mediated by changes in protein-protein interactions within contact sites. The adenine nucleotide translocase is known to bind to VDAC and thus provides an additional link between the specific cytochrome c release pathway and the permeability transition.


The emergence of community cohesion as a British policy priority has represented a discursive shift in approaches to race relations, the emphasis on ethnic diversity downplayed in favour of commonality, shared values and the promotion of national identity. Central to community cohesion has been a focus on 'contact' as a way of overcoming 'parallel lives', and the need for communities to take responsibility within processes of contact and dialogue. The political focus, echoing past assimilationist discourses, has been on an alleged lack of integration on the part of Muslims; by contrast little attention is paid to how white working class young people view the contact central to cohesion strategies. This paper draws on case study evidence from Oldham and Rochdale, Greater Manchester to interpret the limited support the young white respondents have for cross-ethnic contact, and the relevance of class experience to these views.


The regeneration of the paracrystalline proteinaceous cell wall (S layer) of the methanogen Methanococcus voltae was examined by electron microscopy. The S layer was removed from the cell surface by exposing the cells to a protoplasting buffer but was completely regenerated by 60-80 min resuspension in a regeneration medium by some repair mechanism (normal cell generation time is 16 h). The protoplast surface appeared in freeze-fracture to be initially smooth and featureless and remained so for the first 20 min in regeneration medium. Thereafter, nascent S layer appeared on the surface in the form of paracrystalline patches of various sizes that were distributed over the entire surface. The patches were closely associated with disturbances of the cell surface curvature which may have been caused by electrostatic interactions. The steps leading to the complete regeneration of the S layer could not be followed due to the sampling times used, but presumably the patches grew large enough to contact neighbouring patches and somehow fused into a coherent layer. Other ultrastructural changes occurred to the cell envelope during S layer regeneration, most notably the recurrence of the intramembrane particles of the concave fracture face of the plasma membrane. Flagella remained attached to the protoplasts and were apparently still functional. The major changes to the protein profile of untreated cells, protoplasts and regenerating protoplasts included the loss and resynthesis of polypeptides at the 76 kDa (S layer polypeptide) and 60 kDa (unknown polypeptide) positions. SDS-PAGE evidence indicated that new S layer polypeptides were synthesized 20 min prior to their appearance as patches on the cell surface. The S layer polypeptide may have been shed from the surface during the early stages of regeneration to form the extracellular sheet-like material observed in large quantity in the regeneration medium. The response of the cell to changes that occur at the cell surface indicates that some feedback mechanism gears the synthesis of S layer and associated envelope components.


At the end of the nineties the emergence of high resolution (1 m) digital elevation models (DEMs) settled the context of high precision geomorphological analysis. These new elevation models permitted to reveal structures that remained heretofore undetectable. Earth scientists henceforth benefit from a field of analysis with a textural richness that was never attained before. However, the complexity and the volume of the data reveal a series of questions and problems. The storage size has increased, the computational processes have become heavier, and the visual or digital interpretation has become more complex. Moreover, these new models make it possible to characterize and analyse much smaller phenomena than previously. "Traditional" DEMs with resolutions ranging from 10 m to 90 m can be used to analyse a valley or a hillside. Transposed to a cartographic scale, this corresponds at best to a 1 : 25 000 ratio. As for high resolution DEMs, they show much more detailed structural levels and can be used to analyse geomorphological features of 2 – 3 meters, this corresponding to scales ranging from 1 : 10 000 to 1 : 1 000. Yet, in the abundance offered by this growing resolution, large geomorphological structures are still present, including the finer structures. They are even the actuators of processes relevant to larger cartographic scales. Consequently, high resolution DEMs contain a multitude of structures, which exist throughout their interactions with other structures at other scales. This is the context of the present study. Geomorphometry – the quantitative counterpart of exploratory geomorphology – permits to explore and quantify a wide range of shapes and terrain indicators. At higher resolution however, the methods of this discipline can hardly be used. Geomorphometrical methods are based on a geometric model (a quadratic surface) and few of these methods can be applied it in a multiscale context. Furthermore inappropriate techniques are frequently used, hence the idea to move to a multiscale approach called the wavelet transform. The latter had previously been explored by few researchers within the geomorphometry community, but never thoroughly to micro- and to mesoscales. Due to the non-stationarity of DEMs, the wavelet transform was preferred to the Fourier transform in order to decompose DEMs into multiscale spaces. This facilitates a coherent navigation from scale to scale, but also makes new scale specific phenomena emerge for different frequencies. The wavelet transform is a technique widely used in image analysis. It allows decomposing a signal according to its frequency components, but also according to the position of the frequencies in the signal. Its multi-scale capacity is an effective analytical tool in multiple domains. More particularly in geomorphology, structural components – specific to a specific phenomenon – are well determined in these sub-spaces specific to the scale continuum. Finally an in-depth analysis of the phenomena enabled us to understand processes and their and their phenomenological inter-dependencies. In order to understand the effects and outcomes of the approach we developed an artificial landslide. We then computed some profiles and analysed the autocorrelation, slope attenuation and local fractal indicator. The resulting high-pass information of the wavelet transform has also been analysed and filtered using several types of filters. In a case study we used a real-world landslide to validate the transform and to understand its impact on geological structures. Within this case-study we conducted a web-based survey that allowed the participants to analyse the landslide using wavelet results and to make comments on the potential of the wavelet transform in the field of geomorphometry. Moreover, important contributions of this thesis are new algorithms that allow the illustration of the structural coherence in relation to each subspace. These are based on the theory of vision of Marr and on structure tensors. The results of our studies show a high consistency. The wavelet transform thereby extends the range of tools in geomorphometry. The different structural scale levels show that such these methods are needed to better understand the phenomenology of geomorphological processes.


We have measured erosion rates using 10 Be from bare-bedrock surfaces exposed at high elevations at Dolly Sods, West Virginia, a classic Appalachian paleoperiglacial plateau. The mean erosion rate from nine samples is 5.7 m/m.y., signifi cantly lower than previously estimated periglacial erosion rates in this region. Measured bare-bedrock erosion rates likely represent the rate at which the highest portions of this broad upland are being lowered. Fluvial incision rates measured in the region over similar time scales are ≥2 times faster, suggesting relief is increasing in this portion of the Appalachians. This observation of increasing relief is inconsistent with prior work suggesting that the central Appalachian landscape is in dynamic equilibrium or currently decreasing in relief. We hypothesize that late Cenozoic climate change has accelerated fl uvial incision rates, creating a disequilibrium landscape with growing relief with hillslopes undergoing adjustment to increased fl uvial incision rates.


