Shellfish and water have been implicated in the transmission of viral diseases. National surveillance data on waterborne and foodborne illnesses underestimate the public health significance of these viruses. The focus of this research was to evaluate, develop, and apply molecular techniques to detect human enteric viruses in environmental samples. The initial study evaluated a nucleic acid hybridization assay using a $\sp{32}$P labeled cDNA probe to detect poliovirus in clams. Clams (Mercenaria mercenaria) were harvested from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. Poliovirus was detected in clams from the conditionally approved area in 3 of 9 collections and in the prohibited area in 4 of 9 collections. Once in the prohibited area, the coliform standards for water and shellfish were acceptable, although poliovirus was detected by the hybridization probe assay. This study demonstrated that nucleic acid hybridization can be used to detect enteric viruses, but was limited by its degree of sensitivity. There was a need to increase the sensitivity of viral diagnostics. Two alternative molecular tools were developed. First was the T7 polymerase-based amplification system designed to indirectly amplify target RNA without reverse transcriptase. The T7 amplification system contained a viral recognition sequence, a T7 polymerase recognition sequence and a detection sequence to generate RNA transcripts. Efficacy of the amplification sequence was measured by $\sp{32}$P incorporation in the RNA transcripts. Results demonstrated that the T7 amplification sequence was functional by its ability to produce radiolabeled RNA transcripts. The second system developed was a nucleic acid isolation procedure that used magnetic bead technology. A biotinylated oligonucleotide probe was hybridized to poliovirus-RNA in solution. Streptavidin-coated magnetic beads were used to isolate the RNA-oligonucleotide hybrid. This procedure could recover viral RNA suitable for amplification by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This technique was used to recover viral RNA from concentrated groundwater samples. Results indicated that this capture system was effective in both concentrating, and purifying poliovirus RNA while removing environmental RT-PCR inhibitors. A detection sensitivity of one plaque-forming unit in 250 $\mu$l of a concentrated groundwater sample was routinely attained.


This short extract -- the first four pages of Chapter 1 in an edited volume, Controversies in Innocence Cases in America -- begins to describe the history and significance of the Innocence Movement in the American Criminal Justice System. The full chapter traces the origins of the innocence organizations that came together to form the Innocence Network and fostered the new Innocence Movement, the manner in which the Innocence Movement has created an impetus and model for criminal justice reform that shifts the focus from the Warren Court's due process revolution of the 1960s to a more substantive focus on reliability. In this framework, the chapter then considers some of the specific reforms that have emerged from the Innocence Movement's focus on substantive justice, and the challenges that lie ahead.


Along with other European farmland birds, the skylark (Alauda arvensis) has declined rapidly since the 1970's. Between 1975 and 2003, the Swedish population of skylarks declined with 64 %.

In Britain, the decline is often explained by alterations in farming practices in general and the shift from spring-sown to winter-sown cereals in particular. The dense vegetation structure of winter cereals is limiting the number of breeding attempts possible, causing the entire population to decline. In Sweden, however, the proportion of winter-sown cereals has remained stable and cannot be held responsible for the decline. Furthermore, Swedish skylarks do not perform as many breeding attempts as their British relatives and the popu-lation is therefore not as dependant on opportunities to rebreed. On the contrary, the dense structure of winter cereals could benefit Swedish skylarks since it offers slightly more pro-tection from predators. Given the high proportion of presumably predator-friendly forest edges bordering arable fields in Sweden, it is likely that any possibility to nest closer to forest edges would be beneficial for the skylark, since it would make larger areas avail¬able as habitat.

In this study it is examined how the habitat preferences of Swedish skylarks are af-fected by winter- and spring-sown cereals in fields where adjacent forest edges causes pre-dation risks to increase. Information on the distribution of singing skylarks in fields sown with winter wheat, spring-barley and oats has been analyzed using a General Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) in order to investigate how territory densities are affected by the three way-interactions between the date of the inventory, the sowing-time and the presence of forest edge adjacent to the field.

Results show that territory densities in winter-sown cereals decline significantly during the season. In spring-sown cereals, densities increase significantly in fields adjacent to forests and remain stable on fields with no forest edge. Thus, skylarks seem to prefer fields with low predation risks and/or adequate protection during the early part of the season. As winter-sown fields become too dense, skylarks move away, possibly to previously unin-habited spring-sown fields bordering forest edges. Consequently, both winter- and spring-sown cereals can be beneficial to Swedish skylarks, especially if they occur close enough to allow birds to move between them during the season. From a nature conservation point of view, sowing winter- and spring cereals next to each other would be advisable, primarily when fields border on forest edges as is common in Sweden.


Background: The purpose of this study is to report our experience using radiofrequency-assisted liposuction (RFAL) for neck and face contouring. This article details the operative technique, selection, complications, third-party surgeon appraisal, and patient satisfaction survey. Methods: From November 2009 to November 2013, 55 patients who underwent RFAL treatment were enrolled in the study. Postoperative patient satisfaction surveys were conducted, and 2 independent plastic surgeons evaluated contour and skin quality with randomized preoperative and postoperative photographs at 6 months postoperatively. The different parameters recorded involved age, sex, weight, body mass index, operative time, amount of fat aspirated and energy delivered, complications, and aesthetic outcome in 1 and 4 weeks and 3 and 6 months. Our longest follow-up was 4 years. Patients were asked 6 months postoperatively to grade their satisfaction as poor, no change, moderate, good, and excellent. Results: The mean age was 51 years (range, 35–61 years), and the mean amount of fat aspirated was 30 mL (range, 10–200 mL). Five out of 55 patients (9.1%) developed tissue hardness that resolved with massage. All patients were followed up for a minimum of 6 months. Eighty-five percent of patients were satisfied with their contouring result and degree of skin tightening (48/55 patients). Two independent plastic surgeons considered the improvement in contouring and degree of skin tightening good to excellent in 52 of 55 cases. Conclusions: In appropriately selected patients, RFAL neck and face contouring represent a safe procedure to achieve significant improvement of the skin laxity and fat deposits of the cervicomental zone and jowls.


Several options are available to treat moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms in menopausal women, including oestrogen-only and oestrogen-progestogen combination products, to meet the needs of both hysterectomised and non-hysterectomised women, respectively. In addition to selecting an appropriate oestrogen or oestrogen-progestogen combination, consideration should be given to the route of administration to best suit the needs of the individual patient. Delivery systems for menopausal hormone therapy include oral tablets, transdermal patches, transdermal gel and intravaginal preparations. While oral therapy remains the most commonly used route of administration in many countries, evidence suggests that oral delivery may lead to some undesirable physiological effects as a result of significant gut and hepatic first-pass metabolism of oestrogen. Advantages of the transdermal route include the ability to administer oestradiol (the exact molecular form of oestrogen secreted by the premenopausal ovary) directly to the bloodstream using a lower dose than oral oestrogen, and causing minimal stimulation of hepatic protein production. This review article compares the risks and benefits of oral versus transdermal hormone therapy for the treatment of menopausal symptoms.


Abstract One product that resulted from our study of the sequence stratigraphy of the Corpus Christi Bay region was a time stratigraphic cross section, commonly known as a "Wheeler diagram." The cross section portrays time on the y-axis (ordinate) and distance on the x-axis (abscissa). The Corpus Christi Bay area comprises a series of growth-faulted subbasins that become younger basinward. From our research, we were able to delineate the third-order (~1-3 Ma) sequences of the Frio Formation and determined that each subbasin, in large part, comprises the off-shelf portion (i.e., basin floor fan, slope fan complex and prograding wedge) of a third-order lowstand systems tract. Using available, in some cases sparse, biostratigraphic data, we were able to calibrate and correlate the sequence boundaries and maximum flooding surfaces of the local third-order sequences to global coastal onlap and global cycle charts. In a subsequent study of time equivalent sections in another part of the Gulf of Mexico Basin, we used the Frio time cross section to predict the ages of prospective Oligocene off-shelf low-stands, which had minimal paleontologic control. Using the time cross section and published fault maps in conjunction with the hypothesis that significant growth faults approximate paleo shelf edges, it was possible to estimate the location, stratigraphy, and age of intraslope subbasins containing highly prospective off-shelf lowstand deposits basinward from areas of better well and biostratigraphic control. We propose that so-called "Wheeler diagrams" in conjunction with sequence stratigraphy can be useful, predictive, exploration tools.


This paper attempts to provide a general framework to understand the broad features of Turkish political economy by focusing on key crises and their political and economic consequences. Attention is drawn to the transformative impact of the major crises in terms of both shifts in the broad thrust of economic policies and the nature of Turkish private sector development. The paper concludes by underlining the importance of democratic consolidation as a means of overcoming the cyclical nature of economic growth experienced so far, with its far-reaching and costly political and human consequences.


The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country's festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.


