The problem of the black-white gross earnings gap is near its largest amongst lawyers;
 blacks earn a significantly lower income than whites (Dinovitzer et al. 2004; Grodsky
 and Pager 2001). There is also a white advantage in overall job satisfaction amongst
 lawyers (Payne-Pikus et al. 2010; Dau-Schmidt and Mukhopadhaya 1999). This study
 examines how social capital contributes to racial differences in these two aspects of
 overall job success. Social capital theories hypothesize that more social capital leads
 to increased job status attainment (Lin et al. 1981; Lin 2001). Blacks receive fewer and
 lower paying jobs than whites, perhaps in part because of a lack of social capital in
 their lower status and segregated social networks (Braddock and McPartland 1987; Elliot
 1999; although see Mouw (2003) for a challenge which showed little to no effect of the
 use of contacts on earnings). Similarly, Ducharme and Martin (2000) found that social
 relationships with co-workers increase overall job satisfaction. This project specifically examines social capital in the attorney job market, because
 this is a specific job market in which there are strong theoretical reasons to expect
 social capital to affect wages and job satisfaction. Using Portes' (1998) definition of
 social capital, the ability to secure benefits from one's social networks, I distinguish
 between three major social networks (professional, non-professional, and kinship), and
 then derive hypotheses about their effect on earnings and job satisfaction. The main
 hypothesis is that black and white differences in professional and non-professional
 networks account for part of the earnings and job satisfaction inequality between blacks
 and whites. The study also develops competing hypotheses to test the effect of kinship
 networks on job satisfaction. This study takes a mixed methods approach. Nationally
 representative longitudinal data from the After the Juris Doctorate Survey (AJD) test
 the hypotheses to see if there is an effect of social capital on earnings and
 satisfaction. Qualitative interviews seek to further investigate these relationships and
 look for emerging themes for racial differences in earnings and job satisfaction. The
 interviews take place with nine black and white lawyers in Chicago. The survey results
 reveal the significance of professional social capital networks in obtaining a higher
 salary among private firm attorneys. The effects of social capital do not vary across
 race. However, there are some black-white differences in the types of social capital
 used. The interview results reveal the significance of social capital in acquiring
 clients in small private firms, and of…


The subject of the thesis: "Evaluating Public Policies - Normative Models Beyond Cost Benefit Analysis" arise from the interest in the public policies and their construction, and in particular from the problem of how to evaluate them. The thesis, after a preliminary study of tools and mechanisms for European Public Policy founds distributions, has dealt with the Evidence-Based Policy-Making (EBPM). Thus, studying EBPM's objectives and concepts, we studied the characteristics that make legitimate policies, but also those features that make public policies "unique" investment decisions, or better that make such decisions different from all other types of decisions. These feature were then analyzed and summarized in four points: ² medium or long-term time horizon; ² several different source of uncertainty related with the policy-maker; ² great importance of the economic aspect; ² great importance of the flexibility. The study of these has pushed the research and our thesis towards the study of the tools and the mechanisms necessary for the public policies creation, management and monitoring. Therefore, from this broad framework the thesis is focused on the study of the normative tools currently available to the policy-maker, that are: ² Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA); ² Decision Theory (DT); ² Real Options Theory (ROT). In the first part of the thesis we presented these three tools in relation to public policies and policy-makers decision. From that it became clear the inadequacy of the existent tools in addressing the different aspects that characterize public policies. The CBA, despite being the tool in absolute more used and recognized as legitimate, fails to take account and manage one of the four fundamental policies features, namely the policy-maker flexibility to manage the policy in all its time horizon. On the other hand, the study of DT has high- lighted the inadequacy of the decision tree analysis to consider and manage public policies in real time horizons. Finally, the ROT study has made clear that despite such tool represents an important evolution from the CBA, since it is closely related to finance, it fails to take into account the policy-makers subjectivity. In the second part of the thesis, starting from the conclusions about the relevance of the use of CBA, DT and ROT in the field of public policies, we propose a "new instrument". Such tool could be considered an evolution of the decision tree, because although it is built like a normal decision tree it take into account the time in practical terms: not only through a policy construction and decision-making over the time, but also through the inclusion of a subjective discount rate. The subjective discount rate, derived by the utility function of the policy-makers, is able to take account their personal time and uncertainty preferences. The thesis ends with a critical comparison between the new temporal decision tree proposed and the real options theory. The critical comparison show that the two tools are different in two main aspects: 1. The real options are based on the existence of an underlying asset, which allows many simplification. Assuming that the underlying asset perfectly replicate the investment and the investment decision, it is legitimate to use the risk-free discount rate and the risk neutral probabilities, then it is always on the existence of the underlying asset that it is based the probability conditioning. 2. Temporal decision trees on the contrary do not make any of these hypothesis. There is nothing that can replicate the investment, the decision and the policy-maker. The conditional probabilities depend only on the oracle choose, and all formal construction revolve around the subjectivity and preferences of policy-makers. In conclusion we can say that, starting from the study of public policies and their characteristics, the assessment tools currently available to the policy-makers (CBA, DT, and ROT) are incomplete. In other words, they are not able to adequately considered and man- aged the four key characteristics. Overcoming this problem is essential to give at the policy- makers a comprehensive assