Multi-Experiment Studies (MESs) is a type of computational study in which the same simulation software is executed multiple times, and the result of all executions need to be aggregated to obtain useful insight. As computational simulation experiments become increasingly accepted as part of the scientific process, the use of MESs is becoming more wide-spread among scientists and engineers.
MESs present several challenging requirements on the computing system. First, many MESs need constant user monitoring and feedback, requiring simultaneous steering of multiple executions of the simulation code. Second, MESs can comprise of many executions of long-running simulations; the sheer volume of computation can make them prohibitively long to run.
Parallel architecture offer an attractive computing platform for MESs. Low-cost, small-scale desktops employing multi-core chips allow wide-spread dedicated local access to parallel computation power, offering more research groups an opportunity to achieve interactive MESs. Massively-parallel, high-performance computing clusters can afford a level of parallelism never seen before, and present an opportunity to address the problem of computationally intensive MESs.
However, in order to fully leverage the benefits of parallel architectures, the traditional parallel systems' view has to be augmented. Existing parallel computing systems often treat each execution of the software as a black box, and are prevented from viewing an entire computational study as a single entity that must be optimized for.
This dissertation investigates how a parallel system can view MESs as an end-to-end system and leverage the application-specific properties of MESs to address its requirements. In particular, the system can (1) adapt its scheduling decisions to the overall goal of an MES to reduce the needed computation, (2) simultaneously aggregate results from, and disseminate user actions to, multiple executions of the software to enable simultaneous steering, (3) store reusable information across executions of the simulation software to reduce individual run-time, and (4) adapt its resource allocation policies to the MES's properties to improve resource utilization.
Using a test bed system called SimX and four example MESs across different disciplines, this dissertation shows that the application-aware MES-level approach can achieve multi-fold to multiple orders-of-magnitude improvements over the traditional simulation-level approach.


Many human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) researchers focus on the developing new anti-reservoir therapy to eradicate HIV-1 provirus from the HIV-1-infected patients. HIV-1 provirus is the major obstacle for effective HIV-1 treatment because it integrates into the host genome and can produce a virus progeny after stopping highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). We established two novel cell lines latently infected with HIV-1 by limiting dilution cloning of A3.01 cells infected with HIV-1. Analysis of the flanking sequence of HIV-1 proviral DNA integrated into chromosomal cellular DNA revealed that proviral DNA was inserted into different sites of different chromosomes in the two examined cell lines. In these lines, virus reactivation could be induced by a phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) treatment that resulted in a marked increase of the production HIV-1 p24 antigen and appearance of the infectious virus. The novel cell lines latently infected with HIV-1 represent further tool for the study of molecular mechanisms of viral latency and development of anti-reservoir therapy of HIV-1 infection.


Product and labor market deregulation are fundamentally about reducing and redistributing rents, leading economic players to adjust in turn to this new distribution. Thus, even if deregulation eventually proves beneficial, it comes with strong distribution and dynamic effects. The transition may imply the decline of incumbent firms. Unemployment may increase for a while. Real wages may decrease before recovering, and so on. To study these issues, we build a model based on two central assumptions: Monopolistic competition in the goods market, which determines the size of rents; and bargaining in the labor market, which determines the distribution of rents between workers and firms. We then think of product market regulation as determining both the entry costs faced by firms, and the degree of competition between firms. We think of labor market regulation as determining the bargaining power of workers. Having characterized the effects of labor and product market deregulation, we then use our results to study two specific issues. First, to shed light on macroeconomic evolutions in Europe over the last twenty years, in particular on the behavior of the labor share. Second, to look at political economy interactions between product and labor market deregulation.


This book traces Jack Kerouac's 'wild form' within an experimental continuum across the arts."Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form" connects the personal and creative development of the Beat generation's famous icon with cultural changes in postwar America. Michael Hrebeniak asserts that Jack Kerouac's 'wild form' - self-organizing narratives free of literary, grammatical, and syntactical conventions - moves within an experimental continuum across the arts to generate a Dionysian sense of writing as raw process. "Action Writing" highlights how Kerouac made concrete his 1952 intimation of 'something beyond the novel' by assembling ideas from Beat America, modernist poetics, action painting, bebop, and subterranean oral traditions.Geared to scholars and students of American literature, Beat studies, and creative writing, "Action Writing" places Kerouac's writing within the context of the American art scene at midcentury. Reframing the work of Kerouac and the Beat generation within the experimental modernist and postmodernist literary tradition, this probing inquiry offers a direct engagement with the social and cultural history at the foreground of Kerouac's career from the 1940s to the late 1960s.


The purpose of this paper is to discuss the social problem of depression from a multi-theoretical perspective. It explores depression through the lens of two psychologically based theories of human behavior, existential theory and cognitive theory, as well as through the vehicle of two sociological theories, Marxist theory and the theory of oppression. By understanding how each of these theories explains depression, social workers may be helped to see the complexity of treating the problem. It is the belief of the authors that social work literature, which is often dominated by reductionist, quantitatively-based research studies, has increasingly ignored theoretical explorations of key social problems such as depression, to the determent of the profession and the disciplines which inform it. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to discuss the social problem of depression from a multi-theoretical. This work has been undertaken for several reasons. First, each of the four theories presented in this article form a piece of the puzzle for understanding depression as a psychosocial phenomenon. By understanding how each of these theories explains depression, social workers may be helped to see the complexity of treating the problem. Second, the increasing hegemony of psychiatry and privatization in the United States, through the vehicle of managed care, has led to the medicalization of many problems that often have psychosocial etiologies. Thus, other explanations to depression have received little recent interest or articulation. Third, it is the belief of these authors that social work literature, which is often dominated by reductionist, quantitatively- based research studies, has increasingly ignored theoretical explorations of key social problems. This is lamentable, as theoretical scholarship has had an important place in the building of a social work knowledge base. The problem of depression Depression is so prevalent that it has been referred to as the "common cold" of mental illness (Turnbull, 1991). However, unlike the common cold, depression can be fatal, and has been referred to as the world's number one public health problem (Burns, 1980). Social awareness and concern regarding depression can be evidenced by the proliferation of self-help books written on the subject over the past decade (Carrigan, 1997; Greenberger & Padesky, 1995; Larsen, 1989; Katzenstein, 1998; Kramer, 1993; Rosen & Amador, 1996). Since depression is so prevalent, all social workers, regardless of their practice setting and specialization, must be familiar with various aspects of the syndrome. Depression has been a social problem throughout history. The biblical tale of King Saul, and Homer's suicidal character of Ajax depict examples of major depressive disorders (Kaplan & Sadock, 1998). Depression is seen throughout history in literary and medical arenas (Goodwin & Guze, 1996). Freud's conception of depression prevailed for the first half of the twentieth century. While the psychoanalytic view of depression is far more complex and detailed than can be presented here, the perspective stresses unresolved conflicts from the past, locked away in the unconscious, as the main determinant of the disorder. Social workers working from this perspective, the diagnostic school, sought to treat depression by helping their clients uncover and resolve repressed conflicts. The work of Jesse Taft (1933) and the functional school of social work represented a major shift in how depressive moods and other emotional experiences were seen. Taft and the functionalists rejected the notion that emotional problems were the result of unresolved conflicts and intrapsychic pathology. For Taft (1939), emotions were to be accepted and experienced, not changed or blunted. In Taft's conception of maturity and health, the highly functioning individual is able to tolerate a high degree of emotion without reactivity, without the need to "act them out. …


Embedded generation (EG) is the term commonly used to describe generation connected to the distribution network as opposed to the transmission grid. They tend to be smaller in scale and may be linked into the provision of supplies locally. In the past, systems were developed locally often in conjunction with municipalities but advantage was seen in pooling energy sources through the grid. This opened up the opportunity for larger more efficient units to be built of up to 660 MW coupled to local fuel supplies like coal mines or gas pipelines. There were associated economies of scale in higher efficiencies with lower operating costs and fewer support staff. As a result of these developments, many of the distribution networks became passive, without active generation, and radial in structure taking supplies from grid supply points.


Static heat transfer and thermal stress analysis for the new generation quasi-monolithic integration technology (NGQMIT) is presented using a three-dimensional finite element simulator. Effects of different factors and parameters such as the gap between the silicon sidewalls and GaAs-chip (Wg), temperature dependent materials properties, isotropic material properties and backside gold metallization thickness or diamond-filled polyimide are described. It is shown that thermal resistances of 11 °C/W and 8.5 °C/W are possible using 200 µm electroplated gold heat-spreader and diamond-filled polyimide on the backside of the active device, respectively. This promises successful realization of the high frequency circuits containing power active devices using the novel QMIT. In comparison to the earlier fabrication process [1-2], eight times improvement in thermal stress is achieved. This extremely improves lifetime of the packaging. The results of thermal stress simulation are compared with white-light interferomety measurement.


