This study examines the effect of earthquakes, tropical cyclones and volcanic eruptions on the Philippine Stock Exchange index (PSEi) over the period 2 January 1985 to 30 December 2010. The extant literature show varying results with respect to the "gaining from loss" hypothesis of Shelor, Anderson, and Cross (1990, 1992). With a GARCH(2,2)-M specification, support for the "gaining from loss" hypothesis was evident for earthquakes and tropical cyclones. Overall, disasters have an insignificant effect on the market returns. Future researches are directed to use methodological alternatives, consider other forms of disasters, and different level (sector or firm) of analyses. Policymakers can consider including market movements in assessing the impact of natural disasters. Investors can attempt to conceptualize disaster-based trading strategies.


The generation of electricity in the Europe from wind-powered turbines is increasing and the most important challenges for the wind turbine manufacturers are linked to the development of larger and more effective wind turbines. Cast iron is today used in central parts of a wind turbine construction and this is a growing market for Swedish foundries. The specifications and requirements applied for the cast iron components are among the most stringent used within the iron foundry branch. A problem for the production of these large components can be too high pearlite content in the metal matrix, thereby deteriorating mechanical properties. Because of this reason there are just a few iron foundries in Sweden that are able to cast the required high quality cast iron components. The project work has focused on reducing the pearlite stabilizing blanks into the melt and to improve the inoculation process. The project has shown that systematic work with the melt composition and inoculation may provide a much improved structure and thus better properties.


In the last decade, the Internet has become more widely diffused and mobile, developing into a more interactive, globalized space with greater potential for democratic participation and mobilization. An earlier study by Groshek (2010) found that from 1994 to 2003, the Internet had limited national-level democratic effects, which suggested that Internet diffusion should not be considered a democratic panacea, but rather a component of contemporary democratization processes. Updating those analyses, this study used the same sample of 72 countries to examine the democratic effects of the Internet and mobile phones from 2004 to 2014 by replicating Groshek's time-series statistical tests. This study also found very limited evidence that emerging media diffusion resulted in augmented democratization, with only four countries—Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan—demonstrating greater democracy levels than were statistically predicted. Within a framework of diffusion of innovations and demand for democracy, this study extends the current understanding of emerging media's role in democratic development, and represents an important step in identifying the limited agency that emerging media diffusion has shown in cultivating democratic growth nationally.


I have seen the advancement in the field of internet due to wireless networking technologies. It gives rise to many new applications. In the past of few decades, I have seen the advancement in wireless networks. The emerging capabilities of mobile devices have given a new direction to the internet, which decreases the cost and allow us to use infrastructure wireless networks and infrastructure less wireless networks (i.e. Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Network).With so many applications that MANETs provides us, there are still some challenges that have to overcome. I present in this paper, the history of MANET, challenges (issues) involve in MANET and its some applications. MANET :  A Mobile Ad-hoc network is a wireless ad- hoc network which is used to exchange information.


Software companies usually develop a set of product variants within the same family that share certain functions and differ in others. Variations across software variants occur to meet different customer requirements. Thus, software product variants evolve over time to cope with new requirements. A software engineer who deals with this family may find it difficult to understand the evolution scenarios that have taken place over time. In addition, software identifier names are important resources to understand the evolution scenarios in this family. This paper introduces an automatic approach called Juana's approach to detect the evolution scenario across two product variants at source code level and identifies the common and unique software identifier names across software variants source code. Juana's approach refers to common and unique identifier names as a software identifiers map and compute it by comparing software variants to each other. Juana considers all software identifier names such as package, class, attribute and method. The novelty of this approach is that it exploits common and unique identifier names across the source code of software variants, to understand the evolution scenarios across software family in an efficient way. For validity, Juana was applied on ArgoUML and Mobile Media software variants. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of the approach as all evolution scenarios were correctly detected via software identifiers map.


Worldwide, one in eight deaths is due to cancer. Projections based on the GLOBOCAN 2012 estimates predict a substantive increase new cancer cases per year by 2035 in developing countries if preventive measures are not widely applied. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of lives could be saved each year if countries made use of existing knowledge and the best cost-effective methods to prevent and treat cancer. Therefore, the aim of this study is to estimate a provisional budget against cancer in low and middle incomes countries, according the GNI-PPP, the cancer incidence and the number of population. Economically country classification is determining with the Gross national income (GNI), per capita, Purchasing power parity (PPP), according the administrations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Cancer incidence data presented are based on the most recent data available at IARC. However, population compares estimates from the US Bureau of the Census. The provisional budget is establishing among the guidelines developed by WHO for regional and national cancer control programs according to national economic development. Provisional budget against cancer is estimated to 12,960.163 (thousands of U.S $) for a population of 6,163,195 persons in Sierra Leone.


Network measurement plays an important role for many network functions such as detecting network anomalies and identifying big flows. However, most existing measurement solutions fail to achieve high performance in software as they often incorporate heavy computations and a large number of random memory accesses. We present Agg-Evict, a generic framework for accelerating network measurement in software. Agg-Evict aggregates the incoming packets on the same flows and sends them as a batch, reducing the number of computations and random memory accesses in the subsequent measurement solutions. We perform extensive experiments on top of DPDK with 10G NIC and observe that almost all the tested measurement solutions under Agg-Evict can achieve 14.88 Mpps throughput and see up to 5.7X lower average processing latency per packet.


A method for characterizing and quantifying marine methane gas seeps along the U.S. Western Atlantic Margin was developed and applied to 70 free-gas seeps observed by the R/V Okeanos Explorer in 2012 and 2013, in water depths ranging from 300-2000 meters. Acoustic backscatter from an 18 kHz split-beam echo sounder and a 30 kHz multi-beam echo sounder provided information on the height to which the gas seeps rose from the seafloor. Profiles of the depth-dependent target strength and scattering strength were compared to models of the evolution of rising bubbles to help constrain the ultimate fate of the methane gas. To do so, a refined methodology was developed that decoupled the target strength of a bubble plume from the inherent background noise and reverberation in the ocean. This methodology was particularly useful for acoustically weak (i.e. low signal-to-noise ratio) seeps, and for examining the acoustic trends of seeps as their echo signature approached background noise levels. Comparisons of target strength profiles to models of bubble dissolution demonstrated that the parameters used in the model (e.g. gas transfer rate) are consistent with empirical observations.


One of the bestselling garden books ever is fresher than ever! Ready to inspire a whole new generation of gardeners.When he created the "square foot gardening" method, Mel Bartholomew, a retired engineer and efficiency expert, found the solution to the frustrations of most gardeners. His revolutionary system is simple: it's an ingenious planting method based on using square foot blocks of garden space instead of rows. Gardeners build up, not down, so there's no digging and no tilling after the first year. And the method requires less thinning, less weeding, and less watering."I found a better way to garden, one that's more efficient, more manageable, and requires less work," Bartholomew explains. Not surprisingly, his method quickly received worldwide recognition and has been written up in every major newspaper and gardening magazine. His book, which served as the companion to the nationally acclaimed television series, has sold over 800,000 copies. Now freshened with new illustrations, the book Ingram calls "the largest selling garden book in America" is reissued for the delight of a whole new generation of gardeners.


Machine learning (ML) methods have been applied to the analysis of a range of biological systems. This thesis evaluates the application of these methods to the problem domain of skin permeability. ML methods offer great potential in both predictive ability and their ability to provide mechanistic insight to, in this case, the phenomena of skin permeation. Historically, refining mathematical models used to predict percutaneous drug absorption has been thought of as a key factor in this field. Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSARs) models are used extensively for this purpose. However, advanced ML methods successfully outperform the traditional linear QSAR models. In this thesis, the application of ML methods to percutaneous absorption are investigated and evaluated. The major approach used in this thesis is Gaussian process (GP) regression method. This research seeks to enhance the prediction performance by using local non-linear models obtained from applying clustering algorithms. In addition, to increase the model's quality, a kernel is generated based on both numerical chemical variables and categorical experimental descriptors. Monte Carlo algorithm is also employed to generate reliable models from variable data which is inevitable in biological experiments. The datasets used for this study are small and it may raise the over-fitting/under-fitting problem. In this research I attempt to find optimal values of skin permeability using GP optimisation algorithms within small datasets. Although these methods are applied here to the field of percutaneous absorption, it may be applied more broadly to any biological system.


A challenging issue of GNU/Linux: usability has been studied in this report. Usability is considered as one of the core component in any system software. System software should be efficient, effective and satisfying for users. Different studies on usability issue have been conducted in different distros but there is no specific study on Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu 8.10 is considered for usability evaluation of GNU/Linux system software and a multi-phased research approach is adopted. Participants (students) from different disciplines and level are taken to conduct the usability test. The system software is evaluated on the basis of usability test results and user's opinion. An interview is designed and conducted to validate the tested findings of the system. GNU/Linux is serving the whole community as being used by different distros. The current set of interface guidelines and default softwares used by Ubuntu does not provide efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction for novice users. It is very important aspect that software should have uniformity and complete control in applications. There is need to improve or redesign the default softwares for better usability in terms of interface, message windows, bugs and help etc for novice users.


