The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated a need for accessible, home-based therapies for mental health. In an era of social distancing, lockdowns, and declining global mental health, one promising candidate is transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). tDCS is a noninvasive, portable, targeted brain stimulation technique that uses electrical currents to modulate cortical excitability. It has been heavily explored as a treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD) and other mental health issues in recent years. However, before such a treatment may become widespread, certain research questions must be addressed, and safety outcomes must be thoroughly evaluated. This article aims to provide a brief overview of tDCS, the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on mental health, and tDCS' potential to be used in such a situation. The article also explores some of the drawbacks and challenges that lie in the way of tDCS being normalized as a mental health therapeutic.


In this study we characterized the surface morphology and ultrastructure of the foot of the bivalve Limnoperna fortunei (Dunker, 1857) relating the characteristics found to the attaching mechanisms of this mollusc. The observation of the foot of the golden mussel Limnoperna fortunei reveals the presence of micro-scaled cilia with a unique shape, which has a narrowing at its end. This characteristic was associated to the capacity for underwater adhesion to substrates through the employment of van der Waals forces, resembling the adhesion phenomenon of the gecko foot. The temporary attachment during locomotion by means of the foot to substrates were observed to be strong even on smooth surfaces, like glass, or hydrophobic waxy surfaces. Comparing TEM and light microscopy results it was possible to associate the mucous secretions and secreting cells found along the tissues to the production of the byssus inside the groove on the ventral portion of the foot. Not only our experiments, but also the state of the art allowed us to discard the involvement of secretions produced in the foot of the mussel to the temporary adhesion. Through SEM images it was possible to build a virtual three-dimensional model where total foot surface were measured for the estimated calculation of van der Waals forces. Also, some theoretical analysis and considerations have been made concerning the characteristics of the functional surface of Limnoperna fortunei foot.


Niche separation (along habitat use, activity and dietary axes) between two sympatric jackal species, Canis adustus and Canis mesomelas, was investigated in north-west Zimbabwe. Diet of the two jackal species was flexible and opportunistic and dietary overlap between the jackal species was high. However, C. mesomelas ate more springhares Pedetes capensis, and C. adustus ate more safari camp refuse. To a large extent, differences in diet reflect availability within home ranges. Although interspecific home ranges overlapped by up to an average of 26%, the two species did not intensively use the same areas, and favoured different habitats. Canis mesomelas defended territories in the grassland habitat, which was also the favoured habitat of springhares, the predominant vertebrate prey species in the area. Canis adustus centred their home ranges on centres of human activity, benefiting from the regular, but low quality, anthropogenic food resources. In this study, C. adustus, with the more generalist dentition, had a broader niche than C. mesomelas (dietary diversity C. adustus=4.14; C. mesomelas=3.45). Within sympatric areas, differing activity times may further operate to decrease competition, allowing these canids to co-exist. The activity times of the two species differed, with C. adustus being almost entirely nocturnal. Canis mesomelas, while mostly nocturnal, was also active during the morning and in the late afternoon. The jackals in this study did not have clear-cut niches and it is probable that the extreme flexibility of canids in both diet and behaviour allows these species to co-exist sympatrically over part of their range.


This article emerges from a broader study of the role of information and communications technology (ICT) solutions in the economic and social development of Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. (1) These are four very diverse countries, but all have announced policy initiatives and created new agencies to lead their efforts to implement ICT solutions. The common features suggest an opportunity to revisit the idea of the developmental state, and in particular to inquire whether the new agencies can play the role of pilot agencies leading development in the new global situation. The structures and policies of the four case study countries are set in a comparative framework utilizing China as one end of a spectrum of size and development, and Singapore as the other. China is important in its own right because of its significance in the region, but also because it is still a developing country offering a wide range of experiences among regions and agencies. Singapore is not only an example of clearly focused policy and its implementation, but it also plays a crucial direct role as a regional commercial hub. Both yield insights into the conditions in countries more towards the middle of the spectrum. The approach is phenomenological, building from the aims, strategies, and implementation initiatives announced via policy statements on the one hand, and examination of the systems in operation on the other. Policies and programmes to address the digital divide remain no more than gestures unless they are reflected in the actual performance of the websites maintained by the responsible agencies. The study applies the "duck test" to implementation--if it does not waddle and quack, it is not a duck. Each government's website has been accessed to test for functionality and service. If the answer to any question regarding availability of a service is negative, then announced policy is a hope for the future, and has not been supported by implemented solutions. Finally, but perhaps most important, even the best designed website and the most advanced back office solutions will not deliver services if the majority of the population does not have access to the system. The statistics on infrastructure availability, therefore, are an additional test of successful implementation. I. Background: The Threat and the Opportunity of the Digital Divide The digital divide separates those who are connected from those who are not. On one side, wealthy countries, progressive firms, and affluent individuals enjoy easy access to the Internet. They benefit from the instant availability of information, convenient contact with individuals and organizations, and efficient delivery of services. On the other side, less fortunate countries, slow-moving firms, and the poor and disadvantaged across the world are switched off. Without entree to the electronic world they are cut off from sources of information, unable to connect with those who might offer them assistance, and deprived of services. Use of the Internet continues to increase exponentially. The World Wide Web was created in 1991, and the first web browser in 1993. In late 2000, one estimate placed 332 million people online, and another forecast a billion users by 2004. But, of all these computers connected to the Internet, only 5 per cent were in the developing world. The disparity reflects average levels of income, high in the developed world and low in the developing world, and also the distribution of income, relatively equal in the developed world and relatively unequal in the developing world. It also reflects the availability of physical infrastructure. One of the key measures of telecommunications access is "teledensity", the number of main telephone lines per 100 people. In the developed world, on average, there are nearly 50 phone lines per 100 people, but in low income countries, there are only 1.4 phone lines per 100 people. (2) Poverty is an age-old problem, but the revolution in ICT seems to present it in new and pressing forms. …


Simple accurate and sensitive batch and flow injection spectrophotometric method was depicted for the determination of famotidine (FAM) in pharmaceutical formulation. The proposed method based on oxidative coupling reaction between famotidine and the organic reagent -pyro catechol- in the presence of ferric ammonium sulfate as oxidant agent to give the water soluble blue colored product with high absorptivity at a wavelength of 580nm.The molar ratio of FAM and pyro catechol was 1:1. The Optimum conditions and analytical parameters of batch reaction method were evaluated The linearity of spectrophotometric method was in the range of (15-450) μg.ml-1 with a correlation coefficient of 0.9979. The detection limit was 10.425 μg.ml-1. The flow injection method the linear range (100- 1500) μg. mL-1, and the detection limit 87.22μg .mL-1. The proposed method was applied successfully to the assay of famotidine in pharmaceutical preparation.


The question of variable selection in a regression model is a major open research topic in econometrics. Traditionally two broad classes of methods have been used. One is sequential testing and the other is information criteria. The advent of large datasets used by institutions such as central banks has exacerbated this model selection problem. This paper provides a new solution in the context of information criteria. The solution rests on the judicious selection of a subset of models for consideration using nonstandard optimisation algorithms for information criterion minimisation. In particular, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms are considered. Both a Monte Carlo study and an empirical forecasting application to UK CPI infation suggest that the new methods are worthy of further consideration.


"While demographic forces make it inevitable that social institutions that encouraged workers to retire in their early sixties must change, this book shows that how we make these changes will have substantial implications for the risk of poverty and the general level of economic well-being of older populations. Its theme is that policy changes that encourage those able to work at older ages to do so must not come at the expense of our current system's protection of those less able to work. This is an important book for those interested in understanding how recent changes in the United States retirement system are impacting the employment and economic well-being of older workers." Richard V. Burkhauser, Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University"The editors have done an excellent job of compiling some very valuable and interesting papers on working longer. With improvements in health and life expectancy, the decreasing physical requirements of work, and our financing shortfalls, the options of working longer, phased retirement, and more flexibility for retirement ages in retirement plans can be winners. In particular, I found the Introduction's synopsis of the papers by itself worth the price of the book." Ron Gebhardtsbauer, American Academy of Actuaries While mandatory retirement has been eliminated in the United States, a myriad of policies and practices surround pensions, social security, tax law, labor contracts, and health benefits, all of which may have an impact on an older worker s decision to work or retire and an employer s decision to retain and train an older worker. In "Work Options for Older Americans," Teresa Ghilarducci and John Turner assemble a critically important volume that systematically addresses many of the issues considered on a daily basis by employees and employers."Work Options for Older Americans" brings together discussion of these issues by well-known economists and scholars in other fields, from the Government Accountability Office, the AARP Public Policy Institute, the U.S. Department of Labor, and academia. The book contains eleven articles, along with commentary, that deal with issues of employment opportunity and constraints for older persons, pension types and coverage, retirement choices, and public policies that promote or hinder either retirement or employment of the elderly.Contributors present effective ways to prepare for this unprecedented growth in the number of older workers. In the introduction, Teresa Ghilarducci and John Turner identify how the labor market changes dramatically as workers age and how these changes affect the ongoing bargaining between employers and workers. The question is, are the options that workers want the same as those that employers offer?"