Cooperative Target Tracking Enhanced with the Sequence Memoizer Everett A. Bryan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science Target tracking is an important part of video surveillance from a UAV. Tracking a target in an urban environment can be difficult because of the number of occlusions present in the environment. If multiple UAVs are used to track a target and the target behavior is learned autonomously by the UAV then the task may become easier. This thesis explores the hypothesis that an existing cooperative control algorithm can be enhanced by a language modeling algorithm to improve over time the target tracking performance of one or more ground targets in a dense urban environment. Observations of target behavior are reported to the Sequence Memoizer which uses the observations to create a belief model of future target positions. This belief model is combined with a kinematic belief model and then used in a cooperative auction algorithm for UAV path planning. The results for tracking a single target using the combined belief model outperform other belief models and improve over the duration of the mission. Results from tracking multiple targets indicate that algorithmic enhancements may be needed to find equivalent success. Future target tracking algorithms should involve machine learning to enhance tracking performance.


A wireless sensor network (WSN) deployed to sense an environment should be able to send information as per the requirements of the sink. For this, the sink needs a query language to formulate its needs and fire queries to the network. The queried nodes must be able to process the multiple queries in their limited memory and computational capacity in a time bound manner. In this paper, an XQuery based query processing architecture that satisfies the unique needs of WSN has been proposed and evaluated. Traditional SQL does not satisfy the time limitations, source specificity and node constraints required by a WSN. X-query architecture allows spatial aware queries that can be processed by resource constrained nodes. TOSSIM based simulation of X-query processing is energy efficient and the nodes are able to process multiple queries within a small time period.


ABSTRACT Membrane fusion for morbillivirus cell entry relies on critical interactions between the viral fusion (F) and attachment (H) envelope glycoproteins. Through extensive mutagenesis of an F cavity recently proposed to contribute to F's interaction with the H protein, we identified two neighboring hydrophobic residues responsible for severe F-to-H binding and fusion-triggering deficiencies when they were mutated in combination. Since both residues reside on one side of the F cavity, the data suggest that H binds the F globular head domain sideways.


Antiprejudice norms and attempts to conceal racial bias have made Whites' positive treatment of racial minorities attributionally ambiguous. Although some minorities believe Whites' positivity is genuine, others are suspicious of Whites' motives and believe their kindness is primarily motivated by desires to avoid appearing prejudiced. For those suspicious of Whites' motives, Whites' smiles may paradoxically function as threat cues. To the extent that Whites' smiles cue threat among suspicious minorities, we hypothesized that suspicious minorities would explicitly perceive Whites' smiles as threatening (Study 1), automatically orient to smiling White—as opposed to smiling Black—targets (Study 2), and accurately discriminate between Whites' real and fake smiles (Study 3). These results provide convergent evidence that cues typically associated with acceptance and affiliation ironically function as threat cues among suspicious racial minorities.


A new optical label switching system with coherently detected implicit spectral amplitude code (SAC) labels is proposed in this letter. The implicit SAC labels are recognized using a frequency-swept local light source oscillator. Intensity modulation payloads of 625 Mb/s and 1.25 Gb/s are considered. Label and payload bit error rate (BER) performances are assessed and compared by simulations. The results reveal that, at a BER value of 10^{-9}, -32.4-dBm label received power can be obtained. In addition, 8.3-dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) is obtained when carrying a payload of 625 Mb/s. The label BER value hardly reaches 10^{-9} if the payload bit rate is at 1.25 Gb/s; however, a high payload bit rate only has little influence on received payload quality at a BER value of 10^{-9}. Finally, a payload of 1.25 Gb/s could obtain -28.2 dBm received power and 9.5-dB OSNR.


Prevalence sample-based data should be transmitted from Member States to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) using the EFSA Standard Sample Description version 2 (SSD2) standard. To support reporting countries in data submission using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data transfer, specific guidelines are given in this report covering the reporting of sample-based zoonoses and zoonotic agent data. These guidelines are specifically aimed at guiding the reporting of information under the framework of Directive 2003/99/EC. The objective is to explain in detail the individual data elements that are included in the EFSA (SSD2) data model to be used for the XML prevalence sample based data transmission through the Data Collection Framework according to the protocol described in the EFSA Guidance on Data Exchange (GDE). In particular the data elements to be reported are explained, including information about the data type, a reference to the list of allowed terms and business rules or requirements that may apply.


Kenneth Clark's sweeping narrative looks at how Western Europe evolved in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, to produce the ideas, books, buildings, works of art and great individuals that make up our civilisation. The author takes us from Iona in the ninth century to France in the twelfth, from Florence to Urbino, from Germany to Rome, England, Holland and America. Against these historical backgrounds he sketches an extraordinary cast of characters -- the men and women who gave new energy to civilisation and expanded our understanding of the world and of ourselves. He also highlights the works of genius they produced -- in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, and in science and engineering, from Raphael's School of Athens to the bridges of Brunel.


WindSat, the first polarimetric radiometer on orbit, launched in January 2003, provides the promise of passive ocean wind vector retrievals on a continuous basis, simultaneous with the retrieval of many other geophysical variables such as sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapor, cloud liquid water, and sea ice extent and concentration. WindSat also serves as risk reduction for the upcoming National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Conical Scanning Microwave Imager/Sounder (CMIS). Since the dependence of microwave brightness temperatures on wind direction is small relative to that of other parameters such as wind speed, wind direction retrieval relies on increasingly accurate knowledge of the ocean surface microwave emission, which depends upon surface properties such as roughness and foam due to wave breaking. Coordinated near-surface measurements of ocean surface microwave emission and air-sea interaction parameters are needed to quantify the effects of the processes mentioned above in surface emission models to improve the accuracy of wind vector retrievals. Such coordinated observations were performed during the Fluxes, Air-Sea Interaction, and Remote Sensing (FAIRS) experiment conducted on the R/P Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP) in the northeastern Pacific Ocean during the Fall of 2000. X- and Ka-band partially polarimetric radiometers were mounted at the end of the port boom of R/P FLIP to measure ocean surface emission at incidence angles of 45/spl deg/, 53/spl deg/, and 65/spl deg/. A bore-sighted video camera recorded the fractional area of foam in the field of view of the radiometers. Air-sea interaction parameters that were measured concurrently include wind speed, friction velocity, heat fluxes, and significant wave height. The measured dependence of ocean surface emissivity on wind speed and friction velocity is in good agreement with, and extends, earlier observations and empirical models based on satellite data. Concurrent radiometric measurements and fractional area foam coverage data strengthen the possibility of retrieval of sea surface foam coverage using airborne or spaceborne radiometry. The dependence of emissivity on atmospheric stability is shown to be much smaller than the dependence of emissivity on wind speed. Analysis of emissivity dependence on atmospheric stability alone was inconclusive, due to the variation in atmospheric stability with wind speed. The effect of long-wave incidence angle modulation on sea surface emissivity for near-surface measurements was found to be negligible when emissivity measurements were averaged over tens to hundreds of long waves.


Aion, originally published in German in 1951, is one of the major works of Jung's later years. The central theme of the volume is the symbolic representation of the psychic totality through the concept of the Self, whose traditional historical equivalent is the figure of Christ. Jung demonstrates his thesis by an investigation of the Allegoria Christi, especially the fish symbol, but also of Gnostic and alchemical symbolism, which he treats as phenomena of cultural assimilation. The first four chapters, on the ego, the shadow, and the anima and animus, provide a valuable summation of these key concepts in Jung's system of psychology.


We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup dispersion. Trade liberalisation increases foreign competition and reduces the number of active firms in the market, thereby increasing concentration. A more concentrated economy is more efficient due to increasing returns in production. Moreover, higher concentration produces a scale effect on firms' incentives to innovate, which increases welfare via productivity improvements. In the calibrated version of the model we show that a trade-induced increase in concentration contributes substantially to the gains from trade, mostly via its stimulating effect on innovation. Sizeable gains also come from the reduction of the inefficiency produced by trade in identical goods; i.e. through a reduction in reciprocal dumping. Changes in markup dispersion, in contrast, have only negligible effects. JEL-Codes: F120, F130, O310, O410.


This article presents findings from a survey of professional workers in the institutes of technology sector in Ireland regarding work-related stress. The research instrument was based on a work-related stress questionnaire developed by the UK Health and Safety Executive, augmented with a specific subset of questions relevant to the Irish higher education sector. The questionnaire format was modified to enable online delivery. It was distributed to a sample population in 2014 with a response rate over 30% (n=1,131). The research provides baseline data on work-related stress levels experienced by workers in this sector. The results associate increased levels of risk of work-related stress in circumstances of poor consultation, lack of engagement with staff, excessive workload, demanding task with unrealistic deadlines and lack of support provided by management. Low risk levels were associated with peer support and relationships. Good social relations between workers seem to assist in the alleviation of the risk. The results support established research into work-related stress which claims that developing supportive working environments and work cultures can greatly assist in the reduction of risk levels.


Verb tables are based on the simple sentence, made up of a predicate, its arguments, their actualization and the various transformations the sentence may undergo, all presented in binary table form. What though is the theoretical basis? Since the predicate is determined by the nature of its arguments, the first step is to identify these. An evaluation is then made of the concepts of human and non-human nouns, suggesting that these features are too general or inappropriate for identifying usages, relying too much on syntax and too little on semantics. Yet semantics allows for precise descriptions, providing that different levels are not kept separate, since syntax and semantics are so closely interwoven that it is impossible to separate them.