How to unlock the hidden 95 per cent of the customer's mind that traditional marketing methods have never reached. This title provides practical synthesis of the cognitive sciences. Drawing heavily on psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and linguistics, Zaltman combines academic rigor with real-world results to offer highly accessible insights, based on his years of research and consulting work with large clients like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. An all-new tool kit: Zaltman provides research tools - metaphor elicitation, response latency, and implicit association techniques, to name a few - that will be all-new to marketers and demonstrates how innovators can use these tools to get clues from the subconscious when developing new products and finding new solutions, long before competitors do.


Purpose: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome type IV (EDS-IV) results from abnormal procollagen III synthesis and leads to arterial, intestinal, and uterine rupture. The purpose of this study was to review the spectrum, management, and clinical outcome of EDS-IV patients. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the clinical data of 31 patients (15 male and 16 female) with a clinical diagnosis of EDS-IV treated over a 30-year period (1971 to 2001). Biochemical confirmation was obtained in 24 patients, and mutation of the COL3A1 gene was confirmed in 11 patients. The study excluded patients with other connective tissue dysplasias. Results: The mean age at the time of diagnosis was 28.5 11 years (range, 10 to 53 years). Twenty-four patients developed 132 vascular complications; of these, 85 were present either before or at the time of the initial evaluation, and 47 complications occurred during a median follow-up of 6.3 years (range, 0.5 to 26 years). Survival free of vascular complications was 90% at age 20 years, 39% at 40 years, and 20% at age 60 years. Fifteen patients underwent 30 operative interventions for vascular complications, including arterial reconstruction (n 15), simple repair or ligation (n 4), coil embolization (n 3), splenectomy (n 2), and abdominal decompression, nephrectomy, graft thrombectomy, vein stripping and thoracoscopy (n 1 each). Three hospital deaths occurred from exsanguinating hemorrhage: two after operative interventions and one because of a ruptured splenic artery. Procedure-related morbidity was 46%, including a 37% incidence of postoperative bleeding and a 20% need for re-exploration. The incidence of late graft-related complications was 40% of arterial reconstructions, including 4 anastomotic aneurysms, 1 fatal anastomotic disruption, and 1 graft thrombosis. Patient survival was 68% at age 50 years and 35% at age 80 years. Of the 12 deaths during the study period, 11 were associated with vascular or graft-related complications. Conclusion: Operative mortality in patients with vascular complications of EDS-IV was not excessively high, but the incidence of postoperative bleeding complications and late graft-related problems was significant. Despite successful repair of vascular complications, survival was shortened because of secondary vascular or graft-related complications. (J Vasc Surg 2005;42:98-106.)


Talent turnover often costs a large amount of business time, money and performance. Therefore, employee turnover prediction is critical for proactive talent management. Existing approaches on turnover prediction are mainly based on profiling of employees and their working environments, while the important contagious effect of employee turnovers has been largely ignored. To this end, in this paper, we propose a contagious effect heterogeneous neural network (CEHNN) for turnover prediction by integrating the employee profiles, the environmental factors, and more importantly, the influence of turnover behaviors of co-workers. Moreover, a global attention mechanism is designed to evaluate the heterogeneous impact on potential turnover behaviors. This attention mechanism can improve the interpretability of turnover prediction and provide actionable insights for talent retention. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and case studies on a realworld dataset from a large company to validate the effectiveness of the contagious effect for turnover prediction.


GjamoVski, V., m. kiprijanoVski and T. arsoV, 2015. Evaluation of autochthonous ecotype of bitter almond as peach rootstocks. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 21: 624–630 This work presents the results from the study of the important morphological, biological and economic characteristics of 22 eco-types of bitter almond, selected from the rich autochthon population in the republic of macedonia, suitable for use as rootstocks in the peach nursery production. The researches have been made in the period from 2002 2004. The seed used as control is from the almond cultivar texas and seeds from vineyard peach. The research included the pomological and the chemical characteristics of the fruits, the quality of the seedlings, variability of the seedlings and nursery trees and the economical value of the types. The selected types mainly have larger dimensions of the nuts and the kernel respective to the controls. The weight of the Ci-3 type has the largest nuts (5.11 g), whereas the type Ci-2 has the largest weight of the kernels (1.15 g). The kernels with an intensively bitter taste have a larger content of amygdaline which is from 18.4 mg/100g to 275.9 mg/100g. The seedlings from the Ci-8 type have the most uniformed development. The IZ-1 and the VE-1 type have the highest first development of the pre-branches (13 cm), whereas the CI-6 type has the lowest (6.5 cm). The variability of the development of the plants is highest at the Ci-5 type, and the lowest at the iZ-1 type. The following types have the highest marks for economic value, even higher than the controls: Ci-4 (76), Us-1 (75), Ci-8 (74), Ba-6 (73), Ba-1 (72) and VE-2 (72). They are the promising types for the production of generative rootstocks.


By the end of 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began to see a steady rise in the number of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) from Central America, particularly from the Northern Triangle countries— El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—arriving to the US-Mexico border. The number of children entering the United States from these countries more than doubled during fiscal year (FY) 2012 and continued to grow through FY 2014. In FY 2013, CBP apprehended over 35,000 children. That number almost doubled to 66,127 in FY 2014, with Central American children outnumbering their Mexican counterparts for the first time. Research has identified high levels of violence perpetrated by gangs and drug cartels in the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico as a primary reason for this surge. Under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) passed with bi-partisan support in 2008, children from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing. In contrast, unless there are indicia of trafficking, Mexican children are returned immediately to their country. Advocates have expressed concern that expedited removal of Mexican children places children with valid humanitarian claims at risk of being returned to harm, including forcible recruitment into drug cartels and trafficking rings. After the spike in arrivals in FY 2014, several members of Congress called for a change in the TVPRA, urging that Central American children be treated like Mexican children and undergo expedited procedures for their removal. Many of their constituents supported such measures. The Obama administration requested additional funds to strengthen border security, speed up deportation procedures and implement measures to address the humanitarian crisis in Central America. Groups and individuals across the country came together to provide shelter, medical and psychological care, and legal representation to many of these children. Despite these efforts, much needs to be done to ensure that their rights are protected. This paper provides an overview of the violence perpetrated by gangs and other criminal organizations which compels many children to flee their communities. It describes the US government's obligations to protect UAC upon arrival, and good practices of other governments relating to the protection of child migrants and refugees. It also discusses Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, gang-related asylum case law, and the difficulty of prevailing in asylum claims based on persecution by gangs. It concludes with recommendations to the administration and policymakers to ensure compliance with US obligations under national and international laws.


The issue of prenatal testing and selective abortion has never received open public appraisal. This is somewhat regrettable. The interest in this area, however, is rapidly growing. In part this is a result of concerns about the rate of development in genetic knowledge and questions as to its application. For instance, there will be a huge increase in the scope of conditions or features for which we will be able to screen, some of which could hardly be described as significant. Further, for some time now, people with disabilities have had concerns about the practice of prenatal testing and selective abortion. This article looks at the relationship between reproductive autonomy, prenatal testing and associated practices, and the interests of people with disabilities. It asks whether such practices negatively affect the interests of such individuals, and if so, how. This is an important question for the formulation of public policy in this area. Although some groups have studied this issue in detail, policy bodies do not necessarily fully engage with their analyses. This may be a reflection of public confusion about this issue. To some degree, fear of causing offense may also inhibit both expression of public opinion and, in turn, policy analysis. This is unfortunate and needs to be acknowledged.I am grateful to participants of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine—King's College London—Oxford Consortium on Bioethics, 2003, for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and particularly to Professor Jonathan Glover and Dr. Bobbie Farsides for conversations relating to it.


A large ensemble of quantum vortices in a superfluid may itself be treated as a novel kind of fluid that exhibits anomalous hydrodynamics. Here we consider the dynamics of vortex clusters with thermal friction, and present an analytic solution that uncovers a new universality class in the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of dissipative superfluids. We find that the long-time dynamics of the vorticity distribution is an expanding Rankine vortex (i.e.~top-hat distribution) independent of initial conditions. This highlights a fundamentally different decay process to classical fluids, where the Rankine vortex is forbidden by viscous diffusion. Numerical simulations of large ensembles of point vortices confirm the universal expansion dynamics, and further reveal the emergence of a frustrated lattice structure marked by strong correlations. We present experimental results in a quasi-two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate that are in excellent agreement with the vortex fluid theory predictions, demonstrating that the signatures of vortex fluid theory can be observed with as few as $N\sim 11$ vortices. Our theoretical, numerical, and experimental results establish the validity of the vortex fluid theory for superfluid systems.


Network measurements are essential for network operations and troubleshooting. A number of network measurement projects have developed measurement platforms to not only assess the state of individual networks and services but target certain aspects of the Internet as a whole.

Measuring any aspect of the Internet is challenging for various reasons such as the sheer scale of the Internet or the dynamics of it. Building and operating a platform that has Internet-wide network measurements as a goal is therefore challenging. In this paper, GLIMPSE-an end user-based network measurement platform-is introduced and its architecture is described in detail. GLIMPSE is an attempt to build a measurement platform based on standard measurement techniques, external logic to trigger measurements and last but not least community support.