The idea of providing a basic income for all, paid to each individual without means tests or work requirements, is not a new one. But it is only in the past decade, with the emergence of a permanent underclass of unemployed, that politicians and academics have begun to argue seriously for minimum income as a route to stability in societies riven by the grotesque inequalities of modern capitalist economics. The central objection to basic income is simple: there is a widespread feeling that a basic income would be unfair because hard workers would be exploited by loafers. In these pages, a group of specialists describe the type of society in which unconditional income would be legitimate. In so doing they question and clarify some of the central principles of modern political philosophy. The contributors are John Baker, Brian Barry, Alan Carling, Michael Freeden, Robert Goodin, Andre Gorz, Bill Jordan, Richard Norman, Claus Offe, Guy Standing, Hillel Steiner and Philippe Van Parijs.


Despite their widespread Internet availability and use, many of the new drugs of abuse remain unfamiliar to health care providers. The herbal marijuana alternatives, like K2 or Spice, are a group of herbal blends that contain a mixture of plant matter in addition to chemical grade synthetic cannabinoids. The synthetic cathinones, commonly called "bath salts," have resulted in nationwide emergency department visits for severe agitation, sympathomimetic toxicity, and death. Kratom, a plant product derived from Mitragyna speciosa Korth, has opioid-like effects, and has been used for the treatment of chronic pain and amelioration of opioid-withdrawal symptoms. Salvia divinorum is a hallucinogen with unique pharmacology that has therapeutic potential but has been banned in many states due to concerns regarding its psychiatric effects. Methoxetamine has recently become available via the Internet and is marked as "legal ketamine." Moreover, the piperazine derivatives, a class of amphetamine-like compounds that includes BZP and TMFPP, are making a resurgence as "legal Ecstasy." These psychoactives are available via the Internet, frequently legal, and often perceived as safe by the public. Unfortunately, these drugs often have adverse effects, which range from minimal to life-threatening. Health care providers must be familiar with these important new classes of drugs. This paper discusses the background, pharmacology, clinical effects, detection, and management of synthetic cannabinoid, synthetic cathinone, methoxetamine, and piperazine exposures.


The development of technological capabilities results from an extended learning process and external policy agents can play an important role in its development. This paper outlines trends in governmental and non-governmental policy initiatives and the use of concepts such as capability and absorptive capacity, which are positioned within generic-staged models of capability maturity. This paper describes the development of a technology capability assessment/audit tool that has been designed to help locate firms within four archetypes based upon their level of maturity on nine key dimensions of the management of technology. The tool is intended to help bridge the gap between our theoretical understanding of the principles of technology management and policy practice - allowing policy makers to design mechanisms that focus resources in areas of greatest need through the appropriate selection of policy mechanisms and the targeted design of policy. The use of this tool in field experiments is described along with the implications for policy making.


Since the emergence of the formal concept of probability theory in the seventeenth century, uncertainty has been perceived solely in terms of probability theory. However, this apparently unique link between uncertainty and probability theory has come under investigation a few decades back. Uncertainties are nowadays accepted to be of various kinds. Uncertainty in general could refer to different sense like not certainly known, questionable, problematic, vague, not definite or determined, ambiguous, liable to change, not reliable. In Indian languages, particularly in Sanskrit-based languages, there are other higher levels of uncertainties. It has been shown that several mathematical concepts such as the theory of fuzzy sets, theory of rough sets, evidence theory, possibility theory, theory of complex systems and complex network, theory of fuzzy measures and uncertainty theory can also successfully model uncertainty.


In this paper we develop the new physical-mathematical time scale kinetic approach-model applied on organic and non-organic particles motion. Concretely, here, at first, this new research approach is based on enzyme particles dynamics results. At the beginning, a time scale is defined to be an arbitrary closed subset of the real numbers R, with the standard inherited topology. Mathematical examples of time scales include real numbers R, natural numbers N, integers Z, the Cantor set (i.e. fractals), and any finite union of closed intervals of R. Calculus on time scales (TSC) was established in 1988 by Stefan Hilger. TSC, by construction, is used to describe the complex process. This method may utilized for description of physical (classical mechanics), material (crystal growth kinetics, physical chemistry kinetics—for example, kinetics of barium-titanate synthesis), (bio)chemical or similar systems and represents major challenge for contemporary scientists. In this sense, the Michaelis-Menten (MM) mechanism is the one of the best known and simplest nonlinear biochemical network which deserves appropriate attention. Generally speaking, such processes may be described of discrete time scale. Reasonably it could be assumed that such a scenario is possible for MM mechanism. In this work, discrete time MM kinetics (dtMM) with time various step h, is investigated. Instead of the first derivative by time used first backward difference h. Physical basics for new time scale approach is a new statistical thermodynamics, natural generalization of Tsallis non-extensive or similar thermodynamics. A reliable new algorithm of novel difference transformation method, namely multi-step difference transformation method (MSDETM) for solving system of nonlinear ordinary difference equations is proposed. If h tends to zero, MSDETM transformed into multi-step differential transformation method (MSDTM). In the spirit of TSC, MSDETM describes analogously MSDTM.


Navigation, Maritime and River Shipping, and Navigation, Hydrography and Naval Systems Bachelor studies from "Mircea cel Batran" Naval Academy are structured to cover the requirements of the STCW 2010 Convention related to Navigation at the Operational Level.
According to Model course 7.03, ,,Officer in charge of a navigational watch", the background knowledge of a student is to support planning and conducting of a passage, to use the radar and ARPA, AIS, ECDIS in order to maintain safety of the navigation watch, to respond to emergencies or distress signals at sea, to use IMO standard marine communication phrases, to transmit and receive information by visual signalling and to manoeuvre the ship.
Until 2010 students had to demonstrate the assimilation of such knowledge at the license exam, through the paper chart work. Since July 2011, "Mircea cel Batr?n" Naval Academy is using the top notch "Integrated simulator for driving of watercraft" in order to test the students background knowledge according to Model course 7.03.
Thus the paper chart work was replaced by the ,,Practical competences assessment at the integrated simulator for driving of watercraft". The assessment of the students is made not only by certified instructors but also automatically by the ,,Transas Evaluation and Assessment System" (TEAS) module. The license exam is divided in three parts: taking over the navigational watch, performing the navigation watch in normal traffic and navigation in special conditions.The evaluation covers all the navigation aspects and is splitted according to the simulator's capabilities.
This paper presents aspects on how to assess students in order to determine the degree of assimilation of the skills needed to execute their duties as deck officer of the watch. The ratio between the direct evaluation made by the instructors and the automatic evaluation made by the simulator's TEAS module based on the entered criteria as well the main advantages and drawbacks for these type of evaluation and their share will be presented, in order to make an objective final evaluation.
Thus the importance of modern navigation simulators in the evaluation of the practical competencies of graduated students will be pointed out in order to accomplish officer of the watch duties onboard vessels.


There are a large number of misconceptions regarding the great stock market crash of 1929 and the crash of 1987. Both crashes occurred when the general level of business was good and getting better. In 1929 there were very few hints that the great depression was two years away. In fact, in recognition of the favourable business climate, by the end of 1929 the market had recovered most of its October losses and was down only 11.9% from its highs (the major losses were to occur in 1930–1932). There were several causes of the 1929 crash. Two of the most important causes were the campaign by the Federal Government against the orgy of speculation taking place in New York City and an action by the Public Utility Commission of Massachusetts that triggered a collapse of inflated public utility stock prices. That, in turn, triggered a collapse of other stock prices.


A prerequisite to efficient behavior by a multi-robot team is the ability to accurately perceive the environment. In this paper, we present an approach to deal with sensing uncertainty at the coordination level. Specifically, robots attach information regarding features that caused the initiation of a course of action, to any coordination message for that activity. Further information regarding such features, acquired by the team, are then combined and the expected utility of the started action is re-evaluated accordingly. Experiments show that the approach allows to coordinate a large group of robots, addressing sensing uncertainty in a tractable way.


Competition among airline companies demands for a constant and careful evaluation of emerging consumer trends. The demand for on-board services was explored through a means-end study. 40 first and business class frequent flyers were interviewed in order to uncover the individual values associated with their motivations towards products and services. Results showed the significance of spiritual self-development, self-care and relational values as main drivers for multiple needs explaining preferences for health, information and communication related products within an experiential framework. Managerial implications for innovation are discussed.


As part of an NSF-funded Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) project that seeks, in part, to increase student exposure to scientific instrumentation, a gas chromatography experiment has been integrated into the second-semester general chemistry laboratory curriculum. The experiment uses affordable, commercially available equipment and materials. It also parallels the corresponding lecture topics, reinforcing the concept of intermolecular forces (and exposing the structural basis of these forces) through the drawing of Lewis structures, microscale distillation, and gas chromatography. Group presentations end the laboratory session, exposing all students to the entirety of analytical data obtained by their peers. Students respond favorably to the exercise, citing use of the gas chromatograph as interesting and the group presentations as highly beneficial to their understanding of the material.