In this paper, a method is proposed for promoting ICT engineering safety learning from crisis management. The current majority of methodologies for ICT target ICT reliability. However, safety is the upper layer of reliability in terms of a system hierarchy. Therefore, we need more holistic methodologies to realize system safety, and system safety should include human factors. In particular, ICT engineering arena human factors play a crucial role in promoting ICT system safety. The Tokyo stock exchange was crushed on 1 st of November 2005 by an operation error, which had a severe impact on the global . The human factors (operator error, maintenance engineers' error, etc.) cause severe impact to not only ICT systems but also social systems (nuclear plant systems, transportation systems, etc.). A JR West train derailed and overturned on 25 th April 2005 due to driver misconduct caused the loss of 106 passengers' lives at Kyoto in Japan. The progress of ICT technologies (i.e., cloud, virtual and network technology) inevitably shifts ICT systems into complexity with tightly interacting domains. This trend places the human factors above other elements to promote safety more than ever. The emergent property interacting between ICT and human conduct should be dealt with in order to promote system safety. Crisis management treats holistic property over partial component. We introduce a risk management framework to promote a holistic view to manage system failures. An application example of ICT human error exhibits the effectiveness of this methodology.


Relational contracts are key to supply chain collaboration. The literature has focused on the role of trust stemming from prior business with current suppliers. However, the role of expected future business volume on the make-or-buy decision has been relatively neglected. This paper contributes to the literature by examining how the level of expected future business volume affects the make-or-buy decision, that is, the choice to produce the product or service internally rather than to outsource it. Using regression analysis of secondary data from 12,272 construction projects and controlling for endogeneity, our results show that expected future business volume promotes outsourcing and that this impact is larger when the level of prior business with external suppliers is stronger and there is more specificity in the relationship. Our results are consistent with a game theoretic logic in which informally promising future interactions to sustain collaboration is more credible to external suppliers than to internal units because the former can use their assets elsewhere. Also, our results suggest that trust stemming from prior business reinforces the calculativeness logic that stems from the expectation of future business.


When settling their own liabilities and those of their clients, settlement banks rely on incoming payments to fund a part of their outgoing payments. We investigate their behaviour in CHAPS, the United Kingdom's large-value payment system. Our estimates suggest that in normal times, banks increase their payment outflows when their liquidity is above target and immediately following the receipt of payments. We use these estimates to determine the robustness of this payment system to two hypothetical behavioural changes. In the first, a single bank stops sending payments, perhaps because of an operational problem. In the second, it pays out exactly what it previously received, relying exclusively on the liquidity provided by other system members. Using the observed uncertainty around our estimated behavioural equations, we derive probabilistic statements about the time at which the bank's counterparties would run out of liquidity if they followed their estimated normal-time behaviour.


A sourcebook for understanding an uprising that continues to incite historical debate. In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws enacted in its wake, Stono continues to attract scholarly attention as a historical event worthy of study and reinterpretation. Edited by Mark M. Smith, "Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt" introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. Smith has assembled a compendium of materials necessary for an informed examination of the revolt. Primary documents - including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists - offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating incidents of the uprising. To these primary sources Smith adds three divergent interpretations that expand on Peter H. Wood's pioneering study Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Excerpts from works by John K. Thornton, Edward A. Pearson, and Smith himself reveal how historians have used some of the same documents to construct radically different interpretations of the revolt's causes, meaning, and effects.


This paper deals with the problem of mapping hybrid (i.e., both discrete and continuous) constrained optimization problems onto analog networks. The saddle-point paradigm of mean-field methods in statistical physics provides a systematic procedure for finding such a mapping via the notion of effective energy. Specifically, it is shown that within this paradigm, to each closed bounded constraint set is associated a smooth convex potential function. Using the conjugate (or the Legendre-Fenchel transform) of the convex potential, the effective energy can be transformed to yield a cost function that is a natural generalization of the analog Hopfield energy. Descent dynamics and deterministic annealing can then be used to find the global minimum of the original minimization problem. When the conjugate is hard to compute explicitly, it is shown that a minimax dynamics, similar to that of Arrow and Hurwicz in Lagrangian optimization, can be used to find the saddle points of the effective energy. As an illustration of its wide applicability, the effective energy framework is used to derive Hopfield-like energy functions and descent dynamics for two classes of networks previously considered in the literature, winner-take-all networks and rotor networks, even when the cost function of the original optimization problem is not quadratic.


The article reviews the history of freedom of speech in the early American Republic and focuses on two speeches in the House of Representatives, one in the context of the Bill of Rights in 1789 and the other in the context of the Sedition Act in 1798. In the analysis of speeches it is helpful to employ the notion of an informal fallacy. The article offers a definition of the concept and illustrates its application by examining two cases in point, ad socordiam and ad hominem , in the authentic material. An awareness of such fallacious arguments is important to the student of political rhetoric and of any discourse meant to be persuasive.


This paper provides an overview of the Islamic banking system and its product ranges, and examines their ability to meet Corporate Social Responsibility obligations while maintaining efficiency and managing risk. The growing literature on Islamic banking products, including their derivatives indicates that Islamic banking is popular worldwide and has global attention. Similarly, the diversity of banking options is growing in Middle Eastern countries with some banks offering separate windows for conventional and Islamic banking options to customers. Due to the unique nature of Islamic banking, which is constrained not only by the standard operating regulations of the respective countries, but also by Islamic law, the Sharī'ah, there are significant differences in the philosophy behind its finance transactions, the nature of transactions, goals and the obligations between the two types of institutions. Whether these differences lead to changes in risk preferences, lending decision-making processes, and the ultimate efficiency of operations are some of the key empirical questions yet to be fully answered. The paper introduces a theory based on classical utility theory, and then extends it to show its relevance to Islamic banking. In particular this paper shows that Islamic banking may not only improve operating performance, but also increase profitability for all parties concerned.


In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.

Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.

Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive–factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.

A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world.

Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.


'Marx on tax' as an effective antidote to inequality is an overlooked theme within his own output, but also for our own time. Marx theorising on tax is seen even by pre-eminent Marxists as an empty box, but Marx and Engels in fact had plenty to say about tax. Their coverage embraces progressive taxes, both on capital and income, a strong preference for direct over indirect taxation, inheritance tax, land-value tax, taxes on financial transactions, and state finances around the world. Tax also provides the battleground for a rare sight of Marx as campaigning activist, in 1848, matched in the same period by close ally Wilhelm Wolff. The tax policies of Marx and Engels have been neglected because they are primarily to be found in their journalism and letters. They are no anachronistic curiosity but perfectly applicable to the income and wealth inequalities of our own era.


The methods most commonly employed to determine active ingredient content in solid drug formulations involve dissolution of the sample. While these methods are capable of accurate and precise performance, the sample preparation required limits their use in quality-control applications to an occasional sample. There is a need for nondestructive methods capable of rapidly determining the active ingredient content in drug formulations. Spectroscopic methods of analysis have the potential for making the determinations with little or no sample preparation; hence these methods might be applied as at-line product quality monitors. We have investigated the use of diffuse reflectance infrared and Raman spectroscopies for the determination of bucindolol content in solid drug formulations. In experiments on formulations containing 0 to 100 mg of the active ingredient, the standard error of prediction with the use of either spectroscopic method was about 2.0 mg. The Raman spectroscopic method involved virtually no sample preparation, and the spectroscopic data can be collected rapidly; hence Raman spectroscopy shows very good potential as an at-line quality control monitor.


Humans and some animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. This ability has been taken as a demonstration of self-consciousness. Consequently, it has been proposed that the self-recognition in the mirror image, the mirror test, could also be used to determine the potential self-consciousness of cognitive machines. It is shown that very simple machinery is able to pass the mirror test and consequently it is argued that the passing of the mirror test per se does not demonstrate the existence of self-consciousness. Next, the realization of more complex machinery that passes the mirror test and could be considered to possess self-consciousness is outlined.


At the turn of the second millennium AD, Tuckett dubbed Q 22:28–30 an 'exegetical stepchild',given that it has traditionally and commonly received very little attention in Q research. Thisarticle addresses this shortcoming. Specific attention is devoted to the refutation of Horsley'sinfluential claim that, in Q 22:28–30, the verb κρίνοντeς actually means 'liberate' and not'judge'. The discoveries made along the way have significant implications not only for ourunderstanding of this specific Q text, but also for our understanding of the Sayings GospelQ and its people in general. The latter pertains especially to their particular view of the finaljudgement, as well as their relationship to greater Israel. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article refutes the popularclaim that κρίνοντeς in Q 22:28–30 actually means 'liberate' and not 'judge'. The latter hasimplications not only for the interpretation of Q 22:28–30, but also for our understanding ofthe Sayings Gospel Q, its people, the historical Jesus, and the ancient concept of 'judgement'.