This is today's most up-to-date and comprehensive resource for eurodollar futures traders, hedgers, and researchers. Eurodollar futures, and put and call options traded on those futures, revolutionized the world of banking and finance and are now among the most widely traded money market contracts in the world. "The Eurodollar Futures and Options Handbook" explores the complete range of current research and trading practice on these uniquely flexible trading vehicles, and tells you everything you need to know to increase your profits - and, more important, control your losses - when navigating this complex market.Featuring contributions from leading Eurodollar experts, including the author's seminal articles on Eurodollar convexity bias and measuring and trading term TED spreads, this long-awaited book explains: Eurodollar futures - What they are, how they are priced, and how they can be used to hedge interest rate risk and trade the yield curve; Eurodollar options - structures and patterns of Eurodollar rate volatilities, along with price, volatility, and risk parameter conventions of Eurodollar options.Eurodollar futures and options trading has grown exponentially, with no end in sight to its phenomenal growth. Let "The Eurodollar Futures and Options Handbook" arm you with the latest knowledge on these important trading vehicles, and provide you with the strategies and techniques you need to make the most of this liquid and lucrative market. Today's Eurodollar market - the market for dollar denominated deposits outside of the United States - is perhaps the largest and most liquid of the world's short-term dollar markets and is becoming the new standard of value for fixed income markets. For over a decade, futures and options traders in this market have relied on "Eurodollar Futures and Options" (by Burghardt, Belton, Lane, Luce, and McVey) for accurate market analysis coupled with solid, results-oriented trading and hedging strategies.Markets have changed dramatically, however, and the need for a comprehensive new handbook has become obvious and acute. The "Eurodollar Futures and Options Handbook" takes over where that book left off and incorporates all of the major advances in understanding how Eurodollar futures and options work and how traders and hedgers should use them. With contributions from Galen Burghardt, his colleagues, and collaborators, this hands-on volume focuses on every facet of this powerful market. It provides practitioners with practical, detailed discussions of: the Eurodollar market - growth, expansion, and consolidation of the interest rate markets; key money market developments; the birth of Eurodollar futures; exchange-traded money market futures and OTC interest rate swaps; Eurodollar futures - the Eurodollar futures contract; forward and futures interest rates; and hedging with Eurodollar futures; pricing and hedging swaps.It includes: the convexity bias, with new convexity bias series; measuring and trading term TED spreads; hedging and trading with stacks, packs, and bundles; hedging extension risk in callable agency notes; the SP trading the turn Eurodollar Options - the Eurodollar option contract; price, volatility, and risk parameter conventions; caps, floors, and Eurodollar options; structure and patterns of Eurodollar rate volatility; trading with serial and mid-curve Eurodollar options; relative versus basis point volatility, including volatility cones; and hedging convexity bias.Until now, most of the material in this book was available only in assorted and often hard to find research notes. Eurodollar futures and options traders had to seek out special courses or know someone who had access to these notes. The "Eurodollar Futures and Options Handbook" combines greatly improved basic tools and research applications with current research on Eurodollar futures and options, and saves you both time and money by giving you all of the important basic tools and applications in one comprehensive, accessible volume.


UNLABELLED
Ventilation rates (VRs) in buildings must adequately control indoor levels of pollutants; however, VRs are constrained by the energy costs. Experiments in a simulated office assessed the effects of VR per occupant on perceived air quality (PAQ), Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) symptoms, and decision-making performance. A parallel set of experiments assessed the effects of VR per unit floor area on the same outcomes. Sixteen blinded healthy young adult subjects participated in each study. Each exposure lasted four hours and each subject experienced two conditions in a within-subject study design. The order of presentation of test conditions, day of testing, and gender were balanced. Temperature, relative humidity, VRs, and concentrations of pollutants were monitored. Online surveys assessed PAQ and SBS symptoms and a validated computer-based tool measured decision-making performance. Neither changing the VR per person nor changing the VR per floor area, had consistent statistically significant effects on PAQ or SBS symptoms. However, reductions in either occupant-based VR or floor-area-based VR had a significant and independent negative impact on most decision-making measures. These results indicate that the changes in VR employed in the study influence performance of healthy young adults even when PAQ and SBS symptoms are unaffected.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
The study results indicate the importance of avoiding low VRs per person and low VRs per floor area to minimize decrements in cognitive performance.


Breathlessness is a common reason for the hospitalisation of people with chronic heart failure (CHF). It is a distressing symptom for both patients and their informal carers. Breathlessness in CHF derives from physical, psychological, social, spiritual and environmental factors. Optimal management of breathlessness in CHF requires both pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions. This article examines the assessment and management of a patient who was experiencing acute breathlessness as a result of end-stage CHF within an accident and emergency (A&E) department. The patient had only just been discharged from hospital, where she had been an inpatient for 4 weeks because of her breathlessness. However, on discharge home, she became acutely anxious and breathless and returned to the hospital via the A&E department. The article describes how her condition was evaluated holistically. It demonstrates the end-of-life care implications for nurses managing breathless CHF patients in acute settings. A pseudonym has been used to maintain confidentiality ([Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2008][1]). Conflicts of interest: none

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From its inception on October 1, 2012, the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing ("VBP") Program shifted Medicare's paradigm to emphasize performance over costs in determining hospital reimbursement. Reducing the overall Medicare reimbursement to hospitals by an estimated $1.4 billion for Fiscal Year ("FY") 2015, the VBP Program was quick to secure the attention of the nation's health care providers. Technically "budget neutral," the VBP Program will return this same $1.4 billion to hospitals the following year in the form of performance incentives. According to the Federal Government: The program's "benefits will be seen in improved patient outcomes, safety, and in the patient's experience of care. However, [the Federal Government] cannot estimate these benefits in actual dollar and patient terms." As the Federal Government waits to assess the accuracy of its prediction, the FY 2015 reduction of 1.50% will finally level off at two percent (2.0%) in 2017. An additional two years, however, are unnecessary to evaluate the VBP Program under fundamental accounting principals when using a general overview into the ways in which successful and profitable companies operate. Viewed from this perspective, the VBP Program is fundamentally flawed, and data from 2015, 2016 or 2017 will not present opportunities for correction. This article suggests that while smaller hospitals may bear the greatest collateral damage from the VBP Program, larger systems will suffer as well. The number of hospitals forced into financial distress or insolvency by the Hospital VBP Program remains to be seen, although consideration should be given to the number of hospitals lost to their communities it would take to undermine the projected benefits relating to outcomes, safety, and the overall patient experience.


In the following report I shall concentrate on the law as pronounced by the United States Supreme Court, which has, within the sphere of judicial competence, the last say on the interpretation of the Constitution. The volume of significant litigation on the subject which stops below the Supreme Court has been relatively light, and the constitutional law declared by the lower courts has played a less significant role than is the case in many other issues. Indeed, as we shall see, the Supreme Court itself has had less to say on the topic than might be hoped for. I shall try to indicate the main lines of scholarly debate, which is vast in quantity, if not always in insight; but it must be said that in constitutional law as a whole, and in this area in particular, the influence of scholarly opinion on the behavior of governments and courts has been less than may be observed in other fields of American law.


Abstract Aircraft gas turbine engines produce ultrafine PM which has been linked to local-air-quality and environmental concerns. Regulatory sampling and measurement standards were recently introduced by ICAO to mitigate these emission of nonvolatile PM (nvPM). Currently, reported nvPM emissions can significantly under-represent engine exit concentrations due to particle loss. A System-Loss-Tool (SLT) has been proposed to correct for particle loss in the standard sampling and measurement system permitting an estimation of engine exit concentrations for airport environment inventories. Thermophoretic and bend particle loss mechanisms are predicted in the SLT using expressions derived from the literature, which are not in all cases empirically validated to conditions representative of aircraft nvPM exhaust sampling methodologies. In this study, thermophoretic (Tgas≤910 °C) and coiling-induced (≤3960°) particle loss were measured using sampling variables relevant to aerospace certification. Experiments were performed using laboratory generated solid particles (fractal graphite, cubical salt and spherical silica) bounding the upper and lower limits of aircraft soot morphology (i.e., particle effective density, mass-mobility exponent, primary-particle-size). These were aerodynamically classified using a Cambustion Aerodynamic-Aerosol-Classifier (AAC) at electrical-mobility diameters ranging from 30 to 140 nm. The AAC was shown to efficiently classify salt and silica particles, producing monomodal distributions ≥25 nm electrical-mobility GMD, whilst classifying fractal graphite >40 nm electrical-mobility GMD (calculated as da≥20 nm) albeit generally displaying larger GSD's. Thermophoretic loss at ΔTgas of 0–880 K correlated well with the SLT for non-fractal particles with losses ≤39.2% measured, with higher depositions observed for graphite (4.1%) considered insignificant compared to overall measurement uncertainty. Coiling a 25 m sample line in compliance with ICAO standards induced negligible additional particle loss at flowrates relevant of aircraft exhaust sampling, in agreement with SLT-predicted bend losses. However, additional losses were witnessed at lower flowrates (≤13% at 30 nm), attributed to secondary flow diffusion loss induced by the coiling. Copyright © 2020 American Association for Aerosol Research


Despite what we learn in law school about the "meeting of the minds,�? most contracts are merely boilerplate -- take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts' content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate's information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a "horizontal�? approach -- i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the whole transaction. Yet real-world transactions often involve multiple layers of contracts, each with its own information costs. What is needed, then, is a "vertical�? analysis, a study that examines fewer contracts of any one kind but tracks all the contracts the consumer encounters, soup to nuts. This Article presents the first vertical study of boilerplate. It casts serious doubt on the market mechanism and shows that existing scholarship fails to appreciate the full scale of the information cost problem. It then offers two regulatory solutions. The first works within contract law's unconscionability doctrine, tweaking what the parties need to prove and who bears the burden of proving it. The second, more radical solution involves forcing both sellers and consumers to confront and minimize boilerplate's information costs -- an approach I call "forced salience.�? In the end, the boilerplate experience is as deep as it is wide. Our empirical work should reflect that fact, and our policy proposals should too.


