The study examines the pervasiveness of eight well-documented anomalies in global equity markets for the Australian stock market. After partitioning stocks into three size categories (micro, small and big), we find that none of the eight anomalies are pervasive across size groups in either sorts or cross-sectional regressions. The existence of size, value, profitability, asset growth and accruals anomalies is primarily attributable to micro-cap stocks. Momentum and asset growth predict the expected returns of big stocks, but momentum does not predict the returns on micro stocks, and asset growth does not matter for small stocks. Contrarian returns are largely explained by stock size and value dimensions. Evidence for the earnings growth anomaly contradicts the growth extrapolation hypothesis. By looking at the hedge portfolio returns of anomalies in different regimes, we also show that many anomalies tend to exist in bear markets rather than bull markets. This evidence contradicts the risk-based explanations for the existence of anomalies.


New evidence is presented from two under-studied Old Romance varieties, Old Sicilian and Old Sardinian, to assess whether they instantiate V2 systems, as predicted under Beninca's (1983–4) account of Old Romance word order. We suggest that Old Sicilian is a V2 system, evidenced by strong matrix/embedded asymmetries in word order, the limited distribution of V1 clauses and the makeup of the matrix left periphery. A significant finding, however, is that Old Sardinian is a form of verb-initial system, which differs in certain key areas of the syntax from other Old Romance varieties. Our central claim is that both varieties share the microparametric property of a uPhi feature on a C-head in matrix clauses, whilst the locus of this feature in embedded contexts, the position occupied by subjects and the parametric makeup of the left periphery is subject to microvariation across varieties. This leads to a re-evaluation of Beninca's (2004, 245) definition of an "abstract Medieval Romance" word order.


Research suggests that meditation can relieve stress, cultivate self-regulation skills, improve ability to focus, and modify risk for compassion fatigue (CF) and burnout in healthcare providers. However, studied interventions are time-consuming and combining disparate approaches, resulting in unclear mechanisms of effect. This pilot study examined a novel 6-week technology-assisted meditation program, coherently grounded in the system of yoga therapy that required minimal time. Five 10- to 12-minute meditations were offered via smartphone apps supported by biweekly e-mails. Hospice and palliative professionals at a Midwestern US healthcare network participated in the program (n = 36). Each meditation integrated attention, synchronized breath, gentle movements and a meditation focus. Weekly e-mails introduced a new meditation and reminded participants how and why to practice. The participants used the meditations a mean of 17.18(SD, 8.69) times. Paired t tests found significant presurvey to postsurvey improvements for CF/burnout (P < .05) and interoceptive awareness (P < .001). Participation significantly heightened perceived ability and propensity to direct attention to bodily sensations, increased awareness of physical sensations' connections to emotions, and increased active body listening. The technology-assisted yoga therapy meditation program successfully motivated providers to meditate. The program required minimal time yet seemed to reduce CF/burnout and improve emotional awareness and self-regulation by heightening attention to present-moment bodily sensations.


INTRODUCTION Our assignment in this symposium is to explore the role that legal issues play in what is popularly known as "gridlock" in Washington. I am tempted to declare the symposium over by arguing that there are no such relevant legal issues--that our problems are really political and ideological, not stemming from any legal or constitutional deficiencies. But that would be too easy. There are legal defects which contribute to our current frustration, even if we may ultimately conclude that they are symptoms and not causes of gridlock. It is certainly true that the federal government is in a period of extreme dysfunction. (1) We see it in conflicts between the President and the Congress over appointments and long range fiscal policy. We especially see it in the inability of the House and Senate to cooperate on urgently needed legislative priorities. Year after year, budget resolutions and appropriations bills are not passed in a timely fashion, and often not at all. (2) Measures dealing with major public issues die in the Senate. (3) I want to focus in this paper on one of the most talked about elements of gridlock, the use of Senate rules and practices by the minority to block virtually any action unless it is supported by sixty senators. In the public discourse about paralysis in Washington, dysfunction in the Senate may be the most frequently cited cause. Some commentators have even suggested that the Senate now operates as a "vetocracy," (4) and others like Mann and Ornstein have observed that changes in the Republican Party have brought about a laser-like focus on obstruction rather than cooperation on legislation. (5) This is not the place for a deep analysis of the underlying causes of our political dysfunction. But there is agreement on some points. Rarely in our history have the two parties been more polarized. (6) In the Republican Party, zealots have eliminated the traditional moderate-to-liberal legislators, (7) and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party is also more homogeneous. (8) As a result, as a striking chart in Mann and Ornstein's recent book shows, there is no ideological overlap between the parties in the Senate--the most liberal Republican is still more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. (9) As Gregory Wawro and Eric Schickler have observed, party lines today correspond to policy preferences and ideology more tightly than at other times in our history. (10) Compromise across the aisle is virtually never obtained. Procedural holds by individual senators have proliferated on both legislation and nominations. The use or threatened use of the filibuster--extended debate used to block Senate action--has become commonplace, resulting in what is in effect a supermajority voting requirement for any legislative business. We can now see that convulsive events like the civil rights movement, the rise of the religious right, and the "Gingrich revolution" of the 1990s have polarized the parties and reshuffled the voters, eliminating the kind of bipartisan cooperation we saw in the 1950s and 1970s. Perhaps more importantly, this realignment has been accompanied by a new rhetoric, illustrated by the "Tea Party" faction of the Republican Party, that characterizes the other party as not just misguided but evil and immoral. (11) Since legislating is difficult under the best of circumstances, portraying opponents in this Manichean way, and viewing the policy process as a struggle between good and evil, can have devastating effects. Washington now seems unable to deal with the pressing legal, economic and social issues facing the country in the twenty-first century. Solving the larger problem of hyper-partisanship and good versus evil rhetoric is not part of my agenda, however. The more limited issue before us is whether there are changes in laws or congressional procedures which can ease governmental gridlock and make it more likely that important policy issues can be addressed successfully. …


Modern deep learning methods have achieved great success in machine learning and computer vision fields by learning a set of pre-defined datasets. Howerver, these methods perform unsatisfactorily when applied into real-world situations. The reason of this phenomenon is that learning new tasks leads the trained model quickly forget the knowledge of old tasks, which is referred to as catastrophic forgetting. Current state-of-the-art incremental learning methods tackle catastrophic forgetting problem in traditional classification networks and ignore the problem existing in embedding networks, which are the basic networks for image retrieval, face recognition, zero-shot learning, etc. Different from traditional incremental classification networks, the semantic gap between the embedding spaces of two adjacent tasks is the main challenge for embedding networks under incremental learning setting. Thus, we propose a novel class-incremental method for embedding network, named as zero-shot translation class-incremental method (ZSTCI), which leverages zero-shot translation to estimate and compensate the semantic gap without any exemplars. Then, we try to learn a unified representation for two adjacent tasks in sequential learning process, which captures the relationships of previous classes and current classes precisely. In addition, ZSTCI can easily be combined with existing regularization-based incremental learning methods to further improve performance of embedding networks. We conduct extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011 and CIFAR100, and the experiment results prove the effectiveness of our method. The code of our method has been released in https://github.com/Drkun/ZSTCI.


Ischemic colitis is a rare complication of interferon administration. Only 9 cases in 6 reports have been described to-date. This report describes a case of ischemic colitis during pegylated interferon and ribavirin treatment for chronic hepatitis C, and includes a review of the relevant literature. A 48-year-old woman was treated with pegylated interferon α-2a and ribavirin for chronic hepatitis C, genotype Ib. After 19 wk of treatment, the patient complained of severe afebrile abdominal pain with hematochezia. Vital signs were stable and serum white blood cell count was within the normal range. Abdominal computed tomography showed diffuse colonic wall thickening from the splenic flexure to the proximal sigmoid colon, which is the most vulnerable area for the development of ischemic colitis. Colonoscopy revealed an acute mucosal hyperemic change, with edema and ulcerations extending from the proximal descending colon to the sigmoid colon. Colonic mucosal biopsy revealed acute exudative colitis. Polymerase chain reaction and culture for Mycobacterium tuberculosis were negative and the cultures for cytomegalovirus, Salmonella and Shigella species were negative. After discontinuation of interferon and ribavirin therapy, abdominal pain and hematochezia subsided and, following colonoscopy showed improvement of the mucosal ulcerations. Ischemic colitis cases during interferon therapy in patients with chronic hepatitis C reported so far have all involved the descending colon. Ischemic colitis is a rarely encountered complication of interferon administration in patients with chronic hepatitis C and should be considered when a patient complains of abdominal pain and hematochezia.


Searchable Encryption (SE) has been extensively examined by both academic and industry researchers. While many academic SE schemes show provable security, they usually expose some query information (e.g., search and access patterns) to achieve high efficiency. However, several inference attacks have exploited such leakage, e.g., a query recovery attack can convert opaque query trapdoors to their corresponding keywords based on some prior knowledge. On the other hand, many proposed SE schemes require significant modification of existing applications, which makes them less practical, weak in usability, and difficult to deploy. In this paper, we introduce a secure and practical searchable symmetric encryption scheme with provable security strength for cloud applications, called IDCrypt, which improves the search efficiency, and enhances the security strength of SE using symmetric cryptography. We further point out the main challenges in securely searching on multiple indexes and sharing encrypted data between multiple users. To address the above issues, we propose a token-adjustment search scheme to preserve the search functionality among multi-indexes, and a key sharing scheme which combines identity-based encryption and public-key encryption. Our experimental results show that the overhead of the key sharing scheme is fairly low.