The focus of the thesis is the outsourcing of activities in the New Product Development (NPD) process. Outsourcing of NPD refers to the outsourcing of development activities for developing new products (goods and/or service), where all or the innovative part of the NPD process is purchased externally according to a contract from organizational units separate from the outsourcing firm. This definition implies that (A) the activity shall be an innovative part of the NPD process, (B) the activity shall earlier have been conducted internally, and (C) the activity shall be purchased in a contractual agreement between the organizations. The present thesis focuses on outsourcing of NPD in medium sized firms. The framework developed is probably useful for small or large firms as well, but for the three empirical studies presented in the thesis, samples of medium sized firms have been targeted. NPD is a knowledge intense activity that requires ability to handle insecurities and which is very dependent on the individuals involved in the process. That makes it different from production that (especially when producing standard items in large scale) is easier to control, monitor and evaluate costs. Therefore some considerations connected to knowledge acquisition and insecurity need to be addressed. A literature review reveals that research on outsourcing often have a focus on A) Large firms and B) outsourcing of production activities. Also research on NPD often has a focus on large firms, even if we can see that the interest for product development in small and medium sized firms have grown rapidly over the last years. As we can also show that outsourcing of NPD is a frequent method to get access to competence, and to reduce costs and/or insecurity, it can be motivated to study outsourcing of NPD in medium sized firms. The thesis presents a decision framework that is based on three empirical studies (two survey studies and one case study) and a theoretical framework. The theoretical framework presented in the thesis is commonly used to understand outsourcing questions in general, but in the present framework applied in the specific situation of outsourcing a knowledge intense activity (as NPD) in a context of medium sized firms. Theories revisited in the thesis are transactions cost theory, resource based theory, resource dependency theory, knowledge based theory, agency cost theory, and institutional theory. Outsourcing can lead to advantages in form of lower costs, access to knowledge or other resources, or access to markets, but it can also lead to knowledge drain, lower motivation for in-house staff, or an increased level of dependency on external organizations. Therefore the decision to outsource is not always a good decision. The pros and cons must be carefully evaluated. The result of the thesis is a decision framework mapping factors affecting the decisions to make when outsourcing NPD. The implications can be of value for the outsourcing firm as well as for the potential outsourcing partner. The framework has been presented for the firms in the studies and to some extent been of value already. The framework will also be used for the design of the studies hopefully moving towards my PhD degree, with a new survey study and a case study focusing on knowledge integration.


Despite an increasing popularity, the impact and benefits of corporate social computing remain unclear. This paper aims at rigorously studying social computing tools as a new class of technology and provides a holistic definition and characterization. After a comprehensive literature review, we empirically explored the defining attributes and underlying dimensions of social computing as a whole using the multidimensional scaling (MDS) methodology. The study found that 13 representative exemplar tools differ over three dimensions: (i) their ability to support social interactions, social relations, and communities, (ii) their hedonic versus utilitarian focus, and (iii) their ability to support convergence versus conveyance of generated content. A Property Fitting (ProFit) study confirmed the interpretation of the dimensions. This provided a better understanding of this technology and allowed us to better theorize about the expected benefits and impacts of social computing on organizations, to offer guidelines for adoption and provide suggestions for future research.


The objective of this work is to analyse Chapter II of Royal Decree 424/2005, dated 15th April, by which a procedure is regulated to tap electronic communications with the aim of verifying if this practice affects the conditions that limit the essential content of article 18.3 CE. It is concluded that these regulations do not affect article 18.3 CE as refers to the enumeration it includes of the types of data associated to electronic communications that can be legally intervened together with the content thereof. It does, however, mutilate the essential content of article 18.3 CE as refers to the obligation of the judge to determine at least some of such data in the legal tapping order. Inasmuch as the secret of communications is a formal right that limits its content to the possibility of intervene communications by means of a previous judicial resolution detailing the causes thereof, the associated data obtained as a consequence of such an intervention are not protected by article 18.3 CE, but in any case by articles 18.1 and 18.4 CE. This means that once the judicial organ has explicated in its judicial intervention order the objective suspicions of an alleged serious crime as well as the inexistence of other means to prove such a crime that would clarify the alleged criminal conduct that is being investigated, the data obtained as a consequence of such an interception would be protected by article 18.1 CE if that information is revealed to third parties, or by article 18.4 CE if the information is used for other purposes that are different from those for which the tapping was authorised. As a derivation of this, it is also not necessary that organic legislators regulate what data associated to the communications the judges are to mention, as it is necessary to leave a margin of action for the judicial authorities to determine if they believe it is convenient to gather certain associated data mentioned in the regulations, or if a generalised judicial opening of electronic communications is necessary that gathers both the content of the communication as well as data that are associated thereto.


Have you ever wanted to take a holiday from your life? After twenty years of comfortable marriage, and with the kids finally off her hands, Sarah Lewis realises she has filled the washing machine once too often. Surely there must be more to life than this? What she wants is an adventure - a wild, unpredictable adventure - but her husband, good old reliable David, is very happy with the status quo. Besides, he's got his old car to tinker with, when he eventually gets round to it. What Sarah needs is a gap year for grown-ups - and she wants to do it alone. Confident the grass must be greener elsewhere, she heads for France, leaving behind a devastated and resentful David, faced with an empty house and a freezer full of meals for one. But is life really better on the other side of the fence? With a gorgeous French man demanding her company and a renewed joie de vivre, Sarah certainly seems to think so. But then a catastrophe threatens to derail much more than Sarah's little adventure. Pretty soon, she begins to wonder whether gap years are for grown-ups after all...


Abstract Compatibility between tritium self-sufficiency and neutron shielding performance of self-cooled liquid blanket systems without solid neutron multiplier was investigated for the purpose of application to the conceptual helical reactor design of modified FFHR2 having the blanket space of 120 cm. The results of the neutronics calculation indicated that all of the Li/V-alloy, Flibe/V-alloy and Flibe/JLF-1 (Reduced Activation Ferritic steel) blankets are feasible for tritium breeding ability and neutron shielding performance. With the use of vanadium alloys, operation efficiency will be enhanced.


Abstract During South Africa's apartheid regime, the Eoan Opera Group found itself precariously balanced on the tenuous fringe between complicity and resistance. Their elaborate productions of Italian operas were performed to segregated audiences under the auspices of the Department of Coloured Affairs. While the act of singing presented a crossing of the boundaries constructed by the geopolitics of apartheid, the songs themselves implicated them in a problematic celebration of Western culture. But their re-creation of "pure" Western music also provided coloured people with a means of transgressing the ideological and geographical boundaries between themselves and the white centre of apartheid. Thus, the aspirational impulse was transformed into a disruptive inhabiting of what was regarded as the dominion of whiteness. I shall argue that the Eoan group's performances, when read as subversive, form a voice in counterpoint to the familiar master-narrative of nationalist resistance and its typical accompanying musical expressions, thus sounding in productive counterpoint to widely accepted definitions of political struggle. Following Edward Said, I shall argue for a reading of the Eoan operas as moments of forgetting, in which a subversion born out of complicity undermined apartheid's politics of colour.


BACKGROUND
Although literature suggests that parents need support when their child is diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP), it is unclear to what extent providers implement these supports in practice and what parental perspectives surround provider early diagnosis and management of CP. Therefore, we aimed to characterize and compare experiences of providers and parents of children with CP with regards to early detection and intervention.

METHOD
Seventeen parents participated in day-long world-café style workshops focused on categories extracted from the International Classification of Function (ICF) framework and recent systematic reviews of early detection for CP. Thirty regional providers (generalists, specialists, therapists) caring for infants with CP completed surveys with scaled-score and open-ended questions. Quantitative and qualitative data were independently assessed by two reviewers to identify prominent themes.

RESULTS
All parents (100%) stated early diagnosis or high-risk for CP classification was beneficial compared to only 50% of providers who often gave early CP diagnoses before 12 months. Top parent priorities were honesty and positively-phrased messages. Providers most often addressed cognition, primary care need, motor and feeding issues (80%, 62%, 54%, 54% frequently/sometimes). Matching priorities for discussion were neuroimaging timing/risk/benefit, cognition, primary care, motor and feeding/nutrition. Discordance occurred for participation, parent wellbeing, pain and vision, with parents wanting more education and resources.

CONCLUSIONS
Receiving early diagnoses or high-risk for CP classification is a parent priority. Alignment between parents and providers exists for ICF domains of body functions/structures and activity, but less for those of environment, personal and participation.


This study examines the benefit incidence accruing to households from government expenditure on solid waste management in Olorunda Local Government Area of Osun State, Nigeria. Data were collected from one hundred and fifty households using stratified random sampling. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics; Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) poverty index, and benefit incidence analysis. The common methods of solid waste disposal by households are backyard dumping, community dump yard, and riverbank dumping. About 6 percent and 43 percent respectively of the households were core and moderately poor. Average household spending on solid waste disposal service by the user of government facilities is N252.98, which was more than the government unit subsidy on solid waste management of N14.00. About 63 percent of the total government expenditure on solid waste management accrues to the poor but more disproportionately in favour of the moderately poor. It can be concluded that solid waste management is progressively benefitting the poor.


