The thesis discusses the trajectory of the Belgian socialist thinker and activist Hendrik de Man (1885-1953) between 1914 and 1936 ca, with particular attention to his endeavours to renew Western European social democracy after the Great War. The first half of the thesis deals with de Man's theoretical evolution. Having become convinced of the inadequacy of orthodox Marxism as a conceptual framework for the Left while serving as soldier and diplomat during WWI, de Man sought to overcome the split between reformism and revolutionary socialism by developing an ethical conception of socialism outlined in the book Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (1926) and, subsequently, by elaborating planism, a democratic socialist ideology supposedly more in tune with the socio-economic conditions of the 1930s. The second half of the thesis focuses on efforts to put de Man's ideas into practice. Due to his mounting desire to have impact on the social democratic movement, de Man became increasingly involved in politics and, in late 1933, launched the Belgian Labour Plan with the aim of bolstering the Belgian Labour Party and containing the spread of fascism. Planism won support from many young socialists all across Europe but was also met with suspicion and outright hostility by wide segments of the social democratic establishment, including prominent leaders such as Emile Vandervelde and Leon Blum. Eventually, de Man accepted to compromise on the full implementation of the Labour Plan and sought to accomplish the same goals by serving as Minister, without success. By examining his failure as well as the difficulties experienced by his followers in France and Britain, the thesis highlights the limits that Western European social democratic parties set to their own ideological renewal during the interwar period.


While biologically mediated reductive dechlorination continues to be a significant focus of chlorinated solvent remediation, there has been an increased interest in abiotic reductive processes for the remediation of chlorinated solvents. In situ chemical reduction (ISCR) uses zero-valent iron (ZVI)–based technologies, such as nanoscale iron and bimetallic ZVI, as well as naturally occurring reduced minerals incorporating dual-valent iron (DVI), such as magnetite, green rust, and iron sulfides that are capable of dechlorinating solvents. A more recent area of development in ISCR has been in combining biological and abiotic processes.

There are several ways in which biological and abiotic processes can be combined. First, the interaction between the two may be "causative." For example, the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment's biogeochemical reductive dechlorination (BiRD) technology combines a mulch barrier with hematite and gypsum to create an iron-sulfide-based reducing zone. Biodegradation under sulfate-reducing conditions produces sulfide that combines with the hematite to form iron sulfides. As such, the BiRD technology is "causative"; the biological processes create reducing minerals. The biological generation of other reducing minerals such as magnetite, siderite, and green rust is feasible and is, with magnetite, observed in nature at some petroleum sites. A second type of interaction between abiotic and biotic processes is "synergistic." For example, biological processes can enhance the activity of reduced metals/minerals. This is the basis of the EHC® ISCR technologies, which combine ZVI with a (slowly) degradable carbon substrate. This combination rapidly creates buffered, strongly reducing conditions, which result in more complete solvent degradation (i.e., direct mineralization). The extent and level of reducing activity commonly observed are much greater when both the carbon substrate and the ZVI are present. When the carbon substrate is expended, the reducing activity due to ZVI alone is much less. The understanding of biogeochemical processes and their impact on abiotic processes is still developing. As that understanding develops, new and improved methods will be created to enhance volatile organic compound destruction. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Peat ecosystem is an element of peat structure, which is a whole unified that affect each other in forming balance, stability, and productivity. Hydrological Unity of Peat (HUP) is a peat ecosystem located between two rivers, between the river and sea, and or on the swamp. Peat Ecosystem is function as an element of peat that serves to protect water availability, biodiversity conservation, oxygen-producing carbon storage, climate balance divided into protected functions of peat ecosystem and peat ecosystem cultivation function. Damage to the function of peat ecosystems occurs due to mismanagement of land with the selection of business commodities that are not in accordance with the characteristics of peat lands. This is exacerbated by the draining of peat water resulting in a drought on peat that is currently the trigger for forest and land fires. Facts in the field show that fires that occur almost every year with an ever-increasing area are the fact that peat is no longer in natural conditions or has been damaged. Restoration of peat ecosystems can be done by rearranging of hydrological functions where the peat dome as long storage of water, so that peat remains wet and difficult to burn and disasters that have implications directly to the community in the region. Community participation in reducing and avoiding disaster risk is important by raising community awareness and capacity for disaster risk reduction. This research explains how the Community Participation on Peat Restoration Policy in Tohor Village, Meranti Regency. This participation results in changes to peat restoration policies. The Tohor River is a success area for peat restoration in Indonesia that can lead to forest and land fires in Sumatra.


This study evaluated antibiotic degradation and biogas production during anaerobic digestion of dairy manure contained two common veterinary antibiotics at 37 °C. After 18 days of digestion, the concentration of chlortetracycline (CTC) decreased more than 80% regardless of the initial CTC concentration. The concentration of cefazolin (CEZ) decreased from 10 to 0.08 mg/L in 6 days. Less than 50 mg/L CTC and 10 mg/L CEZ had negligible impact on biogas production during anaerobic digestion process. The result showed that the anaerobic digestion has a potential to degrade antibiotic residues in livestock manure.


Susceptability of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) to waterlogging injury seriously limits its persistance and adaptability. Waterlogging injury and accumulation of ethanol under root anoxia may be causal agents which facilitate or promote infection by Phytophthora megasperma Drechsler zoospores and result in "root rot" of alfalfa. While induction of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and increased root accumulation of ethanol are general characteristics of flood-intolerant species, these parameters have not been examined in alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus L.) which vary greatly in flood tolerance and Phytophthora resistance. The objective of this greenhouse study was to compare the flooding response of alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil and determine the effect of anoxia on the induction of ADH and accumulation of ethanol in flooded roots of both species. When flooded for 7 days, alfalfa exhibited much more severe shoot injury symptoms (wilted and yellowing leaves), reduced shoot dry weight, reduced shoot and root total nonstructural carbohydrates, and reduced rates of acetylene reduction than trefoil which is Phytophthora resistant. Induction of ADH activity was very rapid and reached similar levels in both alfalfa and trefoil. Flooding for 6 days at 22 C resulted in maximum ethanol concentration in alfalfa after which shoot injury symptoms rapidly developed. However, ethanol concentration in trefoil roots was several fold lower than alfalfa indicating that trefoil may effectively remove ethanol from the roots.


Although efforts at soil and water conservation are routinely viewed as instrumental in reducing vulnerability to climate change, their impact has rarely been quantified. Combining data on the timing and intensity of soil and water conservation interventions in select Ethiopian watersheds from 2009 to 2016 with a pixel-level panel of vegetative cover and soil moisture data derived from satellite imagery makes it possible to assess the biophysical impacts of such measures using a difference-in-differences specification. The results point toward significant effects overall that vary by season, and that tree planting and other soil and water conservation activities are more effective on degraded than cultivated land. The results are consistent with before-after regressions for daily sediment load and stream flows in a subset of micro-watersheds. It thus appears that satellite imagery can improve the design and near-real-time monitoring of sustainable land management interventions for watersheds and landscape.


INTRODUCTION: In the current climate of urgency in identifying biomarkers for the development of rapid diagnostic kits, the use of urine samples to diagnose acute melioidosis was evaluated, comparing urine samples from Burkholderia pseudomallei culture-positive and culture-negative patients, and comparing pneumonic and septicemic melioidosis. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Eleven urine samples from clinically suspected melioidosis patients from a tertiary referral center, Hospital Tengku Ampuan Afzan, Pahang was used. An in-solution method for the detection of bacterial proteins using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry quadrupole time-of-flight (LCMS QTOF) was used. RESULTS: Three bacterial proteins were consistently detected among all the culturepositive and PCR-positive cases tested, namely SDR family NAD(P)-dependent oxidoreductase protein (32kDa), 3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase Burkholderia sp. (32kDa), and NAD(P)-dependent dehydrogenase (short-subunit alcohol dehydrogenase family) Burkholderia sp. (33kDa). CONCLUSIONS: Short-chain dehydrogenase (SDO) proteins could potentially be a urine biomarker candidate as these have shown to aid in the ability of Burkholderia spp. to invade host cells as this action is important for the initial intracellular survival of the organism.


This article discusses the interplay between verbal and embodied resources when requesting a product at the convenience store. We concentrate on requests for tobacco products, which are not directly accessible to the customers but have to be requested from the seller. We will explore a choice between a phrasal (NP) and clausal format for presenting a request, and show how the choice between these two formats is intrinsically tied to the arrangements of the physical space at the kiosk, the location of and the bodily movements by the participants, as well as to the sequential trajectory of the activity. More specifically, the key element in the verbal request is the description and identification of the product, presented with an NP, and this element is produced to coincide with reaching the counter and achieving a stationary position. There is a practical basis for the choice between an NP and a clause in formatting the request: the extended verbal format is chosen to manage the time it takes for the customer to reach the counter. Thus, the length of the verbal format stands in an iconic relationship to the relative distance and to the time needed for the customer to reach the counter. The verbal format is a flexible resource that is adjustable structurally and temporally to the embodied and sequential trajectory of the on-going activity. The data of the study consist of 101 encounters in which the customer asks for a tobacco product, collected in different parts of Finland.