Centralized vowels, reflected in a reduced vowel space, are commonly associated with the speech of profoundly hearing impaired speakers. In order to characterize longitudinally the vowel spaces of children with profound hearing impairments, recordings of 12 children were obtained at two time periods separated by 3 years. Five repetitions of the vowels, /i/, /i/, /eh/, /u/, and /open oh/ produced in hVd context were recorded and digitized. Measurements were made of the first three formant peaks and fundamental frequency at the first 50‐ms steady‐state period of the vowels. The means for each vowel were plotted and the total space defined by the means was computed for each child at each recording date. Initial results for half the children indicated reduced vowel spaces in the initial recording session and increases in the size and changes in the shape of the spaces at the last session. Data from the remaining children will be presented and discussed relative to the effectiveness of using vowel spaces to ev...


This paper aims to provide an approach to the study of local impacts of military bases and public responses to them. It will focus on the causes, contents and effects of protest that is engendered by the presence of military bases. The analysis will focus on two historical case studies, both situated in Cold War Italy: the Camp Darby base near Livorno in Tuscany in 1952-1963, and the Sigonella base on Sicily in 19781985. The paper proposes hypotheses on the interactions between local responses to military bases, national security debates, and foreign policy formulations. Theoretically, the paper aims to contribute to the literature on "critical security", which proposes alternative notions of security to the ones employed by policy-makers or in mainstream academia, and understands security in terms of public experiences and from a bottom-up perspective. Protest is understood as resulting from changes in public understandings of security, or changes in the boundaries of what is perceived as the security community, the site of shared interests. The paper furthermore aims to contribute to the social history of the Cold War, and how the Cold War affected local politics, political identities, and social movements in the West European context. It will look at the ways in which national security consensuses are constructed and deconstructed and the moments at which this happens. In this regard, questions of change and continuity from the "first" to the "second" Cold War will be addressed.


Three years after implementation of the European Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), the time has come for the general review of its application and effectiveness. The extent and content of any amendments that may be proposed as a result of this review will naturally depend on the contributions of all involved stakeholders. Mobilisation by them, to provide comments based on their experience and analysis, is therefore critical, particularly in light of the first review documents published by European authorities. There seems indeed to be a striking gap between the expectations of practitioners and the concerns expressed by European and national authorities. While the latter show a certain degree of sensitivity to real issues, including bureaucratic overload resulting from specific requirements, the more fundamental issues with the MAR are barely mentioned. Most serious appear to be: its excessive breadth; the ever-increasing ambiguity of key elements and implicit or explicit policy choices, including the central notions of "use" and "inside information", resulting in an evasive definition of an offence which has reached the level of vagueness squared; the confusion between insider trading prohibitions and positive disclosure requirements imposed on listed issuers; and the general lack of legal certainty in its language and application, perhaps as a result of its approach to an admittedly worthy core ambition to ensure equal information among market participants. Key to success of MAR's extensive approach to insider trading – in stark contrast to the US conception of the offence, which focuses on freedom to trade and is directed toward fiduciary duty violations – would seem to be safe harbours providing clear guidance to financial markets on what's allowed. Unfortunately, the MAR fails to do so. In this regard, shareholder activism seems to represent an excellent test bed for various MAR provisions. It well reveals the structural weaknesses of European legislation and underlines the necessity for public normative authorities to reconcile proactively the MAR prohibitions ex ante, in accordance with existing general criminal law principles, and secure shareholder legitimate engagement, therefore minimising the risks and costs of unpredictability, arbitrariness and national divergence in the EU. The legal imperatives to do so here are in line with the economic and financial imperatives. The objective is not to take sides a priori but, if we adhere to the principle that the market as a whole would therefore function more effectively, to ensure that all market participants understand more clearly defined rules of conduct, enabling them and the markets to serve society in an optimally efficient and responsible way.


A single infusion with broadly neutralizing antibody VRC01 resulted in lowered plasma virus load in HIV-1–infected subjects. Passive aggression for HIV Antibodies that neutralize HIV could add to the therapeutic arsenal to prevent and treat disease. Lynch et al. have now tested one such antibody—VRC01—in HIV-infected individuals. Although little difference was observed in viral reservoir in individuals on antiretroviral therapy, plasma viremia was reduced in untreated subjects with a single infusion of VRC01, preferentially suppressing neutralization-sensitive strains. Passive immunization with neutralizing antibodies could therefore aid in viral suppression in HIV-infected individuals. Passive immunization with HIV-1–neutralizing monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) is being considered for prevention and treatment of HIV-1 infection. As therapeutic agents, mAbs could be used to suppress active virus replication, maintain suppression induced by antiretroviral therapy (ART), and/or decrease the size of the persistent virus reservoir. We assessed the impact of VRC01, a potent human mAb targeting the HIV-1 CD4 binding site, on ART-treated and untreated HIV-1–infected subjects. Among six ART-treated individuals with undetectable plasma viremia, two infusions of VRC01 did not reduce the peripheral blood cell–associated virus reservoir measured 4 weeks after the second infusion. In contrast, six of eight ART-untreated, viremic subjects infused with a single dose of VRC01 experienced a 1.1 to 1.8 log10 reduction in plasma viremia. The two subjects with minimal responses to VRC01 were found to have predominantly VRC01-resistant virus before treatment. Notably, two subjects with plasma virus load <1000 copies/ml demonstrated virus suppression to undetectable levels for over 20 days until VRC01 levels declined. Among the remaining four subjects with baseline virus loads between 3000 and 30,000 copies, viremia was only partially suppressed by mAb infusion, and we observed strong selection pressure for the outgrowth of less neutralization-sensitive viruses. In summary, a single infusion of mAb VRC01 significantly decreased plasma viremia and preferentially suppressed neutralization-sensitive virus strains. These data demonstrate the virological effect of this neutralizing antibody and highlight the need for combination strategies to maintain virus suppression.


Estimation of total impervious area (TIA) is a pre-requisite for ecohydrological research to allow for a direct prediction on stream ecosystem health within catchments. This paper presents an alternative to using multi-spectral imagery for estimating TIA at a catchment scale, by using high-resolution colour aerial photography. The method was applied to a number of catchments in South East Queensland, Australia, some of which were gauged and some of which were part of an Ecosystem Health Monitoring Program (EHMP). The results from this method were compared to TIA estimates, for some of the same catchments, that were derived through three other techniques, i.e. manual digitization of geo-referenced aerial photos, Brisbane City Council data derived from image analysis using Landsat TM imagery and rainfall runoff depth relationship. The high-resolution colour aerial photography method compared favourably to the other techniques with standard deviations of TIA (%) ranging between 0.8% and 8%. The major constraints were shading effects, particularly on roads and grassed areas, and from the similarity in colours between some surface types, some of which can be reduced by appropriate selection of signature colours and multiple iterations of a supervised classification. It was concluded that while infra-red spectral wavebands could help considerably, the high-resolution colour photography could be applied with confidence to derive catchment-scale TIA estimates.


Animals domesticated for working closely with humans (e.g. dogs) have been shown to be remarkable in adjusting their behaviour to human attentional stance. However, there is little evidence for this form of information perception in species domesticated for production rather than companionship. We tested domestic ungulates (goats) for their ability to differentiate attentional states of humans. In the first experiment, we investigated the effect of body and head orientation of one human experimenter on approach behaviour by goats. Test subjects (N = 24) significantly changed their behaviour when the experimenter turned its back to the subjects, but did not take into account head orientation alone. In the second experiment, goats (N = 24) could choose to approach one of two experimenters, while only one was paying attention to them. Goats preferred to approach humans that oriented their body and head towards the subject, whereas head orientation alone had no effect on choice behaviour. In the third experiment, goats (N = 32) were transferred to a separate test arena and were rewarded for approaching two experimenters providing a food reward during training trials. In subsequent probe test trials, goats had to choose between the two experimenters differing in their attentional states. Like in Experiments 1 and 2, goats did not show a preference for the attentive person when the inattentive person turned her head away from the subject. In this last experiment, goats preferred to approach the attentive person compared to a person who closed their eyes or covered the whole face with a blind. However, goats showed no preference when one person covered only the eyes. Our results show that animals bred for production rather than companionship show differences in their approach and choice behaviour depending on human attentive state. However, our results contrast with previous findings regarding the use of the head orientation to attribute attention and show the importance of cross-validating results.