Control is an action to direct in order to be able to achieve the goal. One of the ways to control production costs is applying production standard costs that comparing the realization to production costs standard. So, it can be know the difference among the reality with the standardized production costs, in the form of profitable or lost difference. The purposed to be attained in this research is to review the production cost control conducted by the company and to know how far the company performing production control in order to be effective and efficient. Research design used is case study. Research is done in Saradan Forestry Department of Madiun. Data used in this research is secondary data in the form of data issued by the company for management party in period of 2005-2007. Its data collecting technique is documentation and the collected data are production cost data and organization structure. The collected data are analyzed by assessing company's effectiveness level, efficiency level and by analyzing company's overhead cost difference. From the research results, it can be known that production volume effectiveness for period of 2005 is 14.270 m3 in the budgeted production with the actual production is 15.922 and 112% in comparison value. For 2006, it is 16.157 m3 in the budgeted production, while its actual production is 17.427 and 108% in comparison value. And for 2007, it is 18.954 m3 in the budgeted production, with its actual production is 19.486 and 103% in comparison value. It means that the company has been effective, where the actual production has met the budgeted production target. From the cost efficiency, it seems that the actual production cost for period 2005-2006 is still below the budgeted production costs. In 2005, the actual cost is 98% from production cost budget and 98.3 in 2006. It means that company has efficient. If production cost is too high hence cost of good sold will also high. Last, in company's volume/capacity difference is occurred profitable BOP difference where there is capacity difference in 2005 as much as Rp. 63.732.198, Rp. 27.789.963 in 2006 and Rp. 6.750.989 in 2007. Thus, it can be said that the company's standardized capacity need a higher cost tariffs than the standardized capacity cost. Thus, it can be suggested that company should improves its control in each works and it needs a good coordination among each division in its job authority and assignment according to the existing organization chart. Thereby, it can be created a better work circumstance and harmonious to support all policy and the established goal.


We present three new high-precision U–Pb zircon chemical abrasion–isotope dilution–thermal ionization mass spectrometry (CA-ID-TIMS) dates from western European Carboniferous diagenetically altered volcanic ash layers (bentonites and tonsteins) that occur interbedded with cyclic siliciclastic sedimentary rocks. The dates constrain the average periodicity of western European late Carboniferous (Arnsbergian to early Langsettian) cyclic sedimentation to between 89 and 124 ka per cycle. This is consistent with the 100 ka 'short' eccentricity Milankovitch cycle and supports previous suggestions that the cycles are the product of glacio-eustasy. Cyclostratigraphic tuning of Namurian cycles to the 100 ka eccentricity cycle revises the timing of the global Mississippian–Pennsylvanian boundary to c. 323.9 Ma. CA-ID-TIMS dates also facilitate correlation between different facies belts where biostratigraphical correlations are difficult. Correlation between eastern and western European sequences confirms that the base of the Moscovian stage is located within the Duckmantian (Westphalian B) western European regional substage. Supplementary materials: Zircon separation and concentration procedures, U–Pb zircon CA-ID-TIMS methods and data table, average periodicity calculations for western and central European Namurian and Westphalian sedimentary cycles, and procedures for recalibrating legacy 40Ar/39Ar dates are available at www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18547.


Background: Zambia's National Malaria Strategic Plan (NMSP) 2011-2016 aims to eliminate malaria by the year 2020. The WHO Country Office is supporting Zambia in its goal to attain this national target earlier than the global goal contained in Global Technical Strategy (GTS) 2016- 2030. WHO's focus is to accelerate coverage of proven interventions and strategies, and promote their effective use. This study documents impact of the WHO technical support in Zambia to accelerate efforts towards elimination of malaria.Methods: This study involved a desk review of relevant documents and literature to obtain in-depth information on WHO technical support on malaria. Key documents included: malaria strategic plans, World Malaria Reports (WMR), WHO Annual Reports; Country Cooperation Strategy, for WHO in Zambia; and Health Bulletins and Health Management Information System (HMIS).Results: WHO contributed effectively to monitoring malaria trends. Malaria deaths reduced from 6000 in 2010 to 3,200 in 2014. In 2015, ownership of long lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs) increased from 38% in 2006 to 77% in 2015; to be among the highest in Africa. Similarly, utilization of LLINs increased from 19% in 2006 to 55% in 2015 and use of Intermittent Preventive Therapy in pregnancy (IPTp) increased from 61.2% in 2006 to 77% in 2015. In 2014, WHO contributed to the revision of the national malaria diagnosis and treatment guidelines that included: Dihydroartemisinin piperaquine (DHA-PQ) as first line, an alternative to Artemether lumefantrine (AL); injectable Artesunate for treatment of severe malaria and the adoption of the new WHO guidelines on IPTp. In 2016, WHO contributed to epidemiological profile leading to the development of the novel Malaria Elimination Strategy 2017-2020.Discussion: WHO support has led to the determination of epidemiological profile and contributed to the improved focusing of interventions and surveillance activities for greater impact. These have been supported by clear guidelines on proven and evidenced-based prevention, diagnosis and treatment strategies.Conclusion: WHO's technical assistance to priority areas in Zambia remains pivotal for the accelerated health gains countrywide. The importance of this technical support is evidenced in the malaria elimination strategy within an environment of changing epidemiological malaria profile, insecticide and drug resistance.


As remote sensing (RS) applications and resources continue to expand, their importance for ecology and conservation increases – and so does the need for effective and successful training of professionals working in those fields. Methodological and applied courses often form part of university curricula, but their practical and long‐term benefits only become clear afterwards. Having recently received such training in an interdisciplinary master's programme, we provide our perspectives on our shared education. Through an online survey we include experiences of students and professionals in different fields. Most participants perceive their RS education as useful for their career, but express a need for more training at university level. Hands‐on projects are considered the most effective learning method. Besides methodological knowledge, soft skills are clear gains, including problem solving, self‐learning and finding individual solutions, and the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams. The largest identified gaps in current RS training concern the application regarding policy making, methodology and conservation. To successfully prepare students for a career, study programmes need to provide RS courses based on state‐of‐the‐art methods, including programming, and interdisciplinary projects linking research and practice supported by a sound technical background.


A novel molecularly imprinted polymer polypyrrole sensor for rapid direct tartrazine determination was established and is reported in this paper. Polypyrrole as a specific affinity molecule was immobilized on the surface of a glassy carbon electrode. It specifically bound to tartrazine quickly without sample pretreatment. Subsequently, the electrochemical signals were produced and measured accurately. The device possesses many advantages, such as high specific recognition properties, good chemical and mechanical stability, simplicity, low cost of preparation, and sensitive and label-free determination. A linear relationship between the current and the tartrazine concentration was observed from 1 to 10 nM, and a detection limit of 1 nM was achieved.


The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is currently designing and implementing a registry for managing its official element and qualifier definitions over time and in multiple languages. Three aspects of this registry must be versioned: the schema that describes the elements and qualifiers, which may be accessed by software or Web agents; sets of elements and qualifiers as a whole, for which some software vendors require stable snapshots as development targets; and individual elements and qualifiers, which in their life-cycles may change in meaning or approval status. Each such event must be uniquely identifiable in a persistent way, and translations must point to the precise sources on which they were based. Versioning a metadata language such as the Dublin Core over time is a balancing act between an error-tolerant fuzziness and a desire for archival precision. This is consistent with the philosophy of a metadata pidgin language that aims at universal interoperability while recognizing the limits of the goal itself.


B:
Grass pollen is the most important aeroallergen worldwide and the health outcome among sensitive individuals is closely related to exposure. It has been argued that grass pollen concentrations can be expected to vary substantially within the urban environment, partly due to source distribution and partly due to dispersion and deposition mechanisms. Most studies conducted on local spatial and temporal variance of pollen concentrations are from one season. Only a few studies include multiple seasons and the results are inconclusive. The patterns and factors responsible for local spatial and temporal pollen variance are still largely unknown. Bi-hourly pollen data provides finer temporal resolution than the standardized daily data otherwise used. Bi-hourly data collected from two sampling sites are used to investigate local spatial and temporal patterns of grass pollen concentrations in Worcester.
M:
Grass pollen was sampled from two locations in Worcester during the years 2016 and 2017 using a Burkard sampler. Daily and bi-hourly grass pollen concentrations were investigated for temporal and spatial variance using statistical methods by comparing years and locations. The investigation is being repeated for the year 2018.
R:
Preliminary results from 2016 and 2017 suggest that there is a high spatial correlation for the bi-hourly concentrations in 2016 but not in 2017. In 2016, all recorded peaks except one coincide with a corresponding peak. In 2017, the highest peak coincided with a corresponding peak but the rest of the data did not. Results from 2018 are currently unknown.
C:
Spatial and temporal variance in grass pollen concentrations fluctuates between years and locations. Peak concentrations tend to have the highest correlations compared to low concentrations. The results show that at least two years of data are needed to establish potential autocorrelation between nearby sites. Future work needs to include longer time-series, more locations and local grass source maps to understand key underlying factors of localized grass pollen concentrations.


