The mechanisms that regulate the gradual exit of ovarian follicles from the nongrowing, primordial pool are poorly understood. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of adding ascorbic acid to the media for in vitro culture of cattle ovarian fragments and to determine the effects of this addition on the growth activation and viability of preantral follicles. The ovarian cortex was divided into small fragments; 1 fragment was immediately fixed in Bouin's solution (control). The other fragments were cultured for 2, 4, 6, or 8 days on culture plates in minimum essential medium (MEM) supplemented with insulin-transferrin-selenium (ITS), pyruvate, glutamine, hypoxantine, BSA, and antibiotics (MEM+) or in MEM+ plus ascorbic acid (5, 25, 50, 100, or 200 μg mL-1). Ovarian tissue was processed for classical histology, TEM, and immunohistochemical demonstration of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA). Preantral follicles were classified according to their development stage (primordial, intermediate, primary, and secondary) and on the basis of morphological features (normal or degenerated). Pair-wise comparisons were done using Tukey's procedure. Chi-square test was used to compare percentages of follicles with PCNA-positive granulosa cells. All analyses were done with Statistical Analysis System (SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA); P ≤ 0.05 was considered significant. Compared with control fragments, the percentage of primordial follicles was reduced (P ≤ 0.05) and the percentage of growing follicles was increased (P ≤ 0.05) in cultured cortical fragments, independent of the tested medium or incubation time. Furthermore, compared with control tissue, culture of ovarian cortex for 8 days reduced the percentages of healthy, viable follicles (P ≤0.05), but not when cultures were supplemented with 25, 50, and 100 μg mL-1 of ascorbic acid. Ultrastructural and immunohistochemical analysis of ovarian cortical fragments cultured for 8 days, however, showed the integrity and viability of follicles only when fragments were cultured in the presence of 50 μg mL-1 of ascorbic acid. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that addition of ascorbic acid to MEM at a concentration of 50 μg mL-1 not only stimulates the activation and subsequent growth of cattle primordial follicles that are cultured in vitro for 8 days but also safeguards the viability of these preantral follicles. E. R. Andrade and A. A. Alfieri are recipients of the PRODOC/CAPES fellowship.


A process for the design and manufacture of 3D tactile textures with predefined affective properties was developed. Twenty four tactile textures were manufactured. Texture measures from the domain of machine vision were used to characterize the digital representations of the tactile textures. To obtain affective ratings, the textures were touched, unseen, by 107 participants who scored them against natural, warm, elegant, rough, simple, and like, on a semantic differential scale. The texture measures were correlated with the participants' affective ratings using a novel feature subset evaluation method and a partial least squares genetic algorithm. Six measures were identified that are significantly correlated with human responses and are unlikely to have occurred by chance. Regression equations were used to select 48 new tactile textures that had been synthesized using mixing algorithms and which were likely to score highly against the six adjectives when touched by participants. The new textures were manufactured and rated by participants. It was found that the regression equations gave excellent predictive ability. The principal contribution of the work is the demonstration of a process, using machine vision methods and rapid prototyping, which can be used to make new tactile textures with predefined affective properties.


Abstract Planning and accomplishing a publishable research agenda is part of a successful academic real estate researcher's career. This manuscript reports the insights and advice offered by seven people in the real estate field on how to make important contributions to the real estate literature. These people are all highly respected real estate researchers with many papers in prestigious academic journals to their credit. All have been recognized for their important leadership and contributions to the real estate field. These people were asked to offer advice and insights to those pursuing academic tenure and promotion wanting to make important contributions to the real estate literature, while taking advantage of the opportunities available to them by networking with academic scholars and practicing professionals worldwide. Providing guidance and mentoring to new real estate researchers on interesting and useful research agendas, as well as advising on publication strategy, is an important role for senior real estate researchers in the American Real Estate Society (ARES). Such assistance enhances the tenure and promotion prospects of the next generation of real estate researchers and ensures that their contributions to the real estate body of knowledge will be more valuable. This review article provides inspirational research and publication guidance aimed to enhance academic career success; particularly for new researchers with the opportunity to network within the ARES community of real estate scholars and practicing professionals. In preparation for the twenty-second Annual Meeting of ARES in Key West, Florida, April 19-22, 2006, five highly respected real estate researchers with numerous coauthored papers to their credit, were invited to participate in a panel discussion entitled: ''Creating A Research Network Through ARES.'' Subsequent to this Annual Meeting, each of the five panelists, Don Epley, Jim Webb, Stephen Roulac, Mo Rodriguez, and Graeme Newell, along with the panel's chair, Chris Manning, and the editor of the Journal of Real Estate Literature, John McDonald, was asked to provide advice and insights for a successful career in real estate research and publication. These people possessing varied academic and industry experience and having diverse interests, temperaments, and lifestyles, were further asked to tailor their advice and insights for those early in an academic career pursuing tenure and promotion, but also wanting to make important contributions to the real estate field while taking advantage of the networking opportunities available to them through ARES. Based upon many personal publishing successes, these people independently offer advice and insights for achieving a successful academic career. The topics covered include (1) research, writing, planning, and execution; (2) evaluating institutional promotion and tenure requirements; (3) self-assessment of personal interests, talents, and abilities for doing real estate research, writing, and publication; (4) networking strategies and methods; (5) international collaboration; (6) selecting relevant ''real world'' issues for academic research; (7) selection of co-authors; (8) targeting different types of journals; and (9) manuscript submission and review process strategies. More importantly, these people explain how they make their lives enjoyable and satisfying while working hard to achieve high levels of recognition as real estate thought leaders and widely published authors. Each person begins with a brief summary of their past contributions to further the real estate body of knowledge. While a number of useful articles have been published in the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education to help academics improve their teaching performance (Butler, Guntermann, and Wolverton, 1998; Achour-Fisher, 1999; Anderson, Loviscek, and Webb, 2000; Allen and Kaighobadi, 2001; Gibler, 2001; Manning and Roulac, 2001; Manning, 2002; Born, 2003; Gibler and Nelson, 2003; Wolverton and Wolverton, 2003; and Weaver and Michelson, 2004), very few, if any, articles have been published that offer research or publication guidance to help new faculty researchers achieve greater publication recognition and career success. …


Abstract The central aim of this research is to examine the entrepreneur's perception of strategic management in a study of fast growth medium-sized organizations. The literature on strategic management styles is reviewed to develop research propositions. The propositions are then evaluated through an analysis of in-depth interviews with owner-manager entrepreneurs in France and Germany. The findings are that entrepreneurs in these fast growth medium-sized firms adopt hybrid styles of strategic management - a synthesis of entrepreneurial, adaptive, small and large firm characteristics. However, an enduring characteristic of all of the firms is retention of the attributes of entrepreneurial orientation at the core of the strategic management style. Even though there are common patterns due to personal preferences, attitudes and organizational influences, each firm has an individual and particular strategic management style. The research findings provide further evidence to challenge the accepted management ideas of appropriate and standardized organizational structures and styles, with implications for management practice and research in firms undergoing fast growth.


An important step in the more efficient use of PICA (Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator) as a Thermal Protection System (TPS) material for spacecraft is the understanding of its pyrolysis mechanics. The gases released during pyrolysis and their subsequent interaction with the reactive plasma environment is not yet well understood. The surface recession of PICA as it ablates during testing only makes the study and characterization of the chemical reactions more difficult. To this end, a probe has been designed for this study to simulate, in steady state, the pyrolysis gases within the UVM 30kW Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) Torch Facility. This probe, which is an extension of previous work done at UVM, has been used to inject Carbon Dioxide, Hydrogen, and a mixture of the two into pure Argon and dilute Nitrogen, Oxygen, and air plasmas. During testing, spatially resolved, pointwise, line of sight emission measurements were taken in the boundary layer region. These results were then compared to temporally resolved PICA emission data taken in a previous study. After the correct temporal PICA scan was found the data sets closely matched. This indicates that the gas-injection probe is a viable method to simulate pyrolysis in a steady state environment. The key pyrolysis species of CN, NH, OH, Hydrogen Alpha (Hα), and Hydrogen Beta (Hβ) were spatially traced along the stagnation line for the pure Hydrogen and mixture injection cases. These measurements show evidence of spatial relationships between NH and Hα as well as between OH and Hβ. They also show that all of the molecules tend to follow the same general trend spatially. The work done for this study has both reintegrated gas-injection capability into the UVM facility as well as laid the groundwork for future gas-injection testing within the facility. Spatial emission analysis techniques currently being developed at UVM will provide a more resolved picture of the interactions occurring in the boundary layer once completed.


Current speech enhancement techniques operate on the spectral domain and/or exploit some higher-level feature. The majority of them tackle a limited number of noise conditions and rely on first-order statistics. To circumvent these issues, deep networks are being increasingly used, thanks to their ability to learn complex functions from large example sets. In this work, we propose the use of generative adversarial networks for speech enhancement. In contrast to current techniques, we operate at the waveform level, training the model end-to-end, and incorporate 28 speakers and 40 different noise conditions into the same model, such that model parameters are shared across them. We evaluate the proposed model using an independent, unseen test set with two speakers and 20 alternative noise conditions. The enhanced samples confirm the viability of the proposed model, and both objective and subjective evaluations confirm the effectiveness of it. With that, we open the exploration of generative architectures for speech enhancement, which may progressively incorporate further speech-centric design choices to improve their performance.


