Abstract. We describe the design and execution of the BORTAS (Quantifying the impact of BOReal forest fires on Tropospheric oxidants over the Atlantic using Aircraft and Satellites) experiment, which has the overarching objective of understanding the chemical aging of air masses that contain the emission products from seasonal boreal wildfires and how these air masses subsequently impact downwind atmospheric composition. The central focus of the experiment was a two-week deployment of the UK BAe-146-301 Atmospheric Research Aircraft (ARA) over eastern Canada, based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Atmospheric ground-based and sonde measurements over Canada and the Azores associated with the planned July 2010 deployment of the ARA, which was postponed by 12 months due to UK-based flights related to the dispersal of material emitted by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, went ahead and constituted phase A of the experiment. Phase B of BORTAS in July 2011 involved the same atmospheric measurements, but included the ARA, special satellite observations and a more comprehensive ground-based measurement suite. The high-frequency aircraft data provided a comprehensive chemical snapshot of pyrogenic plumes from wildfires, corresponding to photochemical (and physical) ages ranging from 45 sr 10 days, largely by virtue of widespread fires over Northwestern Ontario. Airborne measurements reported a large number of emitted gases including semi-volatile species, some of which have not been been previously reported in pyrogenic plumes, with the corresponding emission ratios agreeing with previous work for common gases. Analysis of the NO y data shows evidence of net ozone production in pyrogenic plumes, controlled by aerosol abundance, which increases as a function of photochemical age. The coordinated ground-based and sonde data provided detailed but spatially limited information that put the aircraft data into context of the longer burning season in the boundary layer. Ground-based measurements of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 μm (PM 2.5 ) over Halifax show that forest fires can on an episodic basis represent a substantial contribution to total surface PM 2.5 .


In this article, we describe Canada as a mineable power. At a domestic level, laws controlling this activity are extremely permissive and political authorities provide multiplej supports to this field. For this reason, we determine the Canadian Miner-State jurisdiction, in other words, a State permitting a mineable oligarchy enrichment placing the state machine at its service.Canada, an international mineable leader, is searching to spread its own pattern beyond its frontiers. At the Toronto Stock Market, hundreds of multinationals find the ideal platform to monitor mining projects carried out around the World. A great number of these projects cause large-scale socio economic impacts with impunity. These multinationals have the political, financial and moral support held by a section of the Canadian government. For all these reasons, we consider Canada a real judicial paradise regarding mineable enterprises.


The third CAIR workshop brings together researchers and developers interested in advancing conversational systems in interactive information retrieval. The workshop builds on the first and second CAIR workshops held at SIGIR 2017 and 2018 and will focus on the continuing development of current challenges, user and system limitations, and evaluation of conversational systems for information retrieval. Participants will collaboratively explore different contexts (i.e., home, hospitals, or work settings), use cases, and interactivity forms (voice-only, multi-modal, screen-based) in which conversational search systems can be used. Possible outcomes include fostering novel and innovative methodologies (such as for data collection and evaluation), personalising conversational systems, and understanding ethical challenges---such as system transparency---from the user's perspective.


The FDA's recent deployment of the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine (also known as the Park Doctrine), and HHS OIG's presumption of federal health program debarment following an RCO Doctrine conviction has been extremely controversial. This article defends strategic use of the Doctrine against officers and directors of entities such as New England Compounding Center, whose egregious behavior puts into commerce products that present serious public health risks. This article posits that the Doctrine is an option of necessity for successful enforcement against entities that are "too big to nail" because of the essential nature of their products which all but precludes their criminal conviction and exclusion from Federal healthcare programs. The article suggests that the toothlessness of fiduciary duties, as well as the theory of efficient breach potentially explain continued legal violations by life science companies, even in the face of enormous fines, which, according to HHS OIG, have become viewed as a cost of doing business.


Learn statistics the easy way with STATISTICS FOR EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE AND EVALUATION! Easy-to-read and practical, this social work text provides you with a step-by-step guide that will help you succeed in statistics. Studying is made easy with practice illustrations, examples, exercises, and a book-specific website that contains frequently asked questions, tutorial quizzes, and links to online resources. Practical examples provide you with the opportunity to see how and when data analysis and statistics are used in practice.


We consider tests of a simple null hypothesis on a subset of the coefficients of the exogenous and endogenous regressors in a single-equation linear instrumental variables regression model with potentially weak identification. Existing methods of subset inference (i) rely on the assumption that the parameters not under test are strongly identified, or (ii) are based on projection-type arguments. We show that, under homoskedasticity, the subset Anderson and Rubin (1949) test that replaces unknown parameters by limited information maximum likelihood estimates has correct asymptotic size without imposing additional identification assumptions, but that the corresponding subset Lagrange multiplier test is size distorted asymptotically.


The interplay between dopamine and α-synuclein (AS) plays a central role in Parkinson's disease (PD). PD results primarily from a severe and selective devastation of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra pars compacta. The neuropathological hallmark of the disease is the presence of intraneuronal proteinaceous inclusions known as Lewy bodies within the surviving neurons, enriched in filamentous AS. In vitro, dopamine inhibits AS fibril formation, but the molecular determinants of this inhibition remain obscure. Here we use molecular dynamic (MD) simulations to investigate the binding of dopamine and several of its derivatives onto conformers representative of an NMR ensemble of AS structures in aqueous solution. Within the limitations inherent to MD simulations of unstructured proteins, our calculations suggest that the ligands bind to the 125YEMPS129 region, consistent with experimental findings. The ligands are further stabilized by long-range electrostatic interactions with glutamate 83 (E83) in the NAC region. These results suggest that by forming these interactions with AS, dopamine may affect AS aggregation and fibrillization properties. To test this hypothesis, we investigated in vitro the effects of dopamine on the aggregation of mutants designed to alter or abolish these interactions. We found that point mutations in the 125YEMPS129 region do not affect AS aggregation, which is consistent with the fact that dopamine interacts non-specifically with this region. In contrast, and consistent with our modeling studies, the replacement of glutamate by alanine at position 83 (E83A) abolishes the ability of dopamine to inhibit AS fibrillization.


What causes terrorism and how can it be prevented? This is one of the great political questions of our time and over the last decade and a half, considerable resources have been allocated not only to state counter-terrorism programmes, but also to research which might shed some light on this question and inform counter-terrorism policies and practices. Terrorism experts have explored a host of possible causes. Low levels of education, economic and financial crisis, globalisation, inequality, occupation, political repression, poverty, psychopathy and state failure; these are just some of the factors examined in the literature, which tends to emphasise the multiplicity of causes and the complexity of the issue. But whilst terrorism experts seem collectively unable to reach any firm conclusions as to the most significant causes of their object of study, the policy agenda, to which they largely orientate themselves, has focused increasingly on Muslims; and, with the usual disclaimers, the experts have followed. ISLAM AND TERRORISM Though political elites rarely refer to Islam per se as a principle cause of terrorism – a claim which though not uncommon is largely restricted to fringe movements – it is nevertheless widely assumed in policy circles that some extreme version of Islam has been a major driving force behind contemporary terrorism. Islamism, Political Islam, Wahhabism and Salafism are a few of the usual suspects appearing in policy pronouncements and the terrorism studies literature, along with more vague references to Islamic extremism, fundamentalism, radicalism and so on. So whilst Islam is routinely lauded as a religion of peace, and ordinary or moderate Muslims are usually invoked in distinction to the terrorists, radicals and extremists, contemporary political violence is still overwhelmingly seen as basically a Muslim problem, and it is largely Muslims who are targeted by counter-terrorism policies and practices. This may seems defensible, even sensible at a surface level. After all, evidence can be produced that suggests that Muslim groups are responsible for the majority of contemporary global non-state political violence. Consider, for example, the figures in the 2014 Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.


PURPOSE
Major cardiovascular complications associated with noncardiac surgery represent a substantial population health problem for which there are no established efficacious and safe prophylactic interventions. Acetyl-salicylic acid (ASA) represents a promising intervention. The objective of this study was to determine surgeons' perioperative usage of ASA, and if they would enroll their patients in a perioperative ASA randomized controlled trial (RCT).

METHODS
Cross-sectional survey of all practicing Canadian general, orthopedic, and vascular surgeons. Our mailed, self-administered survey asked surgeons to consider only their patients who were at risk of a major perioperative cardiovascular complication.

RESULTS
The response rate was 906/1854 (49%). For patients taking ASA chronically, there was marked variability regarding ASA continuation prior to surgery amongst the general and orthopedic surgeons, whereas 76% of vascular surgeons continued ASA in 81-100% of their patients. For patients not taking ASA chronically, approaches to starting ASA prior to surgery were variable amongst the vascular surgeons, whereas 70% of general and 82% of orthopaedic surgeons did not start ASA. For patients taking ASA chronically, 73% of general surgeons, 70% of orthopaedic surgeons, and 36% of vascular surgeons would allow at least 40% of their patients to participate in a perioperative RCT comparing stopping versus continuing ASA. For patients not taking ASA chronically, most general (76%), orthopaedic (67%), and vascular (51%) surgeons would allow at least 40% of their patients to participate in a perioperative RCT comparing starting ASA versus placebo.

CONCLUSION
This national survey demonstrates that perioperative ASA usage as reported by surgeons is variable, identifying the need for, and community interest in, a large perioperative ASA trial.