This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet. It affords a glimpse of one Tibetan scholar's efforts to classify more than two thousand titles of Buddhist literature in the decades before the canonical collections known as the Bka' 'gyur and the Bstan 'gyur achieved a relatively stable form. Tibetan historiography traces the origin of the Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur to Bcom Idan ral gri's efforts, though the unique structure of the Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od, which differs greatly from available Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur catalogues, shows that the situation is more complex. Known to contemporary scholars of Tibetan literature for some time through mention in other works, Bcom Idan ral gri's survey has recently become available for the first time in two manuscripts. The present work contains a detailed historical introduction, an annotated edition of the two manuscripts, as well as concordances and appendices intended to aid the comparative study of early Tibetan collections of Indic Buddhist literature.


In this paper we discuss the subsurface parameters that can be extracted from seismic by AVO inversion over a target interval. It is argued that, while people are very much used to invert for impedances (P and S), or combinations of impedances (e.g. Extended Elastic Impedance), the conventional AVO equations can be formulated directly in terms of bulk modulus and shear modulus, which are much more closely related to hydro-carbon saturation and porosity than impedances or velocities. It is also demonstrated that linear AVO techniques, like the ones based on primary reflection coefficients, have their limitations, due to the fact that there is much more internal multiple scattering and mode conversion than one would usually expect. These problems can be solved by adopting a wave equation based inversion approach, where the non-linear character of the relationship between the data and the property representation to invert for, is fully honoured. Examples are given that demonstrate the increased sensitivity of the bulk modulus to hydro-carbon saturation, over acoustic impedance.


Fortress-Churches of Languedoc:Architecture, Religion, and Conflict in the High Middle Ages. By Sheila Bonde. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xv, 270. $85.00.) Sheila Bonde's gracefully written study of the development of the fortresschurch will certainly be of great interest to architectural historians. This excellent book will also appeal to a broader audience, that is, to medievalists interested in subjects as diverse as the history of southern France, the intertwining of religious and military realms, and the expansion of Capetian power in the twelfth century. The fortress-church (which Bonde defines as a church whose structure incorporates elements of fortification) seems to have first appeared in western Europe in Languedoc during the early twelfth century. Thus southern France was not the architectural backwater that art historians obsessed with the emergence of Gothic have tended to believe. Bonde's focus is on the three earliest important examples of this architectural form: the abbey church of Saint-Ponsde-Thomieres and the episcopal churches of Agde and Maguelone. She examines the physical fabric of each of these twelfth-century churches and the institutional history of the community for which it was built. She also explores archival sources to arrive at approximate dates for the construction of the fortified churches. In an appendix, Bonde provides the text of these Latin documents and her English translations (which are generally accurate translations of the often awkward Latin). Bonde's extensive archival research explains why her study will be of great relevance to scholars other than architectural historians. Bonde is keenly interested in the context, both local and larger, for these churches; hence, she also writes very much as a historian. This is not to say that she ignores the stylistic history of the fortress-church. Looking at Islamic and imperial Roman secular architecture, English cathedrals, and local southern French predecessors and parallels, Bonde traces the development of the distinctive architectural features of fortress churches. She argues that their most important characteristic, the machicolated arcade (a series of arches with an opening at their apexes allowing objects to be dropped on attackers), was introduced to western European architecture from the Muslim world through the fortress-churches of Languedoc, and not through castles as has been assumed previously. Bonde is equally interested in the functional and social history of these buildings. She discusses, for example, the manning and operation of the churches. Using comparative architectural evidence, she also demonstrates that these churches functioned not only as actual fortresses but also as symbolic proclamations of power and order, an order based on a desire for peace. …


The industry is constantly moving towards the research, implementation and deployment of new solutions that permit the optimization of processes. Nowadays, such solutions consist mostly on ICT developments, which permit the collection, distribution, integration, analysis, and manipulation of heterogeneous data. The under way Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks (C2NET) project targets the development of cloud-enabled tools for supporting the SMEs supply network optimization of manufacturing and logistic assets. The C2NET solution includes the implementation of paradigms as e.g. cloud computing or service-oriented and event-driven architectures, used for wide data integration. Among its requirements, the C2NET platform needs a solution for catch, process and react to events triggered in different locations of collaborative manufacturing networks, which are endowed with devices that permits the integration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This paper presents the architecture and main functionality of a knowledge-based approach that allows processing supply chain events handled by CPS devices. The main component of the presented solution is the SECA ontology, which is a knowledge base that can be updated at runtime. The main purpose of the ontology is to describe events, their status and the actions to be performed once a set of events are triggered in certain order. This research work offers a solution that can be employed by the C2NET platform not only to catch and process events; but also to notify linked data consumers.


RATIONALE
Approximately 10% of patients who have a spontaneous pneumothorax have a positive family history.

OBJECTIVES
We sought to identify DNA sequence variations that confer susceptibility to pneumothoraces.

METHODS
We collected 12 families that had at least 2 first-degree relatives with a spontaneous pneumothorax. All affected family members had no obvious stigmata of known genetic disorders associated with pneumothoraces. We used haplotype analysis, DNA sequencing, and restriction fragment analysis of mutations to evaluate the individuals in these families.

MAIN RESULTS
In 2 of the 12 families the disorder cosegregated with markers flanking a candidate locus, FLCN. Sequencing the linked alleles revealed 2 mutations predicted to introduce premature stop codons in 2 of the 12 families. Most mutations in FLCN cause a rare disease, Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, characterized by autosomal dominant inheritance of multiple benign skin lesions, renal tumors, pulmonary blebs, and pneumothoraces. None of the family members with the nonsense mutations had the skin manifestations of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome or renal cancer. Pathologic examination of lung tissue from three affected nonsmokers revealed blebs and underlying emphysema.

CONCLUSIONS
Isolated familial spontaneous pneumothorax can be caused by mutations of the FLCN gene. Because development of a pneumothorax and/or pulmonary blebs may be the earliest or the only clinical manifestation of FLCN mutations, pulmonologists should be alert to the contribution of this gene toward this familial form of emphysema.


One of our primary goals in using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is to be able to infer neuronal response properties from the fMRI signal. The mismatch in spatial scale makes this challenging: our best imaging resolution element contains hundreds of thousands of neurons. Here, we use size tuning in V1 to study the interaction between imaging resolution and inference of the underlying neural population response. We used 7 Tesla fMRI with 1 millimeter (isotropic) resolution to measure responses to sinusoidal luminance gratings with 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 or 4.0 degree diameters centered at 3 degrees eccentricity. Stimuli were presented in a simple block design (8 cycles 12 sec stimulus/12 sec rest per scan) while subjects performed a contrast discrimination task; each scan contained one stimulus size. Seeds for computing regions of interest were located at the center of mass of the response to the smallest stimulus. Average response was then calculated for ROIs of increasing diameter; ROI diameter was computed on the cortical surface and translated back to the functional data. For ROIs less than 3 mm in diameter, the size-tuning function matched neural response predictions - the strongest response was to stimuli 1 degree in diameter, falling off as stimulus size increased until the response to a 4-degree (diameter) stimulus was 60% of the maximum (1-degree) response. For larger regions of interest the peak response occurred for larger stimuli: 4- and 6-millimeter (diameter) ROIs responded most strongly to 2-degree stimuli, for example. Predicting this result from spatial pooling by fMRI of the underlying neuronal population responses is straight-forward. However, it nicely illustrates the difficulty of inferring neuronal response properties from fMRI response: without an accurate encoding model with which to interpret the data, a low-resolution experiment would conclude that V1 neurons prefer larger stimuli than they actually do. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Differences in the competing versions of public memory for the Battle of Gallipoli have become more pronounced as we approach 18 March 2015 (in Turkey 18 March, the naval battle, marks the anniversary, not the landing of 25 April). For many decades, the official nationalist narrative portrayed Gallipoli as a "rehearsal" for or even as part of the War of Independence (1919-1922).  The victory was due almost solely to the military genius of Mustafa Kemal. This public memory might have been dominant for decades, but competing versions also developed. This article will largely deal with what can be called the Islamized or "religionised" memory of Gallipoli.  For some who adhere to this view, Gallipoli is where the "Turkish" soldier stopped the last Crusaders. For others, their version of the battle does not include Mustafa Kemal. Yet, both sides have something in common as they prepare to celebrate the victory. Both the nationalist and the Islamist memories ignore the possible connections to another event which is remembered on 24 April, the day before the Entente landing in Gallipoli: the order given for the deportation of Anatolian Armenians. The "celebration" for one is likely to overwhelm the remembrance and mourning of the other.