Virtual memory (VM) is critical to the usability and programmability of hardware accelerators. Unfortunately, implementing accelerator VM efficiently is challenging because the area and power constraints make it difficult to employ the large multi-level TLBs used in general-purpose CPUs. Recent research proposals advocate a number of restrictions on virtual-to-physical address mappings in order to reduce the TLB size or increase its reach. However, such restrictions are unattractive because they forgo many of the original benefits of traditional VM, such as demand paging and copy-on-write.
We propose SPARTA, a divide and conquer approach to address translation. SPARTA splits the address translation into accelerator-side and memory-side parts. The accelerator-side translation hardware consists of a tiny TLB covering only the accelerator's cache hierarchy (if any), while the translation for main memory accesses is performed by shared memory-side TLBs. Performing the translation for memory accesses on the memory side allows SPARTA to overlap data fetch with translation, and avoids the replication of TLB entries for data shared among accelerators. To further improve the performance and efficiency of the memory-side translation, SPARTA logically partitions the memory space, delegating translation to small and efficient per-partition translation hardware. Our evaluation on index-traversal accelerators shows that SPARTA virtually eliminates translation overhead, reducing it by over 30x on average (up to 47x) and improving performance by 57%. At the same time, SPARTA requires minimal accelerator-side translation hardware, reduces the total number of TLB entries in the system, gracefully scales with memory size, and preserves all key VM functionalities.


Today it is realized by industry that automation of software development leads to increased productivity, maintainability and higher quality. Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims to replace manual software development methods by automated methods using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to express domain concepts effectively. Main actors in software industry, Microsoft and IBM have recognized the need to provide technologies and tools to allow building DSLs to support MDD. On the one hand, Microsoft is building DSL Tools integrated in Visual Studio 2005; on the other hand IBM is contributing to the development of Eclipse Modeling Frameworks (EMF/GEF/GMF), both tools aim to make development and deployment of DSLs easier. Software practitioners seek for guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools. In this thesis, the author presents the current state-of-the-art in MDD standards and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM). Furthermore, the author presents current state-of-the-tools for DSM and performs a comparison of Microsoft DSL Tools and Eclipse EMF/GEF/GMF Frameworks based on a set of evaluation criteria. For the purpose of comparison the author developed two DSL designers (one by using each DSM tool). Based on the experiences gained in development of these DSL designers, the author prepared guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools to existing development environments as well as their advantages and drawbacks.


OBJECTIVE
There is no consensus regarding whether splenic flexure mobilization (SFM) should be performed selectively or routinely for sigmoid and rectal resections. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of SFM on anastomotic leak and surgical site infection rates in sigmoid and rectal resections.

METHODS
PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and Scopus databases were searched by two independent researchers. Anastomotic leak was the primary endpoint. Inclusion criteria were clinical studies comparing SFM to non-SFM during sigmoid and rectal resections. The Mantel-Haenszel method with a random-effects model was used. The odds ratio (OR) was used for dichotomous variables, whereas the mean difference (MD) was used for continuous variables.

RESULTS
Six of 74 potentially eligible studies totaling 12,398 patients (4,356 with SFM and 8,042 without SFM) were selected for further examination. The overall bias risk was found to be high. There was no significant difference in anastomotic leak rates when SFM patients were compared to their non-SFM counterparts [OR (95%CI) = 2.00 (0.95, 4.18); p=0.07]. SFM patients had a longer operating time [MD (95%CI) = 31.62 (24.51, 38.72); p<0.001] and increased incisional SSI rates compared to their non-SFM counterparts [11.1% vs. 9.1%; OR (95%CI) = 1.23 (1.09, 1.40); p=0.0008]. A subgroup analysis of rectal cancer cases found significantly higher anastomotic leak rates with SFM [5.4% vs. 1.5%; OR (95%CI) = 2.37 (1.09, 5.16); p=0.03].

CONCLUSION
This systematic review found that SFM was not associated with significantly decreased anastomotic leak rates. SSI rates were significantly increased in patients undergoing SFM.


Description: Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world. Several recent research studies have generated evidence as to why. Drivers of this problem include lack of information, knowledge and skills among girls, their sexual partners and their families; weak institutions and services, such as health, education, social work and justice; poverty and girls' limited access to assets; widespread sexual violence and exploitation, for which there is both social and legal impunity; and engrained social and gender norms that make girls vulnerable to early sex and pregnancy. This brief discusses initial learning emerging from the Adaptive approaches to reducing teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone action research project. The project is accompanying three international NGOs in Sierra Leone as they trial adaptive approaches to addressing teenage pregnancy.


During the last decades, local governments have increasingly become recognised as actors in international development cooperation. It has been estimated that today 70% of the world's cities are engaged in some form of international cooperation. Many of these relations connect the developed and the developing world ('North' and 'South'). They put cities at the core of international cooperation, both as development agents and as beneficiaries. In the light of world-wide ongoing decentralisation of government, globalisation and urbanisation trends, the changing role of local government and increased attention to good governance as a precondition for development, municipal partnerships are more and more employed as instruments for cities and communities to assist one another by means of knowledge sharing, the transfer of resources and technology, and joint cooperation. Cities – both local administrations and civil societies - partner up and their partnerships seek to contribute to a variety of objectives, including poverty alleviation and institutional strengthening. The concept of urban governance recognises that decision-making power exists both inside and outside local government institutions, diminishing the distinction between the public and private spheres. In order to achieve good, participatory local governance that contributes to local development, people and institutions need to be brought together. Both a strong local government and citizenry are therefore needed. Set against this background, this study aims to gain insight into the relevance and potential of North-South city-to-city cooperation with regard to strengthening urban governance in the South. Moreover, it seeks to understand better the factors affecting this potential. These factors include (supra)national policies and legislation; local political and organisational conditions necessary for municipalities to operate in international cooperation; actors involved, their responsibilities and relations; and conditions to build capacity and exchange knowledge trough partnerships in a North-South context. Drawing on a comparative study of four North-South city partnerships involving cities in Peru, Nicaragua, South Africa, the Netherlands and Germany, this study shows that city-to-city cooperation is successful in improving the effectiveness of local government to supply good service delivery, while it proves more difficult to strengthen civil society to demand good services. Thanks to their specific municipal expertise, cities can be meaningful partners in international cooperation and generate results where other donors do not. Their role is also vulnerable however, as an official municipal mandate for international cooperation is lacking. Political resistance, little financial resources and insufficient knowledge of poverty and development processes may undermine this role.


There is widespread acceptance of formalized cooperative learning (CL) programs in the schools. Research evidence of CL's power has been documented, (Vermette, 1998) but there is still an interesting dilemma for early childhood educators: a great deal of the research on CL has been done at grade levels above those holding children from 4 to 8 years old. Thus, as they consider applications to early childhood classrooms, they may ask, "what does the research say about its use for young children?" This article attempts to answer this question by examining several studies that have investigated five key issues related to the effective use of peer-assisted and/or collaborative structures and which shed great insight into teacher decision-making. Our generalized finding was simple: "cooperative learning works." Vygotsky's dictum "what they can do together today, they can do individually tomorrow" holds up under the scrutiny offered by the formal research process. ********** Picture this in your mind's eye: a busy classroom, full of purposeful noise, as a swarm of motivated youngsters are working and talking. The students, mostly in pairs or threes, are engaged and energetic, explaining their ideas and constructing their own understandings with the help of their peers. Now make the children in that picture ages 4-8. How does that alter the vision you have created? In what ways would someone's original picture be different if the 15 year olds in it suddenly became 5 year olds? How would it change if 11 year-olds suddenly became 6 year olds? Often, teachers think of formal cooperative learning as a strategy for older students and conceptualize early childhood youngsters as too ego-centric for effective partnering for cognitive and social gain. If you are even a little intrigued by the image of the 5 year olds at "cooperative work", then you, like us, will be interested in the answer to this question: "What does research say about how cooperative and collaborative learning works for the youngest students?" Cooperative learning, supported by a mountain of evidence drawn from years of formal studies, "works" when it is well structured and organized and when certain well-accepted conditions are met. However, most of the research support, anecdotal evidence and testimonials have come from classrooms from 3rd grade "up" (Vermette, 1998). Primary teachers do tend to speak of students' "collaborating" and sharing and they talk of these interactions from a lens crafted from Vygotsky's notions of the power of socially constructed meaning. They seldom, if ever, will talk of the use formal strategies, like Kagan's structures or Slavin's STAD or TGT, yet they allow and encourage interactive dialogue or parallel play as a regular feature of their work. Thus, one may well ask: under what conditions does CL work with 4-8 year olds? This paper seeks to first raise several questions about the use of collaborative strategies with 4 to 8 year olds and then offer some answers drawn from the research literature. We do this in hopes of stimulating other Early Childhood educators to recognize the power and limitations of student collaboration, to provoke analysis of current practice in light of the research base, to spark further inquiry into the topic and to entice teacher dialogue about children's use of language in their work efforts. Please note that we have not attempted to offer this as definitive summary of all related research; similarly, it is NOT meant to be seen as a meta-analysis of same. The research reviewed is somewhat selected from the perspectives we have crafted from our own practice yet we see it as representative of the studies that are available to help guide both the decisions and the understanding of our colleagues. Research and Key Questions #1 Do the students need to have formally structured collaborative experiences? YES In a fine study using first and third graders from Australia, Gillies and Ashman (1998) compared the use of formal and informal collaboration across ten [social studies] units spread across the school year. …


In most of the current research works on Quality of Service (QoS) based web service selection, searching is usually the dominant way to find the desired services. This approach comes with the potential problem of framing search queries properly due to requestor's lack of knowledge or vague requirement about QoS attribute values.