About 40% of the observation time of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) is dedicated to studying active galactic nuclei (AGN), with the aim of increasing the sample of known extragalactic very-high-energy (VHE, E>100 GeV) sources and constraining the physical processes at play in potential emitters. H.E.S.S. observations of AGN, spanning a period from April 2004 to December 2011, are investigated to constrain their gamma-ray fluxes. Only the 47 sources without significant excess detected at the position of the targets are presented. Upper limits on VHE fluxes of the targets were computed and a search for variability was performed on the nightly time scale. For 41 objects, the flux upper limits we derived are the most constraining reported to date. These constraints at VHE are compared with the flux level expected from extrapolations of Fermi-LAT measurements in the two-year catalog of AGN. The H.E.S.S. upper limits are at least a factor of two lower than the extrapolated Fermi-LAT fluxes for 11 objects. Taking into account the attenuation by the extragalactic background light reduces the tension for all but two of them, suggesting intrinsic curvature in the high-energy spectra of these two AGN. Compilation efforts led by current VHE instruments are of critical importance for target-selection strategies before the advent of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, CTA.


Childhood cancer can be a traumatic, physically painful and emotionally turbulent experience. Little is still known on the psychological impact of receiving medical treatment for children with cancer, in particular children displaying symptomology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of their painful medical procedures. Literature indicates that art therapy can be a powerful therapeutic tool for paediatric oncology patients, faced with the uncertainties of their illness allowing for exploration of diagnosis and control over an uncontrollable sickness. A crucial first step for art therapists would be the need to focus on understanding the unique perspectives of children living with cancer, in order to effectively tailor interventions. To address this gap, this study aimed to understand children's lived experience of cancer, and art therapy as a therapeutic intervention in managing the emotional repercussions of their condition. Six case studies of expatriate (Western) children residing in Singapore, diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia aged between five and eight years, are presented with fragile ego structure, suspected PTSD, displaying poor awareness of their disease and having an inability to effectively cope with their illness are presented. Research has been carried out over a duration of eight one hour sessions. Images depict the child's progression in developing ego strength by working through the child's defense mechanisms, and strengthening of the ego through the framework of sublimation of internal instinctual drives (id drives). Positive gains were evident through the results of pre/post parental questionnaires, pre/post PTSD evaluation, pre/post art therapy assessment assessing ego strength 'superhero assessment', and analysis of case content and artwork. This indicated a reduction of PTSD symptoms, management of external stimuli (treatment related procedures) was better managed due to an increase in the child's ego strength which resolved internal conflict through the act of sublimation of internal id drives. The findings offer preliminary support not only limited to the use of art therapy as a modality for a child diagnosed with cancer, but also provides insight to the child's emotional experience helping health care professionals managing paediatric oncology and the parents of children with cancer. Thus, emphasizing art therapy as a non-invasive therapeutic support, a support vital for a child diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness. Ongoing research is warranted to investigate ways in which art therapy can assist in managing paediatric oncology. Keywords: paediatric, oncology, art therapy,PTSD


A multilayered deposition structure was developed for fabricating FePt:B2O3 films. We successfully obtained nanostructured FePt:B2O3 films with FePt grains aligned perpendicular to film plane by postannealing the as-deposited multilayers at 550 °C for 30 min. It was found that development of (001) texture depends strongly on the total film thickness, initial B2O3 layer thickness, and Fe concentration. Nearly perfect (001) orientation of FePt-ordered grains can be obtained in the films with small total film thickness, large initial B2O3 layer thickness, and slightly higher Fe concentration. Our results show that highly (001) oriented films with ordered fct phase have significant potential as perpendicular media for extremely high-density recording.


Delivery of affordable healthcare services to communities is a necessary precondition to poverty alleviation. Co-creation approaches to the development of business models in the healthcare industry proved particularly suitable for improving the health-seeking behavior of BOP patients. However, scant research was conducted to understand BOP consumers' decision-making process leading to specific healthcare choices in slum settings, and the relative balance of socio-cultural and socio-economic factors underpinning patients' preferences. This article adopts a mixed-method approach to investigate the determinants of BOP patients' choice between private and public hospitals. Quantitative analysis of a database, composed of 436 patients from five hospitals in Ahmedabad, India, indicates that BOP patients visit a public hospital significantly more than top-of-the-pyramid (TOP) patients. However, no significant difference emerges between BOP and TOP patients for inpatient or outpatient treatments. Qualitative findings based on 21 interviews with BOP consumers from selected slum areas led to the development of a grounded theory model, which highlights the role of aspirational demand of BOP patients toward private healthcare providers. Overall, healthcare provider choice emerges as the outcome of a collective socio-cultural decision-making process, which often assigns preference for private healthcare services because of the higher perceived quality of private providers, while downplaying affordability concerns. Implications for healthcare providers, social entrepreneurs, and policy-makers are discussed.


When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining symbolic boundaries: boundary retention—entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they encounter one another. We construct measures of boundary retention and reformation using random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on pre- and post-contact linguistic styles. We demonstrate this method's utility by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. We find that: (a) the persistence of symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss implications of these findings for the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts and for computational approaches to measuring culture.


UNLABELLED
tigre is an R/Bioconductor package for inference of transcription factor activity and ranking candidate target genes from gene expression time series. The underlying methodology is based on Gaussian process inference on a differential equation model that allows the use of short, unevenly sampled, time series. The method has been designed with efficient parallel implementation in mind, and the package supports parallel operation even without additional software.

AVAILABILITY
The tigre package is included in Bioconductor since release 2.6 for R 2.11. The package and a user's guide are available at http://www.bioconductor.org.


Abstract: Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis) is one of the flowering plant species
considered native to maritime Antarctica. Although the species was intensively analyzed
towards its morphological, anatomical and physiological adaptation to local environment,
its genetic variability is still poorly studied. In the presented study, a recently developed
retrotransposon−based DNA marker system (iPBS – inter Primer Binding Site) was applied
to assess the genetic diversity and differentiation of C. quitensis populations from King
George Island (South Shetland Islands, West Antarctic). A total of 143 scoreable bands
were detected using 7 iPBS primers among 122 plant specimens representing 8 populations.
55 (38.5%) bands were found polymorphic, with an average of 14.3% polymorphic frag−
ments per primer. Nine of all observed fragments were represented as a private bands de−
ployed unevenly among populations. Low genetic diversity (on average He = 0.040 and
I = 0.061) and moderate population differentiation (FST = 0.164) characterize the analyzed
material. Clustering based on PCoA revealed, that the populations located on the edges of
the study area diverge from the central populations. The pattern of population differentia−
tion corresponds well with their geographic location and the characteristics of the sampling
sites. Due to the character of iPBS markers, the observed genetic variation of populations
may be explained by the genome rearrangements caused by mobilization of mobile genetic
elements in the response to various stress factors. Additionally, this study demonstrates the
usefulness of iPBS markers for genetic diversity studies in wild species.


The internal electric field of an illuminated liquid droplet is studied in detail with the use of both wave theory and ray theory. The internal field attains its maximum values on the caustics within the droplet. Ray theory is used to determine the equations of these caustics and the density of rays on them. The Debye-series expansion of the interior-field Mie amplitudes is used to calculate the wave-theory version of these caustics. The physical interpretation of the sources of stimulated Raman scattering and fluorescence emission within a liquid droplet is then given.


In a public high school in suburban Connecticut, it is a novelty. "Why is he wearing those clothes?" "It's cool. He's actually part Black." In a public bathroom amidst a circle of leather-clad teenagers, it is a threat. "What, you think you're Black or something?" At a jazz show in Harlem it is a challenge. "This is your father? Your real father?" On the side of the road in South Carolina in the presence of a state trooper who is letting me go with a warning, it's a secret. "You have a nice day, son." Around the cafeteria table on a small college campus in Boston, it is access. "Homeboy must be lost." "It's cool. I know him." At a restaurant in San Francisco, it is a cool party trick. "I'm black." "No you're not." "No. Really. I'm half black." In my counseling office at a San Mateo community college internship, it is all of these things. When I ask clients to guess what ethnicity I am, I get all kinds of answers-Mexican, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Italian, Greek, Native American, Latin, and of course White. But never Black. And never half Black. With my stick straight hair alongside my slow pace, relaxed enunciation, and laid back demeanor, my medium dark complexion loses it's ethnic power and becomes nothing more than the perfect tan on a White guy who probably surfs a lot. Like most multiracial individuals, my heritage (Scandinavian and African-American) hides within me and unless I find myself confronted with those demanding check boxes on an application form, I usually don't find reason to bring it up. Maria Root (1996) introduced a model to address the complex identity issues of multiracial people. Within this model she offers the possibility that a multiracial individual may experience a shift from one identity to another according to the situation he is experiencing. From a personal standpoint, the result of such oscillation is not only a lack of a singular and continuous identity but also a resentment towards the widespread acceptance of categorizing individuals by one and only one race. Like most biracial people, my life has been all about shifting between identities. As a child, I grew up with black culture all around me, culminating in big family holiday gatherings at grandma's house with candied yams and collard greens. Despite my lighter skin and "good" hair, I identified more with the Black side of my family, if for no other reason than that they were geographically closer than the White side. (My closest Norwegian-American relatives lived 2,000 miles away in Montana and North Dakota). But in grade school, there wasn't a Black kid to be found (besides me) so I became just another White boy in Connecticut equipped with all the privileges to which White people become accustomed. Peggy McIntosh (1988) refers to this compilation of unearned privileges as the "invisible knapsack." So while I had all this wonderful Black culture pouring into me through my father's extended family, I was simultaneously and unknowingly acquiring a sense of entitlement, belonging, and advantage as a member of the dominant White culture. One aspect of being biracial that is particularly irritating to people with definitively dark skin is that I have the "choice" as to whether or not to reveal my secret depending on the context of the situation (Tatum, 1997). In other words, when I get pulled over by a cop or when I am buying my Gatorade at the corner store, I have the ability to keep my race hidden so as to maintain the advantage of being perceived as White or, perhaps more to the point, not Black. While I admit this choice protects me from the oppression of racism, there is a drawback to the power of choice. In not appearing Black, I have encountered numerous racists, in the most true and ugly sense of the word, most of them my friends and acquaintances. Especially during my formative years, I swallowed their slurs, telling myself "they did not really mean it," while secretly battling the idea that I should end the relationship. …