Journal clubs are meetings where participants engage in discussion or appraisal of professional literature and research. This study investigates the perceived value of librarians' participation in journal clubs. Using a hermeneutic dialectic process, we built a construction of the value of journal club participation based on interviews with academic librarians. In the construction, we demonstrate that librarians and their organizations benefit from the informal professional learning that takes place in journal clubs, by developing professional knowledge, building and strengthening communities of practice, increasing research capacity, and closing the research-to-practice gap.


This paper gives an overview of English education policy and practice for young
children in Japan. Recently, a strong need for English education has emerged and
changes have been made at the elementary school levels. English education has not
yet been regulated, however, in early childhood education. This study investigates
English education for young children in Japanese preschool settings, in lessons for
preschoolers provided outside of preschool, and in English preschools. The results
show that English lessons are offered more widely at private institutions than in
public, and a strong commercial involvement that makes English education hard to
access for families with fewer economic resources and families with two working
parents. The results also revealed issues of quality in instructional method and in
teachers' skills. Although there is a wide gap in opportunities to learn English from an
early age, the result in English knowledge and skill in latter education level do not yet
differ. More practical research and policy studies are needed to provide equal educational
opportunities and also methodologically and professionally appropriate English
education for young Japanese children.


Background There is an urgent need for new tools for the early diagnosis of TB disease and monitoring of the response to treatment, especially in resource-constrained settings. We investigated the usefulness of host markers detected in saliva as candidate biomarkers for the immunological diagnosis of TB disease and monitoring of treatment response. Methods We prospectively collected saliva samples from 51 individuals that presented with signs and symptoms suggestive of TB disease at a health centre in Cape Town, South Africa, prior to the establishment of a clinical diagnosis. Patients were later classified as having TB disease or other respiratory disease (ORD), using a combination of clinical, radiological and laboratory findings. We evaluated the concentrations of 69 host markers in saliva samples using a multiplex cytokine platform, and assessed the diagnostic potentials of these markers by receiver operator characteristics (ROC) curve analysis, and general discriminant analysis. Results Out of the 51 study participants, 18 (35.4%) were diagnosed with TB disease and 12 (23.5%) were HIV infected. Only two of the 69 host markers that were evaluated (IL-16 and IL-23) diagnosed TB disease individually with area under the ROC curve ≥0.70. A five-marker biosignature comprising of IL-1β, IL-23, ECM-1, HCC1 and fibrinogen diagnosed TB disease with a sensitivity of 88.9% (95% CI,76.7–99.9%) and specificity of 89.7% (95% CI, 60.4–96.6%) after leave-one-out cross validation, regardless of HIV infection status. Eight-marker biosignatures performed with a sensitivity of 100% (95% CI, 83.2–100%) and specificity of 95% (95% CI, 68.1–99.9%) in the absence of HIV infection. Furthermore, the concentrations of 11 of the markers changed during treatment, indicating that they may be useful in monitoring of TB treatment response. Conclusion We have identified novel salivary biosignatures which may be useful in the diagnosis of TB disease and monitoring of the response to TB treatment. Our findings require further validation in larger studies before these biosignatures could be considered for point-of-care screening test development.


Individual concentrations of glucose, lactic acid, and urea down to 0.1 wt % have been investigated in aqueous solutions by the Raman scattering technique. These measurements have been conducted with three different laser excitation wavelengths at 514.5, 632.8, and 751.8 nm in conjunction with a single-grating spectrometer and a liquid nitrogen-cooled charge-coupled device (CCD). Rabbit and human aqueous humor specimens have also been studied by this method. In addition to a water background, the large fluorescence structure in the Raman spectra resulting from these aqueous humor specimens has been subtracted out by being fitted to a first-degree polynomial. Raman peaks similar to the stretching vibrations of methylene and methyl groups associated with glucose and lactate, respectively, were observed in the human specimens within the region from 2800 to 3050 cm−1. Similar structure was observed from the rabbit specimens. In addition, a Raman peak, indicative of the carbon-nitrogen stretching mode of urea and various amino acids, was observed at 1006 cm−1 in all aqueous humor specimens. However, some of the Raman peaks in the rabbit specimens may have resulted from the euthanasia process.


Virtual memory (VM) is a crucial abstraction in modern computer systems at any scale, from handheld devices to datacenters. VM provides programmers the illusion of an always sufficiently large and linear memory, making programming easier. Although the core components of VM have remained largely unchanged since early VM designs, the design constraints and usage patterns of VM have radically shifted from when it was invented. Today, computer systems integrate hundreds of gigabytes to a few terabytes of memory, while tightly integrated heterogeneous computing platforms (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. As there is a clear trend towards extending the CPU's VM to all computing elements in the system for an efficient and easy to use programming model, the continuous demand for faster memory accesses calls for fast translations to terabytes of memory for any computing element in the system. Unfortunately, conventional translation mechanisms fall short of providing fast translations as contemporary memories exceed the reach of today's translation caches, such as TLBs. In this thesis, we provide fundamental insights into the reason why address translation sits on the critical path of accessing memory. We observe that the traditional fully associative flexibility to map any virtual page to any page frame precludes accessing memory before translating. We study the associativity in VM across a variety of scenarios by classifying page faults using the 3C model developed for caches. Our study demonstrates that the full associativity of VM is unnecessary, and only modest associativity is required. We conclude that capacity and compulsory misses---which are unaffected by associativity---dominate, while conflict misses rapidly disappear as the associativity of VM increases. Building on the modest associativity requirements, we propose a distributed memory management unit close to where the data resides to reduce or eliminate the TLB miss penalty.


Is social research political? Should it be political? What are the implications of the politicization of social research?

Recent years have seen a growing range of challenges to the idea that research should be governed by the principle of value neutrality. Critical, feminist, antiracist and postmodernist analyses have argued that social research is intrinsically political. In this stimulating and often controversial book, Martyn Hammersley weighs the arguments offered in support of these positions. He considers the fundamental issues that the debate raises about the nature of social research, its political dimensions and its contemporary relevance. At the same time he provides a robust defence of value neutrality as a constitutive principle of social research, and makes a reassessment of the role of research in modern societies.


The metal–organic framework copper(i) tricyanomethanide, Cu(tcm), undergoes a ferroelastic transition on cooling below Tf = 240 K. Thermal expansion measurements reveal an order-of-magnitude variation in framework flexibility across Tf. The low-temperature phase α-Cu(tcm) exhibits colossal positive and negative thermal expansion that is the strongest ever reported for a framework material. On exposure to acetonitrile, Cu(tcm) undergoes a reconstructive solid-phase transition to acetonitrilocopper(i) tricyanomethanide. This transition can be reversed by heating under vacuum. Infrared spectroscopy measurements are sensitive to the phase change, suggesting that Cu(tcm) may find application in solid-phase acetonitrile sensing.


We propose a method of generating orthoscopic elemental image array from a sparse camera array. A parallax image array obtained by a sparse camera array provides different perspectives of a real threedimensional (3D) scene, and has all the information the elemental image array needs. In-depth analysis of the generation method and the relationships between the sparse camera array and the elemental image array are presented. The experimental results demonstrate the correctness of the proposed method.


Connectivity is a multi-faceted concept. It relates to three main central pillars of early years learning. These are; the inter-personal connections between educators and children, the connections between the children themselves and the connectivity to learning that exists within each individual child. The interpersonal connections, whether they are between the children and their educator or peer to peer are important because their level of positivity leaves the child either free to learn or unable to progress. If there is a lack of positive inter-personal connectivity within a child's central relationships, they are unable to focus on anything else to any degree of productivity. Amiable and connected relationships free a child to learn unhindered. For this reason, the educator must be very connected to the inner worlds of all the children in their group. They must be mindful, aware, reflective and caring, creating an environment where the children feel loved and valued. This is not simply good practice from a perspective of care, although that too is important, it is also of vital importance from an education perspective. Freedom from feelings of unconnectedness and anxiety about the implications and ramifications of a negative interpersonal relationship leaves a child uninhibited to engage productively in their own learning journey. Equally important is the child's inner connectivity to their learning journey. This too requires both an informed and mindful pedagogical approach as well as national educational policies that are knowledgeable and supportive of the way young children learn. Young children learn in a connected and integrated way. Their main vehicle for learning is play. Rich play experiences should incorporate the full sensory gauntlet. Sensory learning is cellular learning. In the early years, sensory integrated learning creates a powerful vehicle for connected learning experiences that have a formidable impact on foundational learning for important educational skills such as numeracy and literacy. Pedagogies and policies which seek to deliver universal educational goals such as numeracy and literacy skills to children under age six without due consideration of the principle of connectivity within the child's inner learning journey will ultimately impede and potentially damage the child's ability to reach those very


The present economic realities, the effects of globalization, the thirst for innovation and the public's demand for improved services have led many developing states to review their approaches to service delivery. Most public service managers and professionals spend most of their time dealing with the day-to-day pressures of delivering services, operating and reporting to senior managers, legislators and agencies. They have little or no time to think about innovation, which would ease the pressures and burdens of service delivery. The intention of this paper is to point out the fact that capacity building is the bedrock of new public management development. This paper proposes that innovation management could be used as a form of organizational learning capability in challenging the maze of diplomacy and negotiation with experienced multinational extractive industries for the benefit of developing states. This could be achieved through excellent public investments and nurturing capability, from which they execute effective innovation processes, leading to new service innovations and processes, and superior service performance results. To achieve this objective, extensive literature on innovation management and organizational learning was consulted and the need for future research. In trying to unpack the discussion in the paper, the New Public Management Theory (NPMT), which is a pro-private sectors human resources management is proposed, though other available theoretical positions are explored taking into consideration the lapses entrenched in NPMT.