Based on the case study of listed enterprises in China's coal industry, this paper constructs the environmental performance evaluation and implementation process by the data envelopment analysis. Analyze the scale efficiency, efficiency and projection value of 17 coal enterprises, meanwhile, make a horizontal comparison of the environmental performance level among coal enterprises. This paper makes scale improvement and relaxation improvement for invalid cells, finds out the environmental risk spots and makes recommendations for improvement, consequently can guide the coal enterprises to carry out environmental performance management actively and accept public supervision


The frequency diverse arrays (FDAs) have been extensively investigated since it can provide a unique angle‐range‐dependent beampattern. This range‐dependent characteristic can suppress the range ambiguous clutters, leading to many novel potential Radar applications. Two issues, however, exist in conventional FDA (CFDA) beampatterns, that is, range‐angle coupling and range periodicity. Therefore, for a CFDA Radar, target range information cannot be obtained directly from the beampattern peaks and target ambiguity occurs in the range domain. In this work, a new frequency diverse array (FDA) transmitter architecture with random logarithmically increasing frequency offset (log‐RFDA) is presented. It is shown that the proposed strategy provides a nonperiodic thumbtack‐like beampattern, eliminating the ambiguity in range domain, suffered in the CFDA Radar. Furthermore, reduced side lobe and higher detection resolution can be achieved, compared with the previously reported log‐FDA.


Saliency propagation has been widely adopted for identifying the most attractive object in an image. The propagation sequence generated by existing saliency detection methods is governed by the spatial relationships of image regions, i.e. , the saliency value is transmitted between two adjacent regions. However, for the inhomogeneous difficult adjacent regions, such a sequence may incur wrong propagations. In this paper, we attempt to manipulate the propagation sequence for optimizing the propagation quality. Intuitively, we postpone the propagations to difficult regions and meanwhile advance the propagations to less ambiguous simple regions. Inspired by the theoretical results in educational psychology, a novel propagation algorithm employing the teaching-to-learn and learning-to-teach s-trategies is proposed to explicitly improve the propagation quality. In the teaching-to-learn step, a teacher is designed to arrange the regions from simple to difficult and then assign the simplest regions to the learner. In the learning-to-teach step, the learner delivers its learning confidence to the teacher to assist the teacher to choose the subsequent simple regions. Due to the interactions between the teacher and learner, the uncertainty of original difficult regions is gradually reduced, yielding manifest salient objects with optimized background suppression. Extensive experimental results on benchmark saliency datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over twelve representative saliency detectors.


The goal of this work is to study computationally the flow induced by the collision between a single gasoil droplet and a spherical catalytic particle under realistic Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) conditions. FCC reactors are found in the fossil fuel refineries and are used to upgrade heavy fuel (gas oil) to lighter products (gasoline or LPG), which are industrially more important. Gasoil is injected in the reactor and atomizes; the produced droplets vaporize intensely and come in contact with the hot fluidized solid catalysts. The "cracking" reactions accommodated at the particle porous surface (ex. zeolite) result in the decomposition of gasoil to lighter products.

The two-phase flow model developed solves the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for mass and momentum, along with the energy conservation equation. The VOF methodology is used to track the liquid-gas interface, while a dynamic local grid refinement technique is adopted, so that high accuracy is achieved with a relative low computational cost. A local evaporation model coupled with the additional solution of the species transport equation is utilized to consider phase change. Cracking surface reactions are taken into account via a simplified 2-lump scheme.

The model is successfully validated in fundamental droplet dynamics flow conditions, such as droplet acceleration, droplet impingement onto flat and solid surfaces under isothermal conditions and droplet evaporation. Insights into these phenomena provide important information that are missing from experimental measurements. The numerical novelties of the current work include the implementation of a new Wetting Force Model to simulate drop-solid interaction, as well as the proposition of a sharpening scheme for the volume fraction field, to suppress diffusion.

Concerning FCC collisions, the numerical model is able to reproduce both the hydrodynamics (drop deformation, spreading, breakup), as well as the chemical products (gasoil converted to gasoline). It is found that droplets of similar size to the catalytic particles tend to be levitated more easily by hot catalysts, thus resulting in higher cracking reaction rates/cracking product yield, and limited possibility for liquid pore blocking. For larger sized droplets, solid-liquid contact increases.

The main ambition of the current Thesis, which is to combine the droplet hydrodynamics with the chemical reactions acts as a novel step towards the understanding of such micro-scale physical phenomena that are difficult to capture/measure in experimental apparatus. This fundamental numerical tool can provide insight to the spray system strategy of an FCC reactor for a wide range of operating conditions.


We present two new systems that learn to understand natural language instructions and carry out implied sensorimotor tasks. These systems constitute a further step ill our ongoing investigation of acquisition of language by machines [Henis et al. 1994; Henis et al. 1995]. The research approach is based on the idea that language skills and the understanding of the meaning conveyed by spoken communication should be acquired simultaneously and in conjunction with sensorimotor integration. One system is a simulated manipulator in a three dimensional blocks world. The second is a small mobile robot in an office environment. The systems learn on the basis of semantic-level reinforcement feedback signals provided by the user. The associations of words and sensory inputs are derived on the basis of the mutual information between constituents of the inputs and motor outputs. In the course of interacting with the world, an internal representation of the world is constructed that can be manipulated linguistically. The systems starts off without any task relevant words. It takes about 400 sentences (approximately 40 for the simpler mobile robot) for the system to acquire enough knowledge to respond reasonably to the user input, and relate to its environment in terms of given object names, action names and conjunctions of features. The success of these systems show that the principles which formed the basis for our previous systems scale to more complex systems.


We present a tree tensor-network impurity solver suited for general multiorbital systems. The network is constructed to efficiently capture the entanglement structure and symmetry of an impurity problem. The solver works directly on the real-time/frequency axis and generates spectral functions with energy-independent resolution on the order of one percent of the correlated bandwidth. Combined with an optimized representation of the impurity bath, it efficiently solves self-consistent dynamical mean-field equations and calculates various dynamical correlation functions for systems with offdiagonal Green's functions. For the archetypal correlated Hund's metal Sr2RuO4, we show that both the low-energy quasiparticle spectra related to the van Hove singularity and the high-energy atomic multiplet excitations can be faithfully resolved. In particular, we show that while the spin-orbit coupling has only minor effects on the orbital-diagonal one-particle spectral functions, it has a more profound impact on the low-energy spin and orbital response functions.


The emerging drug resistance bacteria increased the demand on the discovery of antibiotics from natural sources. This research was aimed to study the antibacterial reactivity; as well as the phytochemicals, of the wild type of Cyclamen persicum, using nine different extraction methods where four solvents (Methanol, Ethanol, Hexane; and Water) were involved with varied extraction periods ranged from 2 up to 10 hours. The antibacterial activity of crude methanol extract (CME) was found as the best method of extraction, with particular emphasis on the method with prolonged extraction time of (10 hrs). The antibacterial activities of produced CME were determined by using agar diffusion method against two of gram-positive bacteria and two gram-negative ones. The CME treated Mueller-Hinton-Agar plates, were exhibited antibacterial effects against the gram-positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis) by showing of inhibition zone after overnight incubation, while nothing was noticed on those of gram negative ones (Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli). These results that proved the antibacterial activity of the Cyclamen persicum tubers were positively tested the Saponin glycosides from plant. In addition to that, methanol solvent could be the useful method for extractions of Cyclamen and can be used in any developing drugs against pathogenic gram positive bacteria.


Tol and Yohe point out that, in their reply [Vol. 8, No. 1] to Tol and Yohe's review [Vol. 7, No. 4], the Stern team demonstrates the fragility of the numerical findings of the cost–benefit analysis in the Stern Review. At the same time, the Stern team puts less weight on cost–benefit analysis as a guide to policy making on climate change. Tol and Yohe show that the Stern Review allows several, mutually contradictory interpretations of the model that underlies the cost estimates; and argue that each interpretation implies that Stern's cost estimates have a severe downward bias.


This paper analyzes governments' optimal regulations and efficiency losses under imperfectly competitive international emissions trading in which price-influencing and price-taking countries move sequentially. It is found that price-taking countries should not intervene in trading of emission permits. As for the price-influencing group, no regulation is optimal when only one country has market power. In contrast, if there are at least two price-influencing countries, it is optimal for them to subsidize their firms' permit purchases or sales. We show that the subsidies could mitigate efficiency losses of countries adopting this policy, given other countries' optimal regulations. Moreover, a numerical example of the Annex-1 emissions trading is conducted to support our theoretical results. The simulation results further show that the number as well as the composition of price-influencing countries would affect total efficiency losses under imperfectly competitive international emissions trading.


Arguing that narrative serves as a powerful tool for university administration, my dissertation provides new rhetoric and composition professionals with an analytical framework for understanding how to navigate university life. Because our current academic climate of accountability requires universities and their individual academic units to offer narrative accounts that demonstrate institutional effectiveness, narrative is a useful lens for navigating the intricacies of institutional relations among individual academic units and among units within the university at large. On a practical note, most of the work we do in the institution, from grading to annual reports to faculty governance, relies on narrative. Narrative shapes our understanding of the institution and also comprises a majority of the artifacts we associate with it. However, unlike these artifacts, narratives are not static; they are living, changing entities, just like people. From this perspective, writing program administrators can understand the institution and their role within it in a synergetic way and begin to imagine how to direct and redirect the consequences of narratives. I term this process narrative logic, and I offer classical pragmatism as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between narrative and consequences. Through a case study of a mid-sized liberal arts school in the South, I isolates narrative's role in institutional assessment, programmatic change, and disciplinary identity in order to show how narrative effects material change.