Many knowledge management (KM) projects have been initiated, some of which have been successes but many have been failures. Measuring the success or failure of KM initiatives is not easy, and in order to do so some kind of measurement process has to be available. There are three points at which evaluation of KM projects can, and should be, done: (1) when deciding whether to start and where to focus, (2) once under way, following up on a project and making adjustments if needed, and (3) when completed, to evaluate the project outcomes. This paper concentrates on the first two areas by developing a general instrument for evaluation of KM projects.


We propose a neural text-to-speech (TTS) model that can imitate a new speaker's voice using only a small amount of speech sample. We demonstrate voice imitation using only a 6-seconds long speech sample without any other information such as transcripts. Our model also enables voice imitation instantly without additional training of the model. We implemented the voice imitating TTS model by combining a speaker embedder network with a state-of-the-art TTS model, Tacotron. The speaker embedder network takes a new speaker's speech sample and returns a speaker embedding. The speaker embedding with a target sentence are fed to Tacotron, and speech is generated with the new speaker's voice. We show that the speaker embeddings extracted by the speaker embedder network can represent the latent structure in different voices. The generated speech samples from our model have comparable voice quality to the ones from existing multi-speaker TTS models.


This paper reports on estimates of the supply response to price changes of Australian broadacre farmers using a programming model. The products examined were beef, sheep meat, wool and cereals. Medium-term own-price and cross-price elasticities were estimated from a designed experiment with the model. These elasticities are presented and discussed in the context of estimates from other studies.


Food production for aquaculture requires finding other protein sources or ingredients as potential alternatives in the formulation of aquaculture feeds, due to the shortage and high price of protein sources that are most commonly used. The aim of this analysis was to evaluate the relationship between the essential amino acids in 13 types of proteins available in the market with the essential amino acids found in the muscle of four of the most important farmed prawn species of the genus Macrobrachium ( M. amazonicum , M. rosenbergii , M. americanum and M. tenellum ). The results obtained showed the limiting amino acids of each ingredient for each species, thereby allowing for formulation of commercial foods that meet the nutritional needs to support optimal growth of these prawns in culture. In conclusion, there is a difference in the amino acids most often present as first limiting between sources of animal and plant origin. Thereby, it is possible evaluate complementarities between these sources to achieve an amino acids profile close to that of Macrobrachium species.


Cys2-His2 zinc finger proteins (ZFPs) are the largest group of transcription factors in higher metazoans. A complete characterization of these ZFPs and their associated target sequences is pivotal to fully annotate transcriptional regulatory networks in metazoan genomes. As a first step in this process, we have characterized the DNA-binding specificities of 129 zinc finger sets from Drosophila using a bacterial one-hybrid system. This data set contains the DNA-binding specificities for at least one encoded ZFP from 70 unique genes and 23 alternate splice isoforms representing the largest set of characterized ZFPs from any organism described to date. These recognition motifs can be used to predict genomic binding sites for these factors within the fruit fly genome. Subsets of fingers from these ZFPs were characterized to define their orientation and register on their recognition sequences, thereby allowing us to define the recognition diversity within this finger set. We find that the characterized fingers can specify 47 of the 64 possible DNA triplets. To confirm the utility of our finger recognition models, we employed subsets of Drosophila fingers in combination with an existing archive of artificial zinc finger modules to create ZFPs with novel DNA-binding specificity. These hybrids of natural and artificial fingers can be used to create functional zinc finger nucleases for editing vertebrate genomes.


ABSTRACT Expression of the catalase-peroxidase of Caulobacter crescentus, a gram-negative member of the α subdivision of theProteobacteria, is 50-fold higher in stationary-phase cultures than in exponential cultures. To identify regulators of the starvation response, Tn5 insertion mutants were isolated with reduced expression of a katG::lacZ fusion on glucose starvation. One insertion interrupted an open reading frame encoding a protein with significant amino acid sequence identity to TipA, a helix-turn-helix transcriptional activator in the response ofStreptomyces lividans to the peptide antibiotic thiostrepton, and lesser sequence similarity to other helix-turn-helix regulators in the MerR family. The C. crescentus orthologue of tipA was named skgA (stationary-phase regulation of katG). Stationary-phase expression ofkatG was reduced by 70% in theskgA::Tn5 mutant, and stationary-phase resistance to hydrogen peroxide decreased by a factor of 10. Like the wild type, the skgA mutant exhibited starvation-induced cross-resistance to heat and acid shock, entered into the helical morphology that occurs after 9 to 12 days in stationary phase, and during exponential growth inducedkatG in response to hydrogen peroxide challenge. Expression of skgA increased 5- to 10-fold in late exponential phase.skgA is the first regulator of a starvation-induced stress response identified in C. crescentus. SkgA is not a global regulator of the stationary-phase stress response; its action encompasses the oxidative stress-hydrogen peroxide response but not acid or heat responses. Moreover, SkgA is not an alternative ς factor, like RpoS, which controls multiple aspects of starvation-induced cross-resistance to stress in enteric bacteria. These observations raise the possibility that regulation of stationary-phase gene expression in this member of the α subdivision of the Proteobacteria is different from that inEscherichia coli and other members of the γ subdivision.


Meteorological observations from more than 250 stations in the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea coastal, interior, and offshore regions were gathered and quality-controlled for the period 1979 through 2009. These stations represent many different observing networks that operate in the region for the purposes of aviation, fire weather, coastal weather, climate, surface radiation, and hydrology and report data hourly or sub-hourly. A unified data quality control (QC) has been applied to these multi-resource data, incorporating three main QC procedures: the threshold test (identifying instances of an observation falling outside of a normal range); the step change test (identifying consecutive values that are excessively different); and the persistence test (flagging instances of excessively high or low variability in the observations). Methods previously developed for daily data QC do not work well for hourly data because they flag too many data entries. Improvements were developed to obtain the proper limits for hourly data QC. These QC procedures are able to identify the suspect data while producing far fewer Type I errors (the erroneous flagging of valid data). The fraction of flagged data for the entire database illustrates that the persistence test was failed the most often (1.34%), followed by the threshold (0.99%) and step change tests (0.02%). Comparisons based on neighboring stations were not performed for the database; however, correlations between nearby stations show promise, indicating that this type of check may be a viable option in such cases. This integrated high temporal resolution dataset will be invaluable for weather and climate analysis, as well as regional modeling applications, in an area that is undergoing significant climatic change.


Coercion implies a mismatch in intentions/desires: one person desires sex, but the potential partner does not. Coerced sex is sex that occurs despite the mismatch, the reluctant partner having been physically or verbally pressured into the act. This paper examines reports of pressured sex obtained in interviews with young unmarried men and women in Mexico City. Very few young people define themselves as having been coerced, but many report having been pressured into sex. The latter group might be defined by the researcher as having been coerced, even if they themselves do not define themselves in this way. These mismatches are likely to be more extreme when examining men's experiences, compared with women's. Definitions of coercion vary between individuals and societies, and definitions of a single event may change over time, depending upon prior and subsequent events. Measurement of the extent of coercion in a population is dependent on its existence as a stable theoretical object, which can be assessed from reports. This paper shows that not only is the concept of coercion unstable, but reporting is likely to be inconsistent between men and women. Both men and women report pressure, but their reports differ systematically. They tend to construct their experiences in their narratives as having been close to the socially expected version: for men this is where they enjoy sex and are in control, for women this is where they are in a loving and lasting relationship.


Purpose: This study focused on the usefulness of management accounting information to small-medium-sized service enterprises other than manufacturing business. The size and industry classification are important proxies among firms to have market concentration. Design/Methodology/Approach: Median, Spearman Rho, Mann-Whitney U Test, KruskalWallis, and post Hoc test were used to analyzed the relationship of variables and test of difference between and among the service activities based on the data surveyed from 180 respondents. Findings: The evidence suggests that statement of cash flow analysis, capital budgeting decisions, financial budgets, and managing customers' relationship are the very useful management accounting tools enough to response for their urgent needs to operate and grow. There is always non-uniformity of accounting techniques because of the industry classification, enterprise size, the nature of their operation, different managers interpretations placed on particular tool and the knowledge and skills in adopting accounting methods make comparison difficult. Therefore, the choices are associated on the particular problem at hand and the potential problems in the future. Practical Implications: To provide for more valuable representation about the usefulness of management accounting information this time across SMEs service activities. This is because previous research findings has focused more on large and private industries and the current research investigated mostly on small-medium-sized manufacturing activities. Originality/Value: Surveyed accommodation and food service activities, financial and insurance activities, and professional, scientific and technical activities in the research design to give importance and be certain to evaluate the level of its usefulness, test the relationship of net income and capital on the level of usefulness of MATs used, test the difference of the level of usefulness between and across SMEs and identify the problems encountered in the application of management accounting tools used as techniques across service business type of activities.