In contrast to a traditional mechanical car, the Smart Car is a highly computerized automobile featuring ubiquitous computing, intuitive human-computer interaction and an open application platform. In this paper, we propose an advanced Smart Car demonstration platform with a transparent windshield display and various motion sensors where drivers can manipulate a variety of car-appropriate applications in augmented reality. Similar to smartphones, drivers can customize their Smart Car through free downloads of car-appropriate applications according to their needs. Additionally, three potential car-appropriate applications related to computer vision are investigated and implemented in our platform for increased driving safety. The first and second carappropriate applications aim to enhance the driving visual field by restoring the low-visibility scenes captured during inclement-weather or nighttime driving conditions to be high-visibility ones, respectively, and display them on a transparent windshield display. We also survey pedestrian tracking techniques that combine multiple driving recorders' information as a mobile surveillance network, including one proposed framework we have developed as the third car-appropriate application. By embedding these carappropriate applications, the Smart Car has the potential to increase safety of driving conditions both in daytime and nighttime, even in bad weather.


BackgroundAmong survivors of acute myocardial infarction, frequent and repetitive ventricular premature depolarizations (VPDs) detected on ambulatory monitoring contribute independently to the risk of all-cause mortality and sudden death. Apart from the P-blockers, no antiarrhythmic drug has been reliably demonstrated to reduce mortality among patients with VPDs. A pilot study was undertaken to gather data to aid in the design of a multicenter trial of amiodarone for the reduction of mortality from cardiac arrhythmias in such patients. Methods and ResultsSeventy-seven patients with acute myocardial infarction within the previous 6–30 days and 10 or more VPDs/hr or one or more runs of ventricular tachycardia on 24-hour electrocardiographic recording were randomized in a double-blind fashion in a 2:1 amiodarone-to-placebo ratio. The loading dose was 10 mg/kg/day for 3 weeks. The maintenance dose was 300–400 mg/day with reductions at 4-month intervals in response to VPD suppression, excessive plasma levels, or toxicity. VPD suppression at 1 week and 2 weeks was 63% and 85%, respectively, on amiodarone and 17% and 27%, respectively, on placebo. Apart from thyroid-stimulating hormone elevation and skin reactions, no side effects occurred more frequently with amiodarone. The study drug was stopped for side effects or noncompliance in 35% of amiodarone patients and 34% of placebo patients. Patients were followed for a maximum of 2 years (mean, 20 months). Arrhythmic death or resuscitated ventricular fibrillation Occurred in two of 48 amiodarone patients (6%) and four of 29 placebo patients (14%), whereas the rates of all-cause mortality were five of 48 (10%) and six of 29 (21%), respectively. ConclusionsAmiodarone, in moderate loading and maintenance dosages with adjustments in response to plasma levels, VPD suppression, and side effects, results in effective VPD suppression and acceptable levels of toxicity.


On 7 th November 2007 the UK Critical Sexology seminar series (www.criticalsexology.org.uk) hosted a one day event focusing on international perspectives on bisexuality. This seminar drew together academics and activists from several different countries and disciplinary approaches, most of whom were informed, to some extent, by queer theory. As part of the day we chaired a discussion considering the potentials and pitfalls of bringing together queer theory and bisexuality research, and the links between these issues and the agendas of queer/bi activism. This article reports on the main themes emerging from this debate and discusses them in relation to wider writing on queer theory and bisexuality. One specific tension that emerged was the usage of the word 'queer' and what this meant to participants. Another was the tension between a bi identity politics agenda of giving a voice to a largely silenced sexuality and a queer agenda of challenging dichotomous understandings of sexuality and gender. It is clear, from the discussion and other work in this area, that rather than polarising this as an either/or debate, it is more productive to consider the possibilities of both/and conceptualisations and to view this as a creative tension. In this paper we explore these possibilities in depth, considering the way queer theory can open up multiple and fluid sexual, gendered and self experiences, whilst remembering the lived experience many have of fixed identities and the importance of these for achieving visibility. We also explore the links between academic research and theory, and real-world practice.


Abstract Sedimentary basins developed along the European margin during the earliest, Permian, stage of proto-Atlantic rifting, during a phase of high heat flow. The proximity of some basins to Caledonian thrusts has implied that rifts locally utilized the basement fabric. New mineralogical and palaeomagnetic data show that thrust planes in the Moine Thrust Zone channelled a pulse of hot fluid in Permian time. The fluids precipitated kaolin in fractures in the thrust zone, and with decreasing intensity away from the zone. The high-temperature polytype dickite is largely confined to major thrust planes. Stable H and O isotope analyses indicate that the parent fluid included meteoric water involved in a hydrothermal system. Coeval hydrothermal hematite has a chemical remanence that dates the fluid pulse as Permian. This is direct evidence for post-orogenic activity in the thrust zone, in which the thrusts vented excess heat during regional crustal extension. The example from the European margin exemplifies the importance of deep-seated structures in the release of heat, and the value of kaolinite polytype mapping as a tool to record anomalous palaeo-heat flow.


Methylprednisolone (MP) is a glucocorticoid that is used as an anti-inflammatory agent to the treat spinal cord injury (SCI). A low molecular weight chitosan was used to synthesize chitosan-MP conjugate, which was used to evaluate the gene therapy, anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effects of MP. The cytotoxicity of chitosan-MP nanoparticles and the transfection efficiency of plasmid DNA were evaluated by MTT and luciferase assays. A chitosan-MP/pDNA complexes was injected into injured spinal cord to evaluate the anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effects of these complexes using terminal deoxynucleotide transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) and ED1 staining, respectively. In addition, to evaluate the distribution of chitosan-MP/pDNA complexes, pβ-gal encapsulated chitosan-MP was injected into the injected site. Cell survival was similar in cells treated with chitosan-MP conjugate and untreated cells. Luciferase expression was higher in cells treated with the chitosan-MP/pDNA than cells treated with the chitosan/pDNA. The chitosan-MP/pDNA complexes also reduced apoptosis and inflammation at the injury site. These results suggest that chitosan-MP conjugation is an effective gene delivery system to treat SCI.


Empirical evidence and microeconomic theory suggest that, in many settings, farm household production and consumption decisions are "non-separable." Non-separability may have important policy implications, including lack of response or threshold effects when incentives change. This paper extends the literature in two ways. First, we develop a non-separable farm household model with transaction costs and endogenous choice of market "regime" (surplus, self-sufficiency, or deficit) for production-consumption items (commodities and factors that are both demanded and supplied by the household). Second, we embed this household model in an economywidecomputable general equilibrium model which is formulated as a mixed-complementarity problem. Simulations with a model based on data for a stylized, low-income, Sub-Saharan African country show that the proposed formulation enhances our ability to analyze the impact of exogenous changes on African farmers.


We construct a framework for measuring economic activity at high frequency, potentially in real time. We use a variety of stock and flow data observed at mixed frequencies (including very high frequencies), and we use a dynamic factor model that permits exact filtering. We illustrate the framework in a prototype empirical example and a simulation study calibrated to the example.


The Politics of Suicide Terrorism Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, by Robert Pape. New York: Random House, 2005. 250 pages. Acknowledgments to p. 252. Appends, to p. 277. Notes to p. 316. Index to p. 335. $25.95. Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism, by Mia Bloom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xvii + 192 pages. Appendix to p. 201. Notes to p. 238. Index to p. 251. $24.95. There is ongoing controversy about how to understand Islamist terrorism against the West. In Dying to Win, Robert Pape argues that Islamic terrorists target the United States and other Western countries in response to Western policies toward Islamic countries, especially stationing Western troops in Islamic countries. His critics, such as Olivier Roy,1 believe that Islamic terrorists are fundamentalists at war with modernity, globalization, and Western culture. In brief, Pape says they hate us for what we do; his critics say they hate us for what we are. This controversy is associated with important practical implications. If Pape is right, removing US troops from Islamic countries will go far toward decreasing terrorism; if his critics are right, compromise will only encourage the fundamentalists in their culture war. In general, liberals like Pape's argument while conservatives don't. The political stakes have brought Pape's book considerable attention, both among scholars and in the mass media, but the data have perhaps not been scrutinized as carefully as the conclusions. Pape makes his argument on the basis of what he believes to be a complete listing of all suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 1994 - a worldwide total of 315 attacks. In general, the perpetrators are not crazy, not particularly deprived, not particularly frustrated in their personal lives. Often they are idealists with above-average prospects, fighting for a cause they see as desperate. Pape argues that the cause is usually to push foreign forces from a homeland, in other words, that it is nationalism that motivates suicide terrorism. In this view, even al-Qa'ida is not really fighting about religion but about pushing the United States and its allies from Muslim countries. Pape believes that suicide terrorism is increasing because it works. In his accounting, 301 of the 315 suicide attacks can be fitted into 18 campaigns. Of the 13 of these campaigns he assesses as completed, seven were associated with significant gains for the terrorist side (Hizbullah versus US/France 1983, Hizbullah versus Israel 1983-85, Hamas versus Israel 1994, Hamas versus Israel 1994-95, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE versus Sri Lanka 1993-94, LTTE versus Sri Lanka 2001, Hamas versus Israel 1997). Six of the 13 produced no obvious gains for the terrorists. So terrorism works in the sense that it is associated with gains of the weak against the strong in over half of completed campaigns (7/13). Two questions can be raised about the data. First, why not include attempted but unsuccessful examples of suicide terrorism? Sometimes the perpetrators lose their nerve, sometimes there is technical failure of an explosive device, and sometimes state authorities intervene in time to kill or arrest a perpetrator. Would our picture of suicide terrorism change if attempts were counted as well as successes? Second, how are suicide terrorist attacks attributed to groups and campaigns? Among the 14 attacks not attributed to any campaign ("Isolated Attacks," p. 264) are five 1998-1999 attacks by Hizbullah against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Southern Lebanon. It is not clear why these attacks do not constitute a campaign, which might be counted as successful after the IDF withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000 (although Joshua Sinai believes that conventional attacks rather than suicide attacks forced IDF withdrawal).2 Attributions to al-Qa'ida can also be questioned. Pape groups 21 attacks, between November 1995 and December 2003, as Campaign #14: al-Qa'ida vs. …