The purpose of this study was to determine the best dose interaction and liquid organic fertilizer and compost rind cocoa to the growth of oil palm seedlings in Main nursery. The research was conducted from September 2014 to January 2015. The research was conducted using a completely randomized design consisting of two factors and three replications. The first factor is the provision of liquid organic reeds fertilizer with 4 dose level consisting (0, 50, 75 and 100 ml / 1 liter of water. The second factor is the provision of compost rind cocoa with 4 dose level consisting (0, 50, 100 and 150 g / 8 kg soil (37.5 tons / ha). Data were analyzed using analysis of variance followed by a further test DNMRT at 5% level. Parameters measured were high increment, in the number of leaves, tubers circumference, crown root ratio and seedling dry weight. The results showed that administration of a liquid organic fertilizer 50 ml / l and compost rind cocoa 150 g / polybag, showed increased growth of oil palm seedlings to the seedling height parameters, number of leaves, dry weight of seedlings and did not show an increase in the circumference hump and the ratio of the root crown Keywords : oil palm, liquid organic fertilizer, compost rind cocoa


"The proposition that it is land registration, which determines accessibility to formal credit for investment is common knowledge. Such a proposition is premised on the argument that land registration enables owners of registered landed property to use their property as collateral for loans from financial institutions. A sequel to these arguments are the assertions that: (a) western nations are highly capitalised and developed due to the fact that they have comprehensive land registration systems; and (b) high level of poverty and underdevelopment exits in third world countries because it is an infinitesimal proportion of landed property ownership that is registered, which it is argued, impedes the ability of owners to use their property as collateral to access formal capital for investment and wealth creation. Based on the preceding commonly held views, developing countries, backed by international donor institutions like the World Bank, have been religiously pursuing land registration policies and programmes over the years. However, despite many years of the implementation of land registration programmes, poverty and underdevelopment still exists in pandemic proportions in the third world. Considering Africa, for example, research conducted by the World Bank in 2007 shows that the region is a critical development priority since it has some of the world's poorest countries and during the past two decades, the number of poor people in the continent has doubled to 300 million, which is more than 40 percent of the continent's population. It is against this background that this paper examines the extent to which land registration guarantees access to investment capital. It seeks to report the findings of a pilot research project, which is surveying five financial institutions n three in Ghana, a developing country and two in Britain, a developed country. The survey is currently in progress and will be completed in due course.""


The aim of this work was to study the removal of three pesticides using conventional drinking water treatment (DWT) processes. These methods are the most used in Brazil, and include coagulation–flocculation of water. The pesticides/metabolites evaluated were: endosulfan, ethylenethiourea (ETU), and 1,2,4-triazole. The laboratory tests were carried out in triplicate using the jar test. Synthetic water samples prepared with kaolin, simulating the dry and rainy periods, were contaminated with different concentrations of pesticides. Results showed that conventional DWT methods are not suitable for the removal of the pesticides/metabolites evaluated. No significant difference ( p K oc , log K ow and molar mass, in relation to the other two pesticides.


Complete or partially edentulous patients with a skeletal class II skeletal jaw relationship due to a skeletal etiology comprise approximately 15% of the population with the two largest sub-categories being high and low FMA groups. Occlusal relationships in skeletal class II patients are often challenging because of arch size discrepancies which limits the potential occlusal contact area, steep guidance factors which can introduce occlusal interferences, and excessive range of motion which can complicate centric relation records. FMA determination provides a structure-function basis in selecting a scheme for occlusal reconstruction and should be incorporated in the treatment planning procedure as a major adjunctive diagnostic tool. The following treatise provides background information and treatment guidelines to facilitate improved prosthetic treatment for partially and completely edentulous skeletal class II patients.


textabstractThe overarching goal of this dissertation is to study the role of consumer effort within the context of online decision making. We show that consumer effort may not be necessarily malevolent and that some sources and measures of greater consumer effort can lead to beneficial outcomes. A better understanding of the role of consumer effort may help firms to evaluate their investments in reducing consumer effort and justify the cost associated with implementing such strategies. First, we suggest that user effort reduction can be beneficial when it concerns the size of the content of the information but not when it regards the involvement of users in the process of getting the information. These opposing effects can be attributed to the mediating role of content learning. Second, we use the complexity of the composition of the recommended choice set as a source of consumer effort and we propose that greater complexity (through increasing consumer effort) increases objective consumer knowledge due to greater required cognitive elaboration but decreases choice confidence and subjective product knowledge. We validate that these effects on product knowledge are managerially meaningful due to their positive effect on website conversion and consumer willingness to pay. In the third study, we examine the role of time as a measure of consumer effort in the context of online product recommendations. We distinguish between consumer inspection time-based effort at the choice set and at the product-level and suggest that whereas in the first case, inspection time decreases website conversion, at the product level, greater inspection time has the opposite effect due to the different antecedents. Accordingly we suggest improvements on the composition of the recommended choice sets in a way that the allocation of consumers' time spent is effectively balanced.


This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a computer vision task on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). As an experimental approach for an application-specific image-processing problem, it provides results about gained performance and precision compared with similar solutions on General Purpose Processor (GPP) architectures. The problem of detecting Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) in a continuous video stream and computation of their center points has been addressed. Most existing solutions are realized on GPP platforms, where resolution of image material and sequential processing define the performance barrier. FPGA based approaches perform implemented algorithms as fast as hardware circuits and in addition offer parallelization abilities. The evaluation compares precision and performance gain against similar approaches on GPP platforms. The paper discusses different concepts for BLOB detection and shows the implementation of one common method for BLOB detection, including design problems and performance evaluation.


This paper proposes a model based on gene expression programming for predicting discharge coefficient of triangular labyrinth weirs. The parameters influencing discharge coefficient prediction were first examined and presented as crest height ratio to the head over the crest of the weir (p/y), crest length of water to channel width (L/W), crest length of water to the head over the crest of the weir (L/y), Froude number (F=V/√(gy)) and vertex angle () dimensionless parameters. Different models were then presented using sensitivity analysis in order to examine each of the dimensionless parameters presented in this study. In addition, an equation was presented through the use of nonlinear regression (NLR) for the purpose of comparison with GEP. The results of the studies conducted by using different statistical indexes indicated that GEP is more capable than NLR. This is to the extent that GEP predicts the discharge coefficient with an average relative error of approximately 2.5% in such a manner that the predicted values have less than 5% relative error in the worst model.


This work describes the ongoing analysis of blood noninvasively in vivo along with the in vitro validation of the algorithm. The blood is taken as two components, red blood cells and plasma, both of which cause elastic emission (from Mie and Rayleigh scattering) and inelastic emission (from fluorescence and Raman emission). The algorithm describes the linear dependence of the volume fractions of both red blood cells and plasma with both the elastic and inelastic emissions where the two equations are independent. These equations are used to calculate the Hematocrit which is defined as the volume fraction of red blood cells in the total volume of blood. We believe that monitoring changes in the Hematocrit with sufficient sensitivity could give information about many physiological parameters including an early indication for internal hemorrhaging. The stability of the baseline was analyzed in 10 test subjects across 29 experiments including over 8 million frames of data to give the smallest physiological increment of ±0.033 Hematocrit units. Compared to the medical standard blood draw method, with a standard deviation of ±2.0 Hematocrit units, our device is 60 times more sensitive to changes in the Hematocrit. Repeating patterns in the Hematocrit can be analyzed by a Fourier transform to give respiration rate and pulse rate earning the title of "big data." Changes in the Hematocrit were also observed in dialysis patients (where the blood is manually cleaned due to kidney failure) and in a rat model where large portions of the blood can be removed and reintroduced. Blood loss and addition of fluid reveal changes in the Hematocrit that are distinguishable from the baseline. The algorithm was validated by a well-defined in vitro system modeling the blood components. The model demonstrates that an optically thin sample in the linear range produces a good fit by the algorithm. Finally, the blood was analyzed in vitro to demonstrate that the red blood cells and plasma show linearity within the physiological ranges observed in vivo. At 830 nm excitation, the same wavelength used in vivo, volume fractions of red blood cells and plasma at the physiological range demonstrate linearity. All of the experiments and analysis appear to give evidence supporting the measuring of changes in the Hematocrit noninvasively in vivo on a medically useful timescale. Plasma Volume Hematocrit (PVH): "Big Data" Applied to Physiology Enabled by a New Algorithm


Applied Speech and Audio Processing is a MATLAB-based, one-stop resource that blends speech and hearing research in describing the key techniques of speech and audio processing. This practically oriented text provides MATLAB examples throughout to illustrate the concepts discussed and to give the reader hands-on experience with important techniques. Chapters on basic audio processing and the characteristics of speech and hearing lay the foundations of speech signal processing, which are built upon in subsequent sections explaining audio handling, coding, compression, and analysis techniques. The final chapter explores a number of advanced topics that use these techniques, including psychoacoustic modelling, a subject which underpins MP3 and related audio formats. With its hands-on nature and numerous MATLAB examples, this book is ideal for graduate students and practitioners working with speech or audio systems.