Limitations with regard to the scalability of photochemical reactions can be efficiently overcome by using numbered-up microreactor technology. Here, the robustness of such a numbered-up capillary photomicroreactor system is tested when subjected to potential disturbances, such as channel blockage and light source failure. Channel blockage leads to relatively large changes in both flow distribution and yield. However, we found that the performance can be accurately predicted thus making it possible to adjust the reaction parameters to obtain certain output targets. Light source failure did not lead to large variations in the mass flow distribution, highlighting the importance of the flow distributor section. Since the reaction is photocatalyzed, the impact on the reaction yield was significant in the reactor where the light failure occurred.


A single-electrode atmospheric pressure microwave discharge air-plasma is reported. Fundamental characteristics, such as the effects of microwave power, auxiliary air flow, and nebulizer air flow on emission intensity, detection limits, and dynamic ranges for twelve elements and several interference experiments are reported. The plasma temperature is found to be about 4700°K. This simple system can be applied to the spectrochemical analysis of solution samples. The results with the use of this system to determine calcium, sodium, and potassium in SRM-1566 (oyster tissue) and SRM-92 (low-boron glass) show excellent agreement with the NBSs certified values.


Multiple task learning (MTL) is becoming popular due to its theoretical advances and empirical successes. The key idea of MTL is to explore the hidden relationships among multiple tasks to enhance learning performance. Recently, many MTL algorithms have been developed and applied to various problems such as feature selection and kernel learning. However, most existing methods highly relied on certain assumptions of the task relationships. For instance, several works assumed that there is a major task group and several outlier tasks, and used a decomposition approach to identify the group structure and outlier tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we adopt a more general formulation for MTL without making specific structure assumptions. Instead of performing model decomposition, we directly impose an elastic-net regularization with a mixture of the structure and outlier penalties and formulate the objective as an unconstrained convex problem. To derive the optimal solution efficiently, we propose to use an Iteratively Reweighted Least Square (IRLS) method with a preconditioned conjugate gradient, which is computationally affordable for high dimensional data. Extensive experiments are conducted over both synthetic and real data, and comparisons with several state-of-the-art algorithms clearly show the superior performance of the proposed method.


Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. By Colleen McDannell. (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 312. $35.00.) For too long, Colleen McDannell argues,American historians have thought of religion as the "sacred," the transcendent, the spiritual, set against the "profane," the everyday, the material, the commercial.This strict dichotomy, she contends, had blinded them to the way American Christians have continually"scrambled" such categories, the sacred and the profane, the material and spiritual, by employing goods and artifacts, many of them purchased, in the practice of their faith. Even on the few occasions when historians have paid attention to religion's material dimension, this rigid dichotomy, reinforced by intellectual disdain for mass-produced objects, had led to odd distortions in the historical literature. McDannell points out, for example, that we "know far more about the material environment of the Shakers-a community that tried to simplify their physical universe-than we do about that of Roman Catholics whose sacramental theology fully exploited the material world" Colleen McDannell's book is an attempt to address this long-neglected material dimension in American Christian history, to open up study of it by offering some theoretical arguments about how objects have functioned in American religion and to illustrate those arguments through six case studies. These case studies range widely over time and Christian denominations: the emergence of the family Bible as the centerpiece of the Victorian parlor; the place of Christian imagery in the rural cemetery movement of the early nineteenth century; the devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes in late nineteenth-century American Catholicism; Catholic and Protestant debates over Christian art in the 1950's and 1960's; the meanings of sacred garments to contemporary Mormons; and the rise of Christian bookstores in modern America. These case studies are more than mere demonstrations of the importance of objects in American religious life; they are each sophisticated analyses of how and why objects play such central roles in the religious life of American Christians. The research is thorough and imaginative, drawing on a wide variety of sources: the objects themselves, probate records, advertisements, oral history interviews, as well as conventional sources of magazines, newspapers, and manuscripts. McDannell, for example, uses Farm Security Administration photographs of rural workers' homes to show us not only what religious objects and artifacts average people owned, but also how they used them, where they placed them in their homes, and how they surrounded them with other objects and images: how, for example, images of saints were set next to photographs of family members, mixing heavenly patrons and earthly family together in a single communal network. …


Even if the main criminals of an organization are incarcerated, they will be replaced by others who would continue illegal activities, unless their financial assets are removed. Thus, civil forfeiture intends to dismantle the economic infrastructure of drug trafficking networks. Civil forfeiture considers the property as guilty, rather than the owner, and it may exist even if there is not a criminal action. Therefore, it is claimed that police agencies have chosen easy targets, such as wealthy drug users rather than major drug traffickers. Consequently, it has been particularly challenged on the basis of the Excessive Fines, Double Jeopardy, and Due Process Clauses. The use of criminal forfeiture instead of civil forfeiture and the elimination of the equitable sharing provision are considered to be the primary solutions.


Abstract How can countries eradicate poverty while also addressing climate change? Despite the necessity to deal with both issues simultaneously, no study has analysed the empirical relationship between the two aforementioned goals and the factors that drive these interlinkages. This paper addresses this gap in the literature, and the initial research question, by developing a framework to analyse this relationship and its drivers. It then econometrically tests the propositions derived from the framework, using data from 135 developed and developing countries. The paper's findings show that the carbon intensity of poverty reduction (CIPR), defined as the ratio between proportional changes in emissions levels and the share of the population above the poverty line, is heterogeneous across countries. This heterogeneity is partly explained by economic growth, which is found to have a negative effect on the CIPR up to a certain income level, defined here as a 'turning point'. Above that turning point, economic growth increases the CIPR. By contrast, inequality reduction is shown to have an unambiguous negative effect on the CIPR. The results are robust for different poverty lines and different model specifications. In addition, the research underlines the tension between policy perspectives at the national and global levels. Economic growth, despite the potential to reduce the national carbon intensity of poverty reduction for the numerous countries that lie below the estimated turning points, needs to confront global environmental boundaries. Given this tension, the paper concludes that, alongside developed countries drastically reducing their emissions, developing countries should follow alternative development paths. Among them, a stronger greening of economic growth or an increased use of cash transfers and inequality-reducing policies are discussed.


This chapter attempts to address two parallel concerns underscoring the class struggle between laic and Islamic fractions of the Turkish dominant class ensued in connection with the neoliberal transformation in Turkish capitalism. In this regard we focus on the media sector, especially newspapers. First, the schism in the economically dominant class and its ramifications for the ideological supremacy of bourgeoisie will be a focus for discussion. Secondly, how this schism is linked to the turf fight in the media sector will be analyzed.
We first introduce a theoretical framework and elaborate upon the use of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and Repressive Apparatus (RA) in building hegemony by highlighting the implications of a schism in these apparatuses. Here we aim to combine Gramscian notion of hegemony with Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model and how this model can be contextualized with reference to the peculiarities of the Turkish case. In the second section we focus on the media sector and the power struggle between the media corporations owned by the Islamic and laic fractions in order to provide a background to our discussion in the sections to follow. In the third section we present a case, within the limits drawn by the theoretical framework, whereby a state of contention in the media sector is examined in relation to the two dominant class fractions vying for hegemonic leadership. In the fourth section, instead of a conclusion, we argue that, notwithstanding the lasting schism renders the building of hegemony an ever more difficult task for each fraction of the dominant class, monopolization of the media remains to preserve the domination of the capitalist class as a whole and renew its oppressive power over the working class.


MOLLOV, I., P. BOYADZHIEV and A. DONEV, 2010. Trophic role of the Marsh frog Pelophylax ridibundus (Pallas, 1771) (Amphibia, Anura) in the aquatic ecosystems. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 16: 298-306 During our study we identified 1356 prey items, divided in 64 prey categories in the trophic spectrum of Pelophylax ridibundus from the surrounding of Skutare Village (Plovdiv District, South Bulgaria). The average number of prey items per stomach for all studied seasons is as follows: spring 1994 11.93 (SD=18.31); autumn 1994 9.65 (SD=13.44); spring 1995 11.84 (SD=16.34) and totally – 11.49 (SD=38.67). The most important prey category for the whole period of study is Coleoptera (31.93%), followed by Diptera (27.65%) and Hymenoptera (13.42%). A presence of vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles and mammals) in the trophic spectrum was also recorded. The amphibians are presented with tadpoles (0.59 %) and adult specimens of Pelophylax ridibundus (0.36%). The reptiles with two subadult specimens (0.15%) of the Balkan Wall lizard (Podarcis tauricus) and the mammals with one (0.07%) Mus sp., which evidently were accidental captured in the water. The trophic niche breadths for spring seasons are quite high spring 1994 (15.04) and spring 1995 (19.52), but for the autumn of 1994 it was 3.14. The trophic niche breadth for the whole period of study is 15.15. The trophic role of the Marsh frog in the aquatic ecosystems in Bulgaria is discussed.