Abstract. Assessing coastal vulnerability to climate change at regional scales is now mandatory in France since the adoption of recent laws to support adaptation to climate change. However, there is presently no commonly recognised method to assess accurately how sea level rise will modify coastal processes in the coming decades. Therefore, many assessments of the physical component of coastal vulnerability are presently based on a combined use of data (e.g. digital elevation models, historical shoreline and coastal geomorphology datasets), simple models and expert opinion. In this study, we assess the applicability and usefulness of a multi-criteria decision-mapping method (the analytical hierarchy process, AHP) to map physical coastal vulnerability to erosion and flooding in a structured way. We apply the method in two regions of France: the coastal zones of Languedoc-Roussillon (north-western Mediterranean, France) and the island of La Reunion (south-western Indian Ocean), notably using the regional geological maps. As expected, the results show not only the greater vulnerability of sand spits, estuaries and low-lying areas near to coastal lagoons in both regions, but also that of a thin strip of erodible cliffs exposed to waves in La Reunion. Despite gaps in knowledge and data, the method is found to provide a flexible and transportable framework to represent and aggregate existing knowledge and to support long-term coastal zone planning through the integration of such studies into existing adaptation schemes.


OBJECTIVE
To characterize adiponectin protein complexes in lean and obese horses.

ANIMALS
26 lean horses and 18 obese horses. Procedures-Body condition score (BCS) and serum insulin activity were measured for each horse. Denaturing and native western blot analyses were used to evaluate adiponectin complexes in serum. A human ELISA kit was validated and used to quantify high-molecular weight (HMW) complexes. Correlations between variables were made, and HMW values were compared between groups.

RESULTS
Adiponectin was present as a multimer consisting of HMW (> 720-kDa), low-molecular weight (180-kDa), and trimeric (90-kDa) complexes in serum. All complexes were qualitatively reduced in obese horses versus lean horses, but the percentage of complexes < 250 kDa was higher in obese versus lean horses. High-molecular weight adiponectin concentration measured via ELISA was negatively correlated with serum insulin activity and BCS and was lower in obese horses (mean ± SD, 3.6 ± 3.9 μg/mL), compared with lean horses (8.0 ± 4.6 μg/mL).

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
HMW adiponectin is measurable via ELISA, and concentration is negatively correlated with BCS and serum insulin activity in horses. A greater understanding of the role of adiponectin in equine metabolism will provide insight into the pathophysiology of metabolic disease conditions.


Previously, we have described the development of the generic mobile phone data gathering tool, EpiCollect, and an associated web application, providing two-way communication between multiple data gatherers and a project database. This software only allows data collection on the phone using a single questionnaire form that is tailored to the needs of the user (including a single GPS point and photo per entry), whereas many applications require a more complex structure, allowing users to link a series of forms in a linear or branching hierarchy, along with the addition of any number of media types accessible from smartphones and/or tablet devices (e.g., GPS, photos, videos, sound clips and barcode scanning). A much enhanced version of EpiCollect has been developed (EpiCollect+). The individual data collection forms in EpiCollect+ provide more design complexity than the single form used in EpiCollect, and the software allows the generation of complex data collection projects through the ability to link many forms together in a linear (or branching) hierarchy. Furthermore, EpiCollect+ allows the collection of multiple media types as well as standard text fields, increased data validation and form logic. The entire process of setting up a complex mobile phone data collection project to the specification of a user (project and form definitions) can be undertaken at the EpiCollect+ website using a simple 'drag and drop' procedure, with visualisation of the data gathered using Google Maps and charts at the project website. EpiCollect+ is suitable for situations where multiple users transmit complex data by mobile phone (or other Android devices) to a single project web database and is already being used for a range of field projects, particularly public health projects in sub-Saharan Africa. However, many uses can be envisaged from education, ecology and epidemiology to citizen science.


71 No beekeeper wants their bees to develop infections of Paenibacillus larvae, the bacteria causing American Foulbrood (AFB). It's deemed such a threat that colonies must be destroyed if positive detections are found. In addition, neighboring colonies in an apiary or operation must be quarantined, which can significantly impact beekeepers, especially those who need to move their colonies on a schedule. While few formal surveys have been conducted, it's well-known that some beekeepers prophylactically treat their colonies with antibiotics to ward off AFB. But this practice comes with a cost. Similar to how several antibiotics are losing their efficacy to combat human bacterial diseases due to improper use, antibiotic-resistant strains of AFB have been detected for the past several years, presumably due to the prophylactic treatments applied by beekeepers. In other words, new strains of AFB are evolving that can survive antibiotics, and those strains pose an even larger threat to beekeepers. But what if instead of using prophylactic antibiotics, beekeepers could use prophylactic probiotics to combat AFB? That could be a simple, elegant, and potentially cheap way to protect colonies from AFB while avoiding the development of resistant strains. But is it possible? This is the topic for our twenty-sixth "Notes from the Lab," where we highlight "Novel probiotic approach to counter Paenibacillus larvae infection in honey bees," written by Brendan Daisley and colleagues and published in the ISME Journal (2019). For their study, Daisley and colleagues first took advantage of a fortuitous natural outbreak of AFB in one of their apiaries. (Yes, most beekeepers would consider an AFB outbreak anything but fortuitous, but remember these beekeepers are scientists studying AFB!) Next, they also complemented this observational study with manipulative lab experiments isolating the influence of microbes on P. larvae and larval survival. This combination of field observations and controlled laboratory studies can be an excellent 1-2 punch for advancing scientific knowledge on a topic, in this case the impact of probiotic bacteria on AFB. Specifically, the field experiment followed six colonies, two of which were controls (no treatment), two that were supplemented with vehicle controls (pollen patty and a buffered solution without probiotics), and two of which were supplemented with the probiotic treatment (pollen patty and the buffered solution containing probiotics, which the authors call a BioPatty). The authors cultured three bacteria to make their probiotic BioPatty: Lactobacillus plantarum Lp39, Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1, and Lactobacillus kunkeii BR-1. Previous studies in fruit flies found these three strains of bacteria could improve innate immunity, pesticide detoxification, and protection against harmful microorganisms, hence the interest in these specific bacteria by the researchers. The colonies were administered their respective treatments twice (day 0 and day 7) and nurse bees were collected for later screening on each of these days. Colonies were identified as positive for AFB on day 12 and were thus destroyed on this date as per government regulations after larval samples were collected from the infected hives. The nurse bees and larvae were subsequently tested for differences in bacterial communities depending on whether they were taken from treatment or control colonies. Notes


We posit the problem of an autocrat who has to allocate access to the executive positions in his inner circle and de…ne the career pro…le of his own insiders. Statically, granting access to an executive post to a more experienced subordinate increases political returns to the post, but is more threatening to the leader in case of a coup. Dynamically, the leader monitors the capacity of staging a coup by his subordinates, which grows over time, and the incentives of trading a subordinate's own position for a potential shot at the leadership, which de…nes the incentives of staging a palace coup for each member of the inner circle. We map these theoretical elements into structurally estimable hazard functions of terminations of cabinet ministers for a panel of postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries. The hazard functions initially increase over time, indicating that most government insiders quickly wear out their welcome, and then drop once the minister is fully entrenched in the current regime. Hazard rates are higher in more powerful posts, which are more threatening to the leader, than junior posts and inexperienced leaders are constrained to employ only inexperienced ministers. We argue that the survival concerns of the leader in granting access to his inner circle can cover much ground in explaining the widespread lack of competence of African governments and the vast heterogeneity of political performance between and within these regimes.