We document the foraminiferal diversity across a semi-enclosed pool in eastern Bahrain that we named "Murray's Pool†because this is the same location as the one studied by Basson and Murray (1995), the only previous study of foraminifera in this sector of the Arabian Gulf. We subdivided the sampling area into six subenvironments based on distinguishable physical environmental features, namely tidal channel, tidal flat, Salicornia marsh, algal mat, sheltered inner lagoon, and back marsh pool. Faunal analysis from these six shallow-water subenvironments reveals two main assemblages of benthic foraminifera: an Ammonia convexa-Elphidium advenum-Peneroplis pertusus assemblage and an Ammonia convexa-Coscinospira hemprichii-Peneroplis pertusus assemblage. The most abundant species across all the subenvironments are Peneroplis pertusus, Ammonia convexa, Coscinospira hemprichii, and Elphidium advenum. Species assemblage composition and percentage abundances were determined for each subenvironment; the tidal flat subenvironment shows the highest total abundance, but has twenty-four fewer species compared to the sheltered inner lagoon. We also noted the proportions of living foraminifera and juveniles in all the subenvironments to understand the distribution of biofacies within the lagoon. The numbers of juvenile miliolid foraminifera are highest in the tidal channel and the two adjacent subenvironments of the tidal channel.


Abstract A cell culture line of human small cell (oat cell) carcinoma of the lung (NCI-H69) was studied for growth factor requirements for replication in serum-free medium. By a series of addition experiments, the combination of selenium (3 × 10 -8 m), hydrocortisone (10 -8 m), insulin (5 µg/ml), transferrin (100 µg/ml), and 17β-estradiol (10 -8 m) (SHITE) added to Roswell Park Memorial Institute Medium 1640 without serum was found to allow optimum replication when cells were transferred from serum-containing medium. NCI-H69 cells have replicated continuously in SHITE-supplemented Roswell Park Memorial Institute Medium 1640 for periods of more than 12 months. The cells replicate with approximately the same doubling times as in medium supplemented with 10% fetal calf serum, but they exhibited a lower saturation density and longer lag phase in SHITE-supplemented medium compared to serum-supplemented medium. When individual components of SHITE were deleted, immediate and dramatic differences in growth were seen only with deletion of transferrin while minimal decreases were noted with deletion of the other factors. After 6 months of growth in SHITE, deletion of insulin or transferrin from the formula resulted in cessation of cell growth in serum-free medium while deletion of hydrocortisone or estradiol (alone or together) did not. A variety of other hormones and growth factors did not add significantly to SHITE in promoting replication. In addition, a series of hormones was found to inhibit replication or saturation density achieved in serum-free, hormone-supplemented medium including epidermal growth factor, luteinizing hormone-releasing factor, parathyroid hormone, blood meal, and the tripeptide glycyl-l-histidyl-l-lysine acetate. Six other small cell carcinoma lines were tested and also were able to replicate in SHITE-supplemented serum-free medium indicating the generality of this formula for small cell carcinoma, NCI-H69 cells cultured for 4 months in SHITE medium retained their amine precursor uptake and decarboxylation properties, characteristic small cell carcinoma histology by light microscopy, dense core (neurosecretory) granules by electron microscopy, and tumorigenicity in nude mice. The identification of this growth formula should allow selection of tumor cells directly from patient samples, study of hormone production and regulation by these cell lines, and identification of new growth and therapeutic agents, and it should provide a way of selecting for normal amine handling cells related histogenetically to small cell carcinoma.


The study of history may be the ultimate in the art of conjuring tricks. We look into the past as if through a window, and we may then realize that beyond what we see of the past, the window-pane, mirror-like, reflects our own image as well. Therefore, our descriptions and judgments about the past say as much about ourselves as they do about the past itself. No person in Hungarian history has been interpreted and reinterpreted as frequently as Count Istvain Szechenyi has, in wildly divergent responses to wildly divergent needs of an ever-changing present. Why such frequency and, one may ask, why such passion when it comes to the "greatest Hungarian," to use Kossuth's much-repeated phrase? Gyula Szekfu characterized Szechenyi as the "highest peak of our national life."(1) For that very reason, Szekfu claimed, each epoch in Hungarian history is obligated to explore its own deepest problems and relate them to Szechenyi's writings. Implied here is a belief that Szechenyi is relevant, not in specific, of course, but in the more profound sense of offering moral and patriotic guidance. Actually, Szekfu's high praise is relatively modest in comparison to the effusive, sometimes embarrassingly effusive, accolades affixed to Szechenyi. Personally, I like Sandor Karacsony's brief statement the best, because it captures Szechenyi's legacy deceptively simply but most effectively. "He has made us into what we are..."(2) reads Karacsony, referring to Szechenyi's role as the initiator of Hungary's transformation from a backward feudal country into a civilized, Western-oriented one. I do not believe that anyone could quarrel with this statement, because Szechenyi's role as the great initiator is undisputed. But clear as his historical significance may be, the question should still be asked: what exactly did he want Hungarians to be, and what exactly have Hungarians ended up being? This question, open at both ends, allows for a broad range of subjective interpretations. Szechenyi stood apart from political parties, and the scope of his activities and writings is enormous. Consequently, one could pick and choose among his multiple messages, which may then be used as sources of inspiration or rationalization for a variety of often conflicting positions and activities. Szechenyi was in turn hailed by liberals, conservatives, and fascists; even the communist jumped on the bandwagon after they had passed through their sour phase of Stalinist dogmatism. What is then, or is there, a true Szechenyi? Luckily, history denies us the false assurances of finality, but clearly, if history has any validity at all, we can and must separate approximations from distortions. This paper is dedicated to that end. Szechenyi's interpreters may be grouped in three categories: adulators, appropriators, and analyzers. The adulators gush over everything, or almost everything, Szechenyi had ever done. The appropriators have an a priori agenda, and they use, or in extreme cases abuse, Szechenyi in order to promote that agenda. Finally, the analyzers are able to step back and assess multiple nuances in their search for the "true" Szechenyi. Naturally, these categories are not always clear-cut. There may be a great deal of overlap. One work may contain all or some of these elements, or a given historian may use alternate approaches at different times. Nevertheless, there are certain patterns indicating that the ways Szechenyi has been viewed in successive periods of Hungarian history has served specific purposes. In a brief paper I am unable to cover all interpretations of this interesting and complicated man. Zoltan Varga wrote a book about them, and listed 339 entries for the period between 1851 and 1918 alone. Before I embark on discussing these patterns, a few general comments are in order. First, authors' insistence on their objectivity is in inverse ratio to their sober analysis of Szechenyi. Of those I have examined, Zsigmond Kemeny, Miksa Falk, and Gyula Szekfu made that claim. …


Traditional approaches to byzantine fault-tolerance have mostly avoided the problem of confidentiality. Current confidentiality-aware solutions rely on a heavy infrastructure investment or depend on complex key management schemes. The framework presented in this paper relies on a novel approach that combines byzantine fault-tolerance, secure storage and verifiable secret sharing to significantly reduce the additional infra-structure and complexity required by confidentiality protection. The proposed framework was compared to other solutions using a micro-benchmark, and an implementation of TPC-B and NFS.