Dimensional analysis has been used as a tool for developing a non-linear empirical model giving the flow zone indicator (FZI) as a function of open-hole log measurements. Dimensional analysis confirms that interval transit time (Δt), true resistivity (Rt), bulk density (ρb), the apparent water resistivity (Rwa) and the photo-electric absorption (Pe) are essential well-log measurements for estimating the FZI in sandstone formations. A unique power-law relationship has emerged between a dimensionless FZI group (λ) and a dimensionless resistivity group (Ω) for distinct hydraulic flow units. Petrotyping, using either the discrete rock type (DRT) approach or the global hydraulic elements (GHE) approach, appears to provide a credible framework for comparative hydraulic flow unit description. Dimensionless groups permitted the analysis of the effect of several operational variables. The FZI increases with increasing bulk density, and with increasing interval transit time. On the other hand, the FZI decreases with increasing true resistivity (Rt). The relationship between the FZI and the photo-electric absorption is more intricate, though, since it depends on the value of the power-law exponentϖ. Conventional log data from an oil well (well B), penetrating two distinct sandstone oil reservoirs in an onshore sandstone oilfield in the Middle East, were used to validate the dimensionless groups. For the field case presented, the FZI empirical model prediction capability does not appear to be diminished by the existence of a capillary transition zone. The FZI-based model, used for estimating permeability, represents an improvement in the prediction of permeability provided that reliable estimates of the FZI are available. Dimensional analysis proved to be a powerful modelling tool capable of revealing fine relationships that are invisible to exhaustive data mining techniques.


This study investigated a range of motivational variables which might lead individuals to become educational administrators. Identified and reported are those variables which are viewed by teachers who comprised the pool from which most future administrators are drawn. Twenty-seven items were identified and used on an instrument, designed by the writer. The null hypothesis for statistical differences between male and female educators was tested on each of the 27 items at the .05 level of significance, using multivariate analysis of variance and the test of simple main effects. A 20% sample of randomly selected male and female administrators produced 371 responses. The instrument was sent to a total of 1042 educators in the state of North Carolina during the spring of 1986 with a response rate of 75%. It was hypothesized that no significant differences would exist for sex, status, or the interaction of these upon each other for each of the 27 motivators. However, based upon several variables selected for the study, 14 differences appeared to separate the sexes. Compared with male educators, female educators viewed several motivators more negatively. They are: (1) Increased public scrutiny; (2) Negative public reaction; (3) Less time for summer vacations; (4) Being subjected to greater psychological pressures associated with teacher evaluation; (5) Work with athletic personnel and programs; (6) Career family conflicts; (7) Responsibility for disciplinary actions. Compared with male educators, female educators viewed the following motivators most positively. The are: (1) Possibility of earning higher annual salary; (2) Possibility of influencing academic achievement; (3) Opportunity to improve morale; (4) Opportunity to achieve positive recognition; (5) Probability of fewer teaching responsibilities; (6) Likelihood of being supported by coworkers; (7) Opportunity for professional growth. In view of these findings, it seemed appropriate to conclude that female educators represented in this study were not as motivated as male educators to seek administrative positions because of the inherent conflicts associated with the nature of administrative work itself or the collective self-concepts of these women which did not find expression in the kinds of administrative tasks that exist in educational administration today. The study also notes however, that women who are currently administrators hold many views similar to male administrators and appear atypical of women educators in general. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)


Food deserts are increasingly considered as a potential cause of overweight and obesity, yet existing literature is largely inconclusive in part due to the infeasibility of sorting out multiple confounding mechanisms from a purely empirical perspective. This article investigates the hypothesized causality in a rational-choice framework, where the individual chooses how much to patronize a distant supermarket and/or a nearby convenience store, broadly defined, and the weight outcome depends on this choice. Results suggest that neither limited supermarket access nor low income, the key features of food deserts, would determine the weight outcome, which is also affected by individual preferences as well as time and monetary costs associated with grocery shopping. Parametric conditions under which varying effects on weight occur are further derived to elicit policy implications


Research on hybrid inorganic‐organic materials has experienced an explosive growth since the 1980s, with the expansion of soft inorganic chemistry based processes. Indeed, mild synthetic conditions, low processing temperatures provided by "chimie douce" and the versatility of the colloidal state allow for the mixing of the organic and inorganic components at the nanometer scale in virtually any ratio to produce the so called hybrid materials. Today a high degree of control over both composition and nanostructure of these hybrids can be achieved allowing tunable structure‐property relationships. This, in turn, makes it possible to tailor and fine‐tune many properties (mechanical, optical, electronic, thermal, chemical…) in very broad ranges, and to design specific multifunctional systems for applications. In particular, the field of "Hybrid‐Optics" has been very productive not only scientifically but also in terms of applications. Indeed, numerous optical devices based on hybrids are already in, or very close, to the market. This review describes most of the recent advances performed in this field. Emphasis will be given to luminescent, photochromic, NLO and plasmonic properties. As an outlook we show that the controlled coupling between plasmonics and luminescence is opening a land of opportunities in the field of "Hybrid‐Optics".


In polygynous mammals, females are expected to bias maternal investment in favor of male calves. The mother should invest more in males to enhance their reproductive success in adulthood, or the males require greater investment as they are bigger and stronger than females. In this study, we used nursing duration to compare the difference in the amount of maternal investment provided by females. We compared differences according to sex of the offspring and the influence of calves' identification by sniffing, using captive giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) as a model. Since a high intensity of allonursing (nursing of a nonfilial calf) was reported in giraffes, we also focused on the difference between filial and nonfilial calves. We observed 22 nursing females and 47 suckling calves in four zoological gardens in the Czech Republic from 2007 to 2011. Nursing duration was longer for male calves than for female calves and for calves sniffed by the nursing female regardless whether the calves were filial or nonfilial. We conclude that male calves are more demanding for the amount of investment received and they are more successful in this effort than female calves. Since females provided investment in the same way to filial and nonfilial calves, selection for higher demand for investment by male than by female offspring should be important for their future development. Our results also demonstrate the importance of sniffing for the identification of the suckling calf by the female.


Aerosol effects are one of the major uncertainties in assessing global climate change, ecosystem processes and human health. This is because they critically change the balance between the radiation entering and leaving the atmosphere, as well as influencing cloud formation and having direct effects on biological systems e.g. through the respiratory system. It is the direct radiative effects of aerosol that are the focus of this work. The Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is a measure of the extinction of radiation by aerosol throughout the depth of the atmosphere. It is wavelength dependent and is traditionally measured at a number of visible wavelengths, but there is little AOD data available at UV wavelengths especially in the UVB. The Brewer spectrophotometer makes direct sun measurements in the UV spectral range, which can in principle be used to calculate AOD at those wavelengths using a form of Beer?s law. This work explores the capabilities of the Brewer for UV AOD measurements and applies the results to data from the Tropics and temperate mid-latitudes. Instrument specific weighting functions were tested for their ability to improve the AOD retrieval, but while they changed the partitioning of absorption between ozone and SO2, they had negligible effect on the resulting AOD. After correcting the existing Brewer software for AOD retrieval, data from Manchester UK were compared with independent measurements of AOD, and measurements from the Manchester instrument were also evaluated against a standard Brewer on location in Spain. The inter Brewer comparisons were consistent with differences of the order 6-10%, while comparison with independent methods was qualitatively consistent, but absolute differences were of the order 10-30%. This might partially be attributed to wavelength mismatches between the different methods, and assumptions in the various methods of calculating the AOD.Following the validation exercise the AOD was retrieved from Brewer instruments, using standard weighting functions, in Manchester from 2000- 2008 and Reading from 2003-2008. Based on this work in the UK, the method was then applied to data from Malaysia (1998-2007), where the climate is totally different to that of the UK. The AOD data obtained from the UK and from the Tropics have been compared. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia gave the highest average AOD values probably due to it being a developing city with high pollution levels indicating a human impact on climate change. Brewer AOD measurements obtained at a narrow range of wavelengths were then used to calculate Angstrom parameters by applying Volz Method. The results, often generating a negative alpha, were deemed unreliable at the UK sites. This was largely attributed to the high solar zenith angle and low signal to noise of the direct sun measurement, exacerbated by a limited number of clear sky measurements available for the work. However, calculation of Angstrom parameters was more successful in Malaysia due to a low solar zenith angle, high intensity, and greater frequency of truly could free sky. Results indicated that aerosol particles in the capital Kuala Lumpur show a clear domination by fine mode. This domination is probably caused by urban pollution, mainly from road traffic, industrial and anthropogenic activities, which is consistent with a large capital city undergoing rapid development.Thus the capabilities and limitations of the Brewer spectrophotometer to provide both AOD data at UV wavelengths, and from those further aerosol properties, has been tested and demonstrated in two contrasting climatic regions. Air mass, limiting the UV signal, and stray-light within the instrument are two of the factors that limit the success of the Brewer for these measurements, which proved more reliable when the sun was high in the sky as in the Tropics.