Sorties The 78-day United States-led NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo in the Spring of 1999 produced over 3000 bombing sorties and 650,000 refugees. The Old World "moral order" envisioned the bombing as destructive of life and its environs, a necessity to restore coherency and order through technological mastery over catastrophe. Human Rights Watch reported that the bombing campaign deployed a "higher percentage of precision-guided munitions than in any other major conflict in history." Yet Yugoslav civilian, deaths still occurred during Operation Allied Force, during all kinds of weather, with all kinds of bombs, in almost every kind of attack, and on every type of target. [1] In Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, (2000) Michael Ignatieff observes that the war in Kosovo only felt like a war for the Kosovar Albanians and Serbian civilians killed in air strikes. It mobilized civilians as well as spectators; war was calculative rather than visceral. The actual number of Allied combatants was small: 1500 members of a NATO air-crew and 30,000 technicians and staff. [2] The 1999 NATO bombings marked a huge shift from weaponry to computers that military analysts call "the revolution in military affairs" or RMA. General Wesley K. Clark, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, relied on American-supplied intelligence, aircraft and precision ordinance. Ignatieff points out that the bombings were "fought and won by technicians and Clark's team produced a virtuoso display of technical improvisation." [3] Sortie planners at European and stateside airbases used SIPERNET, a U.S. military network, to calculate targets through analysis of aerial reconnaissance, military significance, collateral damage, moral assessment and legal evaluation. [4] Arthur and Marilouise Kroker identify this virtual war as "all about beta-testing: systematic program testing of virtual warriors in their virtual flying machines." [5] The bombings were laboratories for conversion from analog wars of bodies to virtual wars, of imaging and calculation that conceal the racialized phantoms that propels them. [6] In a perverse inversion, this new regime of cyber-civil wars engaged the psychic production of a digitized catastrophe. The NATO campaign targeted th e networks and circuitry of the digital: planes bombed a Serbian television station in late April 1999 and then electrical grids with special graphite ordinances. [7] Amid this perversity where life itself is robbed of its own death, it is impossible to analyze war images as stable, fixed or singular. The images and their imaginaries are multiple, sedimented, mobile, linked. No longer significations, these war images are vectors of movements and interfaces between images and social imaginaries. No longer images, they map nodal points in the invisible digital networks. Pierre Levy has advanced that the art of cyberspace constantly resamples, remixes and remakes images, obliterating the borders between author and reader, creator and interpreter. These mutations in the art and information domains create open works that function more as environments and landscapes than as a message or an image. They blur "distinctions between emission and reception, creation and interpretation." [8] As mediations through images, the 78-day Operation Allied Force excessively fixated in nostalgic historical formations, where phantasmatics of World War II, Vietnam and the Gulf War were imbedded within the images and imaginaries so profusely that they deleted history with a dangerous transparent narrativity. Explanation exceeded words, incomprehensible phantoms etherized history. Psychoanalyzing this trauma, Robert Jay Lifton has shown that "the insight begins with the shattering of prior forms. Because forms have to be shattered for there to be new insight." [9] In the images presented by the transnational media corporations, the fantasy historical was grafted ferociously as a modality of transparency rather than as a modality of agency. …


"Various technologies ranging from standards for data exchange and product / process modeling, to integration through the use of object-oriented technologies, have been experimented and used in order to highlight the benefits of information and communication technologies in the construction domain. In particular, this last decade has seen a tremendous activity in new specifications and developments of standards and architectures for enterprise application integration. Indeed, integration and seamless communication between software applications (proprietary and commercial) are increasingly becoming fundamental issues tackled by a variety of emerging technologies. However, all these latest IT developments didn't have the expected impact on the construction industry. This is due to several factors, including poor investment in construction IT by SMEs, and mismatch between IT innovations and Construction industry needs. In fact, behind the global issue of application integration within the (real or virtual) enterprise, appear a lot of architectural problems (along with the "right" selection of tools, toolboxes and infrastructures) that take a critical dimension in the case of open systems and standard issues.
 The building sector is essentially characterised by its fragmentation, with a high proportion of SMEs involved in the design and build process of Construction projects: this means, from a macroscopic point of view, that designed infrastructures must be adequate to support Extranets and Virtual enterprises. Consequently, the problematic is not only to ensure internal communication between systems as in a single, even large, company, but to provide the required capacity to exchange information and collaborate outside the boundaries of the information systems constituting the IT infrastructure of a company, including means to organise the flow of information and the co-ordination of tasks. To address the issues of communication and interoperability, several routes have been explored and are still under development: after an initial phase related to bulk exchange of documents, middleware has become the focus, with investigations around CORBA or DCOM (for middleware-oriented application integration), and MOM (for the routing and formatting "on-the-fly" of messages). More recently, new architectures have been suggested, especially the now well-known 3-Tier based architecture and application servers (Client desktop – middle-tier Web or application server – DBMS/persistent storage). Eventually, technologies dedicated to the Web has risen, particularly the XML technology, and Java-oriented technologies like JSP and servlets.
 Driven by the identification of intra- and inter-company business processes and information / process requirements of the Construction domain, and also on case studies and experiments conducted in previous European projects, including VEGA, GENIAL and CONDOR, this paper proposes a survey and first evaluation of open Internet-oriented technology and standards for use in open dynamic virtual environments, and analyses the potential usefulness of some current technologies, specifically MOM, CORBA, XML, and application servers (for the handling of business objects). The paper also highlights the benefits of using XML, as a technology for flexible and dynamic representation of complex objects (including documents) and their stream-based interchange, along with distributed object frameworks such as CORBA for remote access to data. Finally, the paper concentrates on the need related to the design of an infrastructure for application integration and tasks collaboration, and elaborates on how recent IT fit into architectures required for the specific needs and peculiarities of the construction industry.

 1. Message Oriented Middleware.
 2. Java Server Pages.
 3. This work is realised in the scope of the OSMOS European project: Open System for inter-enterprise information Management in dynamic virtual envirOnmentS, IST-1999-10491 project."


 This preliminary study aims at examining the major policy issues regarding the formation of a Greek Citation Index. The National Documentation Centre in 2011 has undertaken the task and it is at the stage of establishing policies and setting the goals, the parameters and the collaborations for the currying out of the project. The study examines issues such as: a. the selection of humanities and social sciences as a start of point for the citation index, b. the need to set the goals and objectives of the index in view of the use of impact factor for the assessment of academics and the issues arising from such practices c. the comparison of international to national production of citation indices d. the mechanism needed to establish policies regarding the use of standards, selection of material, the compliance with repository policies and open access practices e. the need to assess the situation within the framework of language (and alphabet) differences, demographics and audience, scientific production within the need to make Greek scientific publications available to the international scientific community and finally f. the decision regarding the creation of an independent national citation index or incorporate it as a part of one of the international citation indices (ERIH, Web of Science, Scopus)


Background: In an effort to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of clinical cervical spine instability (CCSI) and chronic neck pain, we investigated the role of proliferative injection Prolotherapy in the reduction of pain and recovery of constitutional and neurological symptoms associated with increased intervertebral motion, structural deformity and irritation of nerve roots. Methods: For this retrospective case series, 21 study participants were selected from patients seen for the primary complaint of cervicalgia. Following a series of proliferative injections, performed in a private sub-specialty pain clinic, patient-reported assessments were measured using questionnaire data, including range of motion (ROM), crunching, stiffness, pain level, numbness, and exercise ability, between 1 and 39 months post-treatment (mean = 24 months). All patients signed a consent form prior to treatment. Results: 95 percent of patients reported that Prolotherapy met their expectations in regards to pain relief and functionality. Significant reductions in pain at rest, during normal activity, and during exercise were reported. A mean of 86 percent of patients reported overall sustained improvement, while 33 percent reported complete functional recovery. 31 percent of patients reported complete relief of all recorded symptoms. No adverse events were reported. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate statistically significant reductions in pain and functionality, indicating the safety and viability of Prolotherapy for cervical spine instability. Such clinical efficacy of this procedure warrants further investigation as a non-invasive treatment option.


This PhD thesis presents the benefits and importance of using multimedia in the math classes using selected examples of multimedia lessons from isometric transformations, regular polyhedral and definite integral. The research presented in the thesis was carried out among 150 first year students of the Faculty of Architecture, the Faculty of Civil Construction Management and the Faculty of Entrepreneurial Business of the UNION "Nikola Tesla" University, Belgrade, Serbia. Each group of 50 students was divided into two equal groups of students, one of which had the traditional lectures, while the other one had the interactive multimedia lessons. All three topics were presented to students of the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Civil Construction Management while only definitive integral was presented to students of the Faculty of Entrepreneurial Business. The main source of information in multimedia lectures were the software's created in Macromedia Flash, with the same definitions, theorems, examples and tasks as well as in traditional lectures but with emphasized visualization possibilities, animations, illustrations, etc. Both groups were tested after the lectures. In the multimedia groups students showed better theoretical, practical and visual knowledge. Besides that, survey carried out at the end of the research clearly showed that students from multimedia groups were highly interested in interactive multimedia learning.


In spite of growing frequency and sophistication of attacks two factor authentication schemes have seen very limited adoption in the US, and passwords remain the single factor of authentication for most bank and brokerage accounts. Clearly the cost benefit analysis is not as strongly in favor of two factor as we might imagine. Upgrading from passwords to a two factor authentication system usually involves a large engineering effort, a discontinuity of user experience and a hard key management problem. In this paper we describe a system to convert a legacy password authentication server into a two factor system. The existing password system is untouched, but is cascaded with a new server that verifies possession of a smartphone device. No alteration, patching or updates to the legacy system is necessary. There are now two alternative authentication paths: one using passwords alone, and a second using passwords and possession of the trusted device. The bank can leave the password authentication path available while users migrate to the two factor scheme. Once migration is complete the password-only path can be severed. We have implemented the system and carried out two factor authentication against real accounts at several major banks.


Given a weighted graph with profits associated with the vertices, the selective travelling salesman problem (or orienteering problem) consists of selecting a simple circuit of maximal total profit, whose length does not exceed a prespecified bound. This paper provides integer linear programming formulations for the problem. Upper and lower bounds are then derived and embedded in exact enumerative algorithms. Computational results are reported.