Title of dissertation: Understanding State Goal Orientation: Leadership and Work-group Climate as Key Antecedents Lisa Christine Dragoni Dissertation directed by: Associate Professor Cynthia Kay Stevens Associate Professor Paul E. Tesluk Department of Management and Organizations This research attends to a broad range of practically significant employee achievement goals and provides insight into how to enhance individual-level performance by examining the antecedents to individual-level state goal orientation in organizational work groups. State goal orientation is defined here as a temporary achievement goal, and it is theorized that leadership and work group climate processes parallel each dimension of state goal orientation to cue and ultimately induce the corresponding achievement goal among individual work group members. The leader's achievement priority is argued to drive the formation of work group climate consistent with this priority. The resulting work group climate signals and compels group members to adopt the ascribed form of state goal orientation. The quality of the leader-member exchange (LMX) relationship is viewed as a means to internalize cues from the work group climate in the emergence of state goal orientation. Results from experimental and field studies provide evidence that (1) leadership and climate perceptions are related to their parallel form of state goal orientation, (2) the relation between individual perceptions of a climate for learning and state learning goal orientation is stronger when group members enjoy higher quality exchange relationships with their leader, and (3) state goal orientation may be validly and reliably assessed using the measure created especially for this research.


Urothelial carcinoma (UC) is a common and frequently lethal cancer. Despite the presence of genomic alterations creating dependency on particular signaling pathways, the use of targeted therapies in advanced and metastatic UC has been limited. We performed an integrated analysis of whole-exome and RNA sequencing of primary and metastatic tumors in a patient with platinum-resistant UC. We found a strikingly high ERBB2 mRNA expression and enrichment of downstream oncogenic ERBB2 signaling in this patient's tumors compared with tumors from an unselected group of patients with UC (N=17). This patient had an exceptional sustained response to trastuzumab. Our findings show that oncogenic addiction to ERBB2 signaling potentially predicts response to ERBB2-directed therapy of UC.


In March 2000 in Lisbon, EU heads of state and government set the strategic goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. These goals were confirmed at the Barcelona European Council, which added that investment in European R&D should be increased to 3% of GDP by 2010. This Working Document argues that the weakness of R&D and the slow accumulation of knowledge in the EU is probably a major reason why Europe has failed to catch up with the US productivity performance during recent decades. But the emphasis of the Barcelona Council on the spending target for R&D could be misplaced as the question is not so much one of increasing the level but rather of enhancing the efficiency of R&D in Europe. Thus it is important to understand how countries compare in their abilities to encourage greater levels of knowledge, and asks why the countries vary in their abilities to turn R&D into innovative and commercial products through the creation of new, successful companies (and consequently more employment). After an examination of various potential constraints on innovative entrepreneurship, efforts towards the enforcement of competition policy, the introduction of a European patent, adaptations of the tax systems in favour of entrepreneurship, a reduction of red tape, the adaptation of bankruptcy rules and the easing of finance for new ventures are all welcome measures. Nevertheless, actively subsidising investment by venture capitalists may not necessarily deliver the desired results. Consequently, policy measures aimed at enhancing the efficiency and productivity of R&D in Europe should focus on the level of knowledge of workers and the capacity of entrepreneurs to translate scientific excellence into viable technological innovation.


Ecological patterns and processes are often scale-dependent. Understanding organisms' perceptions of and responses to landscape heterogeneity and connectivity is essential for effective conservation and management. We used multiple regression models with backward elimination to test relationships between juvenile fish density and diversity, quantified visually by snorkelers, and site- (100s m) and landscape-scale (1 km) habitat characteristics of mangroves in the Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge (GWHNWR) in the lower Florida Keys, USA. We compared site and land- scape model performance using Akaike's information criterion (AIC) and adjusted R 2 values. Our results demonstrate the following: (1) juvenile fish density in mangrove backreef habitats correlated with landscape characteristics; (2) relationships between fish density and site or landscape character- istics differed greatly among species; and (3) juvenile fish diversity was not strongly correlated to either site or landscape characteristics. We therefore advise caution when (1) selecting fish species and sites for experiments to test nursery habitat hypotheses given the scale- and species-specific relation- ships between fish and mangrove habitats observed in the present study, and (2) implementing con- servation strategies based upon habitat surrogates or quotas (e.g. protect 20% of mangrove habitat to conserve fish species) because landscape context might strongly, and uniquely, influence individual fish species' juvenile density. In light of our results, we argue in support of landscape analyses and individual-based modeling as useful tools to prioritize conservation of backreef nursery habitats.


In this paper, a novel localization algorithm robust to the unmodeled systematic odometry errors is proposed for low-cost non-holonomic mobile robots. It is well known that the most pose estimators using odometry measurements cannot avoid the performance degradation due to the dead-reckoning of systematic odometry errors. As a remedy for this problem, we try to reflect the wheelbase error in the robot motion model as a parametric uncertainty. Applying the Krein space estimation theory for the discrete¬time uncertain nonlinear motion model results in the extended robust Kalman filter. This idea comes from the fact that systematic odometry errors might be regarded as the parametric uncertainties satisfying the sum quadratic constrains (SQCs). The advantage of the proposed methodology is that it has the same recursive structure as the conventional extended Kalman filter, which makes our scheme suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, it guarantees the satisfactory localization performance even in the presence of wheelbase uncertainty which is hard to model or estimate but often arises from real driving environments. The computer simulations will be given to demonstrate the robustness of the suggested localization algorithm.


It is assumed that a preliminary design of an optical system has been completed and the characteristic rays traced through it to determine the aberrations which afflict it. The present article then starts with these data and offers a set of reduction formulae. These formulae are applied, surface by surface, from the image space forward until any particular parameter is reached. This is done for every parameter in the system. These results are finally substituted in differentiated aberration formulae to give a coefficient which, when multiplied by the change in the parameter, gives the change in the aberration in the final image space. When these co-efficients are calculated for all parameters and all aberrations and recorded in a table, say, with the aberrations across the top and the parameters down the side, the designer has a complete picture of the performance of that optical system. The table then enables him to quickly adjust all parameters so as to obtain the best results possible from the set-up as given.


In this paper SIP Info Service (SIPIS) is presented. The main purpose of this system is to deliver prerecorded audio data (traffic news, weather reports, etc.) over the Internet to the receiver using RTP (Real-time Transfer Protocol) with the UDP/IP (User Datagram Protocol/Internet Protocol) as its transport protocol. For signaling purposes SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SDP (Session Description Protocol) are used. The system can be called by any SIP user agent. The main stress in the development of this system was on SIP and SDP. SIPIS consists of UDP server, SIP and SDP parser and user agent for call control. UDP server and client are used for transmission of UDP packets carrying SIP and SDP messages. Parsers dismember corresponding messages and SIPIS user agent's job is to receive requests for audio information and then play it to the calling user.


GPS navigators are now present in most vehicles and smartphones. The usual goal of these navigators is to take the user in less time or distance to a destination. However, the global use of navigators in a given city could lead to traffic jams as they have a highly biased preference for some streets. From a general point of view, spreading the traffic throughout the city could be a way of preventing jams and making a better use of public resources. We propose a way of calculating alternative routes to be assigned by these devices in order to foster a better use of the streets. Our experimentation involves maps from OpenStreetMap, real road traffic, and the microsimulator SUMO. We contribute to reducing travel times, greenhouse gas emissions, and fuel consumption. To analyze the sociological aspect of any innovation, we analyze the penetration (acceptance) rate which shows that our proposal is competitive even when just 10% of the drivers are using it.


Using a novel mAb specific for mouse Ly49B, we report here that Ly49B, the last remaining member of the C57 Ly49 family to be characterized, is expressed at low levels on ∼1.5% of spleen cells, none which are NK cells or T cells but which instead belong to several distinct subpopulations of myeloid cells defined by expression of CD11b and different levels of Gr1. Much larger proportions of bone marrow and peritoneal cells expressed Ly49B, all being CD11b+ and comprising multiple subpopulations defined by light scatter, F4/80, and Gr1 expression. Costaining for Ly49Q, also expressed on myeloid cells, revealed that Ly49B and Ly49Q were most strongly expressed on nonoverlapping subpopulations, Ly49Qhigh cells being mostly B220+CD4+ and/or CD8+, Ly49B+ cells lacking these markers. Myeloid populations that developed from bone marrow progenitors in vitro frequently coexpressed both Ly49B and Ly49Q, and Ly49B expression could be up-regulated by LPS, α-IFN, and γ-IFN, often independently of Ly49Q. PCR analysis revealed that cultured NK cells and T cells contained Ly49B transcripts, and Ly49B expression could be detected on NK cells cultured in IL-12 plus IL-18, and on an immature NK cell line. Immunohistochemical studies showed that Ly49B expression in tissues overlapped with but was distinct from that of all other myeloid molecules examined, being particularly prominent in the lamina propria and dome of Peyer's patches, implicating an important role of Ly49B in gut immunobiology. In transfected cells, Ly49B was found to associate with SHP-1, SHP-2, and SHIP in a manner strongly regulated by intracellular phosphorylation events.