Background Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a very common problem. Early detection of injury with initiation of appropriate supportive care remains the mainstay of therapy. Aim The aim of the present study was to evaluate the incidence, etiology, prognosis, treatment, and outcome of AKI. Patients and methods This was a prospective, observational study of 212 patients (137 men and 75 women) who were admitted in all departments of Al-Zahraa University Hospital with AKI during the period from October 2014 to October 2015. Their ages ranged from 22 to 85 years. We included adults aged more than 18 years who presented with AKI, and we excluded patients on regular dialysis. Serum creatinine, sodium, potassium, urea, calcium, phosphorus and uric acid, complete blood count, pelviabdominal ultrasound, and daily measurement of urine output (UOP) were done. AKI patients were classified according to the RIFLE and Acute Kidney Injury Network staging. Result According to the RIFLE criteria, the number of risk, injury, failure, loss, and end-stage renal disease patients were 55 (25.9%), 62 (29.24%), 33 (15.56%), 38 (17.92%), and 24 (11.32%), respectively. According to the Acute Kidney Injury Network staging system, the number of stages I, II, and III patients were 61 (28.7%), 50 (23.5%), and 101 (47.6%), respectively. The length of hospital stay was significantly associated with severity of AKI. The main cause of AKI was dehydration in 82 (38.7%) patients and sepsis in 71 (33.5%). Oliguric patients were 147 (69.34%) and nonoliguric were 65 (30.66%). Moreover, prognosis of patients was complete recovery in 95 (44.81%), partial recovery in 81 (38.21%), and no recovery in 36 (16.98%). Conclusion AKI was more common among patients in ICU than those in any other department. Dehydration and sepsis were its leading causes.


Ellis, Kathryn .  Home in Time for Dinner .  Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2012. Print. From the author of the book Degrassi Junior High and scripts for the original Degrassi Junior High television show, comes a story about a thirteen-year-old boy who has grown up in Texas, not knowing that is father had abducted him from his Canadian mother in a nasty divorce and custody battle.  Ellis is definitely in tune with teenage boys.  She flawlessly takes the reader through Chris Ramsey's discovery that he is one of the "missing children" profiled on television,  his plan to escape and his flight to Canada.  By presenting the story through Chris's eyes, Ellis draws the reader into the world of a confused and distressed, but determined teenager. Ellis masterfully responds to all of the obvious objections to the events in the story.  Why doesn't Chris just go to the police?  His father has taught him to fear and avoid the police.  Chris makes terrible errors in judgement on his journey, but we know that his father has always controlled him, and not allowed him to make decisions, so he has little experience with it.  Remarkably, his mother still lives in the same apartment in Kingston, but Ellis tells us that she's been waiting for him to return.  So while, objectively, the plot is too tidy, it doesn't seem that way when you are reading the story.  The one point that really stretches the suspension of disbelief is Chris' being easily smuggled across the border.  While the plot line is simple, Ellis has a knack for getting at the essence of a situation in just a few words.  Whether the alcoholic former preacher who gives Chris a ride, the manipulative Moth who gives a him a place to sleep and then robs him or the moment when Chris's mother recognizes her child who has been missing for years,  Ellis creates unforgettable characters and scenes.   This is one of the best young adult novels that I have read recently.  It is not a high literary work, but it is a good read and would be a great addition to public and junior high school libraries.  Highly recommended:  4 stars out of 4 Reviewer:  Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines.  Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.


An active line of research has used on-line data to study the ways in which discrete units of information — including messages, photos, product recommendations, group invitations — spread through social networks. There is relatively little understanding, however, of how on-line data might help in studying the diffusion of more complex practices — roughly, routines or styles of work that are generally handed down from one person to another through collaboration or mentorship. In this work, we propose a framework together with a novel type of data analysis that seeks to study the spread of such practices by tracking their syntactic signatures in large document collections. Central to this framework is the notion of an inheritance graph that represents how people pass the practice on to others through collaboration. Our analysis of these inheritance graphs demonstrates that we can trace a significant number of practices over long time-spans, and we show that the structure of these graphs can help in predicting the longevity of collaborations within a field, as well as the fitness of the practices themselves.


Over the past forty years, the United States Congress has passed legislation expanding the federal criminal code intruding into an area typically reserved to the states. The "tough on crime" rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s brought with it the enactment of various legislative initiatives: harsh mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent federal offenders, "truth in sentencing" laws that restricted or abolished parole and early release, and strict liability disqualifications from employment and federal benefits based solely on the fact of conviction. The effect of this legislation was the creation of a new criminal class: a federal prison population. However, unlike the states the federal government does not have a legal mechanism in place adequately reintegrating federal offenders back into the American polity. This has contributed to soaring federal incarceration rates, rising government costs for corrections, and a historically high rate of criminal recidivism. This is a price tag the United States can no longer afford to pay. This Article argues that individuals who have served their sentences and abided by the law for some period afterward should be given the opportunity to rid their slates of their criminal histories. Such expungement of criminal convictions for individuals who demonstrate that they will abide by the law are likely to reduce the costs of the criminal justice system and improve the lives of ex-offenders. First, this Article examines post-conviction penalties and contemporary recidivism trends. Second, this Article investigates the law governing federal pardons and judicial expungements, finding that the doctrines and their applications lack consistency, making it difficult for nonviolent offenders to re-enter mainstream society. This Article argues that simply eliminating post-conviction disabilities would be extremely complex and perhaps not practically or politically feasible. Moreover, the two existing federal post-conviction remedies — pardons and judicial expungements — are not designed to, and cannot as a practical matter, provide systematic relief from post-conviction disabilities. Using state post-conviction mechanisms as examples, this Article argues that congressionally sanctioned expungements are an attractive alternative to relieve non-violent offenders of the effects of post-conviction disabilities. I propose that the United States Sentencing Commission (U.S.S.C.) create a Second Chance Advisory Group to determine how best to ameliorate the collateral consequences of federal convictions. With a Second Chance Advisory group, the U.S.S.C. could be used as a vehicle for researching and recommending legislative policy initiatives that will effectively slash incarceration, recidivism, and opportunity costs.


The entropy constancy principle describes the tendency for information in language to be conveyed at a constant rate. We explore the possible role of this principle in spoken dialog, using the "summed entropy rate," that is, the sum of the entropies of the words of both speakers per second of time. Using the Switchboard corpus of casual dialogs and a standard ngram language model to estimate entropy, we examine patterns in entropy rate over time and the distribution of entropy across the two speakers. The results show effects that can be taken as support for the principle of constant entropy, but also indicate a need for better language models and better techniques for estimating non-lexical entropy.


Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the Middle Passage in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to a compelling identification of the Middle Passage as the originary moment of the black diasporic migration. In his well-known modernist poem "Middle Passage" (1945), Robert Hayden presents a redemptive critique of the past through a melange of imagined voices that ultimately articulates a passage through suffering to affirmation. More recently, in her widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison turns to the Middle Passage to chart the possibilities for individual and communal agency in the face of radical dislocation and systematic terror. Charles Johnson's controversial postmodern allegory of African American history, Middle Passage (1990), places its protagonist on a mid-Atlantic voyage that radically alters his conception of personal identity, leading him to understand the self as fluid rather than fixed, formed by each person's confrontation with an Other. Finally, in an important recent critical work, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy attempts to "rethink modernity" through the history of the black Atlantic, seeing in its process of "cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity" a challenge to established categorizations of history and nationalist definitions of culture (2). Contrasting with traditional narratives of the search for origins in some utopian or prelapsarian past, these figurative returns to the troubled history of the Middle Passage are suggestive of black writers' continuing struggle with issues of identity and representation in their art. In "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage" (1994), Clarence Major makes his own distinctive voyage across the Atlantic in a poem that is devastating in its attack on the discourse of empire and subtle in its analysis of the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning an identity through art. In contrast to the "speakerly text" Henry Louis Gates describes as characteristic of fiction growing out of the African American folk idiom, Major's poetry typically offers instead what might be called a "painterly text" - one that presents readers with a complex collage of historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, street talk, cartoons, puns, folk tales, children's songs, advertising slogans, and references to international locales. A talented painter as well as a writer, Major has recently described himself as "a visual thinker," one who tends to "make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones" (McCaffery and Kutnik 132). Building its critique through images drawn from specific art works and from repeated themes in Western iconography, "The Slave Trade" draws heavily on Major's technique of associative collage to document European culture's normalization of its own history of conquest through the representation of black people in a hierarchical history of progress. By drawing upon actual works of art to illustrate the various ways in which blackness has been framed by the designs of others and by offering its own reconfigurations of specific European landscapes, Major's poem ultimately raises difficult questions about representation, self-expression, and the emancipatory potential of art, while simultaneously delineating the special province of the "painterly text." I. "Hope, Hope, Fallacious Hope / Where is Your Market, Now?" - J. M. W. Turner, from a poem displayed with his painting The Slave Ship (1840)(1) Charting a dizzying route over three continents and several time periods, "The Slave Trade" is composed of four major sections that move from the African past, to Europe, to the Americas, and, finally, to the present-day United States. From this comprehensive vantage point the poem attempts to negotiate the crisscrossing conceptual routes of a triangular trade whose operating principles are Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. …