AbstractWe have developed a calibrated, simple time-lapse seismic method for estimating saturation changes from the CO2-storage project at Sleipner offshore Norway. This seismic method works well to map changes when CO2 is migrating laterally away from the injection point. However, it is challenging to detect changes occurring below CO2 layers that have already been charged by some CO2. Not only is this partly caused by the seismic shadow effects, but also by the fact that the velocity sensitivity for CO2 change in saturation from 0.3 to 1.0 is significantly less than saturation changes from zero to 0.3. To circumvent the seismic shadow zone problem, we combine the time-lapse seismic method with time-lapse gravity measurements. This is done by a simple forward modeling of gravity changes based on the seismically derived saturation changes, letting these saturation changes be scaled by an arbitrary constant and then by minimizing the least-squares error to obtain the best fit between the scaled saturation ...


Hans Kohn's definition of a more "liberal, civic Western" and "illiberal, ethnic Eastern" nationalism has been highly influential in providing a framework for our understanding of different types of nationalism. This article challenges the Kohn framework as idealized and argues that it did not reflect historical reality and is out of step with contemporary theories of nationalism. Its continued use also ignores the evolution from communist to civic states that has taken place in central-eastern Europe during the 1990s. The assumption that Western nation-states were always "civic" from their inception in the late eighteenth century is criticized and a different framework is proposed that sees Western states as only having become civic recently. In times of crisis (immigration, foreign wars, domestic secessionism, terrorism), the civic element of the state may continue to be overshadowed by ethnic particularist factors. The proportional composition of a country's ethnic particularism and civic universalism has always been in tension and dependent not on geography but on two factors: the historic stage of the evolution from ethnic to civic state and nationhood and the depth of democratic consolidation.


The current spending squeeze in the UK means that there is more interest than ever, both in tools to achieve greater value, and ones that can tap new sources of finance for social goals. Different approaches to investment for social impact are likely to be tested out over the next few years. When incentives cut across long-term, preventive activity, Social Impact Bonds can play a vital role in achieving more for less. This paper builds on previous papers on the topic published by the Young Foundation since 2008, and sets out our current thinking on the concept, on SIBs potential, and some of the challenges they face. It explores how SIBs can be structured, addresses practical concerns of measurement and efficacy, and explores the areas where we expect them to be most popular. We are optimistic about the potential of SIBs and we welcome the enthusiasm they have elicited. However, so far there has been little serious analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the SIB idea, and there is a risk that unrealistic aspirations will be projected onto the idea. Our hope is that SIBs can 'under-promise and over-deliver' rather than the opposite. We are working in the UK with several councils and other agencies that deliver priority social policy outcomes. This practical experience of testing the SIB concept in particular localities, using local data and taking account of particular local circumstances, has informed the analysis and research that underpins this paper.


Mark Twain's visions of the Mississippi River offer some of the most indelible images in American literature: Huck and Jim floating downstream on their raft, Tom Sawyer and friends becoming pirates on Jackson's Island, the young Sam Clemens himself at the wheel of a steamboat. Through Twain's iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain's river occupies in the national imaginary, until now no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume. Thomas Ruys Smith's Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain is the first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Twain's intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity. It follows Twain's remarkable connection to the Mississippi, from his early years on the river as a steamboat pilot, through his most significant literary statements, to his final reflections on the crooked stream that wound its way through his life and imagination. Alongside Twain's evolving relationship to the river, Deep Water details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period--from roustabouts to canoeists, from books for boys to blues songs--and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river. Smith weaves together these perspectives, putting Twain and his creations in conversation with a dynamic cast of river characters who helped transform the Mississippi into a vibrant American icon. By balancing evocative cultural history with thought-provoking discussions of some of Twain's most important and beloved works, Deep Water gives readers a new sense of both the Mississippi and the remarkable writer who made the river his own.


Records on supply (1990 -1994) and slaughter (1984 -1994) were analysed to study the scale, monthly and annual trend of the supply and slaughter of donkey, the ass, Equus asinus for meat at the Ezillo in Ishielu Local Government Area, near Abakaliki, in Ebonyi State of Nigeria. There were two peaks of supply/slaughter in the year. The first occurred I April while the second was by November/December. In each man th of the year, an average of 700 donkeys were supplied from various parts of northern Nigeria. The total supply in 1990 was 6612. This increased sharply to 11,817 by 1994. More than 50% of the supplies were slaughtered at Ezillo monthly. The rest were resold to traders from various others states of the Federation. Also fresh and dried donkey meat were purchased and transported to other towns and markets in the southern States of the country. Post mortem examination of the meat revealed that tuberculosis was the most prominent disease found in 31.69% of the slaughtered animals. This has very serious public health implications


In modern agriculture, seeking eco-friendly ways to promote plant growth and enhance crop productivity is of priority. Biostimulants are a group of substances from natural origin that contribute to boosting plant yield and nutrient uptake, while reducing the dependency on chemical fertilizers. Developing biostimulants from by-products paves the path to waste recycling and reduction, generating benefits for growers, food industry, registration and distribution companies, as well as consumers. The criteria to select designated by-products for valorizing as biostimulant are: absence of pesticide residue, low cost of collection and storage, sufficient supply and synergy with other valorization paths. Over the years, projects on national and international levels such as NOSHAN, SUNNIVA, and Bio2Bio have been initiated (i) to explore valorization of by-products for food and agriculture industries; (ii) to investigate mode of action of biostimulants from organic waste streams. Several classes of waste-derived biostimulants or raw organic material with biostimulant components were shown to be effective in agriculture and horticulture, including vermicompost, composted urban waste, sewage sludge, protein hydrolysate, and chitin/chitosan derivatives. As the global market for biostimulants continues to rise, it is expected that more research and development will expand the list of biostimulants from by-products. Global nutrient imbalance also requires biostimulant to be developed for targeted market. Here, we review examples of biostimulants derived from agricultural by-products and discuss why agricultural biomass is a particularly valuable source for the development of new agrochemical products.


Many critical real-time applications are implemented as time-triggered systems. We present a systematic way to derive such time-triggered implementations from algorithms specified as functional programs (in which form their correctness and fault-tolerance properties can be formally and mechanically verified with relative ease). The functional program is first transformed into an untimed synchronous system and, then, to its time-triggered implementation. The first step is specific to the algorithm concerned, but the second is generic and we prove its correctness. This proof has been formalized and mechanically checked with the PVS verification system. The approach provides a methodology that can ease the formal specification and assurance of critical fault-tolerant systems.


In order to find optimal cutting parameters of carbon steel C45, the optimizing experiment of the cutting parameters in High-Speed Machining based on Taguchi method is presented in this paper. High-Speed milling experiments were designed with high-speed machining tool and surface roughness tester as the equipment. The cutting speed, the feed per tooth and the cutting depth were selected as the cutting parameters while the surface roughness was taken as the criterion. The mean surface roughness and SNR of every factor at different levels was obtained. The effects of these parameters on the surface roughness have been researched by means of the analysis of variance, and then the optimal cutting parameters were found.


Fan Studies aims to de-pathologise fans, their communities and their fannish practices
(Jenkins 1992). In doing so, Fan Studies privileges fan voices by interrogating their quotidian
on- and offline fan practices (Brooker 2002; Hills 2002), demonstrating the emotional
connection these fans have to texts. Much of this fannish engagement revolves around the
creation and consumption of slash fiction (Bacon-Smith 1992; Hellekson & Busse 2006), a
fan practice occurring in fan fiction communities that has been identified as a 'queer female
space' (Lothian et al 2007, 103). This work predominantly explores why women create these
fan texts with little consideration given to the fan's source text. In spite of this, little
attention has been given to LGBT+ fandom and how self-identifying LGBT+ fans negotiate
mediated representations of LGBT+ identity, especially when considering the increasing
level of LGBT+ media representations on television and particularly on Teen TV
programmes.
Therefore, this thesis addresses the ways in which fans negotiate non-normative identities
represented in the teen mystery TV series Pretty Little Liars (2010-) by investigating 'queer'
modes of fan production, namely 'fan talk', (fem)slash fiction, digital (fem)slash and fan
theory-making created by PLL fans. PLL hosts a range of diverse LGBT+ representations and
includes a large number of LGB producers and creative talent. This investigation occurs by
employing a reader-guided textual analysis (Ytre-Arne 2011), a method that centralises fan
meaning-making by analysing the fan's source text through these fan interpretations. I
argue that reader-guided textual analysis (Ytre-Arne 2011) allows us to better understand
how fans negotiate LGBT+ representation, how fans accept or reject these LGBT+
representations and the characters' relationships. The implications lie not just in Fan Studies
methodologies and fan production, but also for Queer Theory's 'evaluative paradigm' (Davis
and Needham 2009) or how Queer Theorist assess representations as either positive or
negative.