Abstract By using recently developed automatic instruments for fabric and texture measurements on ice, both the c-axis orientation and area of the individual crystals can be determined. Each grain can then be associated with its volume fraction, defined as a function of its measured cross-sectional area, to describe the microstructure of a poly-crystal. The relevance of this approach is studied using a three-dimensional microstructure obtained from the Potts model. In particular, the area weighting is compared to the classical implicit equal weighting used by glaciologists, which assumes that all the grains have the same volume fraction (discrete uniform distribution). Then, using the measurements of c-axis orientation and crystal size performed on the North Greenland Icecore Project (NorthGRIP) ice core, we compare area-weighted and equal-weighted fabrics. All these comparisons are made with respect to the orientation tensor. According to the ability of the Potts model to reproduce the ice microstructure, it is shown that using the grain cross-sectional area to infer its volume fraction improves the description of the actual polycrystal fabric.


In this paper, I address the question of whether metaphysics and theology are or can become science. After examining the qualities of contemporary science, which evolved from an earlier historic concept of any body of literature into a formal method for obtaining empirical knowledge, I apply that standard to metaphysics and theology. I argue that neither metaphysics nor theology practices a scientific method or generates scientific knowledge. Worse, I conclude that both metaphysics and theology are at best purely cultural projects—exercises in exegesis of local cultural and religious ideas and language—and, therefore, that other cultures have produced or would produce radically different schemes of metaphysics or theology. At its worst, metaphysics is speculation about the unknowable, while theology is rumination about the imaginary.


Many pervasive games involve people who are not aware of the game that is going on. We look into some examples of games with strong such features, in order to understand the problems and opportunities of such design structures. We also discuss the ethics of unaware game participation, as they may have a major impact on both aware and unaware participants.


A huge body of work has been published in recent times in the area of multi-phase machines and drives. Many aspects of these drives have been analysed, such as reduction of torque pulsations, increased reliability and fault tolerance, improved power sharing capabilities and possibilities for realisation of series-connected multi-motor drives with supply coming from a single multi-phase voltage source inverter (VSI). Various pulse width modulation (PWM) schemes have been developed for multi-phase machines with concentrated and distributed windings, utilising both carrier-based PWM and space vector PWM (SVPWM) approaches. However, no systematic analysis has been performed in order to determine properties of multi-phase PWM in general, and to establish close correlation between carrier-based PWM and space vertor PWM, for multi-phase VSIs. This thesis presents an analysis and development of multi-phase PWM schemes for sinusoidal output voltage generation with two-level muhi-phase VSIs, which are suitable for multi-phase machines with distributed windings. Therefore, attention is paid to the elimination of low order harmonics. The scope of the thesis has been narrowed down to the continuous PWM schemes and operation in the linear region of the modulation only. Both multi-phase carrier-based PWM and SVPWM schemes are considered, and, in particular, five-phase, seven-phase e-phase systems are addressed in detail. Thus, a strong link between these two different approaches is established, allowing for an easier comparison of the features offered by each method. All PWM schemes are practically implemented in a DSP and experimentally verified through extensive experimentation on the custom-built multi-phase VSI. In addition to the methods of sinusoidal output voltage generation, achieved by means of the synthesis of the reference in only the first plane of the multi-phase system with simultaneous zeroing of voltages in all the other planes.


The global knowledge economy has transformed the world of work in the last four decades. Over the last 40 years the Australian economy underwent major structural change a phenomenon that was initiated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. This paper discusses and analyses institutional change characterised by the decentralisation of collective bargaining structures that began in the early 1980s. The paper analyses the impact of these reforms by providing a simple analysis of job creation over a thirty year period. The paper concludes that institutional labour market change can at times produce negative welfare outcomes, particularly as it relates to employment creation. The impact of these effects is increasing inequality of earnings in the labour force.


For some automotive anti-vibration applications, for instance exhaust hangers, center bearing bushes or torsional vibration dampers, temperature constraints make the use of synthetic rubbers, such as EPDM, necessary because of their better heat aging resistance compared to natural rubber. The aim of this paper is to understand the features of the fatigue behaviour of an industrial EPDM compared to the well-known natural rubber. To do so, fatigue tests are conducted on hourglass-shaped specimens, and fracture surfaces are analysed using optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It appears that every samples exhibit only one root cause of failure. Thus, two types of precursors are identified as responsible of the final fracture of samples: material's inclusions and mold flaws. Interrupted fatigue tests are then performed and fatigued samples are observed with SEM. The built procedure allows us to follow fatigue cracks initiation and propagation along cycles, and to propose local damage mechanisms for each type of precursors. A global damage scenario is finally considered and compared to the one of natural rubber described in the literature.


Stroke is the third leading cause of mortality and the first cause of disability in Italy, with an estimated incidence of non-fatal cases of stroke of 10 cases/1000 person years among hypertensive patients, and a prevalence of ischemic stroke in the year 2001 of 5.4/1000 persons. The main responsibility for the primary prevention of stroke should be with the primary care physicians as they are best positioned to determine an atrisk population and to initiate educational, lifestyle, and cardiovascular risk reduction treatments. In primary prevention, only well-documented and potentially modifiable risk factors should be tackled. Recognition of the most relevant modifiable risk-factors leads to corresponding interventions. However, data from surveys conducted in general practice clearly demonstrate an overall under-monitoring or under-treatment for themost relevant risk factors, such as high blood pressure, smoking status, high cholesterol level, atrial fibrillation, and left ventricular hypertrophy, which led to a corresponding low treatment prevalence amongmoderate and highrisk stroke patients. In this context, the use of automatic electronic reminders has shown promising results in improving the performances of primary care physicians in the primary prevention of high-risk cardiovascular patients. This suggests there is a need for further research in general practice to evaluate the effect of such a system in improving the prognosis of individuals at high-risk of stroke.


The phosphorelay signal transduction pathway controls sporulation initiation in Bacillus subtilis. Transfer of a phosphoryl group from multiple kinases (KinA and KinB) through a single domain response regulator homologue (Spo0F), a phosphotransferase (Spo0B), and ultimately to a transcriptional regulator, (Spo0A) activates sporulation. Counteracting this response are phosphatases (RapA and RapB), which can short-circuit this phosphorelay via dephosphorylation of Spo0F. In vitro assays of RapB activity on phosphorylated Spo0F alanine-scanning mutants have been used to identify Spo0F residues critical for interactions between these proteins. The Spo0F surface comprised of the beta1-alpha1 loop and N-terminal half of helix alpha1 has the largest number of residues in which an alanine substitution leads to resistance or decreased sensitivity to RapB phosphatase activity. Other mutations desensitizing Spo0F to RapB are also located near the site of phosphorylation on the beta3-alpha3 and beta4-alpha4 loops. This surface is similar to but not the same as the surface identified for KinA and Spo0B interactions with Spo0F. Divalent metal ions were shown to be required for RapB activity, and this activity was insensitive to vanadate, suggesting that Rap phosphatases catalyze acyl phosphate hydrolysis by inducing conformational changes in phosphorylated Spo0F, which results in increased autodephosphorylation. Arginine 16 of Spo0F is proposed to play a role in catalysis, and similarities between the mechanisms for RapB catalyzed Spo0F approximately P hydrolysis and GAP (GTPase activating protein)-assisted GTP hydrolysis of Ras are discussed.