It is hard to find consensus on questions of statutory interpretation. Debates rage on about the appropriate goals of interpretation and the best means of achieving those ends. Yet there is widespread agreement, even among traditional combatants on the statutory interpretation field, when it comes to so-called "common-law statutes." Textualists concede that text is not controlling; originalists admit that judicial construction of common-law statutes need not be keyed to the specific intent of the enacting Congress; and staunch defenders of strict statutory stare decisis allow frequent departures from precedent.So what are common-law statutes? It is easy enough to name a few, and courts and commentators often do. The list always begins with the Sherman Act, and typically includes Section 1983, the Taft-Hartley Act, and statutory provisions on securities fraud. In the realm of intellectual property, scholars have argued that many of the major enactments make the cut. What is missing is any clear conception of what defines this special category, uniting common-law statutes and distinguishing them from the rest. The relevant case law and commentary reveal two features that are thought to qualify statutes like the Sherman Act for special treatment: Such statutes are written in broad terms and build on a tradition of common-lawmaking. In this Chapter, I argue that neither of the proposed distinctions is persuasive, as the relevant features are shared by many other statutes that do not appear on the privileged list. Any differences are in degree, not in kind.Of course, it is hardly uncommon for the law to mistake points on a continuum for separate categories, and the "common-law" label may serve as an easy — if mildly inaccurate — shorthand for the group of statutes that actively embrace lawmaking by courts. I hope to show, however, that the label is not so benign. Instead, the continuing fiction that there is a categorical difference between common-law statutes and "normal" statutes like, say, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, works to obscure the difficult line-drawing problems that interpreters otherwise would have to confront. If statutes like the Sherman Act and Title VII coexist on a scale of statutory vagueness, it is a mistake to suggest that questions of interpretive methodology switch on and off in an automatic fashion depending on whether the statute at hand is a common-law statute.An additional problem with the "common-law" label is that it diverts attention away from significant questions concerning delegations of lawmaking power to the judiciary. How should the legal system identify such delegations? When are they a good idea, and when should Congress rely on agencies instead? The notion that delegations to courts can be identified, and justified, simply by drawing an analogy to the Sherman Act conceals those issues from view. But once the label is peeled back, it becomes clear that our current treatment of common-law statutes raises more questions than it answers about delegations to courts.


One of the most common measurement errors and the most difficult to identify in natural gas metering systems is that caused by pulsating flow. It is important to understand the effects that pulsations have on the common types of flow meters used in the gas industry so that potential error-producing mechanisms can be identified and avoided. It is also essential to understand pulsation control techniques for mitigating pulsation effects. This paper describes the effects of pulsation on orifice, turbine, ultrasonic, and other flow meter types. It also presents basic methods for mitigating pulsation effects at meter installations, including a specific procedure for designing acoustic filters that can isolate a flow meter from the source of pulsation.


Virtualization allows computer users to utilize their resources more efficiently and effectively. Operating system that runs on top of the Virtual Machine or Hypervisor is called guest OS. The Virtual Machine is an abstraction of the real physical machine. The main aim of this thesis work was to analyze different kinds of virtualization software packages and to investigate their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, we analyzed the performance of the virtual software packages with a real operating system in terms of web services. Web Servers play an important role on the Internet. The response time and throughput for a web server are different for different virtualization software packages and between a real host and a virtual host. In this thesis, we analyzed the web server performance on Linux. We compared the throughput for three different virtualization software packages (VMware, QEMU, and Virtual Box). The performance results clearly indicate that the real machine performance is better than the performance of the virtual machines. VMware has the better performance compared to other virtual software packages.


Instruction-set simulators allow programmers a detailed level of insight into, and control over, the execution of a program, including parallel programs and operating systems. In principle, instruction set simulation can model any target computer and gather any statistic. Furthermore, such simulators are usually portable, independent of compiler tools, and deterministic-allowing bugs to be recreated or measurements repeated. Though often viewed as being too slow for use as a general programming tool, in the last several years their performance has improved considerably. We describe SIMICS, an instruction set simulator of SPARC-based multiprocessors developed at SICS, in its role as a general programming tool. We discuss some of the benefits of using a tool such as SIMICS to support various tasks in software engineering, including debugging, testing, analysis, and performance tuning. We present in some detail two test cases, where we''ve used SimICS to support analysis and performance tuning of two applications, Penny and EQNTOTT. This work resulted in improved parallelism in, and understanding of, Penny, as well as a performance improvement for EQNTOTT of over a magnitude. We also present some early work on analyzing SPARC/Linux, demonstrating the ability of tools like SimICS to analyze operating systems. (NOTE: A later version of this report was published in ILPS''97)


In this study of the manner in which medieval nuns lived, Penelope Johnson challenges facile stereotypes of nuns living passively under monastic rule, finding instead that collectively they were empowered by their communal privileges and status to think and act without many of the subordinate attitudes of secular women. In the words of one abbess comparing nuns with monks, they were "different as to their sex but equal in their monastic profession." Johnson researched more than two dozen nunneries in northern France from the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, balancing a qualitative reading of medieval monastic documents with a quantitative analysis of a lengthy thirteenth-century visitation record which allows an important comparison of nuns and monks. A fascinating look at the world of medieval spirituality, this work enriches our understanding of women's role in premodern Europe and in church history.


Keith Davidson An examination of the extent to which educational leadership and management principles are practiced in a sample London schools, with reference to the effectiveness of the OFSTED model. The Education Reform Act (ERA) 1988, introduced major reforms to the education service. Since then education has remained an important national issue, in a climate that focuses on an ongoing drive to raise educational standards. Thus, this study has directed its attention to an examination of the contributions inspection has made to school improvement and the development and effectiveness of leadership/management practices in a sample of London schools. The research employed a methodology involving elements of documentary analysis, a questionnaire survey and three case study schools. This was against the background of a wide-ranging literature review, covering: theories in leadership; developments in educational management and school improvement; and the OFSTED inspection system. The findings from the study indicate that schools were better at developing school policies, but less successful in implementing them. Headteachers were less proactive in building and expanding leadership amongst colleagues. Headteachers perceived themselves to be mainly leaders and less as managers, and will vary their leadership style to reflect the prevailing situation. The study also demonstrates that the OFSTED inspection system functions well in describing headteachers' behaviour, but appears inadequate in shaping headteachers' approach and leadership style. In addition, the findings show that the schools judged to have had effective overall leadership was the outcome of good leadership development strategies by headteachers. Allied to this is the observation that the low performing schools that were now improving were doing so as a result of the impact of positive and purposeful leadership. The study also confirms that while inspection appears to be a catalyst for educational change and reform, school improvement was ultimately the product of direct leadership initiatives. Finally, the study proposes that while headteachers should consider themselves firstly and essentially leaders, nevertheless, they should recognise the importance of ensuring and developing effective management practices in their schools. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that headteachers should be trained by OFSTED to conduct and develop systematic school reviews and self-evaluation programmes. Schools would also be required to submit annual self-evaluation returns to OFSTED to be part of the data base on which the chief inspector's annual report is derived. This would allow OFSTED more quality time to assist weak schools in building sustainable strategies for school improvement.


The Ubichip is a reconfigurable digital circuit with special bio-inspired mechanisms that supports dynamic partial reconfigurability in a flexible and efficient way. This paper presents an adaptive size neural network model with incremental learning that exploits these capabilities by creating new neurons and connections whenever it is needed and by destroying them when they are not used during some time. This neural network, composed of a perception layer and an action layer, is validated on a robot simulator, where neurons are created under the presence of new perceptions. Furthermore, links between perceptions and actions are created, reinforced, and destroyed following a Hebbian approach. In this way, the neural controller creates a model of its specific environment, and learns how to behave in it. The neural controller is also able to adapt to a new environment by forgetting previously unused knowledge, freeing thus hardware resources.We present some results about the neural controller and how it manages to characterize some specific environments by exploiting the dynamic hardware topology support offered by the ubichip.


Robert Abbott Hadfield, head of the great steel firm bearing his name, died at his house on Kingston Hill on 30 September 1940, in his eighty-second year. He was born at Attercliffe, then still a village, on 28 November 1858, and came of a Derbyshire family which had long been connected with Sheffield. His father, Robert Hadfield, who had gained experience in several branches of the steel industry, at that time carried on on a small scale, in 1872 set up a works with the special object of making steel castings, then a novelty in this country, although practised on the Continent. The enterprise was considered rather rash, on account of a general belief that steel must be forged before it could acquire such mechanical properties as to make it a trustworthy material, but it proved very successful, and the castings, which included such large objects as hydraulic cylinders, showing a great saving of weight over cast iron, gained medals at several international exhibitions. The firm also produced steel projectiles, which until then had only been manufactured in France. Robert Hadfield declined to buy foreign patents for these, and developed their production independently, thus laying the foundation of what was to become one of the leading armament firms. His son attended the Collegiate School in Sheffield, and was taught chemistry by William Baker, whose lecture demonstrations seem to have attracted him. His interest in science was stimulated by reading Pepper's Playbook of Science and Playbook of Metals, two excellent books which must have influenced the careers of many boys.


This report describes the results of laboratory experiments in which concrete reinforcing steel of various sizes was "cold" and "hot" bent under different conditions and was subsquently straightened. The bent/straightened steel was inspected for cracking and tested in tension for strength and ductility. The laboratory data were analyzed to determine the conditions that may cause reinforcing bars to crack during bending/straightening operations, or that may render the engineering properties of bars unsuitable for reinforcing the concrete. The results of those analyses were used to propose standard specifications for bending/straightening reinforcing bars, for WSDOT's considerations.