The aim of this project was to investigate new asymmetric chemistry for solid phase syntheses where in comparison to solution phase reactions very few solid phase reactions are in general use.
The first part of the project involved the synthesis and radical cleavage of a Barton ester to provide a traceless linker on the final reaction product. The synthesis of the Barton ester from benzoylglycine was not successful as the acid chloride derivative of benzolyglycine appeared to undergo a facile cyclisation reaction. In contrast the acid chlorides of both indole-3-acetic acid and N-methylindole-3-acetic acid' were successfully reacted with N-hydroxypyridine-2-thione to give Barton esters and immediate radical cleavage gave the corresponding indole derivatives. The yields of the indole reactions remained low despite our attempts at optimisation and it was therefore concluded that a pyridine-z-thione ester was an unstable linker for successful solid phase chemistry.
The second part of the project involved the synthesis of isoxazolidines using [3 + 2] cycloaddition reactions. These compounds have been shown to be useful intermediates in the synthesis of natural products, antibiotics and other medicinally important compounds. Initially model [3 + 2] cycloaddition reactions were carried out to investigate the regio- and stereoselectivity of the reaction. Analysis of several IH_NMR spectra showed broad resonance splitting patterns, attributed to the inversion of the trivalent nitrogen atom, which was investigated by high temperature IH_NMR. Reactions with the N-(methylene)methylamine N-oxide nitrone simplified spectral analysis.
Asymmetric [3 + 2] cycloaddition reactions were then carried out between the N-(benzylidene)methylamine N-oxide (and the nitro, chloro and bromo derivatives) with the acryloyl and crotonyl acylated Evans' chiral auxiliaries.
The reaction between N-(p-nitrobenzylidene )methylamin~ N-oxide and the acryloyl chiral auxiliary derivative was unsuccessful due to polymerisation of the chiral auxiliary, whilst those between the nitrones and the crotonyl chiral auxiliary derivative gave regiochemical data "but the stereochemical data could not be determined due to the overlapping of resonances on the IH_NMR spectrum. Analysis of the IH_NMR spectra of alternative [3 + 2] cycloaddition products from reactions with the nitrone N-(methylene)methylainine N-oxide were again thwarted by inversion of the nitrogen atom whereas in a [3 + 2] cycloaddition reaction between N-(p-nitrobenzylidene)-methylamine N-oxide and the methacryloyl chiral auxiliary derivative an X-ray analysis of the major diastereomer was obtained. This confirmed the absolute stereochemistry to be (S)-( - )-4:.benzyl-N-[ (S)-5-carbonyl-N,5-dimethyl-(R)-3-(p-nitrophenyl)isoxazolidine ]-2-oxazolidinone (SSR).
An attempt was then carried out to transfer this chemistry on to solid supports using Merrifield resin. Purification of the resulting isoxazolidine led to an interesting decarboxylation reaction. Finally, initial investigations into [3 + 2] cycloaddition reactions with electron poor 1,2-disubstituted alkynes were carried out.


Vladimir Babintzev, a professor at Ural Federal University, well-known for translating numerous French, scholarly works into Russian (Jacques Le Hoffe and Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie among others), will offer a new translation. This new translation will be of a primary source, instead of a scholarly work: i.e., the 1st volume of Russian Diary written by Pierre Pascal, a member of French military mission in Russia during the First World War. In a talk with Konstantin Bugrov, a researcher in the laboratory for studying primary sources at Ural Federal University, Babintzev discusses different aspects of Pascal's diary, the 1st volume of which covers years 1916 and 1917. What did Pierre Pascal think of war, discipline and revolution? What was his interest in religion and in the 'mysterious Russian soul': a riddle he sought to solve for 17 years, until he left the Soviet Union for France in 1933. And although he gained a reputation for being a 'leftist' in France, the 1st volume of his Russian Diary deals much more with religion and national identity. Indeed Vladimir Soloviev is mentioned much more often than Vladimir Lenin. All these aspects surely make this a pioneering translation of Pascal's work, which will attract the interest of a broad range of Russian readers.


Background Previous research shows associations of geographical density of alcohol outlets with a range of alcohol-related harms. Socioeconomic conditions that are associated with both outlet density and alcohol-related outcomes may confound many studies. We examined the association of outlet density with both consumption and harm throughout New Zealand while controlling for indicators of area deprivation and individual socioeconomic status (SES). Methods Individual alcohol consumption and drinking consequences were measured in a 2007 national survey of 18 e 70 year olds (n ¼ 1925). All alcohol outlets in New Zealand were geocoded. Outlet density was the number of outlets of each type (off-licences (stores that sell alcoholic beverages for consumption elsewhere), bars, clubs, restaurants) within 1 km of a person's home. We modelled the association of outlet density with total consumption, binge drinking, risky drinking (above New Zealand guidelines) and two measures of effects ('harms' and 'troubles' due to drinking) in the previous year. Logistic regression and zero-inflated Poisson models were used, adjusting for sex, educational level, a deprivation index (NZDep06) and a rurality index. Results No statistically significant association was seen between outlet density and either average alcohol consumption or risky drinking. Density of off-licences was positively associated with binge drinking, and density of all types of outlet was associated with alcohol-related harm scores, before and after adjustment for SES. Associations of off-licences and clubs with trouble scores were no longer statistically significant in the adjusted analysis. Conclusions The positive associations seen between alcohol outlet density and both individual level binge drinking and alcohol-related problems appear to be independent of individual and neighbourhood SES. Reducing density of alcohol outlets may reduce alcohol-related harm among those who live nearby.


Abstract. Interactions between surface and groundwater systems are well-established theoretically and observationally. While numerical models that solve both surface and subsurface flow equations in a single framework (matrix) are increasingly being applied, computational limitations have restricted their use to local and regional studies. Regional or watershed-scale simulations have been effective tools for understanding hydrologic processes; however, there are still many questions, such as the adaptation of water resources to anthropogenic stressors and climate variability, that can only be answered across large spatial extents at high resolution. In response to this grand challenge in hydrology, we present the results of a parallel, integrated hydrologic model simulating surface and subsurface flow at high spatial resolution (1 km) over much of continental North America (~ 6.3 M km2). These simulations provide integrated predictions of hydrologic states and fluxes, namely, water table depth and streamflow, at very large scale and high resolution. The physics-based modeling approach used here requires limited parameterizations and relies only on more fundamental inputs such as topography, hydrogeologic properties and climate forcing. Results are compared to observations and provide mechanistic insight into hydrologic process interaction. This study demonstrates both the feasibility of continental-scale integrated models and their utility for improving our understanding of large-scale hydrologic systems; the combination of high resolution and large spatial extent facilitates analysis of scaling relationships using model outputs.


This document specifies the Group Secure Association Key Management
Protocol (GSAKMP). The GSAKMP provides a security framework for
creating and managing cryptographic groups on a network. It provides
mechanisms to disseminate group policy and authenticate users, rules
to perform access control decisions during group establishment and
recovery, capabilities to recover from the compromise of group
members, delegation of group security functions, and capabilities to
destroy the group. It also generates group keys. [STANDARDS-TRACK]


Aggressive tax planning efforts of highly profitable multinational companies (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS)) have recently become the subject of intense public debate. As a response, several international initiatives and parties have called for more transparency in financial reporting, especially by means of a country-specific reporting of certain tax information (Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR)). In our paper, we demonstrate that neither consolidated nor individual financial accounts seem to be an appropriate platform to provide such country-specific information and, therefore, that CbCR cannot be based on extended financial accounting standards. Moreover, we argue that even separate CbCR templates do not prevent multinationals from profit shifting, since their common tax minimization strategies are mainly based on the legal exploitation of gaps and loopholes in national and international tax law. In that regard, we show that expected costs for CbCR would exceed expected benefits and therefore contend that CbCR cannot be regarded as a convincing measure to combat international profit shifting. Instead, we argue that tax legislators should limit profit shifting by enforcing national and international tax rules and by closing gaps in tax law. In particular, we call for more tightened and standardized transfer pricing regulations to be adopted at an international level.


In this paper, the effects of a storm surge that happened on the 16th-17th January 1973 in the harbour of Leixoes are analysed and described. These effects were of two types: - As the storm surge coincided with a spring tide and rough seas, severe damages occurred in the outer breakwater, mainly in its head. - Associated to the storm surge range phenomena happened in the nS 2 dock; these movements, acting on a ship berthed in a nodal zone, caused several breakings in the ropes and damages in harbour structures. The characteristics of the storm surge and of the waves are analysed. Their effects on the breakwater are described. By comparing the periods of long waves observed in the tide records with the resonance periods of the inner docks it was possible to conclude that the intensity of the range phenomena observed was due to a half wave length resonance. Having in mind the affinities with the phenomena referred to above, the effects of range action in an oil terminal and new damages in the outer breakwater, that occurred in January and February 1974 respectively, are also briefly examined.


We have developed a new ring-down technique that does not require a shutter to turn a probe laser on and off. With a rapid cavity scan we can measure a simple exponential cavity decay from which a cavity finesse can be found. When the cavity is scanned slowly, the cavity decay exhibits an amplitude modulation, and an analytic expression is derived for this modulation. With this new technique we measured the ultraslow relative velocity of the mirrors (of the order of micrometers per second) as well as the linewidth (~100 kHz) of the probe laser.