Shaping has proven to be a powerful but precarious means of improving reinforcement learning performance. Ng, Harada, and Russell (1999) proposed the potential-based shaping algorithm for adding shaping rewards in a way that guarantees the learner will learn optimal behavior. In this note, we prove certain similarities between this shaping algorithm and the initialization step required for several reinforcement learning algorithms. More specifically, we prove that a reinforcement learner with initial Q-values based on the shaping algorithm's potential function make the same updates throughout learning as a learner receiving potential-based shaping rewards. We further prove that under a broad category of policies, the behavior of these two learners are indistinguishable. The comparison provides intuition on the theoretical properties of the shaping algorithm as well as a suggestion for a simpler method for capturing the algorithm's benefit. In addition, the equivalence raises previously unaddressed issues concerning the efficiency of learning with potential-based shaping.


In software development, every change induces a risk. What happens if code changes again and again in some period of time? In an empirical study on Windows Vista, we found that the features of such change bursts have the highest predictive power for defect-prone components. With precision and recall values well above 90%, change bursts significantly improve upon earlier predictors such as complexity metrics, code churn, or organizational structure. As they only rely on version history and a controlled change process, change bursts are straight-forward to detect and deploy.


The effect of poverty on school leaving was examined for various gender groups, school levels and school locations based on interview data of dropouts (n = 38), parents of dropouts (n = 18), teachers (n = 13) and school administrators of 4 purposively selected elementary and secondary schools in urban and rural locations. By segregating responses according to gender, school level and location of respondents, specific factors related to school level were identified for male and female, elementary and secondary, and urban and rural school dropouts. Employment activities were common among older dropouts, especially the males, while domestic duties such as caring for younger siblings were most true of females, especially those from rural areas. Low motivation was also evident among male and younger school dropouts.


To determine factors that predispose or protect healthcare workers from severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), we conducted a retrospective cohort study among 43 nurses who worked in two Toronto critical care units with SARS patients. Eight of 32 nurses who entered a SARS patient's room were infected. The probability of SARS infection was 6% per shift worked. Assisting during intubation, suctioning before intubation, and manipulating the oxygen mask were high-risk activities. Consistently wearing a mask (either surgical or particulate respirator type N95) while caring for a SARS patient was protective for the nurses, and consistent use of the N95 mask was more protective than not wearing a mask. Risk was reduced by consistent use of a surgical mask, but not significantly. Risk was lower with consistent use of a N95 mask than with consistent use of a surgical mask. We conclude that activities related to intubation increase SARS risk and use of a mask (particularly a N95 mask) is protective.


IIASA celebrated its twentieth anniversary on May 12-13 with its fourth general conference, IIASA '92: An International Conference on the Challenges to Systems Analysis in the Nineties and Beyond. The conference focused on the relations between environment and development and on studies that integrate the methods and findings of several disciplines. The role of systems analysis, a method especially suited to taking account of the linkages between phenomena and of the hierarchical organization of the natural and social world, was also assessed, taking account of the implications this has for IIASA's research approach and activities.

This paper is one of six IIASA Collaborative Papers published as part of the report on the conference, an earlier instalment of which was Science and Sustainability, published in 1992.

If there is anyone who writes with authority on pensions and the problems that all industrial countries will confront in at most the next 20 years it is Professor van Praag. He has been far ahead of his time in pointing out the fatal defect hidden in the present arrangement of social security. It was introduced and is now maintained and defended less from the viewpoint of long-term workability than for its short term convenience.

The system I refer to is called Pay As You Go (PAYG), wherein no reserve is maintained; each year's tax collections (necessarily from those working) are paid out that same year to those retired. The convenience of PAYG was that as soon as announced it could start to pay retirees almost irrespective of the amounts they had contributed. It necessarily reduces saving in the economy, turns one generation against the preceding generation, and has other incidental ill-effects, but these are not what concern van Praag and Dalen most.

What they fear is its instability in the face of demographic fluctuations, specifically the day when the postwar baby boom starts to retire. Subsequent to the baby boom of the 1950s birth rates went down and stayed down, so that the cohorts to pay the pensions will be relatively small, just as the cohorts coming to collect them will attain record size. Beyond that fact, caused by the changing birth rate, is the decline in mortality, the increased fraction of each cohort living to extreme old age. What happens when these facts require that payroll taxes go up to the 25 percent of all wages that will ultimately be necessary if the retired are to have social security incomes equal to 80 percent of the average wage?

PAYG depends on each generation as it makes its payments trusting that the next generation will continue do the same; once doubt starts to spread the fragility of the whole system is revealed. We are told that the system is supported by a "contract between the generations" but the "contract" is metaphorical, as will be revealed in a few years when the crunch comes.

Effects go beyond the social security system; they create a wholly artificial and unnecessary conflict between the generations. With PAYG a shortsighted younger generation can become alarmed at what is ultimately good news for all - the rapidly growing number of octogenarians and people even older - and be tempted to vote against further use of their taxes for research into and therapy of the chronic diseases of old age.

But you do not require my explanation of the problem of PAYG. You not only have it better expressed by van Praag and Dalen, but they provide a remedy, one that will be the more painless the sooner it is initiated.


This Companion offers a one-volume, alphabetically arranged, encyclopedia introducing the main lines of American law, from the institutions, people, events, and cases to the doctrines and concepts. Produced under the editorship of a board of five noted scholars, headed by Kermit L. Hall, it comprises of approximately 500 entries, each written by an expert in the field. The book targets a broad and diverse audience, one that ranges from students studying comparative (including American) law to lawyers or judges actively involved in the practice of law. In subject matter the books deals with the development of positive, common, and constitutional law in the US (as well as arbitration, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution), and the related institutions that support them. The Companion, stresses concepts more than cases and people as primary subjects, preferring, except for the most iconic cases and the most storied figures of American law, to discuss each within conceptual entries. Although many of the entries must of necessity address technical matters the Companion does not seek to provide a technical analysis of the law, either as a matter of history or current practice. The Companion also goes down some of the lesser known by-ways of American law, such as the role of civil, canon, and international law, avenues that the editor believes are essential for a full exploration of the subject. The Companion takes as its starting point the idea that law is embedded in society, and that to understand American law one must necessarily ask questions about the relationship between it and the social order, now and in the past. The volume assumes that American law, in all its richness and complexity, cannot be understood in isolation, as simply the business of the Supreme Court, or as a list of common law doctrines. Hence, the volume takes seriously issues involving law's role in structuring decisions about governance, the significance of state and local law and legal institutions, and the place of American law in a comparative international perspective. The hope is that such an approach, when coupled with the strong law-and-society emphasis, will make the volume genuinely distinctive, readily accessible to students and professionals, and provide for a meaningful contribution to the literature of American law in its own right.


It is a truism that children make greater educational progress when their parents are included in their educational journey from childhood to adulthood. A key focus of this thesis is the particular role accorded to parent-school partnership as a means of engaging parents in the decision-making process concerning their children's schooling. The study was particularly interested in pupils deemed to have special needs and school-related difficulties. The issues addressed related to parents' understanding of disability and SEN issues; disabling barriers experienced when parents sought to get involved in the schooling of their children, particularly barriers which determined their level of participation in parent school partnerships; and the development of inclusive education based on good practice. The methodology for conducting the research consisted of the life history method and focus groups: specifically, twelve individual case histories and three focus groups. Life history interviews and focus group sessions were conducted over a one-year period with twenty-four parents living in one urban locality of the United Kingdom. A particular emphasis was placed on the experiences of Black parents including parents who are themselves disabled and have children with special educational needs. The findings revealed that parents experienced many personal, social and instructional barriers with the education system. These barriers shaped their sense of identity and circumscribed their level of participation in parentschool partnerships. In particular, parents felt undervalued. Though parents thought that the longevity of these barriers would require a concerted effort before change could be effected, they were willing to propose a number of suggestions that could be incorporated into good practice in order to develop an inclusive education system. Overall, there was a call for initiatives to provide a range of specialist support, practitioners and training to parents in order to address home and school-related issues, particularly those relating to managing special needs and school exclusion. The results of the research offer insights into what it is to be a parent whose voice is not always heard when their child comes into contact with the state education system.