This is a preliminary report on a self-applicable online partial evaluator for a flowchart language with recursive calls. Self-application of the partial evaluator yields generating extensions that are as efficient as those reported in the literature for offline partial evaluation. This result is remarkable because partial evaluation folklore has indicated that online partial evaluation techniques unavoidably lead to overgeneralized generating extensions. The purpose of this paper is not to argue which line of partial evaluation is better, but to show how the problem can be solved by recursive polyvariant specialization. The online partial evaluator, its techniques and implementation, are presented in a complete way. Full self-application according to the Futamura projections is demonstrated.


Context. Using Chandra observations we identified a sample of seven off-nuclear X-ray sources in the redshift range z = 0.072–0.283, located within optically bright galaxies in the COSMOS Survey. All of them, if associated with their closest bright galaxy, would have L[0.5–7 keV] > 10^(39) erg s^(-1) and therefore can be classified as ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs).

Aims. Using the multi-wavelength coverage available in the COSMOS field, we studied the properties of the host galaxies of these ULXs. In detail, we derived their star formation rate from Hα measurements and their stellar masses using SED fitting techniques with the aim to compute the probability to have an off-nuclear source based on the host galaxy properties. We divided the host galaxies in different morphological classes with the available ACS/HST imaging.

Methods. We selected off-nuclear candidates with the following criteria: 1) the distance between the X-ray and the optical centroid has to be larger than 0.9", larger than 1.8 times the radius of the Chandra positional error circle and smaller than the Petrosian radius of the host galaxy; 2) the optical counterpart is a bright galaxy (R_(AB) < 22); 3) the redshift of the counterpart is lower than z = 0.3; 4) the source has been observed in at least one Chandra pointing at an off-axis angle smaller than 5'; 5) the X-ray positional error is smaller than 0.8". We verified each candidate super-imposing the X-ray contours on the optical/IR images. We expect less than one misidentified AGN due to astrometric errors and on average 1.3 serendipitous background source matches.

Results. We find that our ULXs candidates are located in regions of the SFR versus plane where one or more off-nuclear detectable sources are expected. From a morphological analysis of the ACS imaging and the use of rest-frame colours, we find that our ULXs are hosted both in late and early type galaxies. Finally, we find that the fraction of galaxies hosting a ULX ranges from ≈0.5% to ≈0.2% going from L_(0.5-2 keV) = 3 × 10^(39) erg s^(-1) to L_(0.5-2 keV) = 2 × 10^(40) erg s^(-1).


Besides that, Africa Natural Resources Institute (ANRI) is delighted to host the 3rd edition of the high level conference on minerals and petroleum at a continental level following the unquestionable success of the second focusing on African Great Lakes Extractive Industry amidst of ongoing climate change challenges. This confirms the importance of ANRI's contribution to the development of these long term untapped resources which show promising growth prospects to the continent. As development plans match a head for oil production in kenya, Uganda, with huge gas investment in Tanzania and Mozambique on addition to already producing countries like Nigeria, Angola, this has made the continent to attractive to international oil companies. In order to realize the potential of extractive industry and other opportunities related to the sector and associated challenges, there is a great need to address them in start as a precursor for good planning to ensure effective exploitation and benefit maximisation.


The interest in magnesium based alloys as structural metal material is due to their low weight, good mechanical and technological properties, high special strength, etc. So magnesium basе alloys сan compete successfully in physical and mechanical characteristics with other light structural materials especially in the fields where decrease in the mass is of primary significance. The aim of the present work was to study the influence of phase and structural changes in the main properties of commercial magnesium basеd alloy MA14 (ZK60 A) under deformation and heat treatment parameters. The microstructure was investigated with the use of an optical inverted microscope. The phase composition was investigated by chemical phase analysis with an X-ray analysis of each insulated phase. It is found, that there are primary phases Mg2Zn3, ZrZn2 and Zr3Zn2. Sometimes phases -ZrH2, -ZrH, Zr2Al can be present in phase composition. All the phases are the hardеning ones. The phase quantity, size, morphology correlate with the condition of the magnesium alloy so traditional deformation and heat treatment has not had much influence on qualitative phase composition; only on the phase and grain size. Now it is stated that the most effective processing for receiving the elevated alloy properties is hydrostatic extrusion. The final operation of hydrostatic extrusion of magnesium alloy semi products causes the well-disposed structure and phase changes. Thus the high strength properties of the cheap commercial magnesium alloy MA14 are obtained: tensile strength is more than 380 MPa; tensile yield strength is more than 340 MPa. Keуwords: magnesium alloy, microstructure evolution, hydrostatic extrusion, high strength properties.


Large document collections can be partitioned into 'topical shards' to facilitate distributed search. In a low-resource search environment only a few of the shards can be searched in parallel. Such a search environment faces two intertwined challenges. First, determining which shards to consult for a given query: shard ranking. Second, how many shards to consult from the ranking: cutoff estimation. In this paper we present a family of three algorithms that address both of these problems. As a basis we employ a commonly used data structure, the central sample index (CSI), to represent the shard contents. Running a query against the CSI yields a flat document ranking that each of our algorithms transforms into a tree structure. A bottom up traversal of the tree is used to infer a ranking of shards and also to estimate a stopping point in this ranking that yields cost-effective selective distributed search. As compared to a state-of-the-art shard ranking approach the proposed algorithms provide substantially higher search efficiency while providing comparable search effectiveness.


The balanced scorecard is one of the most successful, endurable management concepts in recent years. The balanced scorecard is a performance measurement tool developed in 1992 by Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan and management consultant David P. Norton. Kaplan and Norton's research led them to believe that traditional financial measures, such as return on investment, could not provide an accurate picture of a company's performance in the innovative business environment of the 1990s. The balanced scorecard provides a framework for managers to use in linking different types of measurements together. Kaplan and Norton recommend looking at the business from four perspectives: the customer's perspective; an internal business perspective; an innovation and learning perspective; and the financial (or shareholder's) perspective. Using the overall corporate strategy as a guide, managers derive three to five goals related to each perspective. Then they develop specific measures to support each goal.


The thesis is in two main sections.
In the first section, studies on methylarginine processing enzymes are presented.
Dimethyalrginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH) is a class of enzymes involved in
the metabolism of methylarginines ADMA and L-NMMA, which indirectly regulate
physiological nitric oxide levels. It is desirable to inhibit excess NO in pathological
situations, and the arginine mimetic L-257 is a DDAH inhibitor which reduces levels of
NO. Synthesis of ester analogues of L-257 proved to be troublesome with a low
yielding key guanidine forming reaction. However, amide analogues were readily
synthesised, and testing for DDAH inhibition showed the dimethylamide analogue
possessed similar activity to L-257. Further design and synthesis of a 7-membered
cyclic analogue, based on the crystal structure of huDDAH1 with L-257, provided a
novel analogue with no significant inhibition for rat kidney DDAH. Purified and
isolated huDDAH2 protein showed activity after incubation with substrate L-NMMA.
In the second part studies on aldehyde auto-oxidation are presented.
Aldehydes autoxidise to their acids, via an acyl radical, which can undergo addition
reactions with electron-deficient acceptors in a radical hydroacylation reaction. An α-
iodo and α-chloro hexanal failed to autoxidise, however 7-hydroxycitronellal readily
autoxidised and added to pentafluorophenyl(PFP)-vinyl sulfonate. Further studies on
hydroacylation of butanal with PFP-vinyl sulfonate led to functionalised β-ketosulfonates
which undergo elimination to form an enone and can then undergo further
conjugate addition in situ by nucleophiles. Conjugate addition was carried out using
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus nucleophiles, providing a method of obtaining
products which are challenging to make via hydroacylation of electron-rich alkenes.
Decarbonylation of pivaldehyde to the t-butyl radical, via auto-oxidation, was optimised
and the alkyl radical captured by a number of electron-deficient acceptors, providing a
complementary method to current methods of t-butyl addition using metal reagents.


A transcription factor required for gene suppression in regulatory T cells is identified. CD4+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) are critical for keeping our immune system in check: They prevent immune responses from getting out of hand and keep autoimmunity at bay. By activating the expression of some genes and turning off expression of others, the master regulatory transcription factor of Tregs, Foxp3, endows these cells with the appropriate gene expression program to mediate their suppressive effects. Pan et al. now demonstrate that the transcription factor Eos is selectively required for Foxp3-mediated gene suppression in mice. Genes normally suppressed by Foxp3 in Tregs remained "on" when Eos expression was suppressed, whereas genes activated by Foxp3 were unaffected. Treg function was also affected by Eos suppression. With half their genetic program disrupted, these cells resembled an intermediate between Tregs and conventional CD4+ T cells—unable to suppress immune responses properly and partially responsive to T cell–activating stimulation. F. Pan, H. Yu, E. V. Dang, J. Barbi, X. Pan, J. F. Grosso, D. Jinasena, S. M. Sharma, E. M. McCadden, D. Getnet, C. G. Drake, J. O. Liu, M. C. Ostrowski, D. M. Pardoll, Eos mediates Foxp3-dependent gene silencing in CD4+ regulatory T cells. Science 325, 1142–1146 (2009). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The types of workers recruited into teaching and their allocation across classrooms can greatly influence a country's stock of human capital. This paper considers how markets and non-market institutions determine the quantity, wages, skills, and spatial distribution of teachers in developing countries. Schools are a major source of employment in developing countries, particularly for women and professionals. Teacher compensation is also a large share of public budgets. Teacher labor markets in developing countries are likely to grow further as teacher quality becomes a greater focus of education policy, including under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Theoretical approaches to teacher labor markets have emphasized the role of non-market institutions, such as government and unions, and other frictions in teacher employment and wages. The evidence supports the existence and importance of such frictions in how teacher labor markets function. In many countries, large gaps in pay and quality exist between teachers and other professionals; teachers in public and private schools; teachers on permanent and temporary contracts; and teachers in urban and rural areas. Teacher supply increases with wages, though teacher quality does not necessarily increase. However, most evidence comes from studies of short-term effects among existing teachers. Evidence on effects in the long-term, on the supply of new teachers, or on changes in non-pecuniary compensation is scarcer.