This thesis examines the planning of craft and technician
education in Hong Kong, from the late 1950s, when the Technical College
moved to Kowloon, to 1982, when the Department of Technical Education
and Industrial Training and the Vocational Training Council were
established. The study includes a review of social and industrial
developments, and how they .have affected technical education, as well
as how planning has been undertaken as a joint exercise involving the
Government, educational establishments and industry.
The two major approaches to manpower planning are then
examined, namely the first system depending largely on forecasting, and
the second employing flexible education and training methods combined
with the substitution of labour, and reasons are given why a suitable
combination of the two methods is usually selected. In addition, international
developments and the methodology and techniques of manpower
planning are discussed, as well as whether it can be used to stimulate
economic growth. This leads to an examination of the manpower planning
methods that have been employed in Hong Kong, and hew these have been
"translated" into. a supply of technically educated personnel for
industry, and how more thought has been given to social needs and
students' aspirations in recent years.
This thesis also examines the planning and problems of
growth and change in technical education, with respect to accommodation
and equipment, courses and curricula, and staffing. The study then
demonstrates how Hong Kong has become wealthier during the period under
 review, and how much money has been allocated to education. An analysis
is then made of how this was spent, in the case of craft and technician
courses, in order to compare how costs varied from institution to
institution, and from discipline to discipline. The penultimate chapter
then derives various conclusions from the foregoing study and the
"postscript" examines briefly the developments from 1983 to 1985.


In the weeks following September 11, US "reality TV" shows, from Survivor to Temptation Island, took a dive in the ratings. This was hardly surprising when 24-hour cable news stations and major networks were broadcasting uninterrupted coverage of the most devastating attack on the US mainland in history. Stage-managed reality gave way to the real thing. But the technological revolution, which enabled the world to watch a plane plunge into the World Trade Center live on television and has since brought Afghan tribal commanders directly into US living rooms, is causing fundamental changes in the relationship between governments and the media. Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to control the flow of news and to spin it in their favor. At the same time, the pressures of the never-ending news cycle and the demand for instant analysis are placing core journalistic values of objectivity and accuracy at risk. The 1991 Gulf War is often considered the first conflict to be played out live on cable television, and live coverage of the first strikes against Baghdad put CNN on the media map. But 10 years later, the attacks of September 11 and the US-led war against Al Qaeda have cast issues of government action and media response into the spotlight like never before. Both governments and the media are struggling to come to terms with the new world and the way news now affects public perceptions and public policy. From Pigeons to Satellite Phones It has been more than 150 years since Baron Julius von Reuter started using carrier pigeons to deliver news stories and stock prices from Brussels to Aachen in Europe. Within a year, technological advances and the introduction of the telegraph were already transforming his fledgling news business. The story today is no different. The media world is again being turned upside down by new technologies, including faster and more efficient means of gathering and transmitting news across traditional geographical barriers via the Internet. The pace of change in the last two decades has been nothing short of staggering. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the news business was just making the transition from typewriters to primitive electronic terminals. While computer terminals had been finding their way into US newsrooms for several years, London's Fleet Street, the traditional heart of the British newspaper industry, was in turmoil as unions objected to the introduction of new technology that could potentially cause job losses. Violent street clashes escalated into pitched battles with police as newspaper owners sought to revolutionize production and cut costs. The first laptop computer for correspondents in the field was a suitcase that felt as though it were stuffed with bricks. The screen was the size of that on a two-inch wide GameBoy and transmission speed was slow and unreliable. It was dubbed the "portabubble," but few correspondents who used it would call it portable. It could take up to an hour to transmit one black and white photograph, and even that was after the film had been developed and a print was made and strapped to a drum transmitter. By the time of the Gulf War the first true laptops had emerged, but some correspondents were still wrestling with acoustic couplers, trying to wedge foreign telephones into two usually inflexible cups to transmit a signal and often failing to make a connection. Somehow over the next 10 years everything fell into place. Today, the laptop is hooked up to a satellite phone. Images from digital cameras are edited on a laptop and transmitted via the Internet within seconds from the site of a breaking story or sporting event to the reporter's central office. Wireless technology means court reporters can now type key verdicts into a Palm Pilot and transmit them back to editorial headquarters during a hearing. Miniature video cameras have transformed television news gathering, leading to the demise of big team camera crews and the opening of the news world to a generation of freelancers prepared to "go it alone" in dangerous conflict zones to secure footage. …


Associations between macrobenthic communities, measures of water column and sediment exposure, and measures of anthropogenic activities throughout the watershed were examined for the Chesapeake Bay, U.S. The condition of the macrobenthic communities was indicated by a multimetric benthic index of biotic integrity (B-IBI) that compares deviation of community metrics from values at reference sites assumed to be minimally altered by anthropogenic sources of stress. Correlation analysis was used to examine associations between sites with poor benthic condition and measures of pollution exposure in the water column and sediment. Low dissolved oxygen events were spatially extensive and strongly correlated with benthic community condition, explaining 42% of the variation in the B-IBI. Sediment contamination was spatially limited to a few specific locations including Baltimore Harbor and the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River and explained about 10% of the variation in the B-IBI. After removing the effects of low dissolved oxygen events, the residual variation in benthic community condition was weakly correlated with surrogates for eutrophication—water column concentrations of total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and chlorophylla. Associations between benthic conditions and anthropogenic inputs and activities in the watershed were also studied by correlation analysis. Benthic condition was negatively correlated with measures of urbanization (i.e., population density, point source loadings, and total nitrogen loadings) and positively correlated with watershed forestation. Significant correlations were observed with population density and nitrogen loading below the fall line, but not above it, suggesting that near-field activities have a greater effect on benthic condition than activities in the upper watershed. At the tributary level, the frequency of low dissolved oxygen events and levels of sediment contaminants were positively correlated with population density and percent of urban land use. Sediment contaminants were also positively correlated with point source nutrient loadings. Water column total nitrogen concentrations were positively correlated with nonpoint nutrient loadings and agricultural land use while total phosphorus concentrations were not correlated with land use or nutrient loadings. Chlorophylla concentrations were positively correlated with nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in the water column and with agricultural land use but were not correlated with nutrient loads.


Objective To validate the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended algorithms for high-sensitivity troponin (hsTn) assays in adults presenting with chest pain. Methods International post hoc analysis of three prospective, observational studies from tertiary hospital emergency departments. The primary endpoint was cardiac death or acute myocardial infarction (AMI) within 24 hours of presentation, and the secondary endpoint was major adverse cardiac events (MACE) at 30 days. Results 15% of patients were diagnosed with non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (MI) on admission. The hsTnI algorithm classified 2506/3128 (80.1%) of patients as 'ruled out' with 50 (2.0%) missed MI. 943/3128 (30.1%) of patients had a troponin I level below the limit of detection on admission with 2 (0.2%) missed MI. For the hsTnT algorithm, 1794/3374 (53.1%) of patients were 'ruled out' with 7 (0.4%) missed MI. 490/3374 (14.5%) of patients had a troponin T below the limit of blank on admission with no MI. MACE at 30 days occurred in 10.7% and 8.5% of patients 'ruled out' defined by the hsTnI and hsTnT algorithms, respectively. Conclusions The NICE algorithms could identify patients with low probability of AMI within 2 hours; however, neither strategy performed as predicted by the NICE diagnostic guidance model. Additionally, the rate of MACE at 30 days was sufficiently high that the algorithms should only be used as one component of a more extensive model of risk stratification. Trial registration number ACTRN12611001069943, NCT00470587; post-results.


Program slicing is a technique to extract the part of a program (the slice) that influences or is influenced by a set of variables at a given point (the slicing criterion). Computing minimal slices is undecidable in the general case, and obtaining the minimal slice of a given program is normally computationally prohibitive even for very small programs. Therefore, no matter what program slicer we use, in general, we cannot be sure that our slices are minimal. This is probably the fundamental reason why no benchmark collection of minimal program slices exists. In this work, we present a method to automatically produce quasi-minimal slices. Using our method, we have produced a suite of quasi-minimal slices for Erlang that we have later manually proved they are minimal. We explain the process of constructing the suite, the methodology and tools that were used, and the results obtained. The suite comes with a collection of Erlang benchmarks together with different slicing criteria and the associated minimal slices.