A host plant survey for rice stinkbugs was conducted on commercial rice fields in Puerto Rico. Alternate host plants for the five stinkbug species consistently collected from rice fields were identified. Ten plant species were identified as alternate host plants. Oebalus pugnax (F.) displayed the narrowest host range and was collected only from Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench and Sorghum halepense (L.) Pers. The two most abundant stinkbug species, Mormidea angustata Stal and Oebalus ypsilon-griseus (De Geer), exhibited a similar preference or host plant range. Nearly twice as many stinkbugs were collected from weedy fields (560 insects) than from weedfree fields (362 insects).


Community information systems have the power to transform communities. However, without fully understanding the pre-requisite factors affecting community information system viability, and the complex relationships between these factors, communities struggle to manage such projects in a way that leads to viable systems that deliver real benefits. This paper develops and presents a Model of Community Information System Viability Pre-requisite Factors, based on both existing literature and the study of three community information system projects. This Model represents the generic factors that inform viability (i.e. leadership, active membership, funding, awareness, and system design and functionality), and also considers the impact of community context. This study argues that the viability of a Community Information System cannot be considered in isolation. All factors are directly impacted by the value of the Community Information System to the community. Management can also heavily impact on the success of a Community Information System.


Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) devices are of interest as neutron generators for many applications. An essential part of these devices is the formation of a multiple potential well structure within the devices. In this paper, previous analyses of the formation of these wells are reviewed and extended. Three types of IEC systems are classified and analyzed according to the arrangement of electrodes and the species within the system. These systems are the uni-polar cathode-anode (UCA) system, the bi-polar cathode-anode (BCA) system, and the bi-polar anode-cathode (BAC) system. Results of extensive parametric studies are reported through an efficient solution of the Poisson's equation. These results delineate the conditions most conducive for double potential well formation in different systems and may aid in the future design of IEC systems.


The Palenquero creole language (spoken together with Spanish in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia) exhibits a number of key grammatical features found in no variety of Spanish; mutual intelligibility between Spanish and Palenquero is quite low. It is not unreasonable to assume that Palenqueros psycholinguistically partition Spanish and Palenquero, that they are able to identify given configur-ations as belonging to either Spanish or Palenquero, and that utterances con-taining both quintessentially Palenquero and uniquely Spanish structures will be acknowledged as mixed. The present study is based on experiments conducted in San Basilio de Palenque, using stimuli extracted from natural speech samples, entirely in Spanish, entirely in Palenquero, and containing what might be con-sidered Spanish-LP morphosyntactic mixing. The overall results suggest that code-switching as commonly defined is not explicitly accepted by Palenqueros. They also demonstrate an asymmetry between perception and production: "grammars" and "languages" are not psycholinguistically coterminous for LP-Spanish bilinguals.


Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R, the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.


Award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields has garnered praise from scholars and an international audience of readers. Inspired by the quality and scope of Shields's work, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction addresses her creative exploration of postmodernism. As the first thorough examination of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this collection of essays establishes the groundwork for future studies of her oeuvre. The collection begins with a significant new essay from Shields herself, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,' perhaps her most substantial commentary upon her own aims as a writer. In addition, scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and Australia explore the complexity of Shields's work and her contributions to the genre of the novel. These lively essays reflect Shields's verve and her playful approach to today's sophisticated critical thinking. Among the topics are Shields's use of biography and autobiography, metafiction, popular romance, and symbolism. While the essays foreground the unreliability of language, and hence our inability to know one another or even ourselves, the contributors argue that Shields has taken a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology. Containing several essays on Swann and The Stone Diaries, Shields's most popular works, and the most extensive annotated bibliography available of works by and about Shields, this collection will appeal widely to scholars, students, and readers of Carol Shields and Canadian fiction.


ABSTRACT: Runoff losses of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from field applied manure can contribute to surface water pollution. Grass hedges may reduce runoff losses of nutrients and sediment. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of narrow switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) hedges (−0.75 m wide) on the transport of P and N from a field receiving beef cattle feedlot manure under tilled and no-till conditions. This study was conducted on a steep (12 % average slope) Monona silt loam (fine-silty, mixed, superactive, mesic Typic Hapludolls) soil near Treynor, Iowa. The experiment was a split-plot with no-till and disked systems as main plots and subplots of manure, fertilizer, and check with or without a grass hedge. A rainfall simulator was used and runoff was collected from both the initial and the following wet simulations. Only 38% of the no-till plots and 63% of disked plots had any runoff during the initial 6.4 cm hr−1 water application. A single narrow grass hedge reduced runoff concentrations of dissolved P (DP) by 47%, bioavailable P (BAP) by 48%, particulate P (PP) by 38%, total P (TP) by 40%, and NH4-N by 60% during the wet simulation on the no-till plots receiving manure, compared with similar plots with no hedges. The corresponding reductions in concentrations as a result of a grass hedge for DP, BAP, PP, TP, and NH4-N on the disked plots were 21, 29, 43, 38, and 52%, respectively. Runoff NH4-N concentration from fertilizer applied to the disked plots was reduced by 61%, NO3-N by 21%, and total N (TN) by 27% during the wet simulation when grass hedges were used. Grass hedges also reduced total quantities of DP, BAP, TP, and NH4-N during the wet simulation. The TP loss was 3.3% of applied P fertilizer and was 0.3% of applied manure P. Narrow grass hedges were effective in reducing P and N losses in runoff from both manure and fertilizer application.


Scholarly discussion of the fate of the Third World has long been domi-nated by North American and European authors. Yet in recent years the writings of Third World social scientists have often been creative, and are worthy of more attention in the United States. This book makes the work of three outstanding Latin American sociologists readily available to the English-reading public: Gino Germani of Argentina (who has moved to Harvard University); Pablo Gonzalez Casanova of Mexico; and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. Their major writings are summarized, and then interpreted in the context of material from extensive interviews with the authors. In these interviews, the authors explain the events--personal, professional, and political--that have had major influence on their thought. Their views range from Germani's synthesis of orthodox European and American sociology, as adapted to his detailed empirical studies of the modernization of Argentina and other countries in this hemisphere, through Gonzalez Casanova's interpretation of the forces of exploitation, internal as well as external, that dominate the Mexican political system, to Cardoso's influential revisions of Marxist theory to deal with the basic situation of dependency that shapes the range of options open to the Latin American countries, especially Brazil. These "inside" views of the devel-opment process often sharply diverge from the dominant opinions among "outsiders." By understanding the differences, readers in the United States can gain direct insight into Latin American social reality, and can find ways of improving North American social science by bringing to the surface some unstated assumptions. One theme common to all three authors is their concern with issues that arise from policy debates: they focus on questions of practical import, rather than abstruse theoretical models. Yet they use sophisticated tools of social science that go beyond ideological rhetoric, and thus discipline political argument with scholarly rigor.


From the 1970s most scholars have rejected the Cold War orthodoxy that the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was a result of instructions from Moscow, translated into action by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). They have instead argued that local factors precipitated violence, and that the MCP was relatively unprepared when the Emergency was declared. This article puts the international element back into the picture. It shows that the change from a 'united front' to a 'two camp' international communist line from 1947 played a significant role in deciding local debates in favour of revolt. It also demonstrates how the MCP had plans for a graduated build-up to armed revolt before an Emergency was declared. This article therefore offers a model for a dynamic, two-way relationship between the international and local levels of Cold War.


Cyclone separators are widely used for separation of solids or droplets from gaseous or liquid fluids in several industries. Cyclones can be used for many purposes and each cyclone can be fitted to its area of use. In the oil and gas industry there are problems with too much sand in the produced oil. Separation of the solids are critical for other separation and processing equipment and when concerning the environment effective hydrocyclones are very important. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate particle trajectories in a hydrocyclone to achieve a better understanding of the particle flow. A Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner and a technique called Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT) are used to detect the trajectories. The PET scanner is placed at Haukeland University Hospital and is originally used to detect cancer cells in patients. In this thesis the PET scanner is used to track particle behaviour in a hydrocyclone which is done by making the particle radioactive and injecting it into the hydrocyclone. Based on cross-triangulation of lines of response (LOR) obtained from the output of the PET camera, the particle trajectory can be followed throughout the hydrocyclone. The use of this technique makes it possible to see details in the particle trajectory, and hence discover flow abnormalities and trends connected to the operating settings. The PEPT technique has been developed over twenty years and is currently used for process technology research just a few places in the world. Some numerical simulations has been performed to supplement the experimental results, rather than to perform a detailed comparison of the experiments. The detailed particle trajectories obtained in this thesis show a flow abnormality appearing in almost all the experiments. The flow phenomenon end of vortex (EoV) is also present in some of the experiments. The numerical simulations of the experiments coincide well with the experimental results. Additionally the Burgers model of flow gives good results when fitted to the tangential velocity of the particle.