Several studies have shown that the ratio of girls to boys has drastically decreased in some countries in the last few decades. China and India are usually cited as countries where the starkest disparities exist. The normal at-birth ratio for boys to girls is 1000 boys to 952 girls. Yet the overall ratio across India is 1000 boys to 943 girls, according to the 2011 census. Many assume that this greater sex ratio gap in India is due to sex selection.Anti-abortion legislators and groups in the United States have pointed to the widespread practice of sex selection in India and have begun to import (often inaccurate) information about India to lobby for, and in many cases successfully enact, state-wide sex selection bans in the United States. Five states have passed sex selection bans; bills are pending to ban sex selection abortion in ten states, and a federal bill has been reintroduced in Congress. Sex selection can be achieved by means other than an abortion, including sperm sorting (which sorts sperm carrying the X and Y chromosomes before artificial insemination is used to implant the sperm of the desired sex) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (whereby embryos are fertilized in vitro, tested for sex, and then implanted into the uterus). However, the statutes that have been enacted and the bills that have been proposed in the United States do not limit pre-implantation sex selection, but only sex selection if it involves aborting a fetus. An analysis of the recent legislative hearings in Arizona and in Congress reveals extensive references to sex selection in India and other countries to support enacting laws in the United States. On the other hand, Illinois (in 1984) and Pennsylvania (in 1989) adopted sex selection bans before this recent legislative push by anti-abortion groups. In analyzing the legislative hearings from those states, I found that supporters of bans in those two states did not use global sex ratio trends or depictions of sex selection abortion in other countries in lobbying to enact those laws. The issue of sex selection is dividing people who consider themselves pro-choice in the United States because equality for women appears on both sides of the argument. On the one hand, one could argue that sex selection should not be permitted because some people may be aborting female fetuses because of a culture of "son preference" that values boys more than girls. On the other hand, prohibiting sex selection constrains women's autonomy over their bodies. The issue of sex selection places women who typically value autonomy rights in a dilemma, causing many to support sex selection bans in the United States or to be agnostic about the issue.Pro-choice groups have typically taken universal positions on sex selection bans — they should not be put into place in the United States, India, or elsewhere. In line with liberal feminist thought, this position gives primary weight to the right to autonomy of the woman without any limitations. Feminists who take universal positions on the issue (i.e., that sex selection abortion should not be banned in any country) may not have engaged with the true reality of the situation in other countries. As a result, they are not able to effectively counter the inaccurate framing and importation of information on sex selection abortion from India. By engaging with the reality and complexities of the situation in India, pro-choice organizations in the United States will be better able to paint a more accurate narrative of sex selection in India. This understanding will also help distinguish the situation in the United States from India more appropriately. I propose a contextualist feminist approach that prioritizes women's equality, but recognizes that if the practice of sex selection is widespread, it likely reflects and perpetuates inequality of women and girls in society. Part 1 of this article provides an overview of the development and use of sex selection abortion in India. Part 2 describes the use of sex selection abortion as part of a legislative strategy to restrict abortion rights by anti-abortion groups in the United States. Part 3 describes how information about what is happening globally is in fact influencing policymaking in the United States. Part 4 provides an overview of some of the main feminist approaches to sex selection. Part 5 develops a framework that uses the lens of women's equality to understand sex selection.


In 150 years, the trends in regional disparities in economic development within Italy have differed depending on whether they are gauged by longitude or by latitude. The disparities between western and eastern regions first widened and then closed; the North-South gap, by contrast, remains the main open problem in the national history of Italy. This work focuses on the underlying causes of the turning points in regional disparities since national unification in 1861. The first came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with the industrialization of the so-called "industrial triangle". This was followed by the "failed new turn" during the interwar years: not only were the beginnings of convergence blocked but the North-South gap, until then still natural, inevitable, was transformed into a fracture of exceptional dimensions. The second turning point, in the twenty years after the World War, produced the first substantial, lasting convergence between southern and northern Italy, powered by rising productivity and structural change in the South. The last turning point was in the mid-1970s, when convergence was abruptly halted and a protracted period of immobility in the disparity began.


We consider approximate Bayesian model choice for model selection problems that involve models whose Fisher information matrices may fail to be invertible along other competing submodels. Such singular models do not obey the regularity conditions underlying the derivation of Schwarz's Bayesian information criterion BIC and the penalty structure in BIC generally does not reflect the frequentist large sample behaviour of the marginal likelihood. Although large sample theory for the marginal likelihood of singular models has been developed recently, the resulting approximations depend on the true parameter value and lead to a paradox of circular reasoning. Guided by examples such as determining the number of components in mixture models, the number of factors in latent factor models or the rank in reduced rank regression, we propose a resolution to this paradox and give a practical extension of BIC for singular model selection problems.


Ideas are at the heart of our politics. They are the means by which people are influenced and mobilised. Australian politics have been shaped by distinctive patterns of political thought from the colonial period to the Rudd government. But how have these patterns arisen? And what have been their effects on shaping what we think is politically possible or desirable? This book is not a survey of theory but an invigorating history of people trying to make sense of their world, fighting to establish the principles governing the way politics is pursued and justifying their own perspectives. What Were They Thinking? is a compelling story of winners and losers, of individuals interpreting and trying to influence their times, and of how ideas and power are linked.


abstract The article analyzes whether and to what extent regional related and unrelated variety matter for the development of green technology, and whether their influence differs over the technology life cycle. Using patent and socioeconomic data on a thirty-year (1980–2009) panel of US states, we find that unrelated variety is a positive predictor of green innovative activities. When unpacked over the life cycle, unrelated variety is the main driver of green technology development in the early stages, while related variety becomes more prominent as the technology enters into maturity.


There is an oft-touted thought, which has perhaps fallen into adage for its authorlessness, that women carry archives in their bodies. It seems a romantic or old-fashioned thought—that bodies can be 'a witness, testament and document' and so are sites of history-making (Schneider, 2019). It is a thought that has been swept aside by an epistemological framework that has come to dominate how it is we know. And so, as a challenge to this, an 'act of love against the foreclosures of reason' (Singh, 2018, p. 29), I went looking for archival bodies.


The paper addresses the cooperation of Europol and Eurojust with external partners in the fight against crime. Like other EU Justice and Home Affairs agencies do within their respective mandates, Europol and Eurojust take part to the EU's efforts to promote and strengthen cooperation with third countries and international organisations in criminal matters, and the tools and expertise they developed make them interesting and valuable partners with whom to cooperate.
Their external activities are essential in the current criminal landscape, marked by the globalisation of crime and the necessity to conduct cross-border investigations and prosecutions involving non-EU countries. The issue also gains a new interest with the perspective of Brexit, as the question arises whether the negotiations on the future EU-UK relationship will allow the United Kingdom to continue to cooperate closely with the two agencies.
The paper discusses the legal framework currently organising the modalities of Europol and Eurojust's external cooperation, which is marked by the revision of their constitutive instruments in order to modernise them, and a move towards the harmonisation of the relevant provisions. The two agencies face two challenges that may limit their external activities: 1) the importance of diversity and variable geometry in their relations with both EU Member States and external partners, and 2) the need to ensure an appropriate balance between efficient cooperation and protection of fundamental rights. Concerning the latter, mechanisms of political and judicial accountability are particularly important to monitor the agencies' external activities and ensure the absence of fundamental rights' violations.


Compliance with traffic signs is one of the most important things to follow to avoid traffic accidents as well as compliance with traffic rules in terms of parking, speed control, and other traffic sings. Progress in different areas, such as self-propelled car manufacturing or the production of devices that help the visually impaired, require values to find a way to determine traffic signals with high precision in this research, The first step is to take a picture of the traffic sign and apply some digital image processing techniques to increase image contrast and eliminate noise in the image, the second step resize of origin image  , the third step convert color to(YCbCr, HSB) or stay on RGB, the fourth step  image is disassembled using  curvelet  transform and get coefficients , and the last step using cuckoo search algorithm to recognition sings traffics ,the MATLAB (2011b) program was used to implement the proposed algorithm . After applying this method to a set of traffic the percentage of discrimination of traffic signs was yellow 93%, green 94%, blue 94.5%, red 96%.