Synopsis The Tertiary plugs of north Mull and Morvern, can be divided into three broad groups; (1) trachytes and mugearites; (2) diorites and tholeiitic dolerites with < 6 wt. % MgO and; (3) predominantly tholeiitic dolerites with > 6 wt. % MgO. Two trachytic trends are discernible, a low-iron and a high-iron trend. However, only the high-iron trend is found within the Tertiary Mull lava sequence. The origin of these two differentiation trends may be related to the composition of the primary magma, with more tholeiitic magmas fractionating to produce the lower-iron trachytes. The more MgO-rich plugs are invariably tholeiitic and are chemically unlike any of the preserved lavas within the Mull succession. The absence of this composition and of the low-iron trachyte compositions within the lava succession suggests that these magmas were possibly erupted near the top of the lava pile and have since been eroded away. The plugs may have acted as substantial feeders of the lava succession during its later stages of formation, while in the earlier stages the lavas were probably erupted from fissures. The absence of plugs associated with the Skye lavas, contrasts with the Mull and Antrim lava fields, and may be due to the more-intermittent nature of the Tertiary volcanic activity on Skye.


We study distributed learning with the least squares regularization scheme in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). By a divide-and-conquer approach, the algorithm partitions a data set into disjoint data subsets, applies the least squares regularization scheme to each data subset to produce an output function, and then takes an average of the individual output functions as a final global estimator or predictor. We show with error bounds in expectation in both the $L^2$-metric and RKHS-metric that the global output function of this distributed learning is a good approximation to the algorithm processing the whole data in one single machine. Our error bounds are sharp and stated in a general setting without any eigenfunction assumption. The analysis is achieved by a novel second order decomposition of operator differences in our integral operator approach. Even for the classical least squares regularization scheme in the RKHS associated with a general kernel, we give the best learning rate in the literature.


The paper examines the performance record of 17 agricultural parastatals, from independence to 1984. Data is presented showing capital invested, liquidity and gearing ratios, private and social returns to capital, real unit costs and real consumer and producer prices. Firms are classified as to which ones have had serious preblems with cost control or social rates or return, and when those problems developed. About half of the firms currentIv uyex'citxng are considered "good" performers. The data show that for most firms cost control problems preceded financial problems, and that pricing policies have not been a major cause of parastatal financial problems. Since 1976 several firms have developed severe financial problems, while before 1976 no firm had such severe problems. Efforts to restore cost control after serious problems developed have rarely succeeded. Current policies of government are aimed at increasing central government control of all aspects of operations of all parastatals, a strategy which is not likely to succeed.


On March 4, 2005, a car carrying Nicola Calipari and Andrea Carpani, members of the Italian Ministry of Intelligence, and Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist who had been taken hostage one month before and who had just been released and was on her way back to Italy, was traveling to the Baghdad Airport. The car was fired on by US forces from a checkpoint, killing Mr. Calipari and wounding Ms. Sgrena and Mr. Carpani. As a result of this tragic event, a joint investigation occurred and but Italy and the United States could not agree on the results. The United States determined that the soldiers involved had acted appropriately. Italy disagreed and on February 7, 2007, Mario Lozano, an U.S. Army National Guardsman, was indicted by Italian prosecutors who declared that Lozano can be tried in absentia because the case was policial. The trial occurred and the decision was announced on October 25th. Judge Spinaci ruled that the law of the flag, or the law of the soldier's sending state, prevails over a claim of passive personality jurisdiction in a case like this. This paper analyzes Judge Spinaci's decision and determines that he is correct. Absent another international agreement, the exercise of passive personality criminal jurisdiction over a combatant for combatant acts is inappropriate when the combatant's sovereign is seized of the case. Rather, because the combatant is acting on behalf of the sovereign, any claim against the combatant should be resolved through political means.


Objectives
Processed meat is associated with increased risk of colorectal and stomach cancer, but health and economic impacts of policies to discourage processed meat consumption are not well-established. This paper aims to estimate cancer outcomes, costs, and cost-effectiveness of implementing two population-level policies on processed meat: 1) 10% excise tax and 2) mandatory warning label.

Methods
We developed a probabilistic cohort-state transition model, including short-term and lifetime horizon, US healthcare and societal perspective, and 3% annual discount rates for costs and health outcomes. Our model simulated 32 subgroups by age, gender, and race/ethnicity from the US adult population and integrated nationally representative 2011-2014 data on processed meat consumption with etiologic effects of processed meat on cancer incidence, medical and indirect societal costs, and policy costs. Data sources for input parameters included NHANES, US Cancer Statistics, meta-analyses, and other published literature. Main outcomes were cancer incidence, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), policy and healthcare costs, productivity benefits, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.

Results
Over a lifetime, the 10% excise tax would prevent 77,000 colorectal (95% uncertainty interval: 56,800-114,000) and 12,400 stomach (6860-24,700) cancer cases, add 591,000 (418,000-856,000) QALYs, and generate net savings of $20.5B from healthcare and $23.4B from societal perspectives. The warning label policy would avert 84,500 (56,800-141,000) and 14,700 (6880-34,500) colorectal and stomach cancer cases and add 648,000 (416,000-1080,000) QALYs with net savings of $24.1B from healthcare and $27.3B from societal perspectives. In sensitivity analyses, greater health and economic benefits accrued to 1) younger populations, 2) subpopulations with greater cancer risk, and 3) those with higher baseline processed meat consumption.

Conclusions
Our model shows that implementing an excise tax or warning label on processed meats would be a cost-saving strategy with substantial health and economic benefits. Our findings will encourage policymakers to consider nutrition-related policies to reduce cancer burden.

Funding Sources
NIH/NIMHD.

Supporting Tables Images and/or Graphs


We present a floating-gate synaptic circuit that updates its weight according to the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. The weight (or floating-gate voltage) is updated only if the time difference between the pre- and post-synaptic spikes falls within a learning window. The update is implemented through tunneling and injection mechanisms which can be tuned for very long time constants up to seconds. The novelty of this circuit is that the tunneling and injection mechanisms are turned on only when the correlation of the pre and postsynaptic activity is significant. The additional benefit of this non-volatile technology is that synaptic weights can be stored locally on chip. We present experimental results that show the learning and normalization effects from the fabricated circuits.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: One of the sustainable development goals is universal access to reproductive services by 2030. Reproductive disorders is an important neglected component in reproductive health. Some factors, like type of nutrition effects on fertility. The aim of this study is to determine role of nutrition in female and male fertility. METHODS: This study is a narrative review article. Search was conducted by using relevant keywords such as: infertility, fertility, nutrition and diet. Results were limited to 39 articles published in Iranian and international journals in SID, Magiran, Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar, Elsevier databases, in the period 2011-2016. Also nutrition guidelines for infertile couples in scientific nutritional and university sites was used. FINDINGS: The results showed that unsaturated fatty acids, fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy, for improving women's reproductive recommended. Factors that reduce male fertility include: high consumption of red and processed meats, high intake of saturated fat, low intake of unsaturated fats, antioxidants, fruits and vegetables. CONCLUSION: Following a balanced diet is one of promising and valuable interventions in maintaining reproductive health. However, Identification of a suitable fertility diet is "Important achievement" in the management of fertility.


High sensitivity of neural networks against malicious perturbations on inputs causes security concerns. To take a steady step towards robust classifiers, we aim to create neural network models provably defended from perturbations. Prior certification work requires strong assumptions on network structures and massive computational costs, and thus the range of their applications was limited. From the relationship between the Lipschitz constants and prediction margins, we present a computationally efficient calculation technique to lower-bound the size of adversarial perturbations that can deceive networks, and that is widely applicable to various complicated networks. Moreover, we propose an efficient training procedure that robustifies networks and significantly improves the provably guarded areas around data points. In experimental evaluations, our method showed its ability to provide a non-trivial guarantee and enhance robustness for even large networks.