This study examined the coverage of agricultural information in Tanzania's newspapers published between 2009 and 2013. Four newspapers—Mwananchi, Habari Leo, The Guardian and Daily News—comprising 840 editions were selected for the study. Data were collected using a checklist and analysed using Microsoft excel and SPSS. The study findings show that of the 63,609 news articles in all the four newspaper editions, only 836 (1.3%) articles were on agriculture. The proportion of agricultural news articles published ranged from 0.79 percent in 2010 to 1.92 percent  in 2012. Habari Leo had an average of 61.4 agricultural articles followed by Mwananchi with an average of 39.4 articles. The prominence of agricultural information was as low as 4.9 percent in all the newspapers. It is recommended that the government should formulate and institute policies aimed to increase the coverage of developmental topics such as agriculture in the newspapers.


Total knee arthroplasty is nowadays one of the most important orthopedic surgery. It consists of a procedure in which parts of the knee are replaced by a prosthesis. The largest indication for total knee arthroplasty is osteoarthritis, a knee disease that can cause the cartilage of the femur and tibia to wear away, so that the bones rub together with use. The major risk factors for osteoarthritis are aging and obesity. Both the life expectancy and the obesity rate are increasing in the developed countries, thus the number of estimated total knee arthroplasties is growing over the years. Although over one million of prosthetic joints are implanted every year in the developed countries, none of them contains sensors to help the orthopedic surgeons in improving the precision of the replacement surgery. The goal of this study is to design an electronic system to be embedded inside a total knee prosthesis, in order to measure the force applied to it and its kinematics. Providing the orthopedic surgeons with quantitative data on the biomechanics of the prosthetic knee can help them in improving the implant precision and, as a consequence, could reduce the risk of an early revision surgery. In the frame of this thesis, we worked with the F.I.R.S.T. prosthesis by Symbios Orthopedie SA, that was instrumented with sensors and electronics to measure, process and transmit force and kinematics data to an external reader. The constraints in the design have been established by the medical doctors and the prosthesis manufacturer and the technical solutions adopted are presented. In order to simplify a future approval for human tests, we decided to keep the shape of the knee artificial joint. To achieve that, we put all the sensors and the electronics inside the middle part of the prosthesis, constituted of a polyethylene insert located between the metallic parts of the artificial joint and whose function is to reduce the rubbing. An original encapsulation was designed to guarantee the bio-compatibility of the instrumented prosthesis and to avoid a potentially dangerous contact between the electronics and the human body. This should be ensured even in case of extreme wearing of the polyethylene insert, that can occur some years after the prosthesis implant and is one of the main indications for a revision surgery. The sensors were tested by using mechanical simulators of the knee joint and validated by means of reference sensors. Different demonstrators have been designed, from the first, with only the sensors located inside the prosthesis and all the electronics fabricated in a large-scale outside of it, to the last miniaturized versions, that can be entirely embedded inside the prosthesis. Moreover, an autonomous sensor for balancing the ligaments tension during the knee replacement surgery was designed, fabricated and tested. Such a device could be an important help for the medical doctors during the surgery to improve the precision of the implant and, being not-implantable, could easily obtain an approval for human clinical trials.


The aim of this article is to detect new classes of quasi-alternating links. Quasi-alternating links are a natural generalization of alternating links. Their knot Floer and Khovanov homology are particularly easy to compute. Since knot Floer homology detects the genus of a knot as well as whether a knot is fibered, characterization of quasi-alternating links becomes an interesting open problem. We show that there exist classes of non-alternating Montesinos links, which are quasi-alternating.


Among the many strategies used to support teachers, mentoring was introduced in the early 1980s. It is now quite common in the United States. This investigation in mentoring used mail‐in surveys to gather information from teachers who did and did not participate in a formal mentoring program. It reports their perceptions in terms of what was most supportive during their first year in the profession and what was least supportive the first year. Among teachers who were mentored, that experience was identified as most supportive. Colleagues and administrative support were identified as most supportive for teachers who were not mentored. Least supportive factors were somewhat similar between the two groups. Dissatisfaction from administration, training, and lack of materials were identified. Recommendations for what would improve the first year were also offered. Implications for developing and refining mentoring programs are discussed.


State-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches increase the receptive field of their models by using either a downsampling path composed of poolings/strided convolutions or successive dilated convolutions. However, it is not clear which operation leads to best results. In this paper, we systematically study the differences introduced by distinct receptive field enlargement methods and their impact on the performance of a novel architecture, called Fully Convolutional DenseResNet (FC-DRN). FC-DRN has a densely connected backbone composed of residual networks. Following standard image segmentation architectures, receptive field enlargement operations that change the representation level are interleaved among residual networks. This allows the model to exploit the benefits of both residual and dense connectivity patterns, namely: gradient flow, iterative refinement of representations, multi-scale feature combination and deep supervision. In order to highlight the potential of our model, we test it on the challenging CamVid urban scene understanding benchmark and make the following observations: 1) downsampling operations outperform dilations when the model is trained from scratch, 2) dilations are useful during the finetuning step of the model, 3) coarser representations require less refinement steps, and 4) ResNets (by model construction) are good regularizers, since they can reduce the model capacity when needed. Finally, we compare our architecture to alternative methods and report state-of-the-art result on the Camvid dataset, with at least twice fewer parameters.


Five field sites established in the high rainfall zone of southern Victoria were used to examine the downwards vertical movement of phosphorus (P) fertiliser on soils which ranged in P sorption capacity. Fertiliser was applied either as a single application of 280 kg P/ha at the beginning of the experiment (April 1998), or as 35 kg P/ha reapplied every 6 months (totalling 210 kg P/ha by the end of the third year). Soil cores were sampled in June 2001 to a depth of 40 cm, and soil at depths of 0-5, 5-10, 10-20, 20-30, and 30-40 cm was analysed for a range of soil properties and total P concentration. Total P concentration changed very little down the profile, indicating that there was minimal vertical movement of P fertiliser below the 10 cm layer of 5 pasture soils following the single application of 280 kg P/ha or 35 kg P/ha reapplied every 6 months. Soils with low to moderate surface P sorption capacity showed a trend for higher total P concentrations at depth. However, quantitative relationships between vertical P movement and soil properties at depth were poor. A P audit resulted in variable recovery of the applied P (45-128%) in the surface 40 cm at each of the 5 sites. Consistently low P recoveries were achieved at one site, where the surface soil had a high P sorption capacity. Some applied P may have bypassed the high P sorbing surface layers at this site through macropore flow and moved beyond the 40 cm sampling zone, or have been lost to surface runoff. These results question the usefulness of P audit or mass-balance methods for accounting for P movement in a pasture-based system, as spatial heterogeneity of soil properties, both horizontally and vertically, was high in the current study.


In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in three ways. First, it increased the level of benefits through a $600 and then a $300 per week supplement. Second, it expanded the pool of workers who are eligible to receive UI via the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. Third, it extended the duration of benefits. As the labor market recovers from the COVID-19 recession, policymakers and economists have debated whether generous UI benefits are holding workers back from returning to work. All of these program expansions are scheduled to expire in September 2021. Beginning in May 2021, twenty-six states announced they would end these benefits early at the end of June 2021. These expirations will dramatically change the level of benefits workers receive. Whereas typical UI benefits replace roughly 50 percent of a worker's wages, with the $300 supplement almost half of jobless workers (48 percent) receive as much or more in UI benefits than their prior wages (Ganong et al. 2020). Additionally, the PUA program has accounted for roughly 40 percent of total UI claims during the pandemic.1 These benefits have been economically important insofar as they have boosted the spending of jobless workers (Greig et al. 2021). This brief aims to answer two important policy questions central to this debate. First, to what extent have the UI supplements discouraged jobless workers from returning to work? We find evidence of a small job search disincentive from the supplements. Second, how well targeted and timely are PUA benefits in insuring against income losses? We find that PUA is successfully targeting income supports to more marginalized workers, specifically younger and lower-income workers. In addition, PUA recipients experience income losses roughly similar to the losses experienced by UI recipients. However, there were significant delays in PUA payments as states administered this new program. A program like PUA may be an increasingly important macroeconomic stabilizer, especially if, during a future recession, payments are delivered more quickly than was the case during the COVID-19 recession. We summarize our key findings in this insight and describe our methodology in more detail in a companion technical note (see Ganong et al. 2021a).