In this thesis, we propose an interactive QoS browsing mechanism that uses the concept of clustering to present the QoS value distribution to requestors followed by finer views of service quality. By analyzing various QoS attributes, we believe that the symbolic interval data is a proper type of representation, compared with the single valued numerical data. Therefore, we use interval data clustering algorithms to implement our browsing system. We conducted experiments on simulated QoS datasets to compare the performance of using different distance measures and show the effectiveness of the interval data clustering algorithm used. The result of the experiments show that the proposed approach provides an effective, user guided QoS based service selection approach that can conceivably overcome the problems with current approaches.


Recent work exploring the relationship between socioeconomic status and health has employed a psychosocial concept called subjective social status (SSS) as a mediator in the relationship. Given that SSS is "cognitive averaging" of SE characteristics over time, SSS may be a component of socioeconomic status subject to interplay with health over the life course, in that it may be a consequence rather than a cause of one's health. This analysis finds evidence for a reciprocal relation for women, where SSS and self-reported health simultaneously affect one another. This analysis finds evidence of reverse causation for men, in that self-reported health from an earlier time has a significant effect on men's SSS. Contact information: Dana Garbarski University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Sociology 1180 Observatory Drive, Rm 8128 Madison, WI 53706 (608) 262-1913 email@example.com


In communities with bacterial viruses (phage) and bacteria, the phage-bacteria infection network establishes which virus types infects which host types. The structure of the infection network is a key element in understanding community dynamics. Yet, this infection network is often difficult to ascertain. Introduced over 60 years ago, the plaque assay remains the gold-standard for establishing who infects whom in a community. This culture-based approach does not scale to environmental samples with increased levels of phage and bacterial diversity, much of which is currently unculturable. Here, we propose an alternative method of inferring phage-bacteria infection networks. This method uses time series data of fluctuating population densities to estimate the complete interaction network without having to test each phage-bacteria pair individually. We use in silico experiments to analyze the factors affecting the quality of network reconstruction and find robust regimes where accurate reconstructions are possible. In addition, we present a multi-experiment approach where time series from different experiments are combined to improve estimates of the infection network and mitigate against the possibility of evolutionary changes to infection during the time-course of measurement.


Variability reduction and business-process synchronization are acknowledged as keys to achieving sharp and timely deliveries in supply-chain networks. In this paper, we introduce a new notion, which we call six sigma supply chains to describe and quantify supply chains with sharp and timely deliveries, and develop an innovative approach for designing such networks. The approach developed in this paper is founded on an intriguing connection between mechanical design tolerancing and supply-chain lead-time compression. We show that the design of six sigma supply chains can be formulated as a mathematical programming problem, opening up a rich new framework for studying supply-chain design optimization problems. To show the efficacy of the notion and the design methodology, we focus on a design optimization problem, which we call the inventory optimization (IOPT) problem. Given a multistage supply-chain network, the IOPT problem seeks to find optimal allocation of lead time variabilities and inventories to individual stages, so as to achieve required levels of delivery performance in a cost-effective way. We formulate and solve the IOPT problem for a four-stage make-to-order liquid petroleum gas supply chain. The solution of the problem offers rich insights into inventory-service level tradeoffs in supply-chain networks and proves the potential of the new approach presented in this paper.Note to Practitioners-This paper builds a bridge between mechanical design tolerancing and supply-chain management. In particular, the paper explores the use of statistical tolerancing techniques in achieving outstanding delivery performance through variability reduction. Informally, a six sigma supply chain is that which delivers products within a customer specified delivery window, with at most 3.4 missed deliveries per million. The innovations in this paper are the following: 1) to define two performance metrics delivery probability and delivery sharpness to describe the precision and accuracy of deliveries, in terms of process capability indexes C/sub p/,C/sub pk/, and C/sub pm/; 2) to formulate the supply-chain design optimization problem using the process capability indices; 3) to suggest an efficient solution procedure for the design optimization problem. The paper presents the case study of a two-echelon distribution network and using the framework developed in the paper shows the role of inventory in controlling lead time variability and achieving six sigma levels of delivery performance.


Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction. Implications and applications are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Laurence Leonard is one of the most prolific and well-respected researchers in the area of specific language impairment (SLI) in children, and he is well qualified to write a book surveying the topic. SLI is a disorder of unknown origin, which appears to have a genetic component, causing delays and disorders of language development in children of normal nonverbal intelligence with no significant medical, emotional, or sensory deficits. The primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive review of research in the field of SLI, and Leonard has the minute knowledge necessary to succeed at the task. The coverage in the book reaches back to the earliest nineteenth-century descriptions of children who fit the profile and then moves forward quickly to the massive literature that has accumulated on the topic in the last 20 years. Following the introductory historical and definitional section, Leonard goes on to describe the nature of the linguistic impairment in SLI, including important cross-linguistic accounts and nonlinguistic cognitive issues. The book also covers hypotheses of causation, in a "nature versus nurture" section, and clinical issues of assessment and intervention. Part V, on theory, may be of most interest to psycholinguists who are not language disorders specialists. Overall, there is no doubt that this book is both an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with SLI and a welcome overview and resource for experts. Leonard's knowledge is encyclopedic, his presentation erudite, and his grasp of detail unfailingly impressive.


ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview into recent developments in the Afghan conflict and the endemic violence plaguing the country. It argues that the almost exclusive focus on threats generated by the presence of organisations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State by the U.S.-led coalition has pushed Afghanistan itself into the background, a mere host to the unfolding violence and conflict. This approach has resulted in the generation of primarily military focused solutions that have traditionally delivered temporary fixes and bubbles of security that dissipate as quickly as they are won. In contrast, this paper proposes a framework of analysis grounded in the historical, socio-cultural, and geographical particularities of Afghanistan. It identifies five sources of instability. These are; power dynamics; identity politics; corruption; the fractured nature of the insurgency; and the broader geo-political context. The paper examines how these complex and frequently interconnected sets of issues and relationships have helped to generate, shape, and sustain the endemic violence in Afghanistan. Through the provision of a more nuanced understanding, it may be possible to move away from the temporary relief provided through external military strategies and instead identify opportunities that may provide pathways towards long-term stability.


This paper discusses the design and performance analysis of a solar photovoltaic (SPV) array fed water pumping system utilizing a special class of highly rugged machine with simple drive system called switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive. The proposed method of water pumping system also provides the cost effective and highly reliable solution for solar water pumping system. A unique approach of variable DC link voltage operation of SRM drive with electronic commutation for switches of mid-point converter is used with the elimination of voltage and current sensor in the motor side results in reduction in cost and losses of the system. A DC-DC single-ended primary-inductor converter (SEPIC) is used to achieve maximum power from SPV array. The characteristic of providing output voltage with no polarity reversal and having features like minimal active components and low noise operation makes SEPIC suitable for solar water pumping. The water pump with a SRM motor is used in the proposed system because of its similar operational characteristics compared to SPV generator. Keywords: SPV Array, MPPT, SEPIC converter, Soft starting, SRM, Centrifugal water pump


The Asian crisis has done more than keep Filipinos from spending unwisely. If the region-wide recession was no longer sufficient proof of how bad things are, one should consider the facts kept hidden in unemployment figures. The official line maintains that the Philippine economy is in good shape, good enough to significantly bring down 1998 first quarter unemployment figures into impressive second quarter ones. What is not made plain is that the number of unemployed Filipinos looking for work did not include those who were retrenched (but still optimistic) and those who had given up on the shrinking job market. In truth, the crisis did more than just downsize the workforce, it has also exposed the shortcomings of President Joseph Estrada's government and the Central Bank in handling the effects of the crisis. On vital fiscal policies the administration appears to be at odds with itself. Not assured of sound or sustainable investment conditions and consumer demand, businesses are left with very little prospect of reopening their factories and shops until the region recovers from the crisis. This makes for an economic disaster that hits labor where it hurts.