The principle objective of the work presented in this thesis is to investigate and demonstrate the possibility of utilising the inherent properties of long-period gratings (LPGs) to detect the existence and concentration of a given gas in the region immediately surrounding the fibre cladding. The principle and the viability of using LPGs for sensor applications is supported by the preliminary results reported here. However, the sensitivity of the sensor requires further improvement before it can in any way challenge the existing sensors in this field. The operational characteristics and limitations of existing optical sensors are reviewed and the advantages of a LPG based optical sensor highlighted. Thorough explanations of the theory and principles of light propagation, mode formation, and mode coupling in optical fibres are presented. Computer simulations predicting the optical effects due to changes in ambient indices from theoretical conditions are successfully derived, confirming the results obtained by experimental investigation. Various established coating methods are investigated and utilised in the application of optically sensitive compounds adsorbed onto the cladding with different levels of success, the poly-electrolyte self assembly (PESA) and evaporation methods proving most suitable. A novel method of monitoring the build up of PESA layers in-situ using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) methods is introduced. The coating chemicals used in this investigation showed some optical sensitivity at the optimum wavelengths used in optical fibres to the various gases being monitored, in most cases causing a detectable change in the optical characteristics of the modes in the LPG.This study has shown the possibility of using a suitably prepared LPG as a gas sensor. The LPG is coated with a chemical whose refractive index is changed by absorption of a given gas and thus the change in the coupling wavelengths being caused by the existence of the gas. Maximum shifts in coupling wavelength of +/-1.5 nm for relatively high gas concentrations are observed. The possibility of using a coating material which absorbs water, or surrounding the LPG with a suitable liquid is also demonstrated, the refractive index of the coating or liquid and thus the coupling wavelength shift being affected by the reaction of the gas. The possibility of using a single temperature immune LPG for ambient index sensing by observing different coupling wavelengths in the same grating is also reported.


In conjunction with choosing the treatment process for the new wastewater treatment plant of Espoo, Finland (400,000 P.E.), Denitrification-Nitrification (DN) and Step-Feed activated sludge processes were compared in terms of required basin volume and consumption of aeration air and methanol. The comparison was made using dynamic process simulation. The advantages of the step-feed process reported in literature – smaller volume required to treat an equal load or ability to treat a higher load in an equal volume – were questioned. In terms of consumables, the two processes were found practically equal. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first comparison of these process configurations with dynamic simulation.


Why do some men father children outside of marriage but not provide support? Why are single women willing to have children outside of marriage when they receive little or no support from unmarried fathers? To answer these questions, we develop and estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage, employment, fertility, and child support. We consider the extent to which two explanations account for the prevalence of 'deadbeat dads' and non-marital childbearing: low wages and a shortage of single men relative to single women. Even if women prefer to have children within marriage, when faced with a shortage of high wage spouses it may be optimal to have children with low wage men outside of marriage. In response, some men have incentives to have children and not support them. The model is estimated by efficient method of moments using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. We conduct several counterfactual experiments including equating black and white population supplies and eliminating the racial gap in wages to explore the implications of the model. We also analyze a counterfactual policy in which child support enforcement is perfect.


AFM-based single molecule force spectroscopy has developed into a standard method to gain information about molecular elasticities, internal structural transitions and binding forces and kinetics of single (bio-)+molecules. The sensitivity and the resolution of these force spectroscopy measurements are inherently connected to the properties of the cantilevers used in these experiments. The spring constant of the cantilever determines its sensitivity, due to Hooke's law. The coefficient of viscous damping and the resonance frequency of the cantilever determine the resolution of the measurement. In case of the coefficient of viscous damping this is due to the fact, that the Nyquist theorem is valid for the thermal white noise of the cantilever. In case of high resonance frequencies, bandpassfiltering between 1/f-noise and the resonance peak reduces noise without loss of information about the force-distance-dependency of the molecule. Small cantilevers (length: < 30mm, width: < 10 mm, thickness: < 200 nm) show all necessary properties for force spectroscopy: small spring constants, low viscous damping and high resonance frequencies. We present an AFM that is capable of using small cantilevers for force spectroscopy experiments of single biomolecules and our current results.


Background Data on the impact of oral health on sporting performance is missing and the epidemiology of oral diseases in the elite athlete population is poorly understood. Objective To systematically review available evidence to determine the epidemiology of oral diseases in the elite athlete population and the impact of oral health on sporting performance. Design Systematic review of the available literature. We searched Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, EBSCO SPORTDiscus and OpenGrey up to February 2013. Data extraction was carried out with a specially developed form. Data extracted related to the type of study (eg case control, cohort study etc.), methodological quality, sports included and oral health (including its impact on performance). Methodological quality was assessed using a modification of the Newcastle–Ottawa scale and CASP critical appraisal checklist. Setting Elite division. Participants Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or observational studies with some measure of oral health used as an outcome. Studies assessing the impact of interventions on oral health were not included. Main outcome measurements Oral health, methodological quality of included studies. Results After screening 9208 citations, 38 studies remained. Most studies investigated trauma (n=31 papers, 82% of all included studies) with the remainder looking at oral health and other outcomes. Studies were subject to multiple methodological biases and use of a wide range of outcomes limited comparison between studies. In general head/face/dental trauma made up a very small proportion of injuries received by athletes during specific tournaments or over a fixed timespan with the exception of wrestling, ice hockey and football. Oral health as expressed by caries was poor in athletes. No studies to date had been designed to assess impact. Conclusions There is a lack of data on the oral health of elite athletes and its impact on performance.


BACKGROUND
BRCA germline mutations are being targeted for development of PARP inhibitors. BRCA genes collaborate with several others in the Fanconi Anemia (FA) pathway. We screened cancer patients' tumors for FA functional defects then aimed to establish the safety/feasibility of administering PARP inhibitors as monotherapy and combined with a DNA-breaking agent.

METHODS
Patients underwent FA functional screening for the presence (or lack) of tumor FancD2 nuclear foci formation on their archival tumor material, utilizing a newly developed method (Fanconi Anemia triple-stain immunofluorescence [FATSI]), performed in a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments-certified laboratory. FATSI-negative patients were selected for enrollment in a two-arm dose escalation trial of veliparib, or veliparib/mitomycin-C (MMC).

RESULTS
One hundred eighty-five of 643 (28.7%) screened patients were FATSI-negative. Sixty-one received veliparib or veliparib/MMC through 14 dose levels. Moderate/severe toxicities included fatigue (DLT at veliparib 400mg BID), diarrhea, and thrombocytopenia. Recommended doses are 300mg BID veliparib and veliparib 200mg BID for 21 days following 10mg/m(2) MMC every 28 days. Six antitumor responses occurred, five in the combination arm (3 breast, 1 ovarian, 1 endometrial [uterine], and 1 non-small cell lung cancer). Two patients have received 36 and 60 cycles to date. BRCA germline analysis among 51 patients revealed five deleterious mutations while a targeted FA sequencing gene panel showed missense/nonsense mutations in 29 of 49 FATSI-negative tumor specimens.

CONCLUSIONS
FATSI screening showed that a substantial number of patients' tumors have FA functional deficiency, which led to germline alterations in several patients' tumors. Veliparib alone or with MMC was safely administered to these patients and produced clinical benefit in some. However, a better understanding of resistance mechanisms in this setting is needed.


Studies have shown that same-sex marriage (SSM) ballot measures affected voter turnout and primed voters in a manner that aided the Republican Party in 2004. However, if attitude strength plays a role in these spillover effects, then recent increases in the intensity of support for SSM on the left may have eroded—or even reversed—the pro-Republican electoral boost of these measures. Using individual- and county-level data, I demonstrate that more recent votes on SSM have mobilized more pro-Obama SSM supporters than pro-Republican social conservatives. These findings are important for understanding how ballot measures may potentially affect candidate elections.


Universities face increasing demands to improve their visibility, public outreach, and online presence. There is a broad consensus that scientific reputation significantly increases the attention universities receive. However, in most cases estimates of scientific reputation are based on composite or weighted indicators and absolute positions in university rankings. In this study, we adopt a more granular approach to assessment of universities' scientific performance using a multidimensional set of indicators from the Leiden Ranking and testing their individual effects on university Wikipedia page views. We distinguish between international and local attention and find a positive association between research performance and Wikipedia attention which holds for regions and linguistic areas. Additional analysis shows that productivity, scientific impact, and international collaboration have a curvilinear effect on universities' Wikipedia attention. This finding suggests that there may be other factors than scientific reputation driving the general public's interest in universities. Our study adds to a growing stream of work which views altmetrics as tools to deepen science-society interactions rather than direct measures of impact and recognition of scientific outputs.


Author(s): Faust, Ralph | Abstract: The California Coastal Commission is a state agency whose mission is to preserve and manage the state's coast. Its decisions regarding planning and development implement core state policies and determine individual legal rights. Both the perception and the reality of a fair, just, and accessible process is crucial to maintaining public confidence in the Commission's decision-making.This Pritzker Brief analyzes the processes and procedures that the Commission utilizes in making certain types of important decisions, called "quasi-judicial decisions." The Commission makes these types of decisions often, for example in reviewing coastal development permit applications, certifying local coastal programs, and reviewing the activities of the federal government to assess whether those activities are consistent with California law. The article identifies opportunities and recommends strategies to improve the transparency and fairness of the Commission's processes and procedures.


We analyze the role of toeholds (non-controlling but significant equity stakes) as a source of information for a bidder. A toehold provides an opportunity to interact with the target and its management and in the process get a better sense of the possible synergies from a merger or takeover. A bidder considering taking over a target will take a toehold beforehand if the informational benefits are large. Our model makes the following predictions: (i) a toehold is more beneficial if a target is opaque, i.e., if it is generally harder to value potential synergies with the target; (ii) a toehold is incrementally more beneficial if a bidder initially finds it harder than others to assess the value of potential synergies; (iii) that incremental benefit is less important, however, if the target is opaque; and (iv) the benefits from having a toehold are smaller if the number of potential rival bidders is higher. We test these predictions using a large sample of majority acquisitions of private and public companies for which we have information regarding whether the acquirer had a toehold in the target company prior to the majority acquisition. We find evidence consistent with our hypotheses, and thus with the idea that potential acquirers of a target use toeholds to improve their information about possible synergies with the target.