In 2003 the UK government announced, after six years of supporting the notion of educating all pupils in the mainstream, that it advocated a permanent and significant role for segregated Special Schools. Though the term 'inclusion' is still evident in legislation and guidance to Local Authorities and practitioners its meaning, through use across a widening range of circumstances, has become increasingly broad. It has moved from meaning specifically 'access to the mainstream' to the more generalised 'access to a context'; so that now, a Special School can be praised for its inclusive practice. In addition, the failure of many authorities to initiate effective training, funding and support for practice that they label as 'inclusive education' has lead to a great deal of non-inclusive practice. This had created a belief among many teachers, parents, pupils and the wider public that 'inclusive education' is about 'dumping' hard to teach pupils, particularly those with Social and Emotional Behavioural Difficulties, into mainstream settings, to the detriment of those children and others around them. The notion that 'inclusion' in education has gone 'too far' has also become a regular view expressed by opposition politicians and figures such as Baroness Warnock, and in newspaper editorials such as the Times Educational Supplement. For many parents it has become equated with a loss of choice of schools, so that they are no longer able to send their child to the 'special' setting they require. For many others it has become the explanation for mainstream schools failing to respond to the personal learning needs of their children. In general, the idea of inclusion has become associated with children with special educational needs rather than the learning needs of all.

This paper considers how the original notions of inclusion have become dissipated and how they can be developed and reframed so as to encourage their progress. It analyses the discourse within a range of academic, legal and media texts, to explore how this dissipation has taken place within the UK. It contextualises this change in the use of the terms of inclusion with the rise of two other recent constructs, that of the 'specialist school' and the non-theorised practice of 'personalisation'. It identifies the need to establish a clear cut, precisely defined term which can be used to theorise the type of school which inclusion aims to achieve, but a term which cannot be subsumed by those who provide segregated provision. It suggests that such a term needs to reflect a liberal/democratic view of social justice, reminding people that inclusion is about removing social barriers that prevent equity, access and participation for all and that it is not just about making changes for an individual.


This paper examines the role of gender in the relationship between labour market status and preferences for job security. We hypothesize that the insider/outsider theory of employment and unemployment suffers from a gender bias. It neither takes the possibility of family-related labour market transitions nor the role of the household situation (division of labour, presence of children, dual-earner households etc.) into account. We adapt the insider/outsider theory of employment and unemployment by incorporating the, on average, higher number of labour market transitions experienced by women into the model using interaction effects and by conceptualising the household situation as mobility and responsibility effects. Contrary to our expectations, we find no significant effect of gender on preferences for job security, neither in interaction with labour market status nor as an independent effect. In contrast, we observe that individuals living together with their partners and main contributors to the household income consider job security to be particularly important.


[1] This paper compares the results of emission estimates of trace gases from open vegetation fires in southern hemisphere Africa for the year 2000 using different data sets. The study employs several approaches, deriving carbon monoxide (CO) emissions from a variety of satellite information, measurement data sets, and empirically-based techniques to estimate burned areas (BA), fuel consumption (FC), and emission factors (EF). Three BA data sets are used: the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiomter (MODIS) burned area data set, the Global Burned Area data set for the year 2000 (GBA2000), and the Global Burn Scar Atlas (GLOBSCAR) in July and September, 2000. The estimated total BA in southern Africa varies significantly among data sets from 210,000 to 830,000 km2 for the sum of July and September. Temporal and spatial variations associated with CO emissions are analyzed using three different techniques for calculating the FC and EF. The first set of FC and EF extrapolates monthly variations in Zambia to southern Africa, the second extrapolates spatially resolved data for September to July, and the last includes monthly and spatial variations in both FC and EF. This analysis suggests the importance of accounting for the temporal and spatial variations in both FC and EF in order to determine the appropriate temporal and spatial variations of emissions from open vegetation fires. The CO emissions from open vegetation burning for the sum of July and September range from 18 to 31 Tg CO, using the MODIS BA data set and three different techniques for calculating FC and EF. The relative standard deviations (RSD) calculated from the three different methods are 58% for BA, 21% for FC, and 37% for EF. The best estimate of CO emissions from open biomass burning for the sum of the two months is 29 Tg CO, which may be compared to the estimates constrained by numerical models and measurements in 2000 which range from 22 to 39 Tg CO.


Nitrogen is a vital component of atmosphere and plays important roles in the biochemistry of all life forms on the earth. Various mechanisms of biological nitrogen fixation and recycling in the environment have been evolved in all known ecosystems. For example, symbiotic nitrogen fixation is the major N2-fixing mechanism in the agroecosystems. Symbiotic nitrogen fixation is dependent on the biotic factors, such as host plant genotypes and the microbial strains. However, the interaction of these biotic factors is influenced by abiotic factors, such as climate and environmental conditions. The effects of various environmental variables, such as pesticides, temperature, and light as well as acidity, alkalinity, salinity, phosphorus, and water content status of the soils on the nitrogen fixation have been discussed briefly in this chapter.


Grammatically correct but nonsense twenty 4-segment sentences mixed with multiple talk recorded on CD were delivered to ears tested in 47 tinnitus patients at a comfortable level via a headphone. The signal-to-noise ratios were 0dB, 5dB and 10dBSPL. Patients were requested to repeat what they heard before and after electrical treatment. A sinusoidal wave of 10kHz at the intensity of about 200mA was delivered to ears for 30 minutes by using a plate electrode for ECG at the tragus or a stimulating Pt-Ir electrode on the middle ear. Alternatively, 0.5mA DC was delivered to patients using a iontophoretic instrument. Improved word perception under noises was observed in most patients with tinnitus relief following electrical stimulation of the ear, demonstrating that electrical stimulation improved auditory selective attention. There may be a relationship between tinnitus relief and improved selective attention. It may be electrical stimulation of the ears that produced improved selective attention, inducing tinnitus relief and improved word perception according to our previous reports.


ABSTRACT Following infection with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), in most cases immunity fails to eradicate the virus, resulting in slowly progressing immunopathology in the HCV-infected liver. We are the first to examine intrahepatic T cells and CD4+ CD25+ FoxP3+ regulatory T cells (Treg) in patients chronically infected with HCV (chronic HCV patients) during and after antiviral therapy by collecting multiple aspiration biopsy samples from the liver at different time points. We found that intrahepatic Treg frequencies were increased upon alpha interferon and ribavirin administration in about 50% of chronic HCV patients, suggesting stronger regulation of intrahepatic immunity by Treg during antiviral therapy. After cessation of antiviral therapy, the frequency of intrahepatic Treg remained above baseline in the large majority of livers of individuals who successfully cleared the virus. The phenotype of those Treg that were retained in the liver months after therapy-induced clearance of HCV RNA indicated a reduced contribution of effector memory cells. Our findings, gathered by multiple samplings of the liver, indicate that successful antiviral therapy of chronic HCV patients does not lead to normalization of the local immune response to a resting state comparable to that for healthy livers. The continuous presence of high numbers of Treg, with a phenotype reflecting a relatively weak suppressive activity, suggests ongoing residual regulation of immunopathology. These findings provide important insight into the dynamics of the immune response to HCV, as well as the effect of therapy on intrahepatic immunity.


During the past several years, the importance of practicum as a vital proportion of the preservice teacher education program has been increasingly emphasized. There have been a number of initiatives for supporting preservice teachers. Among these, peer based relationship is increasingly emerged as an innovative strategy to provide additional support to preservice teachers. This paper reports on part of a larger study which investigated the impact of peer mentoring in the context of Vietnam. Using mixed methods research design, the study investigated the impact of a peer mentoring model on the preservice teachers' perceptions of their psychosocial support from their peers during their practicum in Vietnam. A peer mentoring model was implemented with a group of preservice teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Data were collected from questionnaires and focus group interview with both a group of formally peer mentored preservice teachers and a group of formally non-peer mentored. The results revealed the preservice EFL teachers in the experimental group perceived more psychosocial support from their peer than those in the control group. The study affirms the empirical evidence for implementing a peer mentoring model for preservice EFL teachers during the practicum and echoes the need for a reform in the practicum.


Modern project management had its genesis in the field of operations research in the late 1940s, but today it is a much more diverse subject. It has evolved and developed a much wider range of methods, techniques, and skills that the project manager can draw upon. Not all these skills are relevant to every project, but an assortment of them will be relevant to most. This book aims to describe for students, researchers and managers the full range of skills that project managers can use to develop their methodologies.The authors group the skills into nine perspectives, representing nine schools of project management research and theory. By attaching a metaphor to each of these perspectives, students, researchers and managers are better able to understand each approach and decide whether it is best suited to the development of a strategy for managing their project. Perspectives on Projects builds upon the various theoretical orientations that the field of project management has developed. Featuring several case studies, drawn from a variety of settings, to illustrate how the different schools can provide different perspectives on projects, this book is an ideal text for anyone involved in project management.


Motivated by the persistently pursued weight reductions in a vehicle projected for a fuel
efficiency competition, this thesis deals with designing new and lighter rims for the vehicle.
The aim of the thesis is to design the rims with a carbon-fibre reinforced polymer, a
lightweight composite material. A profound study on this kind of material is also presented, since it could be useful for lighten, subsequently, other parts of the vehicle. The thesis is based on a review of literature to acquire a theoretical framework. The design process and its validation is supported by finite element analyses.
The preliminary design starts with a closed V profile, which appears to be a viable and
adequate option for the application. The rim is divided into three parts, the contour and two sidewalls. By modelling and simulating the rim, the profile of each part is optimized and information about the stress´s state is acquired. Therefore the layered structure for the different parts are defined by taking the optimum proportions of the fibre's orientations into account. The parts are then simulated making use of a layered element which in the end validates the design.
The reserve factors found are 1,67 for the contour and around 1,5 for the sidewalls, which indicates the good adjustment of the design between safety and performance. On the other hand, an estimation for the weight reduction is calculated, which achieves values around 17% on the better cases. With further work on the manufacturing process the design can in the end offer a reasonable saving of weight.