POWERS UNDER THE U.S. CONSTITUTION by HEIKO BUESING (Under the Direction of Milner Ball) ABSTRACT The EU is developing new structures for its Security and Defense Policy and tries to achieve a more integrated security and defense policy. Currently, the principle of unanimity controls the conduct of the EU's Common Security and Defense Policy. This is one main reason why the EU is in some cases unable to speak with one voice. In the U.S., the President and Congress are the main players in the area of war powers. The President is the most important actor in the area of foreign affairs. However, Congress has the power of the purse and the power to declare war. The role of the courts is rather limited. A good understanding of the respective legal structures of the EU and the U.S. helps the reader to analyze why the U.S. acts in a certain way and why the E.U. may have difficulty to develop a response to a crisis.


Vectorial Kukhtarev equations modified for the nonvolatile holographic recording in doubly doped crystals are analyzed, in which the bulk photovoltaic effect and the external electrical field are both considered. On the basis of small modulation approximation, both the analytic solution to the space-charge field with time in the recording phase and in the readout phase are deduced. The analytic solutions can be easily simplified to adapt the one-center model, and they have the same analytic expressions given those when the grating vector is along the optical axis. Based on the vectorial analyses of the band transport model an optimal recording direction is given to maximize the refractive index change in doubly doped LiNbO3:Fe: Mn crystals. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.


Book synopsis: Extraordinary changes in patterns of family life—and family law—have dramatically altered the boundaries of parenthood and opened up numerous questions and debates. What is parenthood and why does it matter? How should society define, regulate, and support it? Is parenthood separable from marriage—or couplehood—when society seeks to foster children's well-being? What is the better model of parenthood from the perspective of child outcomes?

Intense disagreements over the definition and future of marriage often rest upon conflicting convictions about parenthood. What Is Parenthood? asks bold and direct questions about parenthood in contemporary society, and it brings together a stellar interdisciplinary group of scholars with widely varying perspectives to investigate them. Editors Linda C. McClain and Daniel Cere facilitate a dynamic conversation between scholars from several disciplines about competing models of parenthood and a sweeping array of topics, including single parenthood, adoption, donor-created families, gay and lesbian parents, transnational parenthood, parent-child attachment, and gender difference and parenthood.


Abstract. An intensive investigation of carbonaceous PM 2.5 and TSP (total suspended particles) from Pudong (China) was conducted as part of the MIRAGE-Shanghai (Megacities Impact on Regional and Global Environment) experiment in 2009. Data for organic and elemental carbon (OC and EC), organic species, including C17 to C40 n -alkanes and 17 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and stable carbon isotopes OC (δ 13 C OC ) and EC (δ 13 C EC ) were used to evaluate the aerosols' temporal variations and identify presumptive sources. High OC/EC ratios indicated a large fraction of secondary organic aerosol (SOA); high char/soot ratios indicated stronger contributions to EC from motor vehicles and coal combustion than biomass burning. Diagnostic ratios of PAHs indicated that much of the SOA was produced via coal combustion. Isotope abundances (δ 13 C OC = −24.5 ± 0.8‰ and δ 13 C EC = −25.1 ± 0.6‰) indicated that fossil fuels were the most important source for carbonaceous PM 2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter), with lesser impacts from biomass burning and natural sources. An EC tracer system and isotope mass balance calculations showed that the relative contributions to total carbon from coal combustion, motor vehicle exhaust, and SOA were 41%, 21%, and 31%; other primary sources such as marine, soil and biogenic emissions contributed 7%. Combined analyses of OC and EC, n -alkanes and PAHs, and stable carbon isotopes provide a new way to apportion the sources of carbonaceous particles.


The principle that the constitution derives its ultimate authority from the sovereignty of the people and the nationhood power were both developed by the High Court in the context of Australia's emergence as an independent nation. Although this shared provenance suggests the possibility of a more significant connection between the two doctrines, such a connection has not been developed in Australian constitutional jurisprudence. The heavily criticised judgment of French J in the Tampa decision appears to allude to such a connection, but the relevant reasoning is ambiguous and either left undeveloped or implicitly rejected in subsequent High Court cases. This paper critically examines the relationship between popular sovereignty and the nationhood power on two levels. In the first instance, the paper investigates whether it is even coherent to seek to provide a normative ground for the nationhood power in popular sovereignty. The paper then considers whether such a justification is consistent with Australian constitutional doctrine. Unsurprisingly, the weight of constitutional principle and doctrine supports the general subjection of the executive to prior legislative authorisation, rather than a robust non-statutory executive power grounded in popular sovereignty. While this conclusion is predictable in an Australian context, a detailed examination of the relationship between the weaker conception of popular sovereignty operative in the reasoning of High Court and the nationhood power nonetheless reveals some important underlying assumptions of current doctrinal orthodoxy.


Tourism is travel for leisure and recreational purposes. However, travelers suffer from information overload when they use the Internet to look for information about potential destinations, events and related services. Providing the relevant information to tourists with different personal interests is still a challenging task for tourist guide information systems. This paper presents an ontology based approach for developing STAAR (Semantic Tourist information Access and Recommending), a system that addresses this problem. STAAR help tourist search information by providing a various semantic search feature in a mobile phone application. In addition, we propose an algorithm for recommending travel route relevant to both criterions: itinerary length and user interest.


This paper is concerned with the problem of improving the performance of text search baseline in video retrieval, specifically for the search tasks in TRECVID. Given a query in plain text, we first implement syntactic segmentation and semantic expansion of the query, then identify the underlying "targeted objects" which should appear in the retrieved video shots, and scale up the weights of the video shots retrieved by the query terms that represent these targeted objects. We name the approaches as "object-sensitive query analysis" for video search. Specifically, we propose a set of methods to identify the specific terms representing the "targeted objects" in a video search query, and a modified object-centric BM25 algorithm to emphasize the impact of these specific object-terms. In practice, we place the process of object-sensitive query analysis before the text search stage, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches with the TRECVID 2005 and 2006 datasets. The experimental results indicate that the proposed object-sensitive approaches to query analysis bring significant improvement upon the raw text search baseline of video search.


This fascinating new interpretation of Dutch society in the Golden Age is a major contribution to early modern history. Dutch society in this period was to a significant extent different from that of the rest of Europe. A high proportion of the population lived in the numerous towns and market forces had penetrated the whole economy and transformed every level of society. The heart of this book is a discussion of the processes by which this unique society was produced and an analysis of its character. These social changes are set against the late sixteenth century background and in the context of international, political and economic circumstances of the seventeenth century. In the final chapters the effects of the strains of war and a stagnant and faltering economy on Dutch society are outlined.


In the past, high levels of infant and child mortality were the main responsibles of low levels of life expectancy at birth. During the last decades, several studies have highlighted the fact that in some historical as wells as in some contemporary populations, infant and child deaths are concentrated in a reduced number of families (e.g. Das Gupta 1990; Zaba and David 1996; Willführ and Gagnon 2012). This phenomenon, known as 'death clustering', implies that the risks of experiencing infant and child deaths are unequally distributed among the families in a population. This finding stresses the need of shifting the attention from single individuals to families as the appropriate units of analysis in the study of infant and child mortality (Edvinsson and Janssens 2012). In the present study, we use aggregate mortality data as well as two reliable sources of historical microdata from Sweden and France in order to calculate comparable measures of the concentration of infant and child deaths in different subpopulations, and to examine the impact of the factors affecting the unequal distribution of those deaths. The measures of death clustering in different subpopulations will be illustrated with Lorenz curves, where the observed distributions of deaths will be compared with the corresponding expected binomial distributions. The impact of several factors affecting the distribution of infant and child deaths within families will be analysed with logistic regression, with the mothers as the units of analysis. We expect to find higher levels of death clustering in populations with high mortality. Furthermore, we expect the distribution of deaths to be determined by differences in various biological as well as social characteristics of the mother, in particular the length of the birth interval, the total number of births, and the parental care.


This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service production function for the retail sector is derived with labour and external services as the main inputs. A structural model is used with a proxy function for productivity to overcome the endogeneity of input choice. Ownership is controlled for in the law of motion for productivity. The results of the dataset used to validate the model show that firm-level productivity did not increase after 2008 and that ownership had no effect on productivity. The results provide useful insights into the link between ownership and productivity in modern public enterprises after liberalisation.