Droughts are a recurring feature of Mexican climate, but few high-resolution data are available to test for climate-change forcing of Mesoamerican civilizations. We present a quantitative 2400 yr rainfall reconstruction for the Basin of Mexico, from a precisely dated and highly resolved speleothem, that documents highly variable rainfall over the past 2400 yr. Dry conditions peaked during a 150-yr-long late Classic (ca. 600–900 CE) (Common Era) mega drought that culminated at 770 CE which followed centuries of climatic drying that spanned the fall of the city of Teotihuacan ca. 550 CE. The wettest conditions in the 1450s CE were associated with fl ooding in the Basin of Mexico. Our data suggest that rainfall variability was likely forced by the El Nino–Southern Oscillation, and impacts on spring-fed irrigation agriculture may have been a stressor on Mesoamerican civilizations.


The mashing and brewing potentials of crude extracts of three plants commonly used in Northern Cameroon to make starch gruels sweet were assessed using sorghum cultivarSafrari as an adjunct. Alpha-amylase activities of the extracts fluctuated between 18 and 122 U/g, while the diastatic power and the β-carboxypeptidase activities ranged between 83 and 123 WK, and 16 and 63 mg FAN/min/µL, respectively. A longer mashing time (180 min) was necessary to obtain higher yields of extracts. Extract obtained was 18.7 °P for malted Safrari, 14.6 °P for malted barley, and 9.5, 13.5 and 11.4 °P after mashing Safrariadjuncts with extracts from Abrus precatorius, Burnatia enneandra and Cadaba farinose,respectively. Similar levels of reducing sugars ranging between 60 and 65 g/L were obtained when mashing was carried out using A. precatorius, B. enneandra and crude extracts, but about 50 g/L were obtained for C. farinosa. Free amino nitrogen fluctuated between 56 and 72 mg/L for C. farinose and B. enneandra, respectively, but was as low as 17 mg/L for A. precatorius. Fermentability was low for the worts obtained after mashingSafrari adjuncts using the extracts of the three plants, as compared to the worts of malted sorghum cultivar Safrari and barley.

 Key words: Abrus precatorius, Burnatia enneandra, Cadaba farinosa, α-amylase, extract,free amino nitrogen (FAN).


Lives as lived and lives as written are never one and the same. To turn the first into the second one must introduce "fiction" into the "fact" of the actual existence; this is never more true than during the Renaissance, when multiformity was the rule. "The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe" explores the ways in which authors and their subjects constructed images for themselves, and some of the ways in which those images worked.The volume is especially timely in light of the growing interest in "microhistory," and in the histories that are emerging from nonliterary documents. Chapters consider numerous genres, including hagiography, epistolary and verse biography, and less familiar forms such as parodic prosopography, life-writing in funeral sermons, and comic martyrology.Contributors to the volume come from history, art history, and literature, and they include F.W. Conrad, Sheila ffolliott, Robert Kolb, James Mehl, Diana Robin, T.C. Price Zimmerman, and Elizabeth Goldsmith and Abby Zanger, among others.Thomas F. Mayer is Associate Professor of History, Augustana College. D. R. Woolf is Professor of History, Dalhousie University.


Undergraduate students (N = 691) were given the 1992 Caffeine Consumption Questionnaire of Landrum and provided information on age, sex, and year in school. A subset (n = 168) of those completing the questionnaire were also given the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire of Horne and Ostberg. Analysis indicated that the average intake of caffeine was roughly 1,600 mg, i.e., a range from 13 mg to 21,840 mg per week. Older students consumed more caffeine than younger ones, and students with an Evening personality preference consumed more caffeine in the evening and nighttime hours than those with a Morning personality preference. These results are discussed in the context of other caffeine studies. Caffeine consumption is an important issue, and a consistent measurement system should be used by various researchers testing different populations.


Previous studies have postulated that X‐linked and autosomal genes underlying human intellectual disability may have also mediated the evolution of human cognition. We have conducted the first comprehensive assessment of the extent and patterns of positive Darwinian selection on intellectual disability genes in humans. We report three main findings. First, as noted in some previous reports, intellectual disability genes with primary functions in the central nervous system exhibit a significant concentration to the X chromosome. Second, there was no evidence for a higher incidence of recent positive selection on X‐linked than autosomal intellectual disability genes, nor was there a higher incidence of selection on such genes overall, compared to sets of control genes. However, the X‐linked intellectual disability genes inferred to be subject to recent positive selection were concentrated in the Rho GTP‐ase pathway, a key signaling pathway in neural development and function. Third, among all intellectual disability genes, there was evidence for a higher incidence of recent positive selection on genes involved in DNA repair, but not for genes involved in other functions. These results provide evidence that alterations to genes in the Rho GTP‐ase and DNA‐repair pathways may play especially‐important roles in the evolution of human cognition and vulnerability to genetically‐based intellectual disability.


Step-parent adoption happens where a child is adopted by the spouse or civil union partner of a biological parent. This is a drastic invasion into the life of a child because (except if provided for otherwise) an adoption order terminates all parental responsibilities and rights any person had in respect of a child immediately before the adoption, and confers full parental responsibilities and rights in respect of the adopted child upon the adoptive parent. Under specific circumstances an adoption order may also be rescinded, again disrupting the life of the child dramatically. Because of the immense impact on a child, rescission of an adoption order has to be handled with kid gloves. In Turner v Turner two children had been legally adopted by their step-father while the Child Care Act was in operation. After the implementation of the Children's Act , however, he applied for these adoption orders to be rescinded. The court was faced with a situation where the application had been brought in contravention of the maximum two-year-period as prescribed by the Children's Act. Although it was argued that non-compliance with this statutory requirement prevented the court from adjudicating this matter, Mokgoatlheng J focused on the best interests of the child, considered the legality of the adoption orders (why?), and ultimately concluded that the supremacy of the best interests of the child meant that he was not precluded from hearing the application. In the end he ordered rescission of the adoption orders. The judgment cannot be supported.


Shale energy development is an issue of global importance. The number of reserves globally, and their potential economic return, have increased dramatically in the past decade. Questions abound, however, about the appropriate governance systems to manage the risks of unconventional oil and gas development and the ability for citizens to engage and participate in decisions regarding these systems. Stakeholder participation is essential for the social and political legitimacy of energy extraction and production, what the industry calls a 'social license' to operate.

This book attempts to bring together critical themes inherent in the energy governance literature and illustrate them through cases in multiple countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Germany and Poland. These themes include how multiple actors and institutions – industry, governments and regulatory bodies at all scales, communities, opposition movements, and individual landowners – have roles in developing, contesting, monitoring, and enforcing practices and regulations within unconventional oil and gas development. Overall, the book proposes a systemic, participatory, community-led approach required to achieve a form of legitimacy that allows communities to derive social priorities by a process of community visioning.

This book will be of great relevance to scholars and policy-makers with an interest in shale gas development, and energy policy and governance.


This paper extends the recently developed Model-Aided Visual-Inertial Fusion (MA-VIF) technique for quadrotor Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) to deal with wind disturbances. The wind effects are explicitly modelled in the quadrotor dynamic equations excluding the unobservable wind velocity component. This is achieved by a nonlinear observability of the dynamic system with wind effects. We show that using the developed model, the vehicle pose and two components of the wind velocity vector can be simultaneously estimated with a monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit. We also show that the MA-VIF is reasonably tolerant to wind disturbances, even without explicit modelling of wind effects and explain the reasons for this behaviour. Experimental results using a Vicon motion capture system are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and validate our claims.


Purpose: Presentation of branding as an important element in the creation process of the brand image of national tourism destinations on the example of the operation of 39 National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) in Europe. Design/Methodology/Approach: For the selection of NTOs the following criteria were taken into account. 1. The functional criterion: the main functions attributed to NTOs were accepted as the grounds for the verification, firstly, it was considered whether the promotion of a given country on foreign markets is included among these tasks. 2. The economic criterion: possession of an autonomous financial budget by a given organization (regardless of the percentage share of funds from the budget of the state or from the private sector, or from any other sources) was accepted as the grounds for verification. 3. The organizational criterion: a separation of a given organization in the structure of a superior body was accepted as the grounds for verification. The research methods used include a method of diagnostic survey including a questionnaire technique, a direct interview and a statistical analysis. Findings: The analysis demonstrated among others that the vast majority of the NTOs examined (92.3%) implement the objectives of branding in practice. At the same time, a significant part of these organizations (86.1%) recognized the activities taken within branding to be very effective. Moreover, the vast majority of the NTOs analysed (91.7%) undertake the initiatives realized as part of branding on the global tourist market. Practical Implications: The conclusions following the study can be used by various entities which are responsible for an effective realization of the management process of the brand of tourism destinations on the different levels of administration. Originality/Value: The study constitutes an entirely new insight into the functioning of NTOs while presenting a substantially broader spectrum of the areas of interest for this type organizations as compared to those presented in the source literature till now.