Despite decades of research on the persuasive effects of propaganda, little is known about opinion change in the wake of journalistic accounts of scandal involving public officials. To what extent and under what conditions do opinions change in the wake of information conveyed through newspapers? We conducted five experiments to assess how publicizing scandal changes evaluations of the specific public officials involved and attitudes towards government in general. In each study, subjects drawn from voter files and lists of party activists were mailed "special edition" investigative newspapers that reported on scandals involving public officials. Feature stories depicted some public officials as villains and others as heroes. Treatment and control groups were interviewed approximately two weeks later. We find significant effects on both voters and activists. The most striking pattern is the change in net favorability of the public officials implicated in the scandals. Evaluations of the villains deteriorated and evaluations of the heroes improved. Changes in evaluations are especially large when scandals implicated public officials with whom respondents had little prior familiarity.


Remnants of a Water-Bearing World Stars like the Sun end their lives as white dwarfs. Farihi et al. (p. 218) used detailed spectroscopic analysis of a debris-accreting white dwarf, along with knowledge that such systems accrete this debris from remnants of rocky planetary bodies, to derive the water content in a disrupted extrasolar body. The findings suggest that the white dwarf contains the signature of a rocky minor planet composed of 26% water by mass. Spectroscopic analysis of a debris-accreting star in its latest stage of life reveals the remnants of a water-bearing world. The existence of water in extrasolar planetary systems is of great interest because it constrains the potential for habitable planets and life. We have identified a circumstellar disk that resulted from the destruction of a water-rich and rocky extrasolar minor planet. The parent body formed and evolved around a star somewhat more massive than the Sun, and the debris now closely orbits the white dwarf remnant of the star. The stellar atmosphere is polluted with metals accreted from the disk, including oxygen in excess of that expected for oxide minerals, indicating that the parent body was originally composed of 26% water by mass. This finding demonstrates that water-bearing planetesimals exist around A- and F-type stars that end their lives as white dwarfs.


In this study, a series of binary systems based ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) C12MIm(BF4)yIx (x + y = 1) are prepared by mixing ILCs 1-dodecyl-3-methylimidazolium iodide (C12MImI) and 1-dodecyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (C12MImBF4), aiming to combine the properties of both C12MImBF4 and C12MImI. Their mesogenic properties are characterized by thermal analysis, polarized optical microscopy, X-ray diffraction as well as anisotropic ionic conductivity measurements. It is found that the smectic A phase with interdigitated bilayer structure is observed in the C12MIm(BF4)yIx series. The binary system C12MIm(BF4)yIx has a larger mesophase temperature range and interdigitated layer spacing than pure C12MImBF4. And the anisotropic ionic conductivity of the binary system, including parallel and perpendicular to smectic layer, is higher than pure C12MImI. Moreover, in binary system C12MIm(BF4)yIx, with the increasing content of C12MImI the ability of the anion to form three dimensional hydrogen bonds increases, resulting in the increase of the mesophase temperature range, interdigitated layer spacing and the decrease of anisotropic ionic conductivity. Furthermore, multi-component system based ILCs are obtained by introducing iodine to the binary system, and the mesophase temperature range is lowered, which is associated with the weak ability of I3− to form hydrogen bond with cations. All these results suggest that we can regulate the mesogenic properties of ILCs as we need by making binary or even multi-component systems.


A moral dilemma is often characterized as a situation in which an agent ought to do each of two acts, but he cannot do both. This characterization is too narrow, however, because it erroneously suggests that dilemmas are limited to situations in which only one agent is involved. It is just as plausible, though, to suppose that there might be multi-person moral dilemmas, of which the two-person case may be taken as typical. In my discussion of multi-person moral dilemmas I shall focus on the two-person case and I shall call such situations "interpersonal moral conflicts." To the best of my knowledge, Ruth B. Marcus is the first to distinguish explicitly between single-agent and multi-person dilemmas. What I shall argue here is that the importance of this distinction has been overlooked. Indeed, I shall claim that the problems that single-agent dilemmas generate for moral theories are different from and more serious than the difficulties created by interpersonal conflicts.


Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author wasat first.When the term big data first came on the scene, bestselling author Tom Davenport (Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind.Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data meansand why everyone in business needs to know about it. Big Data at Work covers all the bases: what big data means from a technical, consumer, and management perspective; what its opportunities and costs are; where it can have real business impact; and which aspects of this hot topic have been oversold.This book will help you understand: Why big data is important to you and your organization What technology you need to manage it How big data could change your job, your company, and your industry How to hire, rent, or develop the kinds of people who make big data work The key success factors in implementing any big data project How big data is leading to a new approach to managing analyticsWith dozens of company examples, including UPS, GE, Amazon, United Healthcare, Citigroup, and many others, this book will help you seize all opportunitiesfrom improving decisions, products, and services to strengthening customer relationships. It will show you how to put big data to work in your own organization so that you too can harness the power of this ever-evolving new resource.


This paper discusses a new combination of techniques that help in improving the accuracy of speech recognition in adverse conditions using two microphones. Classic approaches toward binaural speech processing use some form of cross-correlation over time across the two sensors to effectively isolate target speech from interferers. Several additional techniques using temporal and spatial masking have been proposed in the past to improve recognition accuracy in the presence of reverberation and interfering talkers. In this paper, we consider the use of cross-correlation across frequency over some limited range of frequency channels in addition to the existing methods of monaural and binaural processing. This has the effect of locating and reinforcing coincident peaks across frequency over the representation of binaural interaction and provides local smoothing over the specified range of frequencies. Combined with the temporal and spatial masking techniques mentioned above, this leads to significant improvements in binaural speech recognition.


In previous studies the role of apyrase in plant growth and development has been investigated in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana . Results obtained in Arabidopsis have suggested that ectoapyrases regulate plant growth and participate in wound responses. To apply these findings to an agriculturally relevant plant we transformed apyrase into tomatoes ( Solanum lycopersicum , MicroTom). Our goal is to overexpress and knockdown this gene in transgenic tomato plants to determine if their function in tomatoes is similar to those found in Arabidopsis . We first began by constructing vectors for apyrase to either overexpress the gene through a 35-S promoter in a pCambia 2300 plasmid or knockdown the gene by RNAi. These constructs were used for Agrobacterium mediated transformation of tomato plants, where kanamycin was used for plant selection. Thus far we have successfully produced transgenic tomato lines with Solanum apyrase overexpressed as judged by RT-PCR analysis. These transgenic tomato lines will be tested for growth phenotypes including increased fruit size.


Background and aim: The Arterial Hypertension is part of the group of cardiovascular diseases that represent the highest proportion of death causes by diseases thus highlighting the need to evaluate the risk factors that contribute to this clinical situation and its high prevalence. The aim of this review is to assess the prevalence of arterial hypertension and its risk factors. Methods and findings: This study is a literature review of published studies from 2003 to 2015, held in the following databases: Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Scientific Open Access Repository of Portugal (RCAAP) and online Knowledge Library (B-ON). For this research were selected 14 articles and 3 websites/reports were identified that corresponded to inclusion criteria. The prevalence of arterial hypertension in the reviewed studies ranged from 23.6% to 54.8%. Discussion: It is more prevalent in female gender, with the highest incidence in adults and the elderly, African-native peoples and lower education. Arterial hypertension is positively associated to other diseases and genetic and environmental factors, such as: obesity, high sodium ingestion, sedentary lifestyle, stress, alcohol consumption and smoking. Conclusion: It was observed that the development of several studies are important to contribute to the public health policies and actions, by providing indications to combat the increasing prevalence of Arterial Hypertension and risk factors, in order to better control this disease.


The economic downturn is causing recession in the industrially developed nations of the western world. Historic analysis reveals this phenomenon to be nothing new but in fact cyclic, as periods of excess, financed by perceived wealth and fuelled by debt, are followed by a long period of readjustment. We are entering such a period of readjustment, and despite the best efforts of politicians to have us believe that the good times are just around the corner, the historical evidence suggests we are in for a ten-year period of "readjustment". The historical evidence also indicates that technological innovation driven by engineers will be the means by which the industrial nations will emerge from the deep recession. Along the way the social order within nations will be redefined and there will be a new world order amongst nations. This paper outlines how the quality of engineering education can be improved to produce graduates who will be capable of creativity and innovation in the new social and world order, and who will help lead us out of recession. It also outlines some of the problems with the current systems, and how these problems can be addressed.