(ABSTRACT) This is a single case study of the socialization of a woman in the public school superintendency at the end of the 20th century. It is a description of the forces that come to bear on her behavior as the chief executive of a school system. Socialization is a continuous process of adaptation to and personalization of one's environment. Further, it is believed to be a process that occurs throughout one's professional career and life and not a fixed, end state; therefore, one's career is embedded within one's socialization for life. A model is proposed which represents female socialization as dynamic role creation through the responses of accommodation and role personalization as they are affected by the interaction of organizational, community, and personal forces. These forces are communicated through the transmittal processes of formal policies, networking, and mentoring. The unique experiences of this superintendent are explored to see if these forces of influence appear in this situation. iii Data collected through interviews and document reviews were coded and then analyzed with a matrix. Seven categories of subjects were interviewed, so this study not only provides the perspectives of the superintendent but also those of her spouse, secretary, current and former colleagues in the central office, a building-level administrator, current and former members of the school board, and community residents. Documents from the news media, records of school board meetings, and division publications provided information about the total experiences of this superintendent. iv Acknowledgements


The taxonomy of the primnoid genus Amphilaphis Studer and Wright in Studer, 1887 has been in a confused state for a long time and a revision of the species included in that genus has become a necessity. We have revised and redescribed the species previously included in the genus using up-to-date technology, such as polyp and sclerite images obtained with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). As a result of this study, because the type species of Amphilaphis is actually a Thouarella species, we consider the genus Amphilaphis to be no longer valid. One of the species previously considered in Amphilaphis has a set of morphological characters that are not recognizable in any of the current primnoid genera. Primnocapsa n. gen. has a dichotomous branching pattern, polyps placed singly, in spirals around the branchlets, 8 opercular scales with the inner surface keeled and with 2 mounds basally and 8 marginal scales offset from the operculars. The new genus is described and illustrated. Moreover, one of the re-examined species has been included in a new subgenus, Faxiella n. subgen. of Plumarella Gray, 1870 because it has polyps placed in pairs. Finally, the remaining re-examined species have been included in the genus Thouarella Gray, 1870, one of the most specious primnoid genera.


Growth arrest–specific 1 (Gas1) plays a critical role in growth suppression. Previous study indicated that Gas1 was closely associated with survival in patients with colorectal cancer; however, the underlying molecular mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we sought to determine the role of Gas1 in tumorigenesis and metastasis, and elucidate the possible mechanism. First, Gas1 was determined as a negative regulator of oncogenesis and metastasis in colorectal cancer. Mechanistically, Gas1 negatively regulated the aerobic glycolysis, a process that contributed to tumor progression and metastasis by providing energy source and building blocks for macromolecule synthesis. To further consolidate the role of Gas1 in glycolysis, the impact of Gas1 in the transcription of key glycolytic enzymes for glucose utilization was examined. As expected, GLUT4, HK2, and LDHB exhibited a decreased expression pattern. Consistent with this observation, an in vivo subcutaneous xenograft mouse model also confirmed the hypothesis that Gas1 is a negative regulator of glycolysis as reflected by the decreased 18FDG uptake in PET/CT system. Moreover, Gas1 negatively regulated the AMPK/mTOR/p70S6K signaling axis, a well-established cascade that regulates malignant cancer cell behaviors including proliferation, metastasis, and aberrant cancer metabolism. In the end, it was determined that Gas1 is a transcriptional target of FOXM1, whose role in colorectal cancer has been widely studied. Taken together, these studies establish Gas1 as a negative regulator in colorectal cancer. Implications: Gas1 suppresses cell proliferation, invasion, and aerobic glycolysis of colorectal cancer both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, Gas1 inhibited EMT and the Warburg effect via AMPK/mTOR/p70S6K signaling, and Gas1 itself was directly regulated by the transcription factor FOXM1. Mol Cancer Res; 14(9); 830–40. ©2016 AACR.


Much internal migration in India, including the states of Rajasthan and Orissa, is distress-led. Previously issues pertaining to gender were overlooked, because migration tended to be viewed as chiefly a male movement, with women either residual in the process, or dependent followers. Contemporary migration is taking place in a world marked by a deeper belief in the importance of equality of opportunity across socio-political divides. This article stresses the need to analyse migration through the differential experiences of women and of men in the context of a highly gendered world.


INTRODUCTION Understanding customer criteria for product and service selection is an important consideration in any supplier management and marketing effort. Such an understanding helps to establish key customer-facing performance metrics and pro-vides a means to more clearly define customer value and the factors that may help them establish differential advantage. In transportation management, research has While such analyses have investigated selection criteria across one or more transportation modes, studies have not considered how such criteria may differ among investigated carrier selection by comparing perceptions of service priorities between carriers and shippers (Premeaux 2002; Premeaux et al. 1995; Abshire and Premeaux 1991). Studies have also addressed carrier selection criteria and processes as one implementation of customer-supplier relationships (Gibson, Rutner and Keller 2002), and as part of a broader service gap analysis framework (Kent and Parker 1999; Hopkins et al. 1993). specific services offered within a mode. The motor carrier industry, with its alternative forms of equipment and services, provides a context in which to evaluate whether, and to what degree, shipper's rank service attributes differently based on a subset of product/service offerings. This article reports the results of a study which investigated the importance of carrier selection criteria across five truckload (TL) motor carrier service offerings including Dry Van, Temperature Con-trolled, Tank, Intermodal, and Flatbed. An evaluation of how such criteria may differ depending on the primary service requirements of the shipper is also provided. LITERATURE REVIEW Research investigating carrier selection criteria has been published in the logistics and distribution literature as well as the marketing literature within the context of customer service elements, service quality delivery and buyer-seller relationships. Bardi (1973) identified carrier selection criteria and surveyed industry shippers concerned with the movement of household goods. Prior transportation research had been concerned primarily with mode selection characteristics. His study identified 21 relevant carrier selection determinants in areas such as reliability, security, user satisfaction, availability, transit time, costs and others. As he expected, due to the regulatory environment and joint rate publications, transportation cost was found to be less important than other service related characteristics. Factors related to shipment reliability, security, and satisfaction ranked highest among the survey participants. Prompted by the deregulation of the trans-portation industry, Bruning and Lynagh (1984) investigated the extent to which shippers evaluated carriers, the selection criteria used in those decisions, and how they ranked seven key selection criteria. As part of their analysis, they considered the education level of those individuals responding to the survey, the commodity and industry areas of responding organizations, and the relative Repeating his 1991 study, Premeaux (2002) reassessed carrier and shipper perceptions of weight of the criteria. Their results suggested a positive relationship between education level of respondents and the application of more quantitative/objective evaluation criteria. In addition, they identified variation in the frequency of carrier evaluation among industries, types of commodities transported, and types of mode employed in transportation. Bardi et al. (1989) also investigated the impact of deregulation on carrier selection by asking survey participants to assess the importance of carrier selection criteria and to indicate whether the emphasis in selection criteria had changed over the previous five years transition to a deregulated transportation environment. Their study refined 18 carrier selection determinant measures into four selection factors including rate related factors, customer service, claims handling and follow up, and special equipment availability and flexibility. …


Abstract It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of 'tabula rasa' originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an 'originary' state of human nature.


Most brain-computer interface (BCI) systems require users to modulate brain signals in response to visual stimuli. Thus, they may not be useful to people with limited vision, such as those with severe paralysis. One important approach for overcoming this issue is auditory streaming, an approach whereby a BCI system is driven by shifts of attention between two simultaneously presented auditory stimulus streams. Motivated by the long-term goal of translating such a system into a reliable, simple yes-no interface for clinical usage, we aim to answer two main questions. First, we asked which of two previously published variants provides superior performance: a fixed-phase (FP) design in which the streams have equal period and opposite phase, or a drifting-phase (DP) design where the periods are unequal. We found FP to be superior to DP (p = 0.002): average performance levels were 80 and 72% correct, respectively. We were also able to show, in a pilot with one subject, that auditory streaming can support continuous control and neurofeedback applications: by shifting attention between ongoing left and right auditory streams, the subject was able to control the position of a paddle in a computer game. Second, we examined whether the system is dependent on eye movements, since it is known that eye movements and auditory attention may influence each other, and any dependence on the ability to move one's eyes would be a barrier to translation to paralyzed users. We discovered that, despite instructions, some subjects did make eye movements that were indicative of the direction of attention. However, there was no correlation, across subjects, between the reliability of the eye movement signal and the reliability of the BCI system, indicating that our system was configured to work independently of eye movement. Together, these findings are an encouraging step forward toward BCIs that provide practical communication and control options for the most severely paralyzed users.


ABSTRACT In the literature on conspiracy theories, the least contentious part of the academic discourse would appear to be what we mean by a "conspiracy": a secretive plot between two or more people toward some end. Yet what, exactly, is the connection between something being a conspiracy and it being secret? Is it possible to conspire without also engaging in secretive behavior? To dissect the role of secrecy in conspiracies – and thus contribute to the larger debate on the epistemology of conspiracy theories – we define the concepts of "conspiracy," "conspirator," and "secret," and argue that while conspirators might typically be thought to commit to keeping secrets once their conspiracy is underway, the idea that conspiracies are necessarily secretive to start with is not as obvious as previously thought.