A comprehensive graph theoretical and finite geometrical study of the commutation relations between the generalized Pauli operators of N-qudits is performed in which vertices/ points correspond to the operators and edges/lines join commuting pairs of them. As per two-qubits, all basic properties and partitionings of the corresponding Pauli graph are embodied in the geometry of the generalized quadrangle of order two. Here, one identifies the operators with the points of the quadrangle and groups of maximally commuting subsets of the operators with the lines of the quadrangle. The three basic partitionings are (a) a pencil of lines and a cube, (b) a Mermin's array and a bipartitepart and (c) a maximum independent set and the Petersen graph. These factorizations stem naturally from the existence of three distinct geometric hyperplanes of the quadrangle, namely a set of points collinear with a given point, a grid and an ovoid, which answer to three distinguished subsets of the Pauli graph, namely a set of six operators commuting with a given one, a Mermin's square, and set of five mutually noncommuting operators, respectively. The generalized Pauli graph for multiple qubits is found to follow from symplectic polar spaces of order two, where maximal totally isotropic subspaces stand for maximal subsets of mutually commuting operators. The substructure of the (strongly regular) N-qubit Pauli graph is shown to be pseudo-geometric, i. e., isomorphic to a graph of a partial geometry. Finally, the (not strongly regular) Pauli graph of a two-qutrit system is introduced; here it turns out more convenient to deal with its dual in order to see all the parallels with the two-qubit case and its surmised relation with the generalized quadrangle Q(4; 3), the dual of W(3).


For automotive applications, 3D perception of the car's surroundings is crucial, both for driver assistance and for safety systems. In addition, a large field of view is required for future applications such as intersection assistance. A popular option to obtain 3D measurements and detect objects is to use two cameras (stereo vision). Applications based on object detection range from Adaptive Cruise Control, Collision Mitigation Systems to Intersection Assistance Systems. Stereo vision with conventional cameras only delivers a limited field of view. We extend the field of view using fisheye lenses. In this contribution a detailed description of a fisheye stereo system for object detection is given, including the steps calibration, rectification, and stereo computation. Differences to traditional stereo systems are pointed out and the accuracy for an experimental setup is evaluated. In addition, the fisheye stereo approach is combined with optical flow measurements to obtain position and velocity data simultaneously. This so-called 6D Vision approach is extended to stereodata obtained with fisheye lenses. Results for intersection scenes are presented.


Introduction : Burn injury is a major problem in many parts of the world. It has been estimated that 75% of all deaths following burns are related to infection. Thermal injury destroys the skin barrier that normally prevents invasion by microorganisms. Individual organisms are brought into the burns ward on the wounds of new patients. These organisms then persist in the resident flora of the burn treatment facility for a variable period of time, only to be replaced by newly arriving microorganisms. Introduction of new topical agents and systemic antibiotics influence the flora of the wound. Materials and methods : The study group consists of 100 patients admitted to burns ward in a tertiary care hospital. Surface wound swab, biopsy, blood and urine samples were collected under aseptic precautions. The samples were inoculated onto blood agar, Mac Conkey agar and the isolates were identified by standard biochemical tests. Antibiotic sensitivity was performed. Results : Out of 100 patients admitted, 62 were females and 38 males. Female to male ratio was 1.5:1. of all the age groups, patients in the age group of 16$25yrs were more susceptible. Burn injuries with %TBSA of 31$40% were more common.(29%)49% of the wounds were infected on day 7 while 62% of the wounds were infected on day 14 The concordance rates of swab and biopsy on 7 th and 14 th day were 83.3% and 65% respectively. Klebsiella spp. was the most common organism isolated among all samples followed by Staphylococcus aureus. Conclusion : Females constitute a major proportion of victims of burn injuries. People in the age group of 16$25y rs were more susceptible. Burn injuries were more common due to flames where suicidal burns constituted the major proportion. Swab sampling can be considered a good tool for monitoring burn wounds within the first week of treatment and could defer the need for invasive biopsy sampling. But for patients who remain in the burns ward for a longer period, biopsy samples are justified as it gives the microbial load in the tissue.


The Three Faces of Leadership takes readers inside the minds of CEOs who have been celebrated by the Harvard Business Review over the last decade of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with these famous CEOs, Mary Jo Hatch, Monika Kostera and Andrzej K. Kozminski demonstrate how business leaders today use aesthetics, specifically storytelling, dramatizing and mythmaking, to lead their companies successfully. They look at how they inspire organizations through their creativity, virtue and faith, and thus show the faces of the artist and priest alongside the technical and rational face of the manager.
The Three Faces of Leadership features clear and accessible explanations of the aesthetic philosophy of management: as applied to the concepts of creativity, imagination, courage, virtue, inspiration, faith and ethics. It presents techniques for developing these qualities as an essential part of leadership; together with the capacity to communicate them to others. Aesthetic leadership practices are linked to organizational culture, change, vision, values and identity. In this way, the book encourages students and executives to align the creative and spiritual aspects of business with their technical training and practice.


Process control is explained, and it is shown why trying to build process-control software using the same approaches developed and used for data-processing and information-system software will lead to failure. Rather than offering solutions to the problems inherent in developing process-control software, the author identifies the aspects of the problem on which to focus attention and the tasks that are ripe for solution. In particular, modeling and analysis, human-computer interaction, and risk evaluation are discussed.<<ETX>>


This is the introductory chapter to a volume which establishes a theoretical framework for exploring the role of host state legal systems (courts and bureaucracies) in mediating relations between foreign investment, civil society and government actors. The volume then demonstrates the application of that framework in the context of the south Indian city of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore). Drawing on the 'law-and-community' approach of Roger Cotterrell, the volume identifies three mechanisms through which law might, in theory, ensure that social relations are productive: by expressing any mutual trust which may hold actors together; by ensuring that actors participate fully in social life; and by coordinating the differences that hold actors apart. Empirical data reveal that each of these legal mechanisms is at work in Bengaluru. However, their operation is limited and skewed by the extent to which actors use, abuse and/or avoid them. Furthermore, these legal mechanisms are being eroded as a direct result of the World Bank's 'investment climate' discourse, which privileges the interests and values of foreign investors over those of other actor.


One of the most pronounced impacts of climate change is the changing sea ice cover, which has implications for sea ice-associated ecosystems that depend on carbon produced by ice-associated algae. In order to fully understand these ecosystems there is a need to understand both the physical and biological components. We present preliminary results from Polarstern cruises to the Eastern Central Arctic Ocean (summer 2012) and Weddell Sea (fall-winter 2013). Biological samples were acquired from the under-ice environment using the Surface and Under-Ice Trawl (SUIT) and from within the ice by extracting ice cores. Biophysical properties of sea ice and under-ice environments were characterized using a sensor array mounted on the SUIT that measured ice thickness, under-ice light spectra, water properties and chlorophyll a biomass (in- and under-ice). Modal ice thicknesses were between 0.45-1.38 m (Arctic) and 0.23-0.70 m (Weddell Sea). Sea ice properties were related to the distribution of some key under-ice species (e.g. Polar Cod and Antarctic Krill). Previous studies have used under-ice light spectra to derive ice-algal biomass but were limited to local-scale point measurements. We present a new method for calculating ice-algal biomass from under-ice spectra on local- to meso-scales and compare the results using both methods.