Delia's How to Cook: Book Two continues Delia's simple-to-follow teaching course for people of all ages and abilities. With her unique powers of communication, Delia removes the fear and mystique from cooking both the simplest and the more advanced dishes. For those who have mastered the techniques and for those who are already accomplished cooks How to Cook: Book Two contains a collection of 120 simple recipes from Roast Lamb in a Shrewsbury Sauce to Fresh Pecan and Almond Crumble. The cookbook and television series feature the following ten sections: The Store Cupboard; Fish; Meat; Poultry; Vegetables; Salads; Dairy Produce; Fruit; Cheese and Chocolate. How to Cook is a complete guide to cookery for the twenty-first century. Delia shares not only her vast experience, but also her extensive knowledge of English cooks, such as Eliza Acton. This tradition is combined with the very latest advances and innovations in cooking.


Abstract. The Pelagonian zone, situated between the External Hellenides/Cyclades to the west and the Axios/Vardar/Almopias zone (AVAZ) and the Rhodope to the east, was involved in late Early Cretaceous and in Late Cretaceous–Eocene orogenic events whose duration and extent are still controversial. This paper constrains their late thermal imprints. New and previously published zircon (ZFT) and apatite (AFT) fission-track ages show cooling below 240 °C of the metamorphic western AVAZ imbricates between 102 and 93–90 Ma, of northern Pelagonia between 86 and 68 Ma, of the eastern AVAZ at 80 Ma and of the western Rhodope at 72 Ma. At the regional scale, this heterogeneous cooling is coeval with subsidence of Late Cretaceous marine basin(s) that unconformably covered the Early Cretaceous (130–110 Ma) thrust system from 100 Ma. Thrusting resumed at 70 Ma in the AVAZ and migrated across Pelagonia to reach the External Hellenides at 40–38 Ma. Renewed thrusting in Pelagonia is attested at 68 Ma by abrupt and rapid cooling below 240 °C and erosion of the gneissic rocks. ZFT and AFT in western and eastern Pelagonia, respectively, testify at ~40 Ma to the latest thermal imprint related to thrusting. Central-eastern Pelagonia cooled rapidly and uniformly from 240 to 80 °C between 24 and 16 Ma in the footwall of a major extensional fault. Extension started even earlier, at ~33 Ma in the western AVAZ. Post-7 Ma rapid cooling is inferred from inverse modeling of AFT lengths. It occurred while E–W normal faults were cutting Pliocene-to-recent sediment.


Abstract. Uncertainties in aerosol radiative forcings, especially those associated with clouds, contribute to a large extent to uncertainties in the total anthropogenic forcing. The interaction of aerosols with clouds and radiation introduces feedbacks which can affect the rate of precipitation formation. In former assessments of aerosol radiative forcings, these effects have not been quantified. Also, with global aerosol-climate models simulating interactively aerosols and cloud microphysical properties, a quantification of the aerosol forcings in the traditional way is difficult to define properly. Here we argue that fast feedbacks should be included because they act quickly compared with the time scale of global warming. We show that for different forcing agents (aerosols and greenhouse gases) the radiative forcings as traditionally defined agree rather well with estimates from a method, here referred to as radiative flux perturbations (RFP), that takes these fast feedbacks and interactions into account. Based on our results, we recommend RFP as a valid option to compare different forcing agents, and to compare the effects of particular forcing agents in different models.


The Economics of Financial Markets presents a concise overview of capital markets, suitable for advanced undergraduates and for beginning graduate students in financial economics. Following a brief overview of financial markets - their microstructure and the randomness of stock market prices - this textbook explores how the economics of uncertainty can be applied to financial decision-making. The mean-variance model of portfolio selection is discussed, with analysis extended to the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Arbitrage plays a pivotal role in finance and is studied in a variety of contexts, including the APT model of asset prices. Methods for the empirical evaluation of CAPM and APT are also discussed, together with the volatility of asset prices, the intertemporal CAPM and the equity premium puzzle. An analysis of bond contracts leads into an assessment of theories of the term structure of interest rates. Finally, financial derivatives are explored, focusing on futures and options contracts.


Middle school is a time of drastic physical, cognitive, and social change for students. Many kids post their first messages on social media at this age, and their developmental changes are magnified and affected by their experiences online. 'social me' uses a media literacy framework to help kids become critical producers and consumers of photos on social media. Designed for use in schools, it combines lesson plans for teachers and a tablet app for students. Through challenges, discussions, and reflections, 'social me' brings kids' everyday photo-sharing experiences into the classroom.


Background
Hospital emergency admissions have risen annually, exacerbating pressures on emergency departments (EDs) and acute medical units. These pressures have an adverse impact on patient experience and potentially lead to suboptimal clinical decision-making. In response, a variety of innovations have been developed, but whether or not these reduce inappropriate admissions or improve patient and clinician experience is largely unknown.

Aims
To investigate the interplay of service factors influencing decision-making about emergency admissions, and to understand how the medical assessment process is experienced by patients, carers and practitioners.

Methods
The project used a multiple case study design for a mixed-methods analysis of decision-making about admissions in four acute hospitals. The primary research comprised two parts: value stream mapping to measure time spent by practitioners on key activities in 108 patient pathways, including an embedded study of cost; and an ethnographic study incorporating data from 65 patients, 30 carers and 282 practitioners of different specialties and levels. Additional data were collected through a clinical panel, learning sets, stakeholder workshops, reading groups and review of site data and documentation. We used a realist synthesis approach to integrate findings from all sources.

Findings
Patients' experiences of emergency care were positive and they often did not raise concerns, whereas carers were more vocal. Staff's focus on patient flow sometimes limited time for basic care, optimal communication and shared decision-making. Practitioners admitted or discharged few patients during the first hour, but decision-making increased rapidly towards the 4-hour target. Overall, patients' journey times were similar, although waiting before being seen, for tests or after admission decisions, varied considerably. The meaning of what constituted an 'admission' varied across sites and sometimes within a site. Medical and social complexity, targets and 'bed pressure', patient safety and risk, each influenced admission/discharge decision-making. Each site responded to these pressures with different initiatives designed to expedite appropriate decision-making. New ways of using hospital 'space' were identified. Clinical decision units and observation wards allow potentially dischargeable patients with medical and/or social complexity to be 'off the clock', allowing time for tests, observation or safe discharge. New teams supported admission avoidance: an acute general practitioner service filtered patients prior to arrival; discharge teams linked with community services; specialist teams for the elderly facilitated outpatient treatment. Senior doctors had a range of roles: evaluating complex patients, advising and training juniors, and overseeing ED activity.

Conclusions
This research shows how hospitals under pressure manage complexity, safety and risk in emergency care by developing 'ground-up' initiatives that facilitate timely, appropriate and safe decision-making, and alternative care pathways for lower-risk, ambulatory patients. New teams and 'off the clock' spaces contribute to safely reducing avoidable admissions; frontline expertise brings value not only by placing senior experienced practitioners at the front door of EDs, but also by using seniors in advisory roles. Although the principal limitation of this research is its observational design, so that causation cannot be inferred, its strength is hypothesis generation. Further research should test whether or not the service and care innovations identified here can improve patient experience of acute care and safely reduce avoidable admissions.

Funding
The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Services and Delivery Research programme (project number 10/1010/06). This research was supported by the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care South West Peninsula.


Abstract Subjective feelings of risk are a central feature of everyday life, and evidence shows that people who do not conform to contemporary normative notions are often more exposed to everyday risks than others. Despite this, normative notions are rarely acknowledged as risk objects. By drawing on the theory of 'doing' and 'undoing' risk, which combines intersectional and risk theory, this study contributes new perspectives on the everyday risks in contemporary society that face people who many would label as being 'at risk' – lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The study consists of five focus group interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of different ages in Sweden. Findings pinpoint risks and how these are done and un-done in different spheres of interviewees' lives: the emotional risks prevailing in their private lives; the risk of discrimination at work and in relations with other institutions; and the risk of violence and harassment in public places. These risks are all related to the heteronormative order in which the mere fact of being lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender is perceived as a risk.


This paper seeks to contribute to a dynamic understanding of the space of children"s citizenship by exploring perspectives generated by children age 5-13 in two countries in the light of Nancy Fraser"s (2008) theory of representation. To ensure that understandings of the spaces of children"s citizenship are guided by the views of children themselves, the paper reports findings from six Children"s Research Groups who, in a process inspired by Freire (1973), acted and reflected on their understandings of citizenship using participatory methods that they created. The spaces they describe in their data were analysed drawing on Fraser"s theories for reframing claims to social justice. This synthesis of empirical research and political theory suggests the need to supplement Fraser"s theory of representation with more diffuse understandings of how influence occurs in relational spaces. The dynamic spaces of children"s citizenship can then be conceived of as framed by a concern for social justice that children identify and deepened by exploring the way in relationships, institutions and networks influence the achievement of this claim over time, for different social groups. This approach enables children"s citizenship to be located simultaneously in children"s lived practices, in local and in global distributions of actions, attitudes and resources.