Although it has been tacitly assumed since the seminal work of Jones in the 1930s that slump folds bear a systematic and meaningful relationship to the slope upon which they were presumably created, there has in reality been very little attempt to objectively verify this association via the collection of regional slump data in a relatively controlled setting. The potential to walk around the intact Dead Sea Basin at c. 425 m below mean sea level provides a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to undertake such verification via the direct examination of slump fold relationships. The collection of slump data in this well-constrained environment, where the seismogenic trigger for slumping is established via earthquake records, and the palaeogeographical controls are also recognizable and clearly link to the present bathymetry and landscape, thereby permits an evaluation of the use of slump folds as indicators of palaeoslope. The Late Pleistocene Lisan Formation cropping out to the west of the Dead Sea contains superb examples of slump folds that systematically face (>95%) and verge (>90%) towards the east. This study employs and evaluates five statistical techniques, including a new mean axial-planar dip (MAD) method, to analyse relationships between the orientation of slump folds and palaeoslopes. We recognize for the first time that the direction of slumping inferred from slump folds and thrusts varies systematically along the entire c. 100 km length of the western Dead Sea Basin. SE-directed slumping is preserved in the north, easterly directed slumping in the central portion and NE-directed slumping at the southern end of the Dead Sea. They are interpreted to form part of a large-scale and newly recognized radial slump system directed towards the depocentre of the precursor to the Dead Sea, and to be triggered by earthquakes associated with seismicity along the Dead Sea Fault.


The problem of providing connectivity for a collection of applications is largely one of data integration: the communicating parties must agree on thesemantics and syntax of the data being exchanged. In earlier papers [#!mp:jsc1!#,#!sg:BSG1!#], it was proposed that dictionaries of definitions foroperators, functions, and symbolic constants can effectively address the problem of semantic data integration. In this paper we extend that earlier work todiscuss the important issues in data integration at the syntactic level and propose a set of solutions that are both general, supporting a wide range of dataobjects with typing information, and efficient, supporting fast transmission and parsing.


Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis en INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty A member of the CGIAR Consortium IFPRI THE THIRD OF THREE BOOKS IN IFPRI'S CLIMATE CHANGE IN AFRICA SERIES, Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing eight of the countries that make up southern Africa —  Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. Southern Africa's population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. Southern Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer. Through the use of hundreds of scenario maps, models, figures, and detailed analysis, the editors and contributors of Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change present plausible future scenarios that combine economic and biophysical characteristics to explore the possible consequences for agriculture, food security, and resources management to 2050. They also offer recommendations to national governments and regional economic agencies already dealing with the vulnerabilities of climate change and deviations in environment. Decisionmakers and researchers will find Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change a vital tool for shaping policy and studying the various and likely consequences of climate change.


A dissipative photorefractive system is considered, which consists of a biased photorefractive crystal and a pump beam with a uniform spatial distribution. A signal beam couples coherently with the pump beam by codirectional degenerate two-beam coupling and hence obtains a gain. It is shown that the signal beam can evolve into a steady-state spatial bright (or dark) soliton that is a result of double balance, i.e., loss is balanced by gain, and diffraction is balanced by nonlinearity due to the spatially nonuniform screening of the applied field and to the process of two-beam coupling. Such solitons have fixed amplitude and width for fixed values of system parameters and hence are known as rigid screening (RS) solitons. RS solitons differ from previously observed screening solitons in their properties and physical origin and can exist whether the crystal possesses a focusing or a defocusing nonlinearity. If the pump beam is switched to a background illumination, RS-soliton solutions can reduce to screening-soliton solutions. Numerical simulations show that RS solitons are stable relative to small perturbations.


This study contrasts Japanese American activism, centering on citizenship struggles surrounding the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, to show alternatives to the emergence of the model minority trope. This complexity of activity worked to create and contest the making of a "successful" minority and ideas about U.S. democracy and equality at mid-century. Through a nuanced interpretation, this article reveals how certain narratives relied on a social progress framework and shifting global Cold War politics to create a "Japanese American Exceptionalism." The little-known history of Japanese American Cold War progressivism shows the forging of deep solidarities and the refusal to promote domestic rights based on empire building. By inserting Japanese Americans into the "Long" freedom movement historiography, this article further examines intergenerational continuities and ruptures.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
The incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in individuals younger than 50 years is increasing. We sought to ascertain the proportion of young CRC cases associated with genetic predisposition.

METHODS
We performed a retrospective study of individuals diagnosed with CRC at an age younger than 50 years, evaluated by the clinical genetics service at a single tertiary care cancer center from 1998 through 2015. We collected data on patient histories, tumor phenotypes, and results of germline DNA sequencing. For subjects with uninformative clinical evaluations, germline DNA samples were (re)sequenced using a research-based next-generation sequencing multigene panel. The primary outcome was identification of a pathogenic germline mutation associated with cancer predisposition.

RESULTS
Of 430 young CRC cases, 111 (26%) had a first-degree relative with CRC. Forty-one of the subjects with CRC (10%) had tumors with histologic evidence for mismatch repair deficiency. Of 315 subjects who underwent clinical germline sequencing, 79 had mutations associated with a hereditary cancer syndrome and 21 had variants of uncertain significance. Fifty-six subjects had pathogenic variants associated with Lynch syndrome (25 with mutations in MSH2, 24 with mutations in MLH1, 5 with mutations in MSH6, and 2 with mutations in PMS2) and 10 subjects had pathogenic variants associated with familial adenomatous polyposis. Thirteen subjects had mutations in other cancer-associated genes (8 in MUTYH, 2 in SMAD4, 1 in BRCA1, 1 in TP53, and 1 in CHEK2), all identified through multigene panel tests. Among 117 patients with uninformative clinical evaluations, next-generation sequence analysis using a multigene panel detected actionable germline variants in 6 patients (5%). Only 43 of the 85 subjects with germline mutations associated with a hereditary cancer syndrome (51%) reported a CRC diagnosis in a first-degree relative.

CONCLUSIONS
Approximately 1 in 5 individuals diagnosed with CRC at age younger than 50 years carries a germline mutation associated with cancer; nearly half of these do not have clinical histories typically associated with the identified syndrome. Germline testing with multigene cancer panels should be considered for all young patients with CRC.


The behavioral model has proven to be an effective treatment approach for people with Pervasive Developmental Disabilities -PDD(Birnbrauer & Leach, 1993; Lovaas, 1987). It has enhanced intellectual, social and emotional functioning of that people that required less professional attention, as they grow older. This model considers that autism is an organically based disorder and that people with PDD have behavioral excesses (e.g. ritualistic behavior, self stimulation, tantrums, self injurious behaviors) and deficits (e.g. social attachment, language) that can be modified and maintained through time. The general aim of this study was to examine the effect of an intervention implemented by an Argentine specialized foundation. It evaluates the impact of a treatment based on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) on nine children (8 boys Matos y Mustaca INTERDISCIPLINARIA, 2005, 22,1, 59-76 60 and one girl) between 2 and 5 years of chronological age. All the children met the criteria for autism or pervasive developmental disorders outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (APA, 1994). The intervention was based on methods developed by Lovaas and collaborators (1981). It was intensive (the children were exposed to 30 hours of therapy per week during 9 to 12 months), home based, and highly structured. The skills where divided into small, discrete tasks and systematically rewarded or reinforced desired behaviors and ignored or discouraged inappropriate behaviors. All the data was recalled so that the assessment of the effectiveness of the treatment could be done. At the very beginning the instruction was one to one, the child worked along with a therapist. This emphasized the use of experimentally validated teaching approaches based mainly on operant conditioning principles such as shaping, chaining, discrimination training, and behavior management. When the child learned a new skill the therapist prompted him to respond appropriately and immediately reinforced each trial. The therapist faded prompts over subsequent trials until he only reinforced correct, unprompted responses. Once the skills were learned, the therapist worked to help the child maintain and generalize them to natural settings (as school, squares, markets), and acquire new skills in such settings. A single-subject design base line treatment was used. All children were evaluated at intake and between 9 and 12 months after treatment begun. Three examiners from the foundation assessed the following areas: receptive language, adaptive functioning, intellectual functioning and autism level. The instruments administered were, respectively: Peabody Picture Vocabulary (Dunn & Dunn, 1981), Vineland Adaptative Behavior Scale (Sparrow, Balla & Cicchetti, 1984), Bayley Scales of Infant Development (1993), Bateria de Evaluacion Kaufman para Ninos -K.ABCof Kaufman and Kaufman (1997) and The Childhood Autism Rating Scale -CARSof Schopler, Reichler, DeVellis and Daly (1988). A clinical psychologist with expertise in autism carried out the assessment. The data collected was assessed with repeated measures Variance Analysis. The results showed that there was an improvement of the measures after the treatment and that 8 of the 9 children had Analisis Comportamental Aplicado en trastornos del desarrollo INTERDISCIPLINARIA, 2005, 22,1, 59-76 61 benefited from it. The best outcome was in general adaptive functioning (p < .004), and in two of the domains: daily living skills (p < .006) and motor skills (p < .001). There were significant differences in the two other domains: communication (p < .01) and socialization (p < .01). The improvement in receptive language, intellectual functioning and autism level were significant too: (p < .01), (p < .02) and (p < .04), respectively. Only 8 children could answer the receptive language test, and 7 children improved their scores. All the children responded better regarding the general adaptive and intellectual functioning. Seven children had better scores in the measure of autism level, but only one child changed of category showing a lower level. Seven children obtained significant differences at all the measures, one child had better results at three measures and another one at two tests.