This thesis is a study of the generation of topographic mappings - dimension reducing transformations of data that preserve some element of geometric structure - with feed-forward neural networks. As an alternative to established methods, a transformational variant of Sammon's method is proposed, where the projection is effected by a radial basis function neural network. This approach is related to the statistical field of multidimensional scaling, and from that the concept of a 'subjective metric' is defined, which permits the exploitation of additional prior knowledge concerning the data in the mapping process. This then enables the generation of more appropriate feature spaces for the purposes of enhanced visualisation or subsequent classification. A comparison with established methods for feature extraction is given for data taken from the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise for higher educational institutions in the United Kingdom. This is a difficult high-dimensional dataset, and illustrates well the benefit of the new topographic technique. A generalisation of the proposed model is considered for implementation of the classical multidimensional scaling (¸mds}) routine. This is related to Oja's principal subspace neural network, whose learning rule is shown to descend the error surface of the proposed ¸mds model. Some of the technical issues concerning the design and training of topographic neural networks are investigated. It is shown that neural network models can be less sensitive to entrapment in the sub-optimal global minima that badly affect the standard Sammon algorithm, and tend to exhibit good generalisation as a result of implicit weight decay in the training process. It is further argued that for ideal structure retention, the network transformation should be perfectly smooth for all inter-data directions in input space. Finally, there is a critique of optimisation techniques for topographic mappings, and a new training algorithm is proposed. A convergence proof is given, and the method is shown to produce lower-error mappings more rapidly than previous algorithms.


Context: Dandruff a very common scalp disorder with high prevalence in population is caused by numerous host factors in conjunction with Malassezia furfur. Most of the commercially available anti-dandruff hair shampoos contain some form of antifungal agent(s) that appear to reduce the incidence of the disease. There are no good scientific studies done to prove the antifungal activity of commercially available hair shampoos. Aim: In this study commercially available shampoos were assessed for antifungal activity against a human dandruff isolate of M. furfur. The shampoos were Head & Shoulders, Clinic All Clear, and Pantene etc. The results demonstrated that all six of the assayed hair shampoos have some antifungal effect on growth of M. furfur. These products have poor efficacies, more side effects and give scope for recurrence of symptoms. Methods and Materials: Therefore different plant extracts that possess various active compounds which have antifungal activity could help to overcome the incidence of the disease and also avoid the emergence of resistance in the pathogen. The plant extracts were tested in different concentrations like 1:5, 1:10, 1:20 and they were hibiscus, neem, soap nut, etc. The inhibitory action was studied using agar well assay and disc diffusion method and the results indicated in percentage of inhibition. Conclusion: The study was significant as not only efficient known plant products with anti-dandruff activity could be compared with commercially available shampoos but also their better efficacies at minimum concentrations could be identified. This can help make a polyherbal mixture that could be incorporated in hair oil or shampoos for better anti-dandruff activity.


Context. The project Galactic Cold Cores has carried out Herschel photometric observations of interstellar clouds where the Planck satellite survey has located cold and compact clumps. The sources represent different stages of cloud evolution from starless clumps to protostellar cores and are located in different Galactic environments.
Aims. We examine this sample of 116 Herschel fields to estimate the submillimetre dust opacity and to search for variations that might be attributed to the evolutionary stage of the sources or to environmental factors, including the location within the Galaxy.
Methods. The submillimetre dust opacity was derived from Herschel data, and near-infrared observations of the reddening of background stars are converted into near-infrared optical depth. We investigated the systematic errors affecting these parameters and used modelling to correct for the expected biases. The ratio of 250 μm and J band opacities is correlated with the Galactic location and the star formation activity. We searched for local variations in the ratio τ(250 μm)/τ(J) using the correlation plots and opacity ratio maps.
Results. We find a median ratio of τ(250 μm) /τ(J) = (1.6 ± 0.2) × 10^(-3), which is more than three times the mean value reported for the diffuse medium. Assuming an opacity spectral index β = 1.8 instead of β = 2.0, the value would be lower by ~ 30%. No significant systematic variation is detected with Galactocentric distance or with Galactic height. Examination of the τ(250 μm) /τ(J) maps reveals six fields with clear indications of a local increase of submillimetre opacity of up to τ(250 μm) /τ(J) ~ 4 × 10^(-3) towards the densest clumps. These are all nearby fields with spatially resolved clumps of high column density.
Conclusions. We interpret the increase in the far-infrared opacity as a sign of grain growth in the densest and coldest regions of interstellar clouds.


The aim of the research is to study about the academic self regulation of undergraduate students and it's influence to their academic achievement. Furthermore, the research is also leaded to verify the research findings about the impact of self regulation of the graduate students to their academic achievements. Therefore, it can give reliable information about students' self regulation and it relations with academic achievement at university. The participants of the research are 81 students who are selected purposely. Qualitative method is used in this research, in which, the method leads the process of inquiring and discovering any aspects related to the student academic self regulation. The research reveals that the undergraduate students are able to manage their academic self regulation. The ability are reflected in: (1) planning their study goal, (2) managing their behavior in order to achieve their study goal, and (3) the academic achievements of the undergraduate students, in which, they achieve their study goal well. The research result tells the same with the results of the research on self regulation of the graduate students and it impact to their academic achievements. Therefore, it verifies the previous research result about students academic self regulation at university.


This Essay is a contribution to a symposium, "Modernizing Marriage through E-Marriage," that focused on "E-marriage," an idea developed by Professors Adam Candeub and Mae Kuykendall in their article Modernizing Marriage, 44 U. Mich. L. Reform 735 (2011). E-marriage, as Candeub and Kuykendall acknowledge, would be the latest instantiation of the ancient phenomenon of proxy marriage. In this Essay, I aim to complicate Candeub and Kuykendall's claim that E-marriage would represent a positive step forward in the recognition of marriages by same-sex couples by providing a partial genealogy of proxy marriage in our country. In particular, the Essay offers some historical observations about how proxy marriage flourished for a time among immigrants to the United States and was then abolished by the National Origins Act of 1924. There are some striking parallels between E-marriage and these earlier forms of proxy marriage, and my hope is that the historical examples will provide us with a richer backdrop for understanding the complex legal and cultural dynamics surrounding proxy marriage. The story of how proxy marriage became popular and was ultimately banned as a basis for immigration tells us a great deal about marriage's cultural valence in times of social upheaval.


Adjusting to a new culture and getting along with the local people challenge everyone who lives and works abroad. Whether in business, diplomacy, education, or as a long-term visitor abroad, anyone can be blind-sided by a lack of international knowledge and experience and be caught at a disadvantage. In this completely revised and expanded edition of the classic The Art of Crossing Cultures, Craig Storti shows what it takes to encounter a new culture head-on an succeed. This one-of-a-kind guidebook to bridging the cultural divide - with more than 50,000 copies sold worldwide - incorporates a stellar sampling of the writings of some of the world's greatest writers, poets and observers of the human condition. Through the vivid perceptions and words of such literary legends as Noel Coward, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, and others, Storti paints an intimate portrait of the personal challenges of adjusting to another culture: anticipating differences, managing the temptation to withdraw, and gradually adjusting expectations of behaviour to fit reality. This timely new edition focuses special attention on how to deal with country and culture shock and includes many new examples of cross-cultural misunderstandings - particularly in business. Storti breaks new ground with his easy-to-understand model of cultural adjustment and tips on how to master the process and develop adaptive strategies - the heart of the cross-cultural experience.


Atlantic salmon Salmo salar juveniles were fed either fishmeal-based diets (FM) or diets in which soybean meal (SBM) partly replaced the FM from first feeding on. The fish were kept at continuous daylight during the juvenile stage. During the last 3 weeks before reaching 100 g body mass, all fish were subjected to 12L:12D. Starting at 100 g body mass, groups of 60 fish from each feeding background were subjected to continuous light for 12 weeks (short winter), or a square-wave photoperiod cycle to stimulate parr to smolt transformation with 8L:16D during the first 6 weeks, and then continuous light during the last 6 weeks (long winter). After the 12 weeks, 20 fish from each treatment were subjected to 0, 24 or 96 h seawater exposure at a water salinity of 34. Hypo-osmoregulatory ability at seawater exposure was assessed by mortality, intestinal pathology, plasma ion concentrations and osmolality, gill Na+/K+-ATPase activity and element concentrations in the cytoplasm of distal intestinal enterocytes using X-ray microanalysis. The hypo-osmoregulatory capacity was higher in fish kept at short winter than at long winter, apparently due to more rapid development of gill Na+/K+-ATPase activity. Fish fed SBM suffered typical soybean meal-induced histological alterations of the distal intestine and apparent reductions in digestive function in the more proximal gastrointestinal regions. The net osmoregulatory capacity of these fish was maintained, as indicated by higher gill Na+/K+-ATPase activity and lower plasma Na+, Ca2+ and osmolality compared to the FM-fed fish. Thus, feeding SBM did not impair the hypo-osmoregulatory ability of the Atlantic salmon following seawater exposure.


The increasing influence of socio-organizational issues in information systems poses serious challenges to the applicability of most traditional research approaches, since the mechanisms from which they derive their rigor and validity become more and more unrealistic in the new contexts. Indeed, traditional problem decomposition, standardization of procedures, and rigorous quantitative measurement under the control of independent researchers often lose sense in such contexts. We analyze action-research as an alternative approach, bearing in mind that its adoption requires careful consideration of the epistemological foundations that legitimate its use. In particular, we address the legitimacy of generalizing from the researcher's findings, bearing in mind Karl Popper's critical rationalism, to conclude that a virtuous relationship exists between critical rationalism and the mechanisms from which action-research draws its rigor and validity.