The present manuscript concerns the formation of artificial red blood cells and blood substitutes An alternative method for synthesis of erythrocyte models for simulating cellular pathology in clinical hematology as proposed precise control ofmatter at the atomic and molecular level, allowing the construction of micron-scale machines comprised of nanometer-scale components. The complex human body with its interdependent physiological subsystems can be scaled down to a collection of various types of molecules. The accessibility to the molecular and atomic components of the body can resolve a variety of constraints faced in the medical field and can provide a tremendous breakthrough for the treatment of a variety of diseases which are considered incurable in the present scenario. The artificial red blood cell or "respirocyte" proposed here is a blood borne spherical 1-micron diamond 1000-atm pressure vessel with active pumping powered by endogenous serum glucose, able to deliver 236 times more oxygen to the tissues per unit volume than natural red cells and to manage carbonic acidity.An on board nanocomputer and numerous chemical and pressure sensors enable complex device behaviors remotely re programmable by the physician via externally applied acoustic signals. Primary applications will include transfusable blood substitution; partial treatment for anemia, perinatal/neonatal and lung disorders; enhancement of cardiovascular/neurovascular procedures, tumor therapies and diagnostics; prevention of asphyxia; artificial breathing; and a variety of sports, veterinary, and other uses. Even though the respirocytes have not been practically implemented wide research is going on for the design of these promising artificial red blood cells. The major problem in the design of these nanorobots is their manufacturing in the nano scale using materials and components which are physically and chemically compatible with the human body with minimum after effects. The respirocytes thus give us huge hopes for the elimination of many currently untreatable diseases with added advantages of precise and effective resolution


MSPO Capstone research presented at the 3rd Annual Prosthetic Orthotic Research Symposium, April 19, 2013 12:30 pm – 05:30 pm, Student Center Theater.


This article addresses some aspects of the "Man Question" in feminism, by way of the analysis of men's diverse gender-conscious positionings in relation to gender, gender equality and feminism. It builds on earlier work, making use of theoretical models in feminist literature combined with the micro-sociological concept of passing. Consideration is also given to men's non-gender-conscious positionings. The article is primarily concerned with the theoretical and empirical complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of men's positionings, as when they are self-defined as "feminists" (or similar identifications) in radical or deconstructive ways. In this, a Swedish interview data is used. Sweden is considered particularly interesting, with a qualified societal consensus on gender equality and a broadly positive place accorded to men's relations with feminism. The authors argue in the final section that there is a need to further dialogue between analyses of men/masculinities and the multidimensionality of feminisms, as well as a need for more empirical studies of men's different (pro)feminist positionings in order to elaborate the theoretical implications of different social contexts. The framing presented seeks to provide greater possibilities for such complex, nuanced and situated understandings of men's relation to feminism, theoretically, analytically and politically.


Human NDR1 (nuclear Dbf2-related) is a widely expressed nuclear serine-threonine kinase that has been implicated in cell proliferation and/or tumor progression. Here we present molecular characterization of the human NDR2 serine-threonine kinase, which shares ∼87% sequence identity with NDR1. NDR2 is expressed in most human tissues with the highest expression in the thymus. In contrast to NDR1, NDR2 is excluded from the nucleus and exhibits a punctate cytoplasmic distribution. The differential localization of NDR1 and NDR2 suggests that each kinase may serve distinct functions. Thus, to identify proteins that interact with NDR1 or NDR2, epitope-tagged kinases were immunoprecipitated from Jurkat T-cells. Two uncharacterized proteins that are homologous to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae kinase regulators Mob1 and Mob2 were identified. We demonstrate that NDR1 and NDR2 partially colocalize with human Mob2 in HeLa cells and confirm the NDR-Mob interactions in cell extracts. Interestingly, NDR1 and NDR2 form stable complexes with Mob2, and this association dramatically stimulates NDR1 and NDR2 catalytic activity. In summary, this work identifies a unique class of human kinase-activating subunits that may be functionally analagous to cyclins.


The complex interactions between population growth, environment, and anthropogenic climate change are contributing to regional vulnerability and instability. This is particularly pronounced in the Indo-Pacific region where many island nations, or Small Island Developing States (SIDS), face rising seas and changing weather patterns that pose a severe threat to both their physical and functional existences. Section 1 provides a general layout of the major arguments made throughout the paper as they relate to the aforementioned dynamic. Section 2 explores some of the geographic and ecological vulnerabilities that low-lying island and atoll states have as well as a variety of scientific research indicating that sea level is both rising and is rising to varying degrees around the world. It further examines the contributions that melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could make with regards to rising sea levels. It also discusses the numerous relationships between economics and environment, termed environomics, by particularly looking at the economic impacts of sea level rise and increased storm intensity on SIDS.Increased emigration channels from SIDS would not only alleviate strains on the ecosystem and socio-economic environment, but may become the only opportunity for survival in the event of ecosystem collapse or sea level inundation. Section 3 introduces the concept of environmentally motivated migration as well as the new, yet not legally recognized, definition of an environmental refugee.Section 4 takes a closer look at human interactions in the Indo-Pacific and how the human-environment relationship contributes to violent conflict, migration, and both regional instability and weak governance. Section 5 takes this case a step further and explores a variety of international conventions and frameworks that can be drawn upon for assistance in designing a justice-driven mechanism for addressing the needs of environmental migrants. Section 6 looks at current Indo-Pacific emigration schemes that allow for immigration into New Zealand and Australia from SIDS and, along with the previous section, argues that existing systems are inadequate and that appropriate international response has been limited. Therefore, SIDS governments should work cooperatively with regional partners to secure binding regional and bilateral agreements that would expand emigration opportunities for SIDS citizens. Section 6 offers further discourse on the political hurdles of achieving that goal.Section 7 examines the unique possibility of climate-induced statelessness as a result of the either the physical loss of territory to sea level rise or forced abandonment due to ecosystem collapse. It particularly looks at the sovereign rights of SIDS within the Westphalian system and how to retain or redesign those rights in a worst-case climate scenario. Furthermore, Indo-Pacific SIDS exercise sovereign control over 20 million km² of maritime territory and any natural resources that fall within it. This section argues that freezing the current maritime boundaries of nations and their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) could potentially avoid escalated regional or global conflict over maritime space, fisheries, sea mineral deposits, and other renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. Freezing the maritime boundaries under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) could also provide SIDS communities significant economic aid through rental of extraction rights, which would allow them to both construct and maintain climate adaptation engineering projects as well as in community relocation and resettlement.Section 8 summarizes the main arguments and offers policy recommendations that domestic governments, regional alliance organizations, and international governance bodies could explore as solutions to some of the most pressing matters facing SIDS who must prepare for an uncertain future. Despite the existence of nations and borders, it positions migration as an ancient and effective tool for climate adaptation rather than as representative of a failure to adapt. The world must prepare for a very different world than what currently exists and future emigration from SIDS is likely to be one of the most extreme universal challenges of the coming century.


The object-oriented method with three integrated different classifiers was applied to classify satellite images of the forest in the Loess Plateau in China. After image segmentation, feature selection, and training sample selection, three classifiers—the support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbour algorithm, and classification and regression tree—were used for forest classification using SPOT images as the data source. Results indicated that the object-oriented method with the three classifiers effectively extracted Chinese pine forestland, Betula forestland, oak forestland, shrubland, wasteland, farmland, and roads in the study area. The main segmentation parameters of scale, colour, and shape performed best when their values were set to 100, 0.9, 0.1 in forestland and 60, 0.5, 0.5 in nonforestland, respectively. In addition, SVM was the best classifier applied to the forest classification with an overall accuracy of 78% and a kappa coefficient of 0.737. This study provides a fast and flexible approach to forest classification and lays the foundation for forest management and forest resource surveys.


This paper analyses the factors influencing whether a European Securities and Exchange Commission (ESEC) will be created and confirms the primary role that politics will play in its establishment. In the face of growing support for an ESEC, the paper recommends a strategy the UK should adopt towards the creation of such an institution. It is proposed that the UK adopt a three-pronged approach. First, the UK must, as it currently does, support the Lamfalussy Process in the hope that it works. Second, the UK must determine what criteria need to be assessed in order to evaluate whether the Lamfalussy Process together with the Financial Services Action Plan are in fact harming UK interests, and then make such an evaluation. Finally, if political support for an ESEC becomes unstoppable, the UK should negotiate for the creation of an appropriately structured ESEC – even though its backing for the Lamfalussy Process should logically preclude its support for any type of ESEC. A key attribute of the recommended strategy is thus that it is inconsistent. This is not, however, thought a problem. On the contrary, given that the creation of an ESEC is the stuff of politics and thus that a political response is called for, and given that other key participants' policies on the creation of an ESEC are themselves inconsistent, the strategy proposed is argued as being not only constructive, but indeed rational.


After the grueling market experience of the past five years, institutional investors might do well to ask themselves the question, "Can elephants dance?" Despite less than stellar performance by the asset management industry's giants, they have continued to grow and gain market share. Consolidation in the industry during the past market cycle has been driven by regulatory changes in the U.S. and the entry of foreign firms via acquisition. Economies of scale in distribution, compliance and technology have given large firms a substantial cost advantage over small ones. But have these changes benefited clients? Or are expanding behemoths likely to find it more difficult to perform and become less motivated to take significant risk? Emerging managers may answer the needs of investors seeking to mitigate risks, minimize costs, and address diversification within their investment portfolios.