Interview with Craig Santos Perez, the Chamorro poet from Guam whose innovative poetry takes up transoceanic and diasporic indigenous legacies and the ongoing impact of settler colonialism throughout the Pacific islands. Perez is the author of the multi-volume project from unincorporated territory (2008, 2010, 2014).


This is the full text of Chapter 6 (Online Privacy) from Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (Cambridge University Press 2016). This chapter introduces the reader to the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) historical and modern approaches to consumer privacy law.This chapter explains basic principles of privacy law, including fair information practices, which form the building blocks of most privacy protections. It describes the cases and the landscape of FTC law on online privacy. Then it shifts to present half a dozen controversies critical to the FTC's privacy stance: the dominance of rational choice theory approaches and their deficits, the "third party problem" in privacy, self-regulation in consumer protection, default choices, the consumer protection problems implicated by the rise of internet platforms, and finally, privacy by design. Other chapters in the book focus on children's privacy, spam, telemarketing, malware, financial privacy, information security, and international privacy.


Flexible biphenyls have been applied as efficient and practical chiroptical probes for absolute configuration assignment to chiral primary amines. The mechanism of the central-to-axial chirality transfer from the amine moiety to the conformationally flexible biphenyl system has been determined by NMR and computational studies. This allowed proposing a general non-empirical rule in order to establish, simply by looking at the sign of the 250 nm A band in the ECD spectrum of the biphenyl derivative, the torsion of the biphenyl and thus the absolute configuration of the amine. The method proved to be very reliable and sensitive, allowing treatment of samples on the μmol scale and permitting the simultaneous determination of the amine sample's absolute configuration and enantiopurity.

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Constraint programming effectively solves constraint satisfaction and optimization problems by basically building, pruning, and exploring a search tree of potential solutions. In this context, a main component is the enumeration strategy, which is responsible for selecting the order in which variables and values are selected to build a possible solution. This process is known to be quite important; indeed a correct selection can reach a solution without failed explorations. However, it is well known that selecting the right strategy is quite challenging as their performance is notably hard to predict. During the last years, adaptive enumeration appeared as a proper solution to this problem. Adaptive enumeration allows the solving algorithm being able to autonomously modifying its strategies in solving time depending on performance information. In this way, the most suitable order for variables and values is employed along the search. In this paper, we present a new and more lightweight approach for performing adaptive enumeration. We incorporate a powerful classification technique named Top- in order to adaptively select strategies along the resolution. We report results on a set of well-known benchmarks where the proposed approach noticeably competes with classical and modern adaptive enumeration methods for constraint satisfaction.


Trajectory‐based visualization of coordinated movement data within a bounded area, such as player and ball movement within a soccer pitch, can easily result in visual crossings, overplotting, and clutter. Trajectory abstraction can help to cope with these issues, but it is a challenging problem to select the right level of abstraction (LoA) for a given data set and analysis task. We present a novel dynamic approach that combines trajectory simplification and clustering techniques with the goal to support interpretation and understanding of movement patterns. Our technique provides smooth transitions between different abstraction types that can be computed dynamically and on‐the‐fly. This enables the analyst to effectively navigate and explore the space of possible abstractions in large trajectory data sets. Additionally, we provide a proof of concept for supporting the analyst in determining the LoA semi‐automatically with a recommender system. Our approach is illustrated and evaluated by case studies, quantitative measures, and expert feedback. We further demonstrate that it allows analysts to solve a variety of analysis tasks in the domain of soccer.


The characters in Michael Jeffrey Lee's Something in My Eye come out from under all sorts hiding places—a slaughterhouse floor, a whorehouse, a couch by the edge of a river, even hell. It's these characters that compelled Francine Prose to select Lee's collection for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction: "I was drawn to [the] line up of loners and drifters, imperiled children and haunted psychos ... because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language." Lee also utilizes a variety of structures that, once encountered, you can't imagine the story told any other way. "Contemporary Country Music: A Songbook" is a series of ten country songs framing a son's return from war. The transition home is not easy: "no john all the pawn shops are closed and wal-mart wouldn't sell you a gun with beer on your breath no not even in that uniform." Things are not what they used to be for anyone in the family. "Murder Ballad" is the tortured conversation between two lovers in the afterlife—one in heaven, the other in hell. "We'll have our own place in the comforting flames, a little apartment," promises the man in hell for pulling the trigger on them both. "And we'll laugh together. We'll learn how. When you ask me how my day went and I ask you how your day went we'll both just laugh and laugh and laugh until the flesh falls from our bones and we'll be two skeletons in love." The narrator of "I Shall Not Be Moved," a little man who loves alcohol and men, does not want to leave New Orleans in light of a brewing hurricane. He has found a home: "I will not be separated from the city I love. Here I have found, if not complete acceptance of who I am, an environment in which I am able to exploit the dimensions of my body to achieve something resembling a normal life." But an afternoon at his favorite bar with a young man writing poems on napkins changes a few things. Lee's language—punchy in some stories, lyrical in others—is always direct. He lives in New Orleans and is an associate fiction editor at the New Orleans Review. S. HOPE MILLS (Spring 2012)


Modeling and classifying 3D microstructures are important steps in precise micro-manipulation. This thesis explores some of the visual reconstruction and classification algorithms for 3D microstructures used in micromanipulation. Mechanical characterization of microstructures has also been considered. In particular, visual reconstruction algorithm (shape from focus - SFF) uses 2D image sequence of a microscopic object captured at different focusing levels to create a 3D range image. Then, the visual classification algorithm takes the range image as an input and applies a curvature-based segmentation method, HK segmentation, which is based on differential geometry. The object is segmented into surface patches according to the curvature of its surface. It is shown that the visual reconstruction algorithm works successfully for synthetic and real image data. The range images are used to classify the surfaces of the micro objects according to their curvatures in the HK segmentation algorithm. Also, a mechanical property characterization technique for cell and embryo is presented. A zebrafish embryo chorion is mechanically characterized using cell boundary deformation. Elastic modulus and developmental stage of the embryo are obtained successfully using visual information. In addition to these, calibrated image based visual servoing algorithm is experimentally evaluated for various tasks in micro domain. Experimental results on optical system calibration and image-based visual servoing in micropositioning and trajectory following tasks are presented.


TIn 2004, the German Association for Wastewater, Water and Waste (DWA) carried out a survey about the current status of sewage sludge treatment and disposal in Germany. The study covered about one third of the wastewater treatment plants and about two thirds of the entire treatment capacity (expressed in population equivalents) in Germany. This provides an up-to-date and representative database. The paper presents the most important results regarding sludge treatment, process engineering, current disposal paths and sewage sludge quality.


A long standing dilemma of online communities is that a small group of community members account for a disproportionate amount of contributions. Prior studies built on intent-based explanations cannot fully explain the phenomenon. This paper introduces the concept of habit formation as a key driver of individual contributions and investigates how habit is formed and how it influences individuals' participation behavior in online communities. We propose that a threshold of behavioral repetitions exists for individuals to develop a habit. Once the threshold is surpassed, the habit of participation grows stronger and becomes self-reinforcing. We also propose that habit formation weakens the influence of reciprocity, social capital and competition on user participation in virtual communities. Using a panel data of 130,882 postings across 115 discussion boards, we find support for all the hypotheses. Our analysis contributes to the emerging literature on routinized information technology use.


Background : Periodontal ligament stem cells (PDLSCs) are considered as a type of mesenchymal stem cell that is beneficial target for numerous clinical applications in periodontal tissue regeneration therapy. Materials and Methods : This study examined the effects of dexamethasone (Dex) on human PDLSCs in vitro . PDLSCs obtained from the roots of patient's teeth were cultured with Dex (0.01 �M), and their proliferation was measured. The osteogenic differentiation was assessed by alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity and Alizarin Red-S staining for calcium deposition. Results : After the administration of 0.01 �M Dex, the activity of ALP increased significantly. Furthermore, mineralized nodule formation showing the intracellular calcium deposition was significantly higher in the Dex-treated cells than that of the control cells. Conclusion : Collectively, Dex has positive effects on osteogenic differentiation of human PDLSCs in vitro. It is suggested that PDLSCs may serve as a potential material for periodontal tissue regeneration.


This report is an effort to address information gaps regarding how gendered claims are addressed by adjudicators at Canada's Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (the RPD). It looks at one specific type of gendered claim: persecution through domestic or intimate violence. The study considers all the RPD decisions from 2004 to 2009 and judicial reviews from 2005 to 2009 that were reported in the Quicklaw LexisNexis service. These decisions are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.This report finds adjudicators consistently identify domestic violence as a form of gendered persecution that can form a nexus to a convention ground. However, despite contrary directions from the Gender Guidelines, adjudicators often fail to recognize the social, cultural, economic, and psychological dynamics of domestic abuse as legally relevant for their assessment of state protection. There is a striking failure on this account when it comes to determining if it was reasonable to expect the claimant to seek state protection.This report presents data on factors such as the rates at which adjudicators consider the adequacy of women's shelters and the responsiveness of local police to complaints. As well as identifying the frequency and grounds for which judicial reviews are granted, this report also presents a series of recommendations for reform. These recommendations identify where studies are needed, how the Gender Guidelines need reform to make them a helpful instrument, and how training and support for PRD adjudicators needs to be enhanced.