This research sought to understand: 1) The behavior of Bureaucracy in giving publicservice and 2) Motive of their behavior. The qualitative approach was employed in this researchwith the subjects of bureaucracy staff and service users. The interactive analysis model was used togather data needed by employing the procedure of data reduction, data presentation and conclu-sion drawing, and then the data was tested to know their reliability by using level of credibility,transferability, dependability and conformability. This research show that the behavior of bureau-cracy in giving public service show discriminative behavior, they have classified society into theruling group, the haves, and the poor and give them discriminative service such as giving specialservice to the ruling group, giving specific service to the haves and giving excellent service to allgroups of society, especially in arranging for trivial matters. Meanwhile behind of their behaviorthey have motive to save their position, to get more money, to get pride and sacrifice.


A literature review of work carried out on batch and continuous chromatographic biochemical reactor-separators has been made. The major part of this work has involved the development of a batch chromatographic reactor-separator for the production of dextran and fructose by the enzymatic action of the enzyme dextransucrase on sucrose. In this reactor, simultaneous reaction and separation occurs thus reducing downstream processing and isolation of products as compared to the existing industrial process. The chromatographic reactor consisted of a glass column packed with a stationary phase consisting of cross linked polysytrene resin in the calcium form. The mobile phase consisted of diluted dextransucrase in deionised water. Initial experiments were carried out on a reactor separtor which had an internal diameter of 0.97cm and length of 1.5m. To study the effect of scale up the reactor diameter was doubled to 1.94cm and length increased to 1.75m. The results have shown that the chromatographic reactor uses more enzyme than a conventional batch reactor for a given conversion of sucrose and that an increase in void volume results in higher conversions of sucrose. A comparison of the molecular weight distribution of dextran produced by the chromatographic reactor was made with that from a conventional batch reactor. The results have shown that the chromatographic reactor produces 30% more dextran of molecular weight greater than 150,000 daltons at 20% w/v sucrose concentration than conventional reactors. This is because some of the fructose molecules are prevented as acting as acceptors in the chromatographic reactor due to their removal from the reaction zone. In the conventional reactor this is not possible and therefore a greater proportion of low molecular weight dextran is produced which does not have much clinical use. A theoretical model was developed to describe the behaviour of the reactor separator and this model was simulated using a computer. The simulation predictions showed good agreement with experimental results at high eluent flowrates and low conversions.


SUMMARY 1. The inhibitory (antioxidant) effect of serum on the autoxidation of tissue polyunsaturated fatty acids has been investigated. 2. Dialysis studies, DEAE-cellulose chromatography, gel filtration, immunoelectrophoresis and immunodiffusion experiments showed that this effect is the function of two serum protein fractions. 3. One fraction was identified as transferrin. The second fraction includes caeruloplasmin. 4. Studies with radioactively labelled a-tocopherol showed that serum tocopherol in the physiological concentration range contributes only marginally to the total antioxidant activity of serum. 5. These findings are discussed in the wider context of biological antioxidant protection.


The sensing modalities available in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) network are usually fixed before deployment, when the operator selects a suitable IoT platform. Retrofitting a deployment with additional sensors can be cumbersome, because it requires either modifying the deployed hardware or adding new devices that then have to be maintained. In this paper, we present our vision and work towards passive sensor tags: battery-free devices that allow to augment existing IoT deployments with additional sensing capabilities without the need to modify the existing deployment. Our passive sensor tags use backscatter transmissions to communicate with the deployed network. Crucially, they do this in a way that is compatible with the deployed network's radio protocol, and without the need for additional infrastructure. We present an FPGA-based prototype of a passive sensor tag that can communicate with unmodified 802.15.4 IoT devices. Our initial experiments with the prototype support the feasibility of our approach. We also lay out the next steps towards fully realizing the vision of passive sensor tags.


This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist, Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past. Combining elements of Rocket Boys and Elegant Universe, Time Traveler follows Mallett's discovery of Einstein's work on space-time, his study of Godel's work on a solution of Einstein's equation that might allow for time travel, and his own research in theoretical physics spanning thirty years that culminated in his recent discovery of the effects of circulating laser light and its application to time travel. The foundation for Mallett's historic time-travel work is Einstein's theory of general relativity, a sound platform for any physicist. Through his years of reading and studying Einstein, Mallett became a buff well before he had any notion of the importance of the grand old relativist's theories to his own career. One interesting subtext to the story is Mallett's identification with, and keen interest in, Einstein. Mallett provides easy-to-understand explanations of the famous physicist's seminal work.


Abstract Two types of pyrite framboids (PF, probably sulphate-reducing bacteria) have been found within the Zoophycos spreiten, hosted in the Guadalupian (Middle Permian) glaciomarine greywacke of the Westley Park Sandstone Member within the Broughton Formation from the southern Sydney Basin of southeastern Australia. They are composed of non-sheathed (PF1) and sheathed (PF2) sub-micron balls, respectively. Chemically, the sub-micron balls consist of iron, sulphur, carbon and oxygen. Both PF1 and PF2 occur in rhythmic alternation within the thick, light-grey and thin, dark-grey minor lamellae of Zoophycos spreiten. The framboids from the minor lamellae are highly abundant and occur in an orderly arrangement of equal density and in a good state of preservation. Within Zoophycos spreiten no homogeneous filling, fecal pellets, or any sign of re-exploitation of the minor lamellae have been recognized. No similar framboids have been observed outside Zoophycos spreiten. Therefore, the framboids are interpreted as the pyritized remains of microbial colonies within Zoophycos spreiten. The trace Zoophycos would be a multifunctional garden that may have been carefully constructed by the Zoophycos maker, where different microbial colonies were orderly and carefully planted and cultured within different minor lamellae. Further, it is proposed that the Zoophycos maker had a symbiotic relationship with microbial colonies on the mutual basis of food supply and redox conditions. The fact that the overlying spreiten cut the underlying ones indicates that the Zoophycos from the study area is of an upward construction. The rhythmic alternation of both the thick, light-grey and thin, dark-grey minor lamellae within Zoophycos spreiten may be suggestive of a gardening manner of the Zoophycos maker responding to the warm and cold changes, food supply in pulses and variations of sedimentation rate for planting and culturing microbial colonies under the conditions of a glaciomarine environment at the high latitudes.


Reciprocating compressors (RC) are one of the most widely used industrial machines due to their flexibility and reliability. Commonly exposed to harsh working environments, compressors experience various faults that affect their operational performance and functionality. Unfortunately, conventional condition monitoring methods such as vibration monitoring shows inefficiency sometimes in detecting multi-faults that occur in RCs even thoigh it needs a high-cost system for monitoring equipment.

The AC motor driving the RC undertakes an oscillating torque which induces additional components in the measured current signals and changes with the presence of faults in either compressor or motor with consequent. Extensive investigations have shown that motor current signature analysis (MCSA) has the potential to be an accurate and cost-effective technique for the detection and diagnosis of common RC faults (i.e discharge valve leakage, intercooler leakage, broken rotor bars, stator winding asymmetry, and discharge valve leakage combined with stator winding asymmetry). However, a full study has not been found to consolidate this deduction. This research has adopted a model based simulation and experimental evaluation to verify and detail the use of MSCA for monitoring compressors under a wide range of load and fault conditions.

The study firstly develops an extended and comprehensive dynamic model of the compressor, which links the various effects including mechanical dynamics, electrodynamics and fluid dynamics and, thus allows the current signature variations, particularly the sideband patterns to be simulated, and studied under common faults and their combinations at different severity. The model was validated against measured current signatures. Moreover, an advanced and effective technique, modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) has been identified to be the accurate tool as it can accurately extract the effect of sidebands and suppresses inevitable noise influences.

Subsequently, a number of experiments were carried out based on a general purpose two-cylinder RC. Experimental results have shown that the seeded compressor faults caused observable changes in the motor current signature, inducing non-linear and modulation characteristics into the measured signal. The above-cited compressor faults generate different patterns and varying load on the motor, thereby inducing changes in modulation features in the current signal. Especially for the combined fault, an increase in sidebands can be observed by MSB analysis due to its high performance of noise reduction and nonlinear feature extraction.

The MSB results in primary diagnostic features; sideband peaks at the first and second orders of compressor operating frequency has the ability to differentiate RC fault cases over a wide range of operating conditions, which allowed fault diagnosis without the need for additional measurements such as pressure, speed, or temperature. The successful detection and diagnosis of common compressor and motor faults through experiments and model developments confirm the capability of MSB based MCSA method.

With the successful diagnosis of RC and motor faults, this research study is progressed to validate the capability of MSB based methods to diagnose different common compressor faults relating to compressor leakages, motor faults, and combined fault. The results show that MSB signatures allow accurate differentiation between normal condition and abnormal change induced by these seeded faults compared to conventional analysis, confirming the effeciancy of the signal processing technique proposed in this thesis.