advocates have been buoyed by various reports focusing attention on the importance of invigorating and prioritizing ocean research. Indeed, the US Ocean Action Plan called for the development of a long-range national ocean research agenda. The wait for this much-anticipated plan ended on 26 January 2007. In a day filled with a White House ceremony and a public briefing at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, the federal government issued its ocean research agenda. Prepared by the National Science and Technology Council's Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology (JSOST), Charting the Course for Ocean Science in the United States for the Next Decade: An Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy establishes a federal and national research framework for the coming decade. According to Dan Walker of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a cochair of the JSOST, the report is unique because it evolved from prior drafts to reflect the breadth of the ocean sciences community. Moreover, unlike a traditional discipline-centered research plan, Charting the Course is organized around six societally important themes. Within this framework, 20 long-range research priorities are articulated. Four of these have been identified as high priorities requiring immediate attention: (1) forecasting the response of coastal ecosystems to persistent forcing and extreme events; (2) performing comparative analysis of marine ecosystem organization; (3) developing sensors for marine ecosystems; and (4) assessing the variability of the meridional overturning circulation, with its implications for rapid climate change. Reflecting the wave of enthusiasm for science education and outreach that is flowing through a growing segment of the scientific community, and perhaps responding to the NSF (National Science Foundation) push to encourage scientists to communicate research findings to audiences beyond the research community, Charting the Course includes a discussion of the national need for improved ocean education and public outreach. "This interagency priorities plan represents a significant first step towards strengthening our ocean research and educational enterprise," says Anthony Michaels, president of the National Association of Marine Laboratories. Michaels is pleased that the "plan starts to recognize the importance of blending research and education," but hopes this integration will be further enhanced as the plan moves forward into the implementation phase. Centrally important to any research plan or agenda is the availability of financial and human resources for the ultimate execution of the research. Indeed, this issue was raised in comments submitted to the JSOST by AIBS in late 2006: "A significant concern with the draft report is that it fails to articulate the funding that will be sought to achieve the proposed goals.... A realistic budget request and multi-year commitment to federal research program managers would seem to be a central element necessary for the ultimate success of the JSOST research plan." All too often, government documents lack a clear statement of the required financial commitment. Sadly, the same might be said for Charting the Course. The report does, however, allocate nearly a page to explaining the mechanisms that will be used for seeking and coordinating federal resources. Although free of budget commitments, Charting the Course "will impact federal funding policy," according to Walker. To illustrate this pledge, senior administration officials joined together at a White House event before the public briefing on the report. According to an administration press release, the Bush administration plans "major budget increases totaling more than $140 million to support coastal and marine conservation efforts in Fiscal Year 2008." Of this amount, $20 million would be provided to the NSF and the US Geological Survey. NSF director Arden Bement acknowledged the pledge, stating, "Stewardship of the planet and its oceans begins with a clear understanding of the seas, and science and education are the tools that can achieve it. In partnership with the ocean community and other federal agencies, NSF is proud and excited to support research, discovery and innovation to fulfill the vision of the Ocean Research Priorities Plan." Now that a long-range, communitywide research agenda has been established for the ocean sciences community, it remains to be seen whether the community will fully embrace the plan and work to ensure that the funds are provided to achieve its ambitious goals. It also remains to be seen whether other research communities will strive to coordinate and define community-wide research programs similar to those for astronomy and, now, for ocean science.


The conditional, if...then, is probably the most important term in natural language and forms the core of systems of logic and mental representation. It occurs in all human languages and allows people to express their knowledge of the causal or law-like structure of the world and of others' behaviour, e.g., if you turn the key the car starts, if John walks the dog he stops for a pint of beer; to make promises, e.g., if you cook tonight, I'll wash up all week; to regulate behaviour, e.g., if you are drinking beer, you must be over 18 years of age; to suggest what would have happened had things been different, e.g., if the match had been dry it would have lit, among many other possible uses. The way in which the conditional is modelled also determines the core of most logical systems. Unsurprisingly, it is also the most researched expression in the psychology of human reasoning.

Cognition and Conditionals is the first volume for over 20 years (On Conditionals, 1986, CUP) that brings together recent developments in the cognitive science and psychology of conditional reasoning. Over the last 10 to 15 years, research on conditionals has come to dominate the psychology of reasoning providing a rich seam of results that have created new theoretical possibilities. This book shows how these developments have led researchers to view people's conditional reasoning behaviour more as succesful probabilistic reasoning rather than as errorful logical reasoning. It shows how the multifarious, and apparently competing, theoretical positions developed over the last 50 years in this area - mental logics, mental models, heuristic approaches, dual process theory, and probabilistic approaches-have responded to these insights. Its organisation reflects the view that an integrative approach is emerging that may need to exploit aspects of all these theoretical positions to explain the rich and complex phenomenon of reasoning with conditionals. It includes an introductory chapter relating the development of the psychology of reasoning to developments in the logic and semantics of the conditional. It also includes chapters by many of the leading figures in this field.

Cognition and Conditionals will be a valuable resource for cognitive scientists, psychologists and philosophers interested how people actually reason with conditionals.


Adenosine receptor–mediated regulation of monocyte/macrophage inflammatory responses is critical in the maintenance of tissue homeostasis. In this study, we reveal that adenosine potently modulates the expression of NR4A1, 2, and 3 orphan nuclear receptors in myeloid cells, and this modulation is primarily through the adenosine A2a receptor subtype. We demonstrate that A2a receptor activation of NR4A1-3 receptor synthesis is further enhanced in TLR4-stimulated monocytes. After TLR4 stimulation, NR4A receptor–depleted monocyte/macrophage cells display significantly altered expression of cell-surface markers and produce increased inflammatory cytokine and chemokine secretion rendering the cells an enhanced proinflammatory phenotype. Exposure of TLR4 or TNF-α–stimulated monocytes to adenosine analogs directs changes in the expression of MIP-3α and IL-23p19, with NR4A2 depletion leading to significantly enhanced expression of these factors. Furthermore, we establish that nuclear levels of NF-κB/p65 are increased in TLR/adenosine-stimulated NR4A2-depleted cells. We show that, after TLR/adenosine receptor stimulation, NR4A2 depletion promotes significant binding of NF-κB/p65 to a κB consensus binding motif within the MIP-3α proximal promoter leading to increased protein secretion, confirming a pivotal role for NF-κB activity in controlling cellular responses and gene expression outcomes in response to these mediators. Thus, these data demonstrate that during an inflammatory response, adenosine modulation of NR4A receptor activity acts to limit NF-κB–mediated effects and that loss of NR4A2 expression leads to enhanced NF-κB activity and hyperinflammatory responses in myeloid cells.


The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) replication transcription complex (RTC) is a multi-domain protein responsible for replicating and transcribing the viral mRNA inside a human cell. Attacking RTC function with pharmaceutical compounds is a pathway to treating COVID-19. Conventional tools, e.g. cryo-electron microscopy and all-atom molecular dynamics (AAMD), do not provide sufficiently high resolution or timescale to capture important dynamics of this molecular machine. Consequently, we develop an innovative workflow that bridges the gap between these resolutions, using mesoscale fluctuating finite element analysis (FFEA) continuum simulations and a hierarchy of AI-methods that continually learn and infer features for maintaining consistency between AAMD and FFEA simulations. We leverage a multi-site distributed workflow manager to orchestrate AI, FFEA, and AAMD jobs, providing optimal resource utilization across HPC centers. Our study provides unprecedented access to study the SARS-CoV-2 RTC machinery, while providing general capability for AI-enabled multi-resolution simulations at scale.


This article discusses the impact of long-term shiftwork on the families of male shiftworkers at a New Zealand petrochemical company. The findings are based primarily on interviews with twenty-seven shiftworkers and seventeen female partners, supplemented by informal observations of the organisation. All respondents described shiftwork as having a profound influence on the economic, temporal, social and emotional patterns of family life. Men and women gave divergent accounts, reflecting their differing roles within the family. Whilst the company compensated workers well financially for the inconveniences of shiftwork, the rigidity of the shiftwork system meant that families shouldered the primary responsibility for resolving the tensions between work and family life. In consequence, women paid a high price for their partner's employment, often sacrificing their own careers in order to take primary responsibility for organising family life.


The further back we look into the geological past, the more obscured the view, masked by an increasingly fragmentary geological record. This has resulted in a controversy on the rates and mechanisms of early continental crust formation and whether plate tectonics—the dominant crust-forming process over at least the past 2.5 billion years—operated the same way, or even at all, during early Earth history ( 1 , 2 ). On page 434 of this issue, Shirey and Richardson ( 3 ) shed light on this issue by looking at it from a new angle—from the bottom up. They investigated the composition of a suite of minerals occurring as inclusions in diamonds dredged up by young kimberlite volcanoes. These diamonds derive from great depths (125 to 175 km) within the ancient lithospheric mantle keels that underpin the stable continental crustal regions known as cratons. Because the minerals can be precisely dated, they can provide a snapshot of the subcontinental lithospheric mantle (SCLM) composition at the time when the crust was being formed.