This thesis analyses the reasons why the system of industrial relations on the United Kingdom continental shelf is very different from that which prevails both onshore and on the Norwegian continental shelf, where the same technology is used to produce an identical product. The scopeo f the researche ncompassesth e relationships of the trade unions and the offshore companies, both Norwegian and British, where they concern employment and related matters such as accident prevention and those interventions which govermnents have made in response to particular events. In addition research papers and other reports which have a close bearing on the human resource management of offshore employees have received attention. British trade unions have failed to win full recognition offshore after "first oil" because the oil companies have been determined to exclude them and have exhibited a cohesivenesso f purposei n this respectt hrough their formidable employers' association, UKOOA. By comparison trade union efforts have lacked cohesion on account of internal disputes and the indeterminate position of the IUOOC within the trade union structure. Even the assistance of a friendly disposed government which persuaded the employers to permit recruitment visits offshore has had no effect on membership which remains derisory. Although the Norwegian LO recognised as early as 1975 that a new union for all offshore workers was necessary, the TUC has never shown the same realism. OILC seeks to cater for all UK offshore workers, but survives only as a small independent union outside the STUC. It arose spontaneously in 1989 as a crossunion group of workers who wanted a national offshore agreement but after initial support from the official trade unions was later abandoned by them. There have been some dramatic accidents offshore, none worse than Piper Alpha in 1988 with its 167 fatalities. This has concentrated attention on the maintenance of safe working environments and trade unions have sought, unsuccessfully, to win recognition from the employers by demanding representation on installation safety committees. As the oil industry now implements a programme of cost savings there have been accompanying assertions in some publications that the oil industry's commitment to accident prevention remains secondary to profitability, assertions this thesis finds groundless.


We consider a multi-round auction setting motivated by pay-per-click auctions for Internet advertising. In each round the auctioneer selects an advertiser and shows her ad, which is then either clicked or not. An advertiser derives value from clicks; the value of a click is her private information. Initially, neither the auctioneer nor the advertisers have any information about the likelihood of clicks on the advertisements. The auctioneer's goal is to design a (dominant strategies) truthful mechanism that (approximately) maximizes the social welfare.
 If the advertisers bid their true private values, our problem is equivalent to the multi-armed bandit problem, and thus can be viewed as a strategic version of the latter. In particular, for both problems the quality of an algorithm can be characterized by regret, the difference in social welfare between the algorithm and the benchmark which always selects the same "best" advertisement. We investigate how the design of multi-armed bandit algorithms is affected by the restriction that the resulting mechanism must be truthful. We find that truthful mechanisms have certain strong structural properties -- essentially, they must separate exploration from exploitation -- and they incur much higher regret than the optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms. Moreover, we provide a truthful mechanism which (essentially) matches our lower bound on regret.


Successful implementation of infrastructure projects has been a controversial issue in recent years, particularly in developing countries. This study aims to propose a decision support system (DSS) for the evaluation and prediction of project success while considering sustainability criteria.,To predict sustainable success factor, the study first developed its sustainable success factors and sustainable success criteria. These then formed a decision table. A rough set theory (RST) was then implemented for rules generation. The decision table was used as the input for the rough set, which returned a set of rules as the output. The generated rulesets were then filtered in fuzzy inference system (FIS), before serving as the basis for the DSS. The developed prediction tool was tested and validated by applying data from a real infrastructure project.,The results show that the developed rough set fuzzy method has strong ability in evaluation and prediction of the project success. Hence, the efficacy of the DSS is greatly related to the rule-based system, which applies RST to generate the rules and the result of the FIS was found to be valid via running a case study.,Use of DSS for predicting the sustainable success of the construction projects is gaining progressive interest. Integration of RST and FIS has also been advocated by the seminal literature in terms of developing robust rulesets for impeccable prediction. However, there is no preceding study adopting this integration for predicting project success from the sustainability perspective. The developed system in this study can serve as a tool to assist the decision-makers to dynamically evaluate and predict the success of their own projects based on different sustainability criteria throughout the project life cycle.


The inclination circular liquid jet impingement on a horizontal target smooth plate has been investigated experimentally. The hydrodynamic flow structure of unique nocircular profile due to oblique jet is studied in the present work. The nozzle inclination angle is varied from [30 to 90 from horizontal], while the water flow rate is varied from 2 to 5lpm at constant nozzle-to-target separation distance of 30 mm. The nozzle used during the experiments is of circular shape of 5.5 mm diameter. A circular hydraulic jump symmetrical profile was observed due to normal impinging of free water surface jet, but the radial spreading flow structure due to oblique circular jet was different and the hydrodynamic profile of the jump location having elliptical shape structure. The effect of jet inclination angle and the water flow rate on the dimensionless film thickness and the dimensionless hydraulic jump profile in azimuthal direction. The experimental investigation shows that the thin layer film thickness spreading in radial direction decreases gradually until it reaches its minimum value then increases gradually up to location of hydraulic jump. The results show that for oblique jet impingement the thin layer film thickness is non uniform distribution in azimuthal direction. The experimental results indicate that jet inclination angle has significant effect on dimensionless film thickness and flow structure. The thin liquid film area bounded by the jump increases as the jet inclination angle (with the horizontal) increases, being maximum when the jet impinges normal to the horizontal plate. The area bounded being maximum as jet impinging Experimental Investigation for Hydrodynamic Flow Due to Obliquely Free Circular Water Jet Impinging on Horizontal Flat Plate 61 normally on horizontal plate. The striking difference between the non-circular and circular hydraulic jumps is also considered. Keyword: Inclined jet, hydraulic jump, film thickness, free surface jet


Commentators, including the author of a recent book on the Supreme Court, often attempt to give each Justice a methodological label, such as "practitioner of judicial restraint," "legal realist," "pragmatist," or "originalist." This Essay first demonstrates that none of the first three labels applies without fail to Justice John Paul Stevens; consequently, it explores the extent to which Justice Stevens's jurisprudence paid heed to the fourth method, "originalism." It looks in particular at Justice Stevens's opinions in recent cases involving firearms, national security, and capital punishment. Somewhat at odds with conventional wisdom, the Essay reveals Justice Stevens as a kind of originalist – as a Justice duty-bound to identify and enforce principles, such as liberty and fairness, that the Framers embedded in the Constitution. To do so, Justice Stevens has practiced a fifth methodology, one that synthesizes many sources and interpretive techniques in an effort to reach a decision that serves a contemporary understanding of justice.


A general theory is developed to describe graphene with an arbitrary number of isolated impurities. The theory provides a basis for an efficient numerical analysis of the charge transport and is applied to calculate the Dirac-point conductivity σ of graphene with resonant scatterers. In the case of smooth resonant impurities the symmetry class is identified as DIII and σ grows logarithmically with increasing impurity concentration. For vacancies (or strong on-site potential impurities, class BDI) σ saturates at a constant value that depends on the vacancy distribution among two sublattices.


In fully self-organized MANETs, nodes are naturally reluctant to spend their precious resources forwarding other nodes' packets and are therefore liable to exhibit selfish or sometimes malicious behaviour. This selfishness could potentially lead to network partitioning and network performance degradation. Cooperation enforcement schemes, such as reputation and trust based schemes have been proposed to counteract the issue of selfishness. The sole purpose of these schemes is to ensure selfish nodes bear the consequences of their bad actions. However, malicious nodes can exploit mobility and free identities available to breach the security of these systems and escape punishment or detection. Firstly, in the case of mobility, a malicious node can gain benefit even after having been detected by a reputation-based system, by interacting directly with its source or destination nodes. Secondly, since the lack of infrastructure in MANETs does not suit centralized identity management or centralized Trusted Third Parties, nodes can create zero-cost identities without any restrictions. As a result, a selfish node can easily escape the consequences of whatever misbehaviour it has performed by simply changing identity to clear all its bad history, known as whitewashing. Hence, this makes it difficult to hold malicious nodes accountable for their actions. Finally, a malicious node can concurrently create and control more than one virtual identity to launch an attack, called a Sybil attack. In the context of reputation-based schemes, a Sybil attacker can disrupt the detection accuracy by defaming other good nodes, self-promoting itself or exchanging bogus positive recommendations about one of its quarantined identities. This thesis explores two aspects of direct interactions (DIs), i. e. Dis as a selfish nodes' strategy and Dis produced by inappropriate simulation parameters. In the latter case DIs cause confusion in the results evaluation of reputation-based schemes. We propose a method that uses the service contribution and consumption information to discourage selfish nodes that try to increase their benefit through DIs. We also propose methods that categorize nodes' benefits in order to mitigate the confusion caused in the results evaluation. A novel layered security approach is proposed using proactive and reactive paradigms to counteract whitewashing and Sybil attacks. The proactive paradigm is aimed at removing the advantages that whitewashing can provide by enforcing a non-monetary entry fee per new identity, in the form of cooperation in the network. The results show that this method deters these attackers by reducing their benefits in the network. In the reactive case, we propose a lightweight approach to detect new identities of whitewashers and Sybil attackers on the MAC layer using the 802.11 protocol without using any extra hardware. The experiments show that a signal strength based threshold exists which can help us detect Sybil and whitewashers' identities. Through the help of extensive simulations and real-world testbed experimentations, we are able to demonstrate that our proposed solution detects Sybil or whitewashers' new identities with good accuracy and reduces the benefits of malicious activity even in the presence of mobility.


Visual servoing methods are commonly classified as image-based or position-based, depending on whether image features or the camera position define the signal error in the feedback loop of the control law. Choosing one method over the other gives asymptotic stability of the chosen error but surrenders control over the other. This can lead to system failure if feature points are lost or the robot moves to the end of its reachable space. We present a hybrid switched-system visual servo method that utilizes both image-based and position-based control laws. We prove the stability of a specific, state-based switching scheme and present simulated and experimental results.