This guide contains a broad range of instructions and suggestions regarding structural failures. Topics include failure causes by project type, failure causes by structural type, failure causes by material, connection, and foundation type, field operations, project management, data analysis and reports, and a conclusion. There are also two appendices containing references, collapse investigation reports, sample forms, and eyewitness interview records. This guide will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers investigating structural failures.


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This paper is concerned with the challenging and timely problem of channel estimation for spatial modulated systems in the presence of time varying channels. Recently, estimation of channel state information for SM systems is investigated by the recursive least square (RLS) algorithm for slow fading channels. However, it is clear that the RLS based receiver will have a performance degradation for fast fading channels. Therefore, we developed iterative channel estimation based on detected symbols and curve fitting to track the channel variations for SM systems. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed iterative channel estimation offer substantial performance gains over the RLS channel estimation. In particular, a savings of about 4dB is obtained at BER = 10-7, as compared with RLS based receiver at 150km/h for 2 × 4 single carrier SM systems.


Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) and neural architecture search (NAS) are methods of choice to obtain the best-in-class machine learning models, but in practice they can be costly to run. When models are trained on large datasets, tuning them with HPO or NAS rapidly becomes prohibitively expensive for practitioners, even when efficient multi-fidelity methods are employed. We propose an approach to tackle the challenge of tuning machine learning models trained on large datasets with limited computational resources. Our approach, named PASHA, is able to dynamically allocate maximum resources for the tuning procedure depending on the need. The experimental comparison shows that PASHA identifies well-performing hyperparameter configurations and architectures while consuming significantly fewer computational resources than solutions like ASHA.


The volume scattering function (VSF) of natural bubble populations is (1) determined from Mie scattering theory, (2) measured by a newly designed volume scattering meter in the laboratory, and (3) inferred from field observations of the VSF. The laboratory measurements have confirmed our theoretical prediction in that (1) bubbles of sizes that have been recorded in situ in the surface ocean (>10 μm) show elevated scattering for angles between 60° and 80° and (2) the organic coatings on the bubble surface will increase the scattering in the backward hemisphere but little change the scattering in the forward directions, including the critical angles. An optimization analysis is applied to the measurement of the VSF in coastal waters, and the results suggest the potential existence of submicron bubbles that are coated with organic film. The bubble population thus determined, which has a negligible contribution to the total scattering (5%), accounts for 40% of the total backscattering that has been observed in situ. The extension of the bubble size distribution to smaller sizes than can presently be measured by direct techniques will alter the shape of derived phase function in general but will result in rather small changes to the backscattering ratio (<20%) as long as the slope of the size distribution is small, because most of the changes are in the forward (<10°) direction. However, the prominent peak in the VSF at the critical angle observed for larger bubbles is strongly reduced by the inclusion of the small sizes, and the backscattering ratio is increased by a factor of two for distributions that varies as the −4 power of size. Because these bubbles contribute strongly to scattering at large angles, these results have significant implications for the remote observation of the color of the sea.


Due to the presence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), there is a need for patients in public clinics in Potchefstroom, South Africa to move from paper-based patient records towards electronic Patient Health Records (ePHRs). This paper, based on qualitative research, investigates the perceptions of nurses on the feasibility of managing ePHRs at public clinics in Potchefstroom. The study identifies factors that will influence the use of ePHRs at these clinics. The findings of the study indicate that patients who visit clinics in Potchefstroom will each have an individual ePHR which will allow their specific data to be securely stored. The integration of ePHRs will ensure that one patient will have one health record across these clinics in Potchefstroom, which will further provide efficiency in record-keeping and shorter consultations at clinics.


Effects of Dirt roads on Vegetation and Diversity in Arid Rangelands (Case Study: Aliabad Pyshkoh of Yazd, Iran).
Since the road are considered as one of sustainable development indicators and many rural dusty roads are passed through rangelands, the effect of road networks on rangeland ecosystems is so important. In order to investigate the effects of roads, two regions were determined; one around the road, from the edge of road to 5 m and the other far from it, from 5 to 20 m. 10 transects of 50 m and 40 random plots of 1 m2 were placed on each transect on each site and some vegetation characteristics were measured in Ali Abad Pishkuh rangelands in Yazd province. The results showed that road changes vegetation composition, production, and canopy cover percentage. So, grass production and canopy cover were decreased near the road. Important value of shrubs was declined near the road while it was increased in terms of grasses. Richness, evenness and diversity indices were reduced and distribution pattern moved to clumped. These factors indicate that plant communities moves less stable and they are crossed boundaries of ecological threshold around the road. Therefore, it is suggested that rural dusty roads construction should be with more study and proper reclamation.


Since securing trade promotion authority in 2002, the Bush administration has launched an aggressive campaign to negotiate bilateral and regional freetrade agreements (FTAs). FTAs have been reached with Singapore and Chile and are under negotiation with Australia, Morocco, Bahrain, and nations of the Central American Common Market and the Southern African Customs Union. None of those countries is among our top 10 trading partners, but considered together, the proposed FTAs would cover a major segment of U.S. trade. As a group, the FTA countries would constitute the world's ninth largest economy and would be America's sixth largest trading partner. Free-trade agreements deviate from the multilateral principle of nondiscrimination, and they can divert trade from more efficient to less efficient but favored import producers. But under the right conditions, FTAs can inject new competition into our domestic economy, lowering prices for consumers and shifting factors of production to more efficient uses, while leveling the playing field for U.S. exporters. FTAs provide institutional competition to keep multilateral talks on track. If other members of the World Trade Organization become intransigent, the United States must have the option of pursuing agreements with a "coalition of the willing" in pursuit of trade liberalization. FTAs can spur regional integration and blaze a trail through difficult areas for broader negotiations in the future. As a foreign policy tool, FTAs can cement ties with allies and encourage countries to stay on the trail of political and economic reform. To maximize the benefits of freetrade agreements, the administration should seek agreements with countries that can provide import competition in our domestic market and export opportunities abroad and that are reform leaders in regions of the world where models of successful reform are most needed. Judged by those criteria, the FTAs proposed by the Bush administration deserve to be pursued. Free-Trade Agreements Steppingstones to a More Open World


Background: Whereas several authors recently reported a positive association between the α2-macroglobulin gene (A2M) and late-onset AD (LOAD), others were unable to replicate these findings. Early-onset AD (EOAD) is defined as onset age <65 years. Virtually all patients with LOAD are >65 years of age. Objective: To evaluate the role of A2M in AD, the authors conducted a population-based study of EOAD and LOAD as well as a meta-analysis of all studies conducted to date. Methods: Patients with EOAD (n = 100) were derived from a population-based study in four northern provinces of the Netherlands and the area of metropolitan Rotterdam. Patients with LOAD (n = 344) were drawn from the Rotterdam Study, a population-based prospective study on residents aged 55 years and over of a Rotterdam suburb in the Netherlands. Two polymorphisms were studied, A2M-I/D and A2M-Ile1000Val, in relation to the APOE ε4 allele (APOE*4). Results: No genotypic or allelic association was found for either polymorphism in the population-based series of patients with LOAD. In patients with EOAD without APOE*4, a significant increase of carriers of A2M-1000Val was found. The meta-analysis of available published case–control data on these polymorphisms in white and mixed ethnic populations yielded no significant differences between cases and controls. Pooling the Asian studies conducted to date showed a significant decrease in the frequency of A2M-D among patients. Conclusions: These results suggest that A2M is not genetically associated with LOAD in white patients or mixed populations as found in the United States. In these populations A2M does not have clinical relevance. From a scientific perspective, the findings on EOAD and Asian patients require replication and further research in the A2M region.