ABSTRACT:

Purpose: This review aims to
explore the benefits and barriers of the commercialisation of camels (camelus
dromedaries). Included is a discussion section exploring the impacts that commercialisation
might have on local communities, including Aboriginal and pastoralist
communities. While this report may offer a base framework, further study is
necessary to explore topics and considerations in more detail. Method: The authors utilised online databases, hand-searched grey literature, and
anecdotal information via a field trip to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. These
resources were subsequently screened for suitability. Thematic analysis was
conducted on the literature. Results:
Seven
key themes were identified in the literature; (i) camel farming, (ii) barriers,
(iii) socioeconomic benefits, (iv) rural and remote Australian communities, (v)
Indigenous Australians, (vi) camel culling, and (vii) camel by-products. Discussion: Current management methods
consist primarily of culling. Historically, there have been some government
instigated management projects, however, the responsibility for managing camel
populations largely falls on pastoralists. Camel populations presently impact
rural, remote and Indigenous Australian communities in Western Australia,
primarily causing damage to infrastructure and affecting other livestock. The
literature suggests that, for commercialisation/farming to be viable, there
needs to be a defined market that pastoralists can supply. Currently there are known
international markets including meat/by-product markets in China and other
areas of Asia, plus Middle Eastern markets, and various halal markets globally.
There are also potential domestic markets, namely for pet foods, human
consumption, milk, etcetera. Conclusion: The authors found
that there are economic and social benefits for the formalised
commercialisation of camels in Australia, assuming the barriers are adequately
addressed. The Western Australian Goldfields Esperance region stands to profit
from camel processing and export, both internationally and domestically, as
well as increased employment opportunities, specifically for Indigenous
Australians. The authors believe that this report is best utilised as a
resource for further study into areas including socioeconomic implications,
cultural considerations, and long-term farming prospects.For full report please go to:

http://hdl.handle.net/1959.9/568768


The clinical suitability of intraoperative autotransfusion was evaluated in 25 patients undergoing orthotopic liver transplantation using a Cell Saver #4 (Haemonetics) with acid-citrate-dextrose anticoagulation. In the first 14 patients (phase 1), biochemical, hematologic, coagulation, and semiquantitative bacteriologic studies were performed from the collected blood, processed blood, and patients' blood before and after 500 mL of autotransfusion. The acid-citrate-dextrose solution produced adequate anticoagulation, and the system effectively removed most of the potassium, red blood cell fragments, plasma free hemoglobin, bilirubin, coagulation factors, platelets, and fibrin degradation products. Autotransfusion (500 mL) did not alter coagulation, electrolyte balance, and hematologic findings in recipients except for a clinically insignificant increase in plasma free hemoglobin. Seventeen of 56 samples of the collected blood or processed blood were positive for coagulase (-) Staphylococcus (occasional or rare), but blood cultures before and after autotransfusion were negative in all patients. In the next 11 patients (phase 2), a quantitative bacteriologic study was performed from the collected blood, processed blood, skin, bile duct stump, peritoneal cavity, and room air using a mock reservoir. The processed blood was not transfused. All blood cultures from the patients were sterile. However, coagulase (-) Staphylococcus or Bacillus sp was seen in two cultures from skin, three from the processed blood, and three from air, suggesting that room air and skin were the sources of contamination. When the patients of the two phases of study were compared, postoperative blood cultures were all sterile, and renal function was similar. Therefore, autotransfusion appears to be clinically acceptable during liver transplantation. Occasional contamination by few bacteria appears to be insignificant in patients who receive prophylactic antibiotic therapy.


In breeding for self-pollinated crop cultivars, early generation testing and selection (EGT) is desirable because it allows for more resources to test superior lines and helps avoid the loss of desirable alleles that would occur if EGT is delayed. However, high intergeneration correlations (IGCs) are required for effective EGT. This study is conducted to determine the effects of linkage and epistasis on IGCs. The covariance between genetic means of lines at early and late selfing generations with both linkage and epistasis is derived. Intergeneration correlations are calculated for different levels of coupling and repulsion linkages and for 10 nonepistatic and epistatic models. Intergeneration correlations are moderate to high in the presence of only additive and dominance effects at unlinked and nonepistatic loci but can be very low (<0.2) in tight repulsion linkages or some allelic and nonallelic effects. Epistasis may mimic or counteract the effects of linkage on changes in IGCs. Thus linkage or epistasis can be an important cause of low IGCs and such genetic causes cannot be changed through testing of more environments. This study points out the need to consider both genetic and nongenetic causes of low IGCs when evaluating the efficiency of EGT in self-pollinated species.


Abstract: The question of how fluctuations in the business cycles and
fertility are linked resurfaced in the aftermath of the Great Recession of
2008-09, when birth rates started declining in many countries. Finland,
although affected to a much lesser extent than other regions of Europe, is no
exception to this decline. However, previous macro-level research on the much
stronger recession in Finland in the 1990s shows that, contrary to other
developed countries, the typical pro-cyclical behavior of fertility in relation
to the business cycle was absent. The objective of this paper is to test how a
typical feature of both recessions at the individual level, labor market
uncertainty, is linked to childbearing risk in Finland. In particular, I focus
on the transition to first birth and on the explicit period comparison between
the 1990s and the 2000s. I use Finnish population registers (1988-2013) and
adopt a dyadic couple perspective to assess the association between each
partner's employment status and the transition to parenthood. Finally, I
investigate how, differently in the two periods, the latter relationship
changes depending on aggregate labor market conditions to test whether there
was a change over time from counter- to pro-cyclicality of fertility in
Finland.


In connection with the requirements of color correction discussed in the preceding paper, we found that a set of n simultaneous equations can be solved by using each of the n error signals to control one of the independent variables. Stability of this equation-solving network can be achieved by the proper interconnection. In applying this procedure to the equations for color correction, it was necessary to find the sum of eight terms, each of which is the product of either three or four independent variables. It was found that these individual products could be computed by making use of the fact that, if n events have probabilities of occurrence a, b, ⋯n, respectively, the probability of their simultaneous occurrence is the product of their individual probabilities abc ⋯n. By generating rectangular waves of irrationally related frequencies whose positive pulse widths are proportional to the values of the unknown variables, and applying these signals to the grid of a vacuum tube in such a manner that its plate current flows only when all of the signals have positive values simultaneously, the average value of the plate current is proportional to the required product. When controlled in this way, eight vacuum tubes with their plates connected in parallel deliver an average current that is proportional to the required sum.


PURPOSE
To measure heterochromatic flicker electroretinograms (ERGs) at high (36 Hz) and intermediate (12 Hz) temporal frequencies to evaluate luminance and cone opponent responses, respectively, in glaucoma eyes with (perimetric) and without (preperimetric) visual field defects.

METHODS
Flicker ERGs were recorded from one randomly chosen dilated eye of 32 patients (mean age, 61 ± 11 years; 15 men, 17 women) from the Erlangen Glaucoma Registry and from 24 healthy volunteers (mean age, 43 ± 11 years; 14 men, 10 women). Red and green light-emitting diodes in a Ganzfeld stimulator were sine wave-modulated in counterphase. The responses were measured at 36 Hz, the frequency at which ERGs reflect activity of the luminance pathway, and at 12 Hz, the frequency at which ERGs reflect chromatic activity.

RESULTS
Response amplitudes were similar in glaucoma patients and controls. Phase differences were observed in patients with visual field defects (perimetric) compared with the control group at 36 and 12 Hz in the first harmonic and second harmonic responses. Patients without visual field defects (preperimetric) showed phase differences for the second harmonic component at 36 Hz. No age effect on response amplitudes and phases was found in any of the subject groups (controls and patients).

CONCLUSIONS
The responses displayed phase differences but not amplitude differences in perimetric glaucoma patients at both 36 and 12 Hz, suggesting that both magnocellular and parvocellular pathways are affected. Preperimetric glaucoma patients also showed phase differences. The response phase may be sensitive to early dysfunction of the inner retina. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00494923).


The purpose of the paper is to introduce the new "g3†structural model of the Czech National Bank and illustrate how it is used for forecasting and policy analysis. As from January 2007 the model was regularly used for shadowing official forecasts, and in July 2008 it became the core model of the CNB. In the paper we highlight the most important and unusual features of the model and discuss tools and procedures that help us in forecasting and assessing the economy with the model. The paper is not meant to provide a full derivation of the model or the complete characteristics of its behavior and should not be regarded as model documentation. Rather, the paper demonstrates how the model is used and how it contributes to policy analysis.


Across different landscapes, plant abundance and richness change. Bee distributions may vary spatially or temporally in accordance with differences in floral diversity. I used a habitat-based approach to investigate the hypothesis that the abundance of bees in assemblages varied among three distinct meadow types: dry meadow, wet meadow-Veratrum, and wet meadow-Salix. Patterns of bee abundance were sampled using bee bowls and netting around Gothic, Colorado. I sampled four triplets of sites (each consisting of the three meadow types) every other week, between June 22 and August 26, 2009. In total, I caught 2938 bees and identified each of them to family. I found that there was no significant difference in the abundance of bees across the three meadow types. Furthermore, I did not detect a difference in bee abundance within a family across the three meadow types, though there were significantly more bees of the family Apidae than either Colletidae or Megachilidae within wet meadow-Veratrum sites. There was no significant relationship between bee abundance and the mean flower abundance or rarefied richness at sites. Overall, I found no difference in bee abundance at different meadow types once divided into four sampling periods; however, bee abundance for the family Apidae depended on time and meadow type while bee abundance for the family Halictidae depended on time only. Additional experimentation over multiple years may be needed to reveal significant patterns. About 50 percent of the variation in bee abundance was accounted for by site, rarefied plant species richness, and daily rainfall. Bee distribution may also depend on nesting preference, or perhaps there are species level differences that this experiment was no able to detect.