Real estate represents a significant portion of most people's wealth, and this is especially true for many homeowners everywhere in the world. The size and scale of the real estate market make it an attractive and lucrative sector for many investors. This paper aim at presenting the main determinants of the real estate market in Romania such as demographics, interest rates of financing instruments, the economy (measured by economic indicators such as the GDP, employment data, manufacturing activity, the prices of goods), government policies/subsidies legislation that can have a sizable impact on property demand and price, real estate investment opportunities, depth and sophistication of capital markets, investor protection and legal framework, administrative burdens and regulatory limitations, and socio-cultural and political environment.


This paper explores the integration of indicators that reflect the concepts of sustainability into business cases and business case evaluation methods. It is based on the observations that sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time and that sustainable development requires change of the way we use resources, produce products, share our wealth, and so on. And as change is inescapably related to innovation and projects, sustainable development is related to projects. Business cases of projects should therefore reflect this relationship and include criteria for the assessment of sustainability aspects. Based on an identification of business case evaluation methods, and an overview of frameworks for sustainability indicators, an analysis is made of the inclusion of the indicators and principles of sustainability in business cases and business case evaluation methods. The analysis will conclude that the integration sustainability considerations into business cases of projects, is more than a set of additional criteria to be considered. Integration of sustainability considerations suggests a more holistic and elaborated perspective on business case evaluation than the Return on Investment question, that is dominating business cases and business case evaluation today.


This paper addresses the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem in DC power microgrids via a combinatorial optimization technique known as Black Hole Optimization (BHO). Such optimization method allows to solve OPF problems via algorithmic strategies trough a master-slave formulation. In the master stage, the total power generated by each Distributed Generator (DG) is determined by the BHO, while the slave strategy is entrusted with solving the resulting conventional power flow problem via a classical Gauss-Seidel (GS) numerical method. For comparison purposes, this work uses nonlinear optimization methods available in General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) as well as continuous metaheuristic optimization techniques. Two test feeders with 21 and 69 nodes were considered for validating the proposed hybrid BHO-GS optimization method, which enables to demonstrate its applicability, robustness and efficiency compared to conventional approaches. The results of all the simulations were obtained via MATLAB 2017a.


This article examines the position of drug education workers who deliver drug education in non-formal education settings to children and young people in Ireland. Employing secondary data and document analysis, the paper analyses three national drug strategies and the annual reports of 21 local and regional Drug and Alcohol Task Forces (DATFs), in order to determine the prominence of drug education workers within the statutory response to illicit drug use in Irish society. Drug education has been on the Irish Government agenda since the 1970s; however, drug education continues to remain a small field in Ireland, underfunded and without any national representative voice. This paper argues that drug education in Ireland is becoming subsumed into the formal education sector and positioned primarily within the remit of teachers of Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE). Drug education workers who provide educational programmes in non-formal education settings are unacknowledged in Ireland's most recent national drug strategy and this poses a risk to education programmes that take place in non-formal settings, and diminishes the role of youth and community services/organisations in abating illicit drug use at local and community levels.


We address the challenge in depositing ultra-thin GaAs cells (<200 nm) using a more scalable process (metal–organic chemical vapor deposition). We present results for a GaAs/GaAs double-junction solar cell with a 110-nm-thick top cell. Current, voltage, fill factor, and efficiency of this architecture are improved by replacing the zinc doping in the emitter of the top cell with carbon doping. We find that the carbon doping results in a well-defined active junction profile that agrees well with the secondary ion mass spectroscopy measurement. Additionally, we find that the carbon doping coincides with the incorporation of indium in the emitter. We postulate that the incorporation of indium relieves stress in the material, which results in a smoother morphology of the GaAs film. Finally, we show the efficiency achieved with the carbon-doping process is 19.2% for the GaAs/GaAs dual junction cell. The open circuit voltage is 1.087 V for the ultra-thin (110 nm) GaAs top cell and 2.08 V for the dual junction cell.


We believe datacenters can benefit from more focus on per-node efficiency, performance, and predictability, versus the more common focus so far on scalability to a large number of nodes. Improving per-node efficiency decreases costs and fault recovery because fewer nodes are required for the same amount of work. We believe that the use of complex, general-purpose operating systems is a key contributing factor to these inefficiencies. Traditional operating system abstractions are ill-suited for high performance and parallel applications, especially on large-scale SMP and many-core architectures. We propose four key ideas that help to overcome these limitations. These ideas are built on a philosophy of exposing as much information to applications as possible and giving them the tools necessary to take advantage of that information to run more efficiently. In short, high-performance applications need to be able to peer through layers of virtualization in the software stack to optimize their behavior. We explore abstractions based on these ideas and discuss how we build them in the context of a new operating system called Akaros.


Cultivation of extremophilic microorganisms has gained interest due to their ability to accumulate and produce high value compounds, namely metabolites, enzymes, carotenoids among others. Coccomyxa onubensis is an acid-environment microalga. Coccomyxa pigments profile is rich in carotenoids, especially lutein, of which naturally accumulates around 4 to 6 g Kg1 dry weight, that is in accordance with other lutein producing species. Furthermore, C. onubensis has the practical advantage of growing well in an extremely selective culture medium at high concentrations of heavy metals, and very low pH which preserves cultures from microbial contamination. This gives the microalga attractive potential as a producer of this photosynthetic pigment This thesis was aimed at increasing biomass productivity and carotenoid content of this lutein-rich microalga, C. onubensis. Chapter II intends to show that acid-environment microalgae can be produced at similar productivities of non-extreme microalgae, with the added advantage of their highly selective culture medium. The existence of carbon concentration mechanisms and conditions that might lead to their increased activity in C onubensis was studied as a tool to increase alga productivity. C. onubensis was grown under high and low CO2 concentrations, showing external and internal carbonic anhydrase activities. Best carbon uptake capacity and growth were showed to occur at acid pH, proving acid-tolerant behavior of C. onubensis. Incubation in air followed by shift to high carbon conditions enhanced carbon use efficiency in terms of growth rate and biomass productivity, based on the activity of both carbonic anhydrases. High concnetrations of lutein was accumulated and did not depend on inorganic carbon conditions. Consequently, chapter II showed that repeated cycles of air-incubation and high CCh-incubation of C. onubensis might become a suitable tool to perform production processes of lutein-enriched biomass. In Chapter III, the influence of Cu (II) on productivity and accumulation of value carotenoids of the microalga was studied. Copper was added in range between 0.06 and 0.4 mM, and an increase in algal viability, biomass and carotenoid productivities was obtained. A copper concentration of 0.2 mM was found to be as the most appropriate one to enhance productivity and lutein accumulation and was used in semicontinuous cultures. C onubensis was found to have great potential as lutein producer when compared to known lutein accumulating microalgae. At low light intensities, most algae produce more light-harvesting pigments to improve their photosynthetic efficiency while at high light intensities, some algae produce high concentrations of "sunscreen" pigments to protect the cell from excess light. In these terms, the aim of the work described in Chapter IV was to study the effect of low to moderate light intensity shifts on lutein accumulation of Coccomyxa cultures, doubly aimed at understanding the light'dependent role of main carotenoids in acid-tolerant microalgae and at developing strategies to induce lutein accumulation with applied purposes. Coccomyxa reached its maximum growth rates and carotenoid productivities at 400 pmol photons nv2 s1 that corresponds to maximal irradiance that reaches the surface of a flat panel reactor placed vertically under summer conditions in southern Spain. Cell density was also shown to influence short-time course evolution of carotenoids, which can be used for increasing lutein content of C. onubensis in outdoor production. According to that, the aims of the Chapter V were to evaluate the feasibility of outdoor cultivation of the acid-environment alga C. onubensis and to assess its potential as alternative source of lutein. C. onubensis was cultivated in acid culture medium under springtime outdoor conditions in a pilot tubular photobio reactor in southern Spain. The results showed that C. onubensis is able to withstand high temperature levels. Maximum daily biomass productivity was obtained at maximum irradiance of 1000 {imol photons nr2 s'1, however higher irradiances were detrimental for the culture. Intracellular lutein content increased at the end of the day, probably related to light absorption functions. This thesis gives a guideline of some of the parameters that influence both biomass productivity and carotenoid enrichment of the acid-environment microalga Coccomyxa onubensis. Therefore, the obtained results should allow to design mass production strategies of a potential large-scale cultivation of acid-environment microalgae and should allow to design lutein-rich biomass production strategies of this microalga.


In this paper, two efficient fourth-order compact finite difference algorithms have been developed to solve the one-dimensional Burgers' equation: u t +u u x =ε u xx . The methods are based on the Hopf–Cole transformation, Richardson's extrapolation, and multilevel grids. In both methods, we first transform the original nonlinear Burgers' equation into a linear heat equation: w t =ε w xx using the Hopf–Cole transformation, which is given as u=−2ε (w x /w). In the first method, the resulted heat equation is solved by the second-order accurate Crank–Nicholson algorithm while w x is approximated by central finite difference, which is also second-order accurate. Richardson's extrapolation technique is then applied in both time and space to obtain fourth-order accuracy. In the second method, to reduce the cancellation error in approximating w x , we derive the heat equation satisfied by w x , which is then solved by the Crank–Nicholson algorithm. The original Dirichlet boundary condition is transformed into the Robin boundary condition, which is also approximated using second-order central finite difference. Finally, Richardson's extrapolation and multilevel grid techniques are applied in both time and space to obtain fourth-order accuracy. To study the efficiency, accuracy and robustness, we solved two numerical examples and the results are compared with those of two other higher-order methods proposed in W. Liao [An implicit fourth-order compact finite difference scheme for one-dimensional Burgers' equation, Appl. Math. Comput. 206(2) (2008), pp. 755–764] and I.A. Hassanien, A.A. Salama, and H.A. Hosham [Fourth-order finite difference method for solving Burgers' equation, Appl. Math. Comput. 170 (2005), pp. 781–800].