Work began in 1985 at Wayne State University on a research study of pipeline suspension bridges. This effort, which was funded by ANR Pipeline Company of Detroit, Michigan, investigated four existing bridges under dynamic wind and seismic loading. As an extension of this research, a database for pipeline suspension bridges in North America is being developed. This general-purpose database, which presently includes 52 fields of design information per bridge, currently contains data on 14 of the longest pipeline suspension bridges in the United States and Canada. The potential applications for the information in the database include: replacement cost estimating for existing pipeline suspension bridges, finite-element modeling and dynamic analysis of existing bridges, evaluation of existing bridges in the design of new pipeline bridges, extrapolation of previous wind and earthquake analysis results to other bridges, and evaluation of existing bridges for possible wind or seismic retrofitting.


A recently developed near-bottom reflection profiling system has been used to obtain high resolution seismic sections across the Vema transform fault. At the western ridge–transform intersection deep-towed 3.5 kHz echo sounder data show evidence of fresh lava flows at the seabed within the nodal deep. Over one kilometre of sediment fills the bottom of the ridge–transform intersection deep. Many strong, discontinuous reflectors within the sedimentary section caused by lava layers indicate that the intersection deep has been the site of sustained igneous activity. On the eastern side of the deep is a large, uplifted fault block created as the newly formed crust moved out of the spreading centre. Dipping strata within the fault block document back-tilting as the new crust is extended by normal faulting. Profiles across the active transform fault reveal that the zone of deformation throughout the one kilometre thick sediment column is narrow, suggesting that the location of the fault has remained stable throughout at least the last million years.


The article outlines the main points in my new book with Martin Allen. Published by Continuum in April 2010, it questions whether young people today really are a 'lost generation' as they have been called by the media. Or whether 'new strategies for youth and education' can bring together student and non-student youth in new forms of learning with their teachers through which the latter could recover their expertise if not their professionalism. This question is critical to the future of Education Studies to which our book sees itself as a contribution. It is addressed to teachers and students alike and builds upon our previous publication Education make you fick, innit? (Tufnell Press 2008). This was developed from an Education Studies core course in education policy. Now we suggest that, rather than being 'lost,' many young people know perfectly well where they are but are 'stuck'. Anxious to enter employment, repay debts and move on with their lives, they are a generation all dressed up but with nowhere to go. Inevitably, amongst the immediate consequences of this will be even more pressure for top grades in examinations to gain HE places with higher fees combined with pressure for shorter, local and more vocational courses. Concomitantly, many young people may begin to believe that education is losing its legitimacy as an agent for moving their lives forward into a meaningful and productive adult world. Hopefully the article can contribute to debate in Educationalfutures on how best to confront this development.


Context. Precise stellar parameters (effective temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, stellar mass, and radius) are crucial for several reasons, amongst which are the precise characterization of orbiting exoplanets and the correct determination of galactic chemical evolution. The atmospheric parameters are extremely important because all the other stellar parameters depend on them. Using our standard equivalent-width method on high-resolution spectroscopy, good precision can be obtained for the derived effective temperature and metallicity. The surface gravity, however, is usually not well constrained with spectroscopy. Aims. We use two different samples of FGK dwarfs to study the effect of the stellar surface gravity on the precise spectroscopic determination of the other atmospheric parameters. Furthermore, we present a straightforward formula for correcting the spectroscopic surface gravities derived by our method and with our linelists. Methods. Our spectroscopic analysis is based on Kurucz models in local thermodynamic equilibrium, performed with the MOOG code to derive the atmospheric parameters. The surface gravity was either left free or fixed to a predetermined value. The latter is either obtained through a photometric transit light curve or derived using asteroseismology. Results. We find first that, despite some minor trends, the effective temperatures and metallicities for FGK dwarfs derived with the described method and linelists are, in most cases, only affected within the errorbars by using different values for the surface gravity, even for very large differences in surface gravity, so they can be trusted. The temperatures derived with a fixed surface gravity continue to be compatible within 1 sigma with the accurate results of the infrared flux method (IRFM), as is the case for the unconstrained temperatures. Secondly, we find that the spectroscopic surface gravity can easily be corrected to a more accurate value using a linear function with the effective temperature.


Seed dispersal studies have primarily examined dispersal as a function of distance from the parent tree and/or heterogeneity in dispersal due to animal use of nesting, roosting and sleeping sites. However, non‐random heterogeneity in seed dispersal is also likely to result from the post‐foraging behavior and movement of frugivores which prefer certain trees. To characterize variation in seed rain at fine scales, we studied the dispersal curve of Prunus ceylanica, a primarily bird‐dispersed species. We compared seed rain at conspecifics, heterospecific fruiting trees with similar frugivore assemblages, emergent trees, and the landscape surrounding these trees. Seed rain of P. ceylanica was found to peak globally under the canopy of conspecifics but to peak locally under the canopy and immediate neighborhood of heterospecific fruiting trees. Our results demonstrate that seed rain is highly clumped even at fine spatial scales. A large proportion of seeds are dispersed in specific, localized regions. This variation can have important implications for plant population dynamics and might significantly alter the impact of post‐dispersal processes. Seed dispersal models may need to incorporate this heterogeneity to explain manifestations of spatially explicit dynamics like mixed species 'orchards'.


The experience of emigration generated a new paradigm in Estonian culture and literature. After World War II Sweden became a new homeland for many people. Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in homeland and the national ideology limited literature in the initial years of exile. Both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. It was a traumatic experience for nation and culture where the totalitarian political power and trauma have allied. The normal cultural communication was destroyed. But the most important thing at this time was memory, not just memory but entangled memory, which emigrants carried with them to the new homeland and which influenced people in Estonia. The act of remembering becomes crucial in the exile cultures. Estonian literature in exile and in the homeland presents the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. Surrealism as well as fantasy and science fiction as the literary styles reveal what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French surrealism, it is a uniquely Estonian surrealism. At the same time Estonia was already a new homeland for many refugees from Russia who had escaped during the Revolution of 1917 and World War I. August Gailit and Oskar Luts wrote about that issue in different literary works. Luts entangled different memories in his novel Tagahoovis ( In the Backyard , 1933): the memories of Estonians and the memories of Russian emigrants. He also entangled historical narratives about World War I, the Russian revolution and the young Estonian state in the 1920s. Luts wrote about common people who interpret historical narratives. The novel was also published in exile in 1969 in Toronto.


OBJECTIVE: This case study reports on three cases of patients with documented cervical disk herniations, who responded to chiropractic management and manipulative therapy. CLINICAL FEATURES: Three patients complaining of neck pain with radiation of pain and tingling into the upper extremities had positive magnetic resonance imaging scans consistent with cervical disk herniations. They also had positive neurophysiologic testing with positive thermography scans and electrodiagnostic studies. INTERVENTION AND OUTCOME: The patients were prescribed a treatment regimen consisting of chiropractic management including bracing, physiotherapy, cervical manipulative procedures, traction and exercises. The patients responded well to care as evidence by posttreatment MRI, electrodiagnostic studies, clinical exam findings and thermography scan findings. CONCLUSION: Patients with and without nerve root compression secondary to cervical disk herniation can and do respond well to chiropractic care. Chiropractic management of this condition can and should be employed prior to more invasive treatment.


Linear Time Invariant (LTI) filters are often specified and simulated using high-precision software, before being implemented in low-precision hardware. A problem is that the hardware does not behave exactly as the simulation due to quantization and rounding issues. This article advocates the construction of LTI architectures that behave as if the computation was performed with infinite accuracy, then rounded only once to the low-precision output format. From this minimalist specification, it is possible to deduce the optimal values of many architectural parameters, including all the internal data formats. This requires a detailed error analysis that captures the rounding errors, but also their infinite accumulation in infinite impulse response filters. This error analysis then guides the design of hardware satisfying the accuracy specification at the minimal hardware cost. This is illustrated on the case of low-precision LTI filters implemented in FPGA logic. This approach is fully automated in a generic, open-source architecture generator tool built upon the FloPoCo framework, and evaluated on a range of Finite and Infinite Impulse Response filters.


Psychiatric symptoms are extremely pervasive in epilepsy patient populations and represent a significant burden on quality of life for people with epilepsy (PWE). Despite growing awareness of this reality, mental illness (MI) in PWE continues to be under-diagnosed and under-treated. Recent developments in our understanding of the bidirectional relationship between seizures and psychopathology inform an increased need for collaboration of healthcare providers from neurology and psychiatry disciplines. This article highlights present institutional barriers to diagnosis and treatment of PWE with comorbid MI (PWE/MI), including poor interdisciplinary communication, limited opportunities for cross-specialty training, and the arbitrary theoretical divide between neurology and psychiatry, which distinguishes their approach to managing complex brain disorders. We discuss recent progress towards improving quality of care, both through advancements in our understanding of the common risk factors for epilepsy and MI and through practical interventions, such as increased behavioral health screenings. While these developments have demonstrated a positive impact on patient outcomes, there remains a clear need for system-wide change.