The Propaganda Model (PM), developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky and published in Manufacturing Consent in 1988, sought to explain the behaviour of the mass media in the United States. Analysing the function, operation and effects of the media are essential to any understanding of contemporary societies and the article begins by sketching out the contours of the liberal-pluralist vs. critical-Marxist debate about the role of the media. The article then presents an overview of the PM, locates it within the field of media and communication studies, considers its reception, discusses a number of complementary methodological and theoretical approaches, and argues that the PM, more than 20 years after its formulation, continues to provide an invaluable tool for understanding the media within contemporary capitalist societies.


Over the last decades, slow steaming strategies have been adopted by most shipping lines with the aim of reducing fuel costs. At the same time, these have resulted in significant environmental benefits from emissions reductions, which have contributed to a relative reduction to of the footprint of maritime transport, currently accounting for about 3% of the total world carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Such initiatives need to be expanded as the maritime transport demand steadily grows and its impacts increase. The maritime transport is also responsible for sulfur, nitrogen and Particulate Matter emissions, which can pose significant threats to public health and resulted in calls from local communities for action. Near port emissions from ships can be classified into three types; those that originate from near-port cruising, manoeuvring and berth emissions. Port authorities tend to develop policies and apply technological solutions to address these types. Slow steaming has been recognised as one of the most promising approaches to reduce cruising emissions. This paper examines the effects of such policies locally and globally, and seeks to answer how to best deploy a vessel speed reduction program for a port authority in order to achieve the highest possible local benefits without compromising on a global level. The economic consequences of adopting such policies are discussed, along with the effects of sulfur emission control areas. The local versus global trade-offs between different pollutants are discussed and the proposed methodology allows the calculation of such trade-offs.


The growth of agricultural sectors can be maintained by increasing crop productivity through soil, water, and nutrient management. The most important management practice is nutrient management, which is supported by the effective use of nano-technology, especially nano-fertilizers. It is well known that nano-fertilizers are nutrient carriers of nano dimensions ranging from 30 to 40 nm (10−9 m or one-billionth of a meter). Due to their high surface area, they can hold abundant nutrients ions and release them slowly and steadily, commensurate with crop demand. Nano-fertilizers are easily uptaken and assimilated by the plants because of their ease of solubility, stability, controlled release in time, and easy mode of delivery and disposal. Due to nano fertilizers characteristics, different commercial products are available in the market, namely Nanogro, Geohumus, NanoGreen, and Lithovit High Yield fertilizer, which can be demonstrated among the farmers for increasing agricultural performance through soil and nutrient management. Besides, nano-fertilizer has good criteria like disease resistance properties. Nanoparticles of ZnO, CuO, and MgO can kill different fungal infections of crop plants. Though nano-fertilizers can be beneficial for improving agricultural performance, it has a detrimental effect on soil microflora, fauna, animals, and humans. It is associated with several diseases or hazards like high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke, arrhythmia, heart disease, etc. Nano-fertilizer also improves the yield of several field crops like pearl millet, wheat, pomegranate, onion, tomato, soybean, and vegetable crops like spinach and cucumber. Nano fertilizers also have sound capabilities to find the solution against the issues arising in modern agriculture due to conventional fertilizer application. Thus, nano-fertilizer has the potential to improve the yield of several field crops.


RNA editing is a post-transcriptional modification of pre-mRNA that results in increased diversity in transcriptomes and proteomes. It occurs in a wide variety of eukaryotic organisms and in some viruses. One of the most common forms of pre-mRNA editing is A-to-I editing, in which adenosine is deaminated to inosine, which is read as guanosine during translation. This phenomenon has been observed in numerous transcripts, including the mammalian 5-HT2C receptor, which can be edited at five distinct sites. Methods used to date to quantify 5-HT2C receptor editing are labor-intensive, expensive and provide limited information regarding the relative abundance of 5-HT2C receptor editing variants. Here, we present a novel, ultra high-throughput method to quantify 5-HT2C receptor editing, compare it to a more conventional method, and use it to assess the effect of a range of genetic and pharmacologic manipulations on 5-HT2C editing. We conclude that this new method is powerful and economical, and we provide evidence that alterations in 5-HT2C editing appear to be a result of regional changes in brain activity, rather than a mechanism to normalize 5-HT2C signaling.


United Kingdom fire investigators use ad hoc adsorbents to investigate the suspected use of ignitable liquids and their residues (ILR) at fire scenes. It was unknown whether these materials adsorb all ignitable liquid target compounds specified by ASTM methods, or if they interfered with such analysis and therefore prevented the positive identification of ignitable liquids.
This research has ascertained that adsorbents such as clay based cat litter, montmorillonite, limestone, Tampax®, Tenalady®, talc; sand and the use of a squeegee tool cannot adsorb the full range of ASTM target compounds in common ignitable liquid residues by themselves. However, some can adsorb a limited range of target compounds. For example, cat litter can adsorb C3 and C4 alkylbenzenes and other molecules for the identification of petrol, but cannot adsorb heavy alkanes such as those found in diesel fuel. In contrast, limestone can adsorb heavy alkanes but not all aromatic target compounds present in petrol. This study has found that when limestone was mixed with Fuller's Earth (10:1 w/w) that a range of common ignitable liquids and their associated target compounds could be adsorbed and identified. Furthermore, the instrumentation and separation methods used with an automated thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometer (ATD-GC-MS) and Tenax TA® were improved and it is hoped that these would form a basis for a new standard method. Limestone and Fuller's Earth as well as the limestone/Fuller's Earth mixture were characterised with Fourier-Transform Infra-Red spectroscopy and X-ray Diffraction. The results showed that mixing the components together did not alter the chemical composition of the adsorbent mixture and that the major phases in the mixture were identified as calcite, quartz and palygorskite.
The performance of the adsorbents was assessed using a combination of a standard ASTM method for analysis using GC-MS and an improved oven separation time of six to nine hours. The ATD method was improved for real fire debris samples by setting the split flow valves to 40 mL/min to minimise instrument overloading. The adsorbents were subjected to evaluation in the laboratory using blind tests and also a field blind test at a real fire scene. The laboratory analysis and fire scene evaluation revealed that the limestone/Fuller's Earth mixture adsorbed all ignitable liquid target compounds from different ignitable liquids and as a result were identified from extracted ion chromatograms. This is the first reported use of this novel mixture as a universal adsorbent for common ignitable liquids.


performance and availability in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, but it will also raise consistency issues. Epidemic based update protocol can be used to address the consistency issue while maintaining high concurrency, but is also exposed to great threats when it is operated in the untrustworthy P2P environment. In this research, security protection and detection protocols are designed into the epidemic based update protocol to protect systems against possible compromised malicious peers who can generate arbitrary timestamps to introduce inconsistency into the system. Our analysis shows that the security protocol can detect manipulated updates and the compromised peers in the system. Replication can improve both data access


We define a new notion of truth for logic programs extended with labelled variables, interpreted in non-Herbrand domains. There, usual terms maintain their Herbrand interpretations, whereas diverse domain-specific computational models depending on the local situation of the computing device can be expressed via suitably-tailored labelled models. After some introductory examples, we define the theoretical model for labelled variables in logic programming (LVLP). Then, we present both the fixpoint and the operational semantics, and discuss their correctness and completeness, as well as their equivalence.


Despite the fact that Fannie Mae's creation of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) played a major role in causing the 2008 financial crisis, the issue of reforming Fannie Mae's securitization activities was ignored by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, Congress' legislative response to the crisis. Former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson said in a February 5, 2014 interview with the Washington Times, "[i]t perplexes me that nothing has been done." Paulson worries that if nothing is done, any future failure of Fannie Mae — a very real possibility absent reform — will lead to what he calls a financial "horror show," and that the "ensuing crisis [will be] much bigger than the financial collapse in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy." Given the urgency of the matter, it is surprising that post-2008 financial crisis scholarship — much like Congress — has largely ignored the need to reform Fannie Mae. The scholarship that does exist on the topic tends to recommend abolishing Fannie Mae (allowing the private sector to fill the hole). This Article fills a major gap in the scholarly debate. This Article recognizes that Fannie Mae plays an important role in financing home ownership, and accordingly, proposes a solution that will maintain Fannie Mae, but constrain its risk taking in the future. Because as Louis Brandeis famously stated, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman," this Article proposes that the best way to reduce risk taking at Fannie Mae is to subject its MBS offerings to the disclosure requirements of the Securities Act of 1933. As this Article explains, right now — as was the case in 2008 — Fannie Mae only engages in ad-hoc voluntary disclosure, which is void of substance, and entirely inadequate given the number of investors that purchase its MBS daily.In arguing that Fannie Mae's MBS should be subject to the disclosure requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, this Article moves beyond the traditional justification — investor protection — and argues that disclosure can protect the taxpaying public. After all, in 2008, it was the taxpaying public that was called upon to bailout investors in Fannie Mae's MBS. The bill was $116 billion. While subjecting Fannie Mae to the disclosure requirements of the Securities Act of 1933 to protect the taxpaying public is a novel application of the law, it is not without support. It is supported by the language of the Securities Act itself, which calls in several places for the "protection of the public."