In the Kenyon Review, Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, "Writing is our way of assuaging homesickness," and this is the quote that came to mind in the fall of 2015 when Oates read as part of Butler University's Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. At Clowes Hall, she read from her memoir, The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, which tells of her childhood home and her formative years. She read with ease, pausing occasionally with a humorous aside. Oates, the serious-looking woman on the book jackets of countless dark novels, is funny. In the introduction to The Best American Essays of the Century, an anthology Oates edited, she wrote: "Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." Oates carries this sentiment through in her novels and stories, which provoke and disturb by employing plots that often spark from an act of violence. The author's empathetic prose never excuses her characters' cruelty, but informs it by providing a window into their deepest hurts and desires. Oates's list of accomplishments, still growing after fifty years in the field, is so vast and unwieldy that it defies attempts to catalogue. Her work ethic embodies the historically American idea of success—a Horatio Alger story—that a dream can be achieved through perseverance and hard work. But Oates's career also fits another narrative of success, that some individuals are born with a bounteous talent. In The Lost Landscape Oates reveals that as a girl she told stories by coloring pictures with her Crayolas because her desire to narrate came before she learned to write. Oates's oeuvre fills bookshelves and includes novels, short story collections, memoirs, essays, and literary criticism. The New York Times has included dozens of her books on its list of notable books of the year, and other honors include the National Book Award; nominations for the Pulitzer Prize; the National Humanities Medal bestowed by President Obama; and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. After her reading, Oates fielded questions from the audience, and the next morning she sat in a room with thirty students to answer more questions. In this more casual setting she spoke about being a formalist. She explained that different stories call out for specific types of language, and that she is always seeking forms to tell the multitude of stories that crowd her head and fill her files at home. "I'm really happy when I'm running," she said. "I get lots of ideas when I run." Before Oates headed home she sat down with Booth. Cover Page Footnote "A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates" was originally published at Booth. This article is available in Booth: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/booth/vol8/iss5/3


Most central banks perceive a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the gap between output and desired output. However, the standard new Keynesian framework implies no such trade-off. In that framework, stabilizing inflation is equivalent to stabilizing the welfare-relevant output gap. In this paper, we argue that this property of the new Keynesian framework, which we call the divine coincidence, is due to a special feature of the model: the absence of non-trivial real imperfections. We focus on one such real imperfection, namely, real wage rigidities. When the baseline new Keynesian model is extended to allow for real wage rigidities, the divine coincidence disappears, and central banks indeed face a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the welfare-relevant output gap. We show that not only does the extended model have more realistic normative implications, but it also has appealing positive properties. In particular, it provides a natural interpretation for the dynamic inflation-unemployment relation found in the data.


Today's industrial facilities, such as oil refineries, chemical plants, and factories, rely on wired sensor systems to monitor and control the production processes. The deployment and maintenance of such cabled systems is expensive and inflexible. It is, therefore, desirable to replace or augment these systems using wireless technology, which requires us to overcome significant technical challenges. Process automation and control applications are mission-critical and require timely and reliable data delivery, which is difficult to provide in industrial environments with harsh radio environments. In this article, we present the GINSENG system which implements performance control to allow us to use wireless sensor networks for mission-critical applications in industrial environments. GINSENG is a complete system solution that comprises on-node system software, network protocols, and back-end systems with sophisticated data processing capability. GINSENG assumes that a deployment can be carefully planned. A TDMA-based MAC protocol, tailored to the deployment environment, is employed to provide reliable and timely data delivery. Performance debugging components are used to unintrusively monitor the system performance and identify problems as they occur. The article reports on a real-world deployment of GINSENG in an especially challenging environment of an operational oil refinery in Sines, Portugal. We provide experimental results from this deployment and share the experiences gained. These results demonstate the use of GINSENG for sensing and actuation and allow an assessment of its ability to operate within the required performance bounds. We also identify shortcomings that manifested during the evaluation phase, thus giving a useful perspective on the challenges that have to be overcome in these harsh application settings.


This paper traces the evolution of space-derived remote sensing data and data products from their initial dissemination to their impact on public policy related to climate change. We focus on the examples of renewable energy, public health, and ecosystem assessment. Our approach differs from previous studies that have characterized the value of data in terms of the fundamental scientific phenomena they describe. In our research we have sought to identify contributions of space-derived earth science in "making a difference" beyond scientific understanding, thereby providing at least a partial answer to questions about the utility of research posed by Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, managers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other decisionmakers.


QBase Radiology 1 and 2 together represent a completely comprehensive resource for all postgraduate and undergraduate trainees in radiology. In combination, the books include 900 multiple choice questions (480 on Volume 1 and 420 on Volume 2) and the free CD-ROMs that accompany both books also contain all 900 MCQs and over 100 high quality radiological images. The powerful QBase examination analysis software allows the reader to attempt the same exams as printed in the book, but on screen, realistically replicating the examination situation. The user can also 'custom-build' their own exams based on their own choice of subjects and number of questions, sit an exam that is automatically set by the program using all of the questions on the CD, or they can sit a 'shuffled' version of an exam, whereby the question parts (A-E) are reorganised automatically to avoid pattern recognition. The software also allows the user to set their own 'confidence level' when taking an exam and it will automatically mark, analyse and store completed exams for future review and re-sitting, allowing the package to be used as a fully interactive self-learning tool.


It's safe to say that the world of publishing is where much of my academic passion resides. After co-editing EASA's flagship journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, with Sarah Green for the past four years, what I feel I most strongly bring to AJEC is an interdisciplinary research profile and an international trajectory. With formative years in Edinburgh and London, I have been exposed to the diverse subfields of human ecology and medical anthropology as well as material, digital and visual culture studies. Indeed, much of my research has occurred in quite multi- or transdisciplinary settings, often dealing with the formulation of British and European sociocultural identities. This parallels the interests of many ethnographers who explore the
anthropologies of the familiar or even 'at home' topics.


We use the abbreviations tet and tri for tetrahedron and triangle. TetStreamer encodes a Delaunay tet mesh in a back-to-front visibility order and streams it from a server to a client (volumetric visualizer). During decompression, the server performs the view-dependent back-to-front sorting of the tets by identifying and deactivating one free tet at a time. A tet is free when all its back faces are on the sheet. The sheet is a tri mesh separating active and inactive tets. It is initialized with the back-facing boundary of the mesh. It is compressed using EdgeBreaker and transmitted first. It is maintained by both the server and the client and advanced towards the viewer passing one free tet at a time. The client receives a compressed bit stream indicating where to attach free tets to the sheet. It renders each free tet and updates the sheet by either flipping a concave edge, removing a concave valence-3 vertex, or inserting a new vertex to split a tri. TetStreamer compresses the connectivity of the whole let mesh to an average of about 1.7 bits per tet. The footprint (in-core memory required by the client) needs only to hold the evolving sheet, which is a small fraction of the storage that would be required by the entire tet-mesh. Hence, TetStreamer permits us to receive, decompress, and visualize or process very large meshes on clients with a small in-core memory. Furthermore, it permits us to use volumetric visualization techniques, which require that the mesh be processed in view-dependent back-to-front order, at no extra memory, performance or transmission cost.


In the last half century higher education has had to respond to a rapidly accentuated process of globalisation. Consequently, universities worldwide are more concerned with internationalisation than before. Stier identifies three intrinsic internationalisation ideologies (idealism, instrumentalism and educationalism) in higher education. Drawing from these ideologies and using discourse analysis, written documentation on internationalisation from 31 universities in 12 countries has been analysed to explore the self‐presentations that universities project of themselves in discursive space. Focal questions were: (1) what types of rhetorical devices are used in university's self‐presentations and (2) what are the ideological consequences of this use? Five idealtypical self‐presentations were discussed. One conclusion drawn is that universities must harmonize politically controversial dichotomies, which produces consensus narratives. Yet there are potential tensions between these dichotomies. On the language level these tensions are resolved by harmonising different ideals.


Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a geophysical and close-range remote sensing technique based on the use of radar pulses to obtain cross-section images of underground features. This method is characterized by the transmission of an electromagnetic short length pulse (1-2 ns), presenting a centre frequency ranging from 10 MHz to 2.5 GHz. The principles of GPR operation are based on the ability of low frequency radar waves to penetrate into a non-conductive medium, usually subsoil, but also walls, concrete or wood. Those waves are detected after suffering a reflection in electromagnetic discontinuities of the propagation medium. Therefore, this is a suitable method to study changes in those physical properties, and also to characterize different mediums and the reflective targets providing information about their physical properties. The aim of this work is to describe and demonstrate different applications of GPR in forestry, showing the obtained results together with their interpretation. Firstly, in this paper, it is illustrated how GPR is able to map shallow bedrock, subsoil stratigraphy and also to estimate shallow watertable depth. Secondly, different tree trunks as well as dry timber are analyzed, evaluating the different radar data obtained in each particular case, and observing differences in their electromagnetic properties related to the GPR response. Finally, several measurements were taken in order to analyze the use of GPR to detect tree root systems using polarimetric techniques, being possible to detect medium and big size roots, together with groups of small roots.