Stabilometry, which is useful for the quantitative evaluation of the equilibrium function, is typically performed using Romberg's posture. In this posture, stabilometry can detect deterioration in the equilibrium function because this posture is unstable with a small support area. For many elderly individuals and for patients with equilibrium disorders, it may be difficult to maintain Romberg's posture for several seconds without falling to the floor during stabilometric analysis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the control system under unstable conditions. We developed an apparatus for adjusting the tilt angle of the slope on which body sway is recorded. Sixty-nine healthy paid volunteers (13-87 years old) participated in this study. Their body sway in Romberg's posture was recorded, and the temporally averaged potential function was estimated from the stabilograms. We then compared the mathematical models for body sway on slopes with tilt angles of 0°, 10°, and 20°.


ABSTRACT Home health care providers often deal with older clients who have cognitive deficits. Cognitive problems have a negative impact on independence. Certain chronic pain conditions present with cognitive dysfunction as a co-morbidity. Fibromyalgia syndrome is one such condition. Home health care providers need to know that mild-moderate exercise may positively affect fibromyalgia-related cognitive deficits at very low cost. All of the above is discussed in this paper along with advice concerning the provision of exercise for older, homebound people.


Honey bee queens are exceptionally promiscuous. Early in life, queens perform one to five nuptial flights, mating with up to 44 drones. Many studies have documented potential benefits of multiple mating. In contrast, potential costs of polyandry and the sensitivity of queens to such costs have largely been ignored because they are difficult to address experimentally. To consider one aspect of mating costs to queens, the difficulty of flight, we compared flight behavior and success among a group of control queens and two experimental groups of queens that carried lead weights of two different sizes. For each queen, we assessed the number and duration of all flights and, after egg-laying commenced, the amount of stored sperm and the number of mates in terms of the offspring's patrilineal genetic diversity. Added weights quantitatively decreased the number of flights, the mean duration of flights and consequently the total time spent flying. Mating success in terms of sperm quantity and patrilines detected among the queens' offspring was also negatively impacted by the experimental manipulation. Thus, it can be concluded that the flight effort of honey bee queens during their mating period is adjusted in response to an experimentally increased cost of flying with multiple consequences for their mating success. Our results suggest that queen behavior is flexible and mating costs deserve more attention to explain the extreme polyandry in honey bees.


Event-based Systems (EBS) are used to detect and analyze meaningful events in surveillance, sports, finances and many other areas. With rising data and event rates and with correlations among these events, sequential event processing becomes infeasible and needs to be distributed. Existing approaches cannot deal with the ubiquity of out-of-order event arrival that is introduced by network delays when distributing EBS. Order-less event processing may result in a system failure. We present a low-latency approach based on K-slack that achieves ordered event processing on high data rate sensor and event streams without a-priori knowledge. Slack buffers are dynamically adjusted to fit the disorder in the streams without using local or global clocks. The middleware transparently reorders the event input streams so that events can still be aggregated and processed to a granularity that satisfies the demands of the application. On a Realtime Locating System (RTLS) our system performs accurate low-latency event detection under the predominance of out-of-order event arrival and with a close to linear performance scale-up when the system is distributed over several threads and machines.


What drives commodity price booms and busts? We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of commodity demand shocks, commodity supply shocks, and inventory demand shocks on real commodity prices. In particular, we analyze a new data set of price and production levels for 12 agricultural, metal, and soft commodities from 1870 to 2013. We identify differences in the type of shock driving prices of the various types of commodities and relate these differences to commodity types which reflect differences in long-run elasticities of supply and demand. Our results show that demand shocks strongly dominate supply shocks.


Modern business trends such as agile manufacturing and virtual corporations require high levels of flexibility and responsiveness to consumer demand, and require the ability to quickly and efficiently select trading partners. Automated computational techniques for supply chain formation have the potential to provide significant advantages in terms of speed and efficiency over the traditional manual approach to partner selection. Automated supply chain formation is the process of determining the participants within a supply chain and the terms of the exchanges made between these participants. In this thesis we present an automated technique for supply chain formation based upon the min-sum loopy belief propagation algorithm (LBP). LBP is a decentralised and distributed message-passing algorithm which allows participants to share their beliefs about the optimal structure of the supply chain based upon their costs, capabilities and requirements. We propose a novel framework for the application of LBP to the existing state-of-the-art case of the decentralised supply chain formation problem, and extend this framework to allow for application to further novel and established problem cases. Specifically, the contributions made by this thesis are: • A novel framework to allow for the application of LBP to the decentralised supply chain formation scenario investigated using the current state-of-the-art approach. Our experimental analysis indicates that LBP is able to match or outperform this approach for the vast majority of problem instances tested. • A new solution goal for supply chain formation in which economically motivated producers aim to maximise their profits by intelligently altering their profit margins. We propose a rational pricing strategy that allows producers to earn significantly greater profits than a comparable LBP-based profitmaking approach. • An LBP-based framework which allows the algorithm to be used to solve supply chain formation problems in which goods are exchanged in multiple units, a first for a fully decentralised technique. As well as multiple-unit exchanges, we also model in this scenario realistic constraints such as factory capacities and input-to-output ratios. LBP continues to be able to match or outperform an extended version of the existing state-of-the-art approach in this scenario. • Introduction of a dynamic supply chain formation scenario in which participants are able to alter their properties or to enter or leave the process at any time. Our results suggest that LBP is able to deal easily with individual occurences of these alterations and that performance degrades gracefully when they occur in larger numbers.


Expectations for accountability have led policy makers to create standards designed to educate children to their highest potential. In addition to k-12 standards, the Commonwealth of Virginia created Foundation Blocks for a state-sponsored preschool program called the Virginia Preschool Initiative. This study included assessment of Virginia's Foundation Blocks for Early Learning: Comprehensive Standards for Four-Year-Olds as they relate to theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Rogoff. This assessment included play, scaffolded instruction, emergent literacy, and spatial reasoning. The Foundation Blocks were examined to determine how they were interpreted and implemented by preschool classroom teachers. Using a case-study format, four volunteer teachers participated in three days of classroom observations, be interviewed, and complete a survey. Evidence showed that the standards were theoretically based, and the participating teachers" pedagogy included play, emergent literacy, and spatial reasoning. Scaffolded instruction was not observed. There were concerns about teachers" low expectations and low-level questioning techniques. Preschool Standards Implementation iii


Poultry litter application is an option in improving soil fertility of acid sandy soils although over application may promote environmental problems. Pot and laboratory experiments using uncharred (UPL) and charred poultry litter (CPL) at 4 levels (10, 20, 30, and 40 g kg-1 soil) were carried out to evaluate their direct and residual effects on the fertility and microbial respiration in acid sandy soil. Peanut was used as the test plant. At 10 and 20 days of incubation (DOI), a linear trend on the direct effects of levels regardless of the type of poultry litter was noted on soil pHH2O, organic C (OC), total N, and extractable P. Exchangeable Al and acidity on the other hand, significantly decreased with increasing rates of either UPL or CPL poultry litter. Interaction of types and levels of poultry litter also resulted in a significant change on soil pHCaCl2, exchangeable acidity, OC, and total N at 10 DOI but at 20 DOI, significant change was only noted on soil pHCaCl2 and OC. The residual liming benefit of CPL was superior to UPL. In general, the direct effects of application of uncharred or charred poultry litter resulted in better plant growth, nodulation, biomass, and N and P uptake than the control plants. The direct effects of UPL application resulted in a greater amount of CO2 evolved than CP. The above results indicate that converting raw poultry litter into char may play an important role in reducing C emissions associated with organic matter enhancement practices and increasing C stocks in acid sandy soils.


We present a Microsoft Kinect-based hand recognition algorithm for an interactive image clipping system, which is widely used for environments such as public facilities and security environments where personal capturing devices including mobile phones are not allowed. User-friendly interface and accurate image capturing function are required for an image clipping system. We build the system by combining Microsoft Kinect, HD webcam and projector. The Kinect and webcam are used to capture the motions of users" hand and project is to display the user-selected area from the capturing material. Hand recognition is composed of three steps: (i) the region occupied by users" hand is extracted from an image, (ii) the fingertips of the extracted hand region are analyzed using k-curvature algorithm, and (iii) the height of the fingertip is estimated using the depth image from Kinect. The height of the fingertip informs whether users" finger touched the surface of the target. The region captured by the fingertip is clipped from the image and stored as the target image. The excellence of our hand recognition algorithm is proved through a user test.


In this study we report the results of an experiment that examines how relatively sophisticated financial statement users interpret management stock option compensation disclosures under SFAS No. 123 and SFAS No. 123R. We predict and find that mandated income statement recognition, as required under SFAS No. 123R, leads to higher user assessments of reliability than either voluntary income statement recognition or voluntary footnote disclosure, options allowed under SFAS No. 123. Users view voluntary footnote disclosure as the least reliable reporting alternative. We also examine the amount users invest in response to these accounting treatments, and find that users invest more in a firm when management chooses income statement recognition than when management chooses footnote disclosure. We find no difference in investment amounts between mandated recognition and either voluntary recognition or footnote disclosure. Finally, although we find that these results are insensitive to whether management explicitly disavows the reliability of stock option expense, we present evidence that in side-by-side comparisons, where one firm disavows and the other does not, disavowals may affect user judgments and decisions.