Inspired by selective molecular transport in the nuclear pore complex, a system that can separate proteins using a facilitated diffusion-based mechanism is developed. The system is comprised of two components: nuclear transporter receptors (NTRs) fused with a peptide tag that can "catch" target biomolecules and a nucleoporin-like protein (NLP) hydrogel that can selectively "trap" target molecule-NTR complexes due to the physical binding between hydrophobic Phe-Gly sequences in the protein polymer network and the NTR. Similar to the nuclear pore complex, substrate selectivity is achieved via complexation with NTRs, which permits transport into the gel, whereas environmental proteins are rejected. The NLP hydrogel effectively transports cargo complexes down to the single nanomolar range in the environment, and a selectivity of approximately 300 can be achieved between target molecule and protein impurity. High selectivity requires both interactions between the hydrogel and cargo complex for efficient "catching" as well as high NLP gel concentration to reduce the pore size for rejecting environmental molecules. As a proof of concept of "catch-trap" for a protein target, a partial green fluorescent protein (GFP) sequence and staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) toxoid are both separated from protein mixtures using engineered NTRs that contain binding tags for the corresponding protein. This represents a versatile system for fusing nuclear transporters with diverse peptide tags, enabling the selective binding and transport of a wide variety of separations of high value biomolecules.


Background The long-term results after second generation everolimus eluting bioresorbable vascular scaffold (Absorb BVS) placement in small vessels are unknown. Therefore, we investigated the impact of vessel size on long-term outcomes, after Absorb BVS implantation. Methods In ABSORB Cohort B Trial, out of the total study population (101 patients), 45 patients were assigned to undergo 6-month and 2-year angiographic follow-up (Cohort B1) and 56 patients to have angiographic follow-up at 1-year (Cohort B2). The pre-reference vessel diameter (RVD) was <2.5 mm (small-vessel group) in 41 patients (41 lesions) and ≥2.5 mm (large-vessel group) in 60 patients (61 lesions). Outcomes were compared according to pre-RVD. Results At 2-year angiographic follow-up no differences in late lumen loss (0.29±0.16 mm vs 0.25±0.22 mm, p=0.4391), and in-segment binary restenosis (5.3% vs 5.3% p=1.0000) were demonstrated between groups. In the small-vessel group, intravascular ultrasound analysis showed a significant increase in vessel area (12.25±3.47 mm2 vs 13.09±3.38 mm2 p=0.0015), scaffold area (5.76±0.96 mm2 vs 6.41±1.30 mm2 p=0.0008) and lumen area (5.71±0.98 mm2 vs 6.20±1.27 mm2 p=0.0155) between 6-months and 2-year follow-up. No differences in plaque composition were reported between groups at either time point. At 2-year clinical follow-up, no differences in ischaemia-driven major adverse cardiac events (7.3% vs 10.2%, p=0.7335), myocardial infarction (4.9% vs 1.7%, p=0.5662) or ischaemia-driven target lesion revascularisation (2.4% vs 8.5%, p=0.3962) were reported between small and large vessels. No deaths or scaffold thrombosis were observed. Conclusions Similar clinical and angiographic outcomes at 2-year follow-up were reported in small and large vessel groups. A significant late lumen enlargement and positive vessel remodelling were observed in small vessels.


Anilocra mediterranea has a diploid chromosome number of twelve, eight of the chromosomes having median, and four subterminal centromeres. The localization of chiasmata is extreme and is of a previously undescribed type, combining the terminal and centric systems. The centromeres stain differentially from the non-centric regions of the chromosomes; they are the only parts stained at anaphase of first meiosis, and at metaphase and anaphase of second meiosis.


Determining the Mechanisms Generating Soluble IL-15 Complexes A diverse assortment of infectious pathogens and TLR agonists enhance the expression of Interleukin (IL)-15. Additionally, inducing lymphopenia enhances anti-tumor responses in an IL15-dependent manner. Paradoxically, despite the limited expression of IL-15 during homeostasis, the role of IL-15 during the steady state is well-known, while its roles during inflammation and infections remain largely undefined. IL-15 uses a unique method of production and presentation to support the development and homeostasis of NK and CD8 T cells. IL-15 is produced with its high affinity IL-15Rα and this IL-15Rα/IL-15 complex is shuttled to the cell surface where it is presented in-trans or cleaved into soluble cytokine/receptor complexes. Unfortunately, little is known about the mechanisms generating soluble IL-15 complexes. I set out to elucidate the mechanisms responsible for inducing sIL-15 complexes to test my hypothesis that Type I IFN signaling and ADAM17 are necessary for generating sIL-15 complexes. In Bone marrow dendritic cells, Type I Interferon (IFN) directly regulates the cleavage of sIL-15 complexes using the metalloprotease ADAM17. Mice with the conditional deletion of ADAM17 or a deficiency in IFN signaling led to the surprising discovery that neither Type I IFN signaling nor ADAM17 expression are required in vivo for inducing sIL-15 complexes. Interestingly, VSV infection enhances sIL-15 complexes in the absence of both IFN and CD40 signaling pathways, indicating multiple redundant mechanisms generate sIL-15 complexes. I discovered a shared mechanism of enhanced IL-15 transpresentation common to all types of lymphopenia, while only forms of lymphopenia associated with inflammation display increases in sIL-15 complexes. The optimal production of sIL-15 complexes in response to total-body irradiation (TBI) required the activation of both the IFN and STING pathways, indicating a dominant role for inflammatory cell death. Utilizing an adoptive transfer model, I identified a novel role for lymphopenia-induced inflammatory IL-15 on the proliferation of CD8 memory T cells. Overall, I've demonstrated a diverse assortment of stimuli utilize a variety of pathways and cell types to induce the generation


Datasets can be biased due to societal inequities, human biases, under-representation of minorities, etc. Our goal is to certify that models produced by a learning algorithm are pointwise-robust to potential dataset biases. This is a challenging problem: it entails learning models for a large, or even infinite, number of datasets, ensuring that they all produce the same prediction. We focus on decision-tree learning due to the interpretable nature of the models. Our approach allows programmatically specifying bias models across a variety of dimensions (e.g., missing data for minorities), composing types of bias, and targeting bias towards a specific group. To certify robustness, we use a novel symbolic technique to evaluate a decision-tree learner on a large, or infinite, number of datasets, certifying that each and every dataset produces the same prediction for a specific test point. We evaluate our approach on datasets that are commonly used in the fairness literature, and demonstrate our approach's viability on a range of bias models.


ABSTRACT Claims of global homogenization towards a singular model of finance capitalism constitute a "financialization convergence hypothesis" that has not been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. Using extensive firm-level data we center on the key indicator of firm leverage, and reveal that substantial cross-national and cross-firm variation still persists. We first compare distributions across OECD countries and find no significant evidence of convergence over time. We then assess whether firms classified as prudent by a simple leverage threshold comprise a declining share of total financial assets over time. We find they do not, and that trajectories remain largely distinct. We do find empirical evidence of financialization convergence in two specific areas. First, there was convergence within the US and the UK in the years immediately proceeding the crisis – but not in other countries representative of stereotypical non-Anglo-American types financial systems, such as Germany and France. Second, we find convergence within the category of large, transnationally-active financial firms. Overall our results suggest that while the behavior of the world's largest globally active financial institutions is converging irrespective of home domicile, their activities are not necessarily leading to the general global homogenization of financial forms and activities implied by the financialization convergence hypothesis.