US health care reform includes an abbreviated pathway for follow-on biologics, also known as biosimilars, in an effort to speed up access to these complex therapeutics. However, a key patient safety challenge emerges from such an abbreviated pathway: immunogenicity reactions. Yet immunogenicity is notoriously difficult to predict, and even cooperative approaches in licensing between companies have resulted in patient safety concerns, injury, and death. Because approval pathways for follow-on forms do not involve cooperative disclosure of methods and manufacturing processes by innovator companies and follow-on manufacturers, the potential for expanded immunogenicity must be taken into account from a risk management and patient safety perspective. The US Institute of Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has principles of medication safety that have been applied in the past to high-risk drugs. We propose adapting ISMP principles to follow-on biologic forms and creating systems approaches to warn, rapidly identify, and alert providers regarding this emerging patient safety risk. This type of system can be built upon and provide lessons learned as these new drug forms are developed and marketed more broadly.


Abstract Deuteration (H/D substitution at 200ºC) was performed on powders of two ground talcs of different particle shapes (different basal/lateral surface ratios). Results indicate that the deuteration process is only efficient on lateral talc surfaces, and suggest that the hydrogens located in the hexagonal ring of the talc basal surfaces are not exchanged. The FTIR spectra collected from the two talc samples show that it is possible to discriminate between particles with the same specific surface area but with different basal/lateral surface ratios using the deuteration process.


Women in general seem to have a complicated relationship with their bodies and their body image. A small percent of the female population develop a serious pathological eating pattern which is characterized by a disturbed image of body size and shape. This disturbance has been investigated by many researchers and the quest of finding the underlying neural correlates has progressed enormously during the last decade. The relationship between disturbed eating patterns and body image distortions is highly complicated. The purpose of this review article is to give an overview of current research literature and scientific results. The aim is to find a framework for the phenomenon of body image distortions among both healthy and non-healthy women. Differences between genders and how food intake affects body image will also be addressed. The focus lies on behavioral traits and the underlying neural correlates, with focus on both the perceptual and the cognitive-affective component.


Abstract Heaving bedrock is a geological hazard that is related to expansive soils, but it is more complex in terms of its uplift morphologies, deformation mechanisms, and regional distribution. It is common along Colorado's Front Range piedmont where steeply dipping sedimentary bedrock containing zones of expansive claystone is encountered near to the ground surface. It occurs in the Pierre Shale and other Upper Cretaceous formations. The heave features associated with heaving bedrock are distinctly linear and are caused by differential swelling and/or rebound movements within the bedrock. Heaving bedrock has caused exceptional damage to houses, roads, and utilities along the Front Range piedmont since suburban-type development began in the early 1970s. Much of this damage may be attributed to the longstanding tendency to assume that the bedrock may be treated, for site-exploration and design purposes, as an expansive soil having essentially uniform properties. This approach ignores the strong heterogeneity that is often present in the bedrock. In particular, drill-hole exploration surveys and drilled pier foundations, which are generally appropriate for expansive soil hazards, have proven to be inappropriate for recognizing and mitigating heaving-bedrock hazards. This article presents a summary of heaving bedrock as a distinct geological hazard and describes the technological and policy advances that have been made in recent years to promote understanding and effectively mitigate the problem. The Colorado Geological Survey has played a key role in these advances by introducing the term "heaving bedrock" to differentiate the problem from expansive soils; leading stakeholder field trips and conferences; investigating the physical characteristics, mechanics, causes, and distribution of heaving bedrock; publishing the investigation results; assisting county governments in creating new land-use regulations; and reviewing site investigation reports for actual subdivision projects. From this experience, we conclude that a state geological survey must be active in numerous arenas—scientific, practical, and political—to assist effectively in addressing potential hazards that impact the general public.


Internet domain - name disputes and trade-mark law The rapid expansion of on-line communications and the increasing commercial use of the Internet by businesses have given rise to a number of unique and interesting legal questions that seem set to launch the law into the era of cyberspace. The Internet consists of thousands of independent computer networks all over the world containing several million host computers that provide access to information on a global scale. The Internet's forerunner, called APRANET, was created by the US Defense Agency as a means of providing and distributing reliable communications in the event of a nuclear war.


Frances Bell and Rhona Sharpe became co-editors of ALT-J in September 2007, experiencing generous support from the previous team of editors, Grainne Conole, Martin Oliver and Jane Seale, during the handover period. With the support of the Editorial Board and ALT's new Director of Development, Mark van Harmelen and Publications Officer, Louise Ryan, we have a great opportunity to build on the many strengths introduced at ALT-J by the previous editors. My first venture was to commission a special issue on Learning and Teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds, with Maggi Savin-Baden and Robert Ward as co-editors. Projects in immersive virtual worlds were proliferating, raising questions about the opportunities for learning offered by these new spaces, and how students and academics would respond to them. There was a place for the publication of early findings, and theories to guide and inform ongoing research. Are immersive virtual worlds 'disruptive technologies' (Bower and Christensen 1995) in education? To answer this question, we need to pay close attention to their use in new applications, rather than in re-creations of traditional learning activities online.

Learning and teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds

This special issue comprises a number of exciting initiatives and developments that begin to put issues of learning in immersive virtual worlds centre stage. Although learning through specific types of serious games has been popular for some years, the pedagogical value of immersive worlds is currently not only inchoate but also under-researched. Whilst several of the articles here are not based on empirical research, what they do offer is new ways of considering the pedagogical purposes of using these kinds of digital spaces. The difficulty with the perception of immersive virtual worlds is that there is often a sense that they are seen as being dislocated from physical spaces, and yet they are not. Web spaces are largely viewed as necessarily freer locations where there is a sense that it is both possible and desirable to 'do things differently'. The consequence is that digital pedagogies tend to be, or at least feel, less ordered than much of face-to-face learning, forcing a reconsideration of how learning spaces in digital contexts are to be constituted (for further discussion on this see Savin-Baden 2007). Immersive virtual worlds demand that we confront the possibility of new types of visuality, literacy, pedagogy, representations of knowledge, communication and embodiment. Thus, as Pelletier has argued, "technologies are systems of cultural transmission, creating new contexts within which existing social interests express themselves" (2005, 12). Yet there remain conflicts about whether "pedagogy must lead the technology", a stance Cousin (2005) believes has become something of a mantra. Although this position would seem plausible and convincing to adopt, it denies the difficulties inherent in putting technology in the lead. It seems that many of the difficulties about the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and technology stem from a failure to ask what might appear to be some straightforward questions, such as:

 * What do we mean by pedagogy in immersive virtual worlds?
 * For what is the learning technology to be used?
 * Is it learning technology, teaching technology, technology to enhance teaching and learning, or something else?
 * What is the relationship between the type of pedagogy to be adopted and the type of pedagogy currently being used?

Cousin (2005) also points out that technology is not just lying there waiting for pedagogues to put to good use - but it might be that that is how some innovators see the situation.

Knowledge to go, knowledge on the move is embodied by open source systems and in particular Web 2.0 technologies, with their emphasis on user-generated content. Yet what remains problematic is students' engagement with immersive worlds: there seems to be a marked contrast between how such spaces are used by students within the university and what they do outside formal learning environments. We hope that through this special issue some of the queries and questions raised here will promote engagement in ongoing debates that begin to move forward both the arguments and practices, in interesting and innovative ways.
References

1. Bower, J. L. andChristensen, C. M. (1995) Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave. Harvard Business Review pp. 43-53.
2. Cousin, G. Land, R. and Bayne, S. (eds) (2005) Learning from cyberspace. Education in cyberspace pp. 117-129. RoutledgeFalmer , Abingdon.
3. Pelletier, C. Land, R. andBayne, S. (eds) (2005) New technologies, new identities: The university in the informational age. Education in cyberspace pp. 11-25. RoutledgeFalmer , Abingdon.
4. Savin-Baden, M. Learning spaces. Creating opportunities for knowledge creation in academic life McGraw Hill , Maidenhead.


BACKGROUND
  Although headache is the most common complication of dural puncture, knowledge gaps remain about patient-related risks. Data are lacking on the role, if any, of tobacco smoking, race, anxiety, depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in conferring risk for post-dural puncture headache (PDPH).

OBJECTIVE
  To determine the influence of tobacco smoking, race, anxiety,depressed mood, and PTSD on the risk for PDPH.

STUDY DESIGN
  Retrospective chart review, single site.