An investigation of the distribution of the intensity of spectral lines in the gap length of a copper dc arc of 7A, burning both with and without nonhomogenous magnetic field, will be described in this paper. The close-electrode intensification effect of spectral lines has been observed and its variation with the time of preliminary burning and the gap length has been investigated. It has been established that close-electrode intensification appears only with the ionic lines. An increase of the intensity of some spectral lines and certain variations in their distribution have been observed when the arc is burning in a magnetic field. The temperature range has been studied in its relationship to the gap length. The temperature around the cathode region is approximately 6500 K and that around the anode region is about 6000 K. The superposition of an external magnetic field contributes to an increase of the temperature of about 400 K. Some possibilities for the application of these effects in the case of spectral analytical determinations have been suggested.


Batch Normalization (BN) has proven to be an effective algorithm for deep neural network training by normalizing the input to each neuron and reducing the internal covariate shift. The space of weight vectors in the BN layer can be naturally interpreted as a Riemannian manifold, which is invariant to linear scaling of weights. Following the intrinsic geometry of this manifold provides a new learning rule that is more efficient and easier to analyze. We also propose intuitive and effective gradient clipping and regularization methods for the proposed algorithm by utilizing the geometry of the manifold. The resulting algorithm consistently outperforms the original BN on various types of network architectures and datasets.


The hypothesis of this study was that the extent of bone regeneration could be enhanced by using scaffolds with appropriate geometry, and that such an effect could be further increased by mimicking the natural timing of appearance of bone morphogenetic proteins BMP‐2 and BMP‐7 after fracture. Bioplotted poly(ε‐caprolactone) (PCL) disks with four different fibre organizations were used to study the effect of 3D scaffold architecture on the healing of bone defects in a rat pelvis model. Moreover, one PCL construct was further modified by introducing a nanoparticulate sequential BMP‐2/BMP‐7 delivery system into this scaffold. Scaffolds and functionalized construct along with free nanocapsules were implanted using a rat iliac crest defect model. Six weeks post‐implantation, the defects were evaluated by CT scan and histology. Analysis revealed that the basic architecture, having the highest pore volume for tissue ingrowth, presented the highest bone formation as determined by the bone mineral density (BMD) within the defect (144.2 ± 7.1); about four‐fold higher than that of the empty defect (34.9 ± 10.7). It also showed the highest histological analysis scores with a high amount of bone formation within the defect, within the scaffold pores and along the outer surfaces of the scaffold. The basic scaffold carrying the BMP‐2/BMP‐7 delivery system showed significantly higher bone formation than the growth factor‐free basic scaffold at 6 weeks (BMD 206.8 ± 15.7). Histological analysis also revealed new bone formation in close to or in direct contact with the construct interface. This study indicates the importance of open and interconnecting pore geometry on the better healing of bone defects, and that this effect could be further increased by supplying growth factors, as is the case in nature. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, particularly those who have chosen to settle themselves rather than allow outside powers to intervene in their settlement choices. This article looks at how the refugee settlement process has taken place in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, and how that process has very much been influenced by the trauma of losing social position in their ancestral country and the desire to regain it and belong to a new land.


Next generation wireless networks are expected to provide high data rate and satisfy the Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints of the users. A significant component of achieving these goals is to increase the efficiency of wireless networks by either optimizing current architectures or exploring new technologies which achieve that. The latter includes revisiting technologies which were previously proposed, but due to a multitude of reasons were ignored at that time. One such technology is relaying which was initially proposed in the latter half of the 1960s and then was revived in the early 2000s. In this dissertation, we study relaying in conjunction with resource allocation to increase the efficiency of wireless networks. In this regard, we differentiate between conventional relaying and relaying with buffers. Conventional relaying is traditional relaying where the relay forwards the signal it received immediately. On the other hand, in relaying with buffers or buffer-aided relaying as it is called, the relay can store received data in its buffer and forward it later on. This gives the benefit of taking advantage of good channel conditions as the relay can only transmit when the channel conditions are good. The dissertation starts with conventional relaying and considers the problem of minimizing the total consumed power while maintaining system QoS. After upper bounding the system performance, more practical algorithms which require reduced feedback overhead are explored. Buffer-aided relaying is then considered and the joint user-and-hop scheduler is introduced which exploits multi-user diversity (MUD) and 5 multi-hop diversity (MHD) gains together in dual-hop broadcast channels. Next joint user-and-hop scheduling is extended to the shared relay channel where two sourcedestination pairs share a single relay. The benefits of buffer-aided relaying in the bidirectional relay channel utilizing network coding are then explored. Finally, a new transmission protocol for overlay cognitive radios is derived. This protocol utilizes relays with buffers, requires only causal knowledge of the primary's message at the secondary and incentivizes the primary to cooperate with the secondary and share its codebook.


Mixing of thermal effluents, being discharged from thermal power plants on coastlines and which head into surface waves was investigated by analyzing extensive field and laboratory data on plume and ocean ambient conditions. Emphasis was given on the effect of waves and surf zone currents on the modifications of plume surface area and vertical temperature profile in the near-field area.The results of this investigation showed that large opposing waves increase the plume surface area, in the vicinity of the outfall, for all cases of tide level and wave direction. Moreover, waves focused cold bottom currents on the discharge outlet and consequently the temperature of the released warm water was decreased at the surface and near the bottom. Wave-induced cross flows decreased the plume cumulative surface area which corresponded to fractional excess temperature ranging between 0.8 and 0.5 normalized values. This decrease was shown to be contingent that there is no interaction between the far-field and near-field plume waters. Gradient of wave momentum flux across surf zone was found to be necessary parameter to characterize the incident wave field.


Manually querying search engines in order to acquire a large body of related information is a tedious, error-prone process. Search engines retrieve and rank potentially relevant documents for human perusal, but do not extract facts, assess confidence, or fuse information from multiple documents. This paper present an information extraction system that aims to automate the tedious process of extracting large collections of facts from large-scale, domain-independent, and scalable manner. The paper focus on four major components: search engine interface, extractor, assessor, database, and further analyzes system architecture and reports on simulation results with large-scale information extraction systems.


Every aspect of credit management is explored in this guide. The key message is that cash flow and profits can be much improved by proper planning, motivation and control, without jeopardizing sales or alienating customers. This edition has been revised to include methods, technology, and legal framework, aimed mainly at small businesses, particularly those that have begun to sell abroad and need to find their way through international terms and expressions. Retail credit for consumers is a changing and increasing field, particularly with the increased importance of credit cards and charge cards. This book aims also to guide sellers through the Consumer Credit Act and related operating methods. Deciding on how much credit to give the customer is covered, as is overcoming excuses when collecting overdue debts, deciding payment terms for foreign customers, and how to use courts for serious debts.


Why do some people consistently inspire others to follow their lead? According to John C. Maxwell, author of 24 books and a regular speaker on the topic, its the character qualities they possess. In The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, Maxwell identifies these top traits as character, charisma, commitment, communication, competence, courage, discernment, focus, generosity, initiative, listening, passion, positive attitude, problem-solving, relationships, responsibility, security, selfdiscipline, servanthood, teachability, and vision--and then defines them in ways that readers can absorb and utilize. Each is covered in a separate chapter opening with a high-concept definition and continuing with relevant anecdotes, details on its meaning, suggestions for further reflection, and exercises for improvement. For example, in the section on vision (You can seize only what you can see), Maxwell describes how Walt Disney initially developed the theme-park concept after accompanying his daughters to a fun-filled but rather shabby amusement park. He then analyzes how Disneys resultant projects drew on his personal history while meeting others needs, and explains how readers must listen to several voices to develop successful foresight in a similar way. Finally, Maxwell suggests methods to articulate these visions and measure their implementation. --Howard Rothman


After the establishment of the independent Slovak Republic, legal and institutional ground rules were set for providing asylum to foreigners present on the territory of the Slovak Republic. The national legislation of the last twenty years was adopted in compliance with international treaties and the European Union instruments covering asylum matters. In the field of asylum policy, the Slovak Republic complies with its traditional pillars and supports new forms of protection following the new challenges faced by the international community. The currently valid Asylum Act regulates the international protection of aliens in the Slovak Republic, by defining the conditions and procedures related to granting asylum and provision of subsidiary protection and temporary shelter. The Asylum Act also covers the rights and obligations of different categories of persons, stay in asylum facilities and, partially, the integration of persons that are granted asylum. This article describes and analyses the development of the Slovak asylum legal framework and the concept of asylum policy. Furthermore, it looks at different protection statuses granted to foreigners and finally deals with the refugee migration trends in the Slovak Republic.