The Object-Protocol Model (OPM) data management tools provide facilities for rapid development, documentation, and flexible exploration of scientific databases. The tools are based on OPM, an object oriented data model which is similar to the ODMG standard, but also supports extensions for modeling scientific data (L.A. Chen and V.M. Markowitz, 1995). Databases designed using OPM can be implemented using a variety of commercial relational DBMSs, using schema translation tools that generate complete DBMS database definitions from OPM schemas (L.A. Chen and V.M. Markowitz, 1996). Further OPM schemas can be retrofitted on top of existing databases defined using a variety of notations, such as the relational data model or the ASN.1 data exchange format, using OPM retrofitting tools (L.A. Chen et al., 1997).


Carrion of large animals is an extremely nutrient rich, ephemeral resource that is essential for many species, but is scarce in the anthropogenic Western-European landscape due to legislative restrictions. Rewilding, a novel conservation strategy that aims at restoring natural processes with minimal human intervention, is increasing in popularity and could lead to increased carrion availability in the landscape. It is therefore important to understand the effects of carrion on biodiversity. We investigated the direct and delayed (five months) effects of red deer (Cervus elaphus) carcasses on plants and arthropods in the Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands, one of the oldest rewilding sites in Europe. Specifically, we tested whether carrion has a positive direct effect on the abundances and diversity of various arthropod functional groups, as well as a delayed effect on the vegetation and arthropods through the increased nutrient availability. During the active decomposition stage in spring, we, not surprisingly, observed higher abundances of carrion associated species (scavengers and their specialized predators) at the carrion sites than at control sites without carrion, but no higher abundances of predators or detritivores. In late summer, after near-complete decomposition, plant biomass was five times higher, and nutritional plant quality (C:N ratio) was higher at the carrion sites than at the control sites. Arthropod abundance and diversity were also manifold higher, owing to higher numbers of herbivorous and predatory species. Regression analysis showed that abundances of herbivores and detritivores were positively related to plant biomass, and predator abundances were positively related to abundances of herbivores and detritivores, suggesting bottom-up effects propagating through the food chain. Our results show that even in a naturally nutrient-rich ecosystem like the Oostvaardersplassen, carrion can have strong positive effects on local plant biomass and nutritional quality and arthropod abundances, lasting the whole growing season. We found evidence that these effects were first directly caused by the presence of carrion, and later by the enhanced nutrient availability in the soil. This highlights the importance of the indirect pathways by which carrion can structure arthropod communities.


Background: Alzheimers disease is common and debilitating, and diabetes is a widely documented risk factor for the development of Alzheimers disease. Given that Alzheimers disease and diabetes are two extremely common and comorbid conditions in geriatric populations that greatly affect quality of life, it follows that treatment and prevention of both pathologies be exhaustively investigated. This is especially evident, as there is no existing medication that prevents or reverses the pathogenesis of Alzheimers disease. Pioglitazone, a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma agonists of the thiazolidinedione drug class, acts by upregulating gene expression cell receptors that improve insulin sensitivity at target tissue. This drug also has the salutary effect of improving patient lipid profiles and acting as an anti-inflammatory agent. Research is evolving that suggests that pioglitazone may play a role in preventing the onset of Alzheimers disease in noninsulin dependent diabetic patients. Moreover, it has also been identified as possibly improving cognition in patients with existing mild Alzheimers disease. The purpose this systematic review is to revisit research that has been completed on pioglitazone regarding its efficacy treating mild cognitive impairment caused by Alzheimers disease as well as its possible role in preventing the onset of Alzheimers disease in diabetic patients. Method: An exhaustive search using MEDLINE-Ovid, Web of Science, and Google Scholar was performed using keywords pioglitazone and dementia. Studies found were screened with eligibility criteria and analyzed for quality with GRADE. Clinical trials included two pilot, randomized control trials published in 2011 measuring piogtliazone's use to treat mild cognitive impairment caused by Alzheimers disease. A retrospective observational study measuring pioglitazone's preventative effect delaying or preventing the onset of Alzheimers disease was also included; this study has not yet been published, but has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review. Results: Three studies were included in this systematic review, meeting the eligibility criteria. One RCT looked at 42 patients with NIDDM and mild Alzheimers, showing statistically significant improvement in cognitive function with six months of treatment with pioglitazone. Another RCT looked at 28 patients without diabetes and with mild Alzheimers disease that found no significant improvement in cognition with 18 months of treatment with pioglitazone. Finally, a retrospective observational study demonstrated a 47% risk reduction in the development of Alzheimers disease when patients were treated with pioglitazone for greater than or equal to 8 quartiles (when compared to diabetics not receiving pioglitazone). Conclusion: It is thought that pioglitazone may improve cognition and delay the onset of Alzheimers due to its multiple positive benefits including increasing insulin sensitivity, improving lipid profiles, and acting as an anti-inflammatory agent. While the quality of evidence that is currently available is not enough to suggest the use of pioglitazone to treat mild cognitive impairment caused by Alzheimers disease, there is compelling data to suggest its use as a preventative modality possibly delaying the onset of Alzheimers disease in diabetic patients. This is an evolving area of research, and larger, double-blinded randomized control trials are needed to elucidate pioglitazone's efficacy. If found to be efficacious, pioglitazone, a drug that is widely available and relatively safe to take, could help to uncouple the pathogenesis of two major pervasive and life altering disease processes: diabetes and Alzheimers disease. This capstone project is available at CommonKnowledge: http://commons.pacificu.edu/pa/597 Degree Type Capstone Project Degree Name Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies


Intellectual property (IP) law doctrines fall into three basic categories: validity, infringement and defenses. Virtually every significant legal doctrine in IP is either about whether the plaintiff has a valid IP right that the law will recognize – validity – about whether what the defendant did violates that right – infringement – or about whether the defendant is somehow privileged to violate that right-defenses.

IP regimes tend to enforce a more or less strict separation between these three legal doctrines. They apply different burdens of proof and persuasion to infringement and validity. In many cases they ask different actors to decide one doctrine but not the other. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for example, decides questions of patent and trademark validity but not questions of infringement. Even in court, resolution of one issue is often allocated to a judge while the jury decides a different issue. And even where none of that is true, the nature of IP law is to categorize an argument in order to apply the proper rules for that argument.

The result of this separation is that parties treat IP rights "like a nose of wax, which may be turned and twisted in any direction." When infringement is at issue, IP owners tout the breadth of their rights, while accused infringers seek to cabin them within narrow bounds. When it comes to validity, however, the parties reverse their position, with IP owners emphasizing the narrowness of their rights in order to avoid having those rights held invalid and accused infringers arguing the reverse.

Because of the separation between validity, infringement, and defenses, it is often possible for a party to successfully argue that an IP right means one thing in one context and something very different in another. And courts won't necessarily detect the problem because they are thinking of only the precise legal issue before them.

The result is a number of IP doctrines that simply make no sense to an outsider. In patent law, for instance, it is accepted law that there is no "practicing the prior art" defense. In other words, one can be held liable for doing precisely what others had legally done before, even though a patent isn't supposed to cover things people have already done. In design patent law, one can be held liable for making a design that an "ordinary observer" would find too similar to a patented design, even though the things that make the two look similar – say, the roundness of the wheels on my car – are not things the patentee is entitled to own. In copyright, once a court has concluded that someone has actually copied from the plaintiff, a song will sometimes be deemed infringing because of its similarity to a prior song, even if the similarity is overwhelmingly attributable to unprotectable standard components of the genre. And in trademark, a party can be deemed infringing because its products look to similar to the plaintiffs' mark and therefore make confusion likely, even if that confusion is likely caused by non-source-designating features of the design.

The culprit is simple, but fundamental: IP regimes largely lack an integrated procedure for deciding the proper extent of an IP right. The proper scope of an IP right is not a matter of natural right or immutable definition. Rather, it is a function of the purposes of the IP regime. But without some way of assessing how broad an IP right is that considers validity, infringement, and defenses together, courts will always be prone to make mistakes in applying any one of the doctrines.

In this article, we suggest that IP regimes need a process for determining the scope of an IP right. Scope is not merely validity, and it is not merely infringement. Rather, it is the range of things the IP right lawfully protects against competition. IP rights that claim too broad a scope tend to be invalid, either because they tread on the rights of those who came before or because they cover things that the law has made a decision not to allow anyone to own. IP rights with narrower scope are valid, but the narrowness of that scope should be reflected in the determination of what actions do and do not infringe that right. And whatever the doctrinal label, we should not allow an IP owner to capture something that is not within the legitimate scope of her right. Nor should it follow from the fact that some uses are outside the lawful scope of an IP owner's right that the IP right itself is invalid and cannot be asserted against anyone. Only by evaluating scope in a single, integrated proceeding can courts avoid the nose of wax problem that has grown endemic in IP law. Scope is, quite simply, the fundamental question that underlies everything else in IP law, but which courts rarely think about expressly.