METHODS
  We determined the incidence of significant PDPH according to age, sex, race, smoking status, and psychiatric diagnosis in 153 consecutive research patients at the Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Medical Center who had continuous cerebrospinal fluid (CFS) sampling performed after using a large-bore (17 gauge) Tuohy needle to place a 20-gauge polyamide catheter in the lumbar spinal canal.

RESULTS
  Thirty-nine subjects (25.5%) had significant PDPH, defined as requiring an epidural blood patch for therapy (an average of 4 days post-procedure).  Greater age was associated with a decreased risk of PDPH (P = 0.008); subjects over the age of 40 had the lowest incidence (15.7%). Women and men had a 31.4% and 23.7% incidence of PDPH, respectively; these were not significantly different (P = 0.38).  Neither were rates of PDPH in Caucasians (28.0%) and African-Americans (15.6%) significantly different (P = 0.18)   Healthy controls had a higher incidence of PDPH than patients with PTSD (P = 0.032).  Smokers had a lower incidence of PDPH than non-smokers, 13.7% vs. 34.1% (P = 0.009).

LIMITATIONS
  This was not a prospective study, rather a retrospective chart review.

CONCLUSION
  Most notably, smokers had a considerably reduced rate of PDPH in comparison with non-smokers.  This information could be a useful addition to the clinical assessment of relative risk for PDPH.  Further research into the mechanisms by which tobacco smoking may inhibit PDPH, such as nicotine stimulation of dopamine neurotransmission or alterations in coagulation, appears warranted.


In this paper, a new guidance problem with the impact time constraint is investigated, which can be applied to salvo attack of anti-ship missiles. The closed form solution based on the linear formulation is derived, suggesting an additional loop for adjusting the impact time in addition to the traditional optimal guidance loop. This solution is a combination of the well-known PNG law and the feedback of the impact time error, which is the difference between the impact time by PNG and the prescribed impact time. The new guidance law called ITCG (Impact-Time-Control Guidance) can be used to guide multiple missiles to hit a stationary target simultaneously at a desirable impact time. Nonlinear simulation of several engagement situations demonstrates the performance and feasibility of ITCG. In addition, the similarity of the closed form solution and APNG is investigated and the switching rule for practical implementation is discussed.


The presence of international nongovernmental organizations in Kenya can be traced back to earlier years of independence with most of them recording over fifty years of presence and implementing community supported development programmes. The role played by these organizations through donor support in improving living standards of vulnerable communities in any country cannot be underestimated. However, development projects initiated and lor funded by these agencies perform poorly and many become nonoperational on termination of donor support. Despite this problem, evaluative studies and recommendations by external consultants are not relevant with the context and sociocultural factors of African communities. Most of these projects lack transition and participation strategies due to donor pressure on accountability. This therefore poses a gap that this study seeks to fill through investigation of the factors that influence the success and sustainability of the projects especially in poverty ravaged county of Turkana. The study adopts a descriptive research design. The target population included the employees of selected INGOs in Turkana County. Data was collected from the sampled respondents using questionnaires as the principal data collection instrument. Stratified and purposive sampling techniques were used to come up with a representative sample size. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) to aid in the generation of results. The study recommended successive planning, active participation of stakeholders, the linkage between development plans and vision 2030, all inclusive gender responsive policies, participative and transition strategies that will ensure projects are consultatively identified, owned, successful and sustained by the community long after the donor funds. have been withdrawn. x --'.. ----...•.....


Abstract. In this paper the results of some surveys carried out in an area of Apulian territory affected by serious environmental hazard are presented. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a key engineering tool for future environmental survey tasks. UAVs are increasingly seen as an attractive low-cost alternative or supplement to aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry due to their low cost, flexibility, availability and readiness for duty. In addition, UAVs can be operated in hazardous or temporarily inaccessible locations, that makes them very suitable for the assessment and management of environmental risk conditions. In order to verify the reliability of these technologies an UAV survey and A LIDAR survey have been carried outalong about 1 km of coast in the Salento peninsula, near the towns of San Foca, Torre dellOrso and SantAndrea( Lecce, Southern Italy). This area is affected by serious environmental risks due to the presence of dangerous rocky cliffs named falesie. The UAV platform was equipped with a photogrammetric measurement system that allowed us to obtain a mobile mapping of the fractured fronts of dangerous rocky cliffs. UAV-images data have been processed using dedicated software (AgisoftPhotoscan). The point clouds obtained from both the UAV and LIDAR surveys have been processed using Cloud Compare software, with the aim of testing the UAV results with respect to the LIDAR ones. The total error obtained was of centimeter-order that is a very satisfactory result. The environmental information has been arranged in an ArcGIS platform in order to assess the risk levels. The possibility to repeat the survey at time intervals more or less close together depending on the measured levels of risk and to compare the output allows following the trend of the dangerous phenomena. In conclusion, for inaccessible locations of dangerous rocky bodies the UAV survey coupled with GIS methodology proved to be a key engineering tool for the management of environmental risks.


The interaction of terpene gas with the sensing element in the sensor array can cause changes in electrical properties because of a charge transfer and the polymer chain structure. Resistive type interdigited electrode sensor arrays covered with a mixture of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP)/conductive polymer (CP) were designed and fabricated to detect terpene gases. MIP coated on CP (MOC) type showed markedly higher sensitivity compared to mixture of MIP and CP (MMC) type. The gas detection patterns by PCA were used to get higher selectivity of multicomponent chemical media.


Impairment of hand function is prevalent among stroke survivors, motivating the search for effective rehabilitation therapy. Recent studies have suggested that for upper extremity functional recovery, repetitive training with virtual reality is helpful. Repetitive training can be facilitated with assistance from mechanical devices. Thus, we have developed a training environment that integrates augmented reality (AR) with assistive devices for post-stroke hand rehabilitation. The AR element of our environment utilizes head mounted display and virtual objects for reach-and-grasp task training. The assistive device consists of either a body-powered orthosis (BPO) or a pneumatic-powered device (PPD), both of which are incorporated into gloves. This environment can be easily set up and calibrated, is customizable for individual users, and requires active user participation. Additionally, it can be used with both real and virtual objects, as desired. We are currently conducting pilot case studies to assess ease of use and efficacy. At present, one stroke survivor from each of the three training conditions, AR-with-BPO, AR-with-PPD and AR-only (acting as the control), has completed the 6-week training paradigm. Preliminary findings suggest user acceptance of the technology and some potential for beneficial effects


The study examines the effect of job satisfaction on organisational commitment among non-academic staffs of tertiary institutions in Ekiti State, with the main focus to determine the influence job satisfaction has on affective commitment and continuance commitment. 343 non-academic personnel are drawn from three (3) tertiary institutions into the sample and questionnaires distributed among them. 326 questionnaires are duly returned and analysed using Simple Percentage, Regression Analysis, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) methods. The findings indicate that pay/salary, job security, supervision, job enrichment and job challenges lead to job satisfaction. It also reveals that job satisfaction has significant positive influence on both affective commitment and continuance commitment; however, job satisfaction exerts a greater influence on continuance commitment. The study suggests that job satisfaction plays a vital role on organisational commitment among nonacademic staff of tertiary institutions.


UNLABELLED
Cerebral embolism from cardiac source is an important cause of stroke, specially in patients younger than 45 years old.

OBJECTIVE
To describe the transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) findings in young and non-young stroke patients without any prior evidence of cardiac source for cerebral embolism.

METHOD
Transversal study: 523 patients (267 men and 256 women) with ischemic stroke, without any evidence of cardiac abnormality, underwent to TEE.

RESULTS
Ten percent were aged 45 years; or less. Left ventricle hypertrophy, left atrial enlargement, spontaneous contrast in aorta, interatrial septum aneurysm, mitral and aortic valve calcification, aortic valve regurgitation, and atherosclerotic plaques in aorta were significantly more frequent in patients aged more than 45 years; 2.8% of non-young patients had thrombus in left heart.

CONCLUSION
TEE is widely used to diagnose cardiac source of cerebral embolism in young patients, but it seems to be as useful for older ones, in whom cerebral embolism risk is underestimated; atherogenic and cardioembolic causes may actually coexist, and both should be treated.


The reaction of 1,3-diisopropyl-4,5-dimethylimidazol-2-ylidene (I) with sulfur halides and sulfur oxygen halides may be described as a coordination or redn. process in respect to the S center. With SCl2 and SOCl2 the hypervalent S compds. II [R = SCl2, S(O)Cl2] are obtained. The SF2 adduct II (R = SF2) is formed on treatment of II (R = SCl2) with AgF. Compd. II [R = S(O)Cl2] is alkylated by MeI to give the cation II [R = S(Me)OCl2+]. Surprisingly, redn. of the S center occurs on treatment of I with SF4 to form the cation II (R = F+) with SF3- as anion. The same type of reaction occurs with SO2ClF and SO2F2 to give the fluorosulfites II (R = Cl+, F+) with SO2F- as anion. The x-ray structures of Im.SCl2, Im.S(O)Cl2, and ImF+SO2F- are reported.