Reliability is one of the important aspects of any software, which has been studied for decades with many techniques proposed and developed. In software engineering, software reliability cannot be ignored in any application. However, it is still hard to measure and difficult to ensure the reliability of software, which means that it is necessary to find new ways to study on the software reliability, especially for researchers. Naturally, idea generation has to be involved in the process of getting innovative ideas. Although a considerable number of applications and research studies have been made in the past years in order to increase the effectiveness of idea making process, it is lack of efforts working on creativity in the idea generation process particularly. Moreover, creative computing is suitable to be employed to enhance the innovation of research studies on the software reliability, as it emphasises being creative in the whole software lifecycle. Therefore, the objective of this research paper is to propose an idea generation process to inspire new studies on software reliability. This paper first represents an idea generation framework. Then, after critically reviewed the creativity features and attributes, three creativity elements are proposed with corresponding sub-dimensions to support on balancing new and value of the ideas. Formal algorithms are designed to calculate and incorporate the creativity elements and their sub-dimension. Furthermore, a prototype of the proposed idea generation system is developed that is named as Research Topics Generation System (RTGS), in which a set of new research topics on software reliability are generated to inspire further studies, whilst creative computing ontology is created as the basis of the idea generation.


Recent advancements in deep learning techniques facilitate intelligent-query support in diverse applications, such as content-based image retrieval and audio texturing. Unlike conventional key-based queries, these intelligent queries lack efficient indexing and require complex compute operations for feature matching. To achieve high-performance intelligent querying against massive datasets, modern computing systems employ GPUs in-conjunction with solid-state drives (SSDs) for fast data access and parallel data processing. However, our characterization with various intelligent-query workloads developed with deep neural networks (DNNs), shows that the storage I/O bandwidth is still the major bottleneck that contributes 56%--90% of the query execution time. To this end, we present DeepStore, an in-storage accelerator architecture for intelligent queries. It consists of (1) energy-efficient in-storage accelerators designed specifically for supporting DNN-based intelligent queries, under the resource constraints in modern SSD controllers; (2) a similarity-based in-storage query cache to exploit the temporal locality of user queries for further performance improvement; and (3) a lightweight in-storage runtime system working as the query engine, which provides a simple software abstraction to support different types of intelligent queries. DeepStore exploits SSD parallelisms with design space exploration for achieving the maximal energy efficiency for in-storage accelerators. We validate DeepStore design with an SSD simulator, and evaluate it with a variety of vision, text, and audio based intelligent queries. Compared with the state-of-the-art GPU+SSD approach, DeepStore improves the query performance by up to 17.7×, and energy-efficiency by up to 78.6×.


When immigrants experience "nationality discrimination" in the labor market, ceteris paribus their earnings are lower than native-born workers because they were born abroad. The challenge to testing for nationality discrimination is that the native/immigrant earnings gap will very likely also be influenced by productivity differences driven by incomplete assimilation of immigrants, as well as the possibility of racial or gender discrimination. There is relatively little empirical literature, and virtually no theoretical literature, on this type of discrimination. In this study, a model of nationality discrimination where customer prejudice and native/immigrant productivity differences jointly influence the earnings gap is presented. We derive an extension of Becker's market discrimination coefficient (MDC), applied to the case of nationality discrimination when there are productivity differences. A number of novel implications are obtained. We find, for example, that the MDC depends upon relative immigrant productivity and relative immigrant labor supply. We test the model on data for hitters and pitchers in Major League Baseball, an industry with a history of immigration, potential for customer discrimination, and clean detailed microdata on worker productivities and race. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and decomposition methods are used to estimate the extent of discrimination. We find no compelling evidence of discrimination in the hitter group, but evidence of ceteris paribus underpayment of immigrant pitchers. While our test case is for a particular industry, our theoretical model, empirical specifications, and general research design are quite generalizable to many other labor markets.


We present an algorithm, HOMER, for exploration and reinforcement learning in rich observation environments that are summarizable by an unknown latent state space. The algorithm interleaves representation learning to identify a new notion of kinematic state abstraction with strategic exploration to reach new states using the learned abstraction. The algorithm provably explores the environment with sample complexity scaling polynomially in the number of latent states and the time horizon, and, crucially, with no dependence on the size of the observation space, which could be infinitely large. This exploration guarantee further enables sample-efficient global policy optimization for any reward function. On the computational side, we show that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently whenever certain supervised learning problems are tractable. Empirically, we evaluate HOMER on a challenging exploration problem, where we show that the algorithm is exponentially more sample efficient than standard reinforcement learning baselines.


Abstract : Hysteresis exhibited by smart materials hinders their wider applicability in actuators and sensors. In this paper methods are studied for recursive identification and adaptive inverse control of smart material actuators, where a Preisach operator with a piecewise uniform density function is used to model the hysteresis. Persistent excitation conditions for parameter convergence are discussed in terms of the input to the Preisach operator. Two classes of recursive identification schemes are explored, one based on the hysteresis output, the other based on the time difference of the output. Asymptotic tracking for the adaptive inverse control method is proved, and the condition for parameter convergence is given in terms of the reference trajectory. Practical implementation issues are also investigated. Simulation and experimental results based on a magnetostrictive actuator are used to illustrate the approach.


Monte Carlo simulations are used to investigate the conformational and orierjtational properties of lipids and proteins in a bilayer membrane. in the first instance, linear, hard-core tri-atomics are used to represent the two-dimensional projections of the lipid molecules.
Studies on lipid only systems show that the average number of gauche rotations and the cross-sectional area of the lipids decrease with increasing density. There is no long range orientational order within the lipids but the local orieritational order increases with increasing density. No first order phase transitions are observed though a glassy solid is observed at high densities.
The properties of the bulk lipid are unchanged upon the addition of protein molecules represented by hard discs of varying sizes. The nearest neighbour lipids are unchanged conformationally but are found to exhibit a high degree of orientational ordering around the proteins preferring to have the long axis of their projections parallel to the proteins surface. The degree of ordering increases with increas-ing density and decreasing curvature of the protein.
The lateral pressure is almost independent of protein size or concentration if expressed as a function of the bulk
lipid density. The hard-core of the lipids is softened to a site-site Lennard-Jones potential. The particles are found to cluster
within the periodic cell used. There is a critical density below which the average number of gauche rotations and the
cross-sectional area change little and the local orientational order increases. Above this density these properties are the same as for the hard-core systems. The structure, indicated by the radial distribution functions, is much greater than that for the hard-core systems and is almost independent of density.
The invariance of the lipid conformations and the observed lipid-protein orientational order resolve the conflict that
has arisen in the past regarding the presence or absence of an annulus of lipid around integral protein molecules. The
different experimental methods are seen to examine different lipid properties.


Systems analysis allows quantitative empirical testing of models that exist in the study of public policy. Simulation and visualisation techniques can help policy makers to reduce uncertainties on the possible impacts of policies. This paper presents a new tool for systems modelling and simulation of policy problems to support the problem analysis, the design of policy options and impact assessment activities. The tool facilitates the cognitive activity of representing complex mental models using system dynamics simulation modelling by defining standards and a procedure for policy modelling. We propose a new policy-oriented problem structuring method (PSM), the 'labelled causal mapping'. The method supports scenario-based dynamic simulation and provides graphical representations of the involved actors, key variables, control flows and causal dependencies in a policy decision situation. A web-based tool prototype has been implemented in a Node.js environment. Two real policy problems are presented for demonstration of the use of the prototype.


The delightful, gossipy diaries of James Lees-Milne describe his encounters with the owners of country houses - from eccentric lords and oil millionaires to raffish socialists - as he travelled over England saving properties for the National Trust. Here are sharply observed accounts of dinner with Vita Sackville - West at Sissinghurst; Winston Churchill's bedroom at Chartwell; T.E. Lawrence's dilapidated Dorset cottage; and, war damage to a great house in Derby. All are infused with his love of beauty and his sympathy for those giving up their ancestral homes forever. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it. "English Journeys" celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).


We present a method for developing multi-device services which allows for the creation of services that are adapted to a wide range of devices. Users have a wide selection of electronic services at their disposal such as shopping, banking, gaming, and messaging. They interact with these services using the computing devices they prefer or have access to, which can vary between situations. In some cases, the services that they want to use func-tions with the device they have access to, and sometimes it does not. Thus, in order for users to experience their full benefits, electronic services will need to become more flexible. They will need to be multi-device services, i.e. be accessible from different devices. We show that multi-device services are often used in different ways on different devices due to variations in device capabilities, purpose of use, context of use, and usability. This suggests that multi-device services not only need to be accessible from more than one device, they also need to be able to present functionality and user interfaces that suit various devices and situations of use. The key problem addressed in this work is that there are too many device-service combinations for developing a service version for each device. In-stead, there is a need for new methods for developing multi-device services which allows the creation of services that are adapted to various devices and situations. The challenge of designing and implementing multi-device services has been addressed in two ways in the present work: through the study of real-life use of multi-device services and through the creation of a development method for multi-device services. Studying use of multi-device services has gener-ated knowledge about how to design such services which give users the best worth. The work with development methods has resulted in a design model building on the separation of form and content, thus making it possible to create different presentations to the same content. In concrete terms, the work has resulted in design guidelines for multi-device services and a system prototype based on the principles of separation between form and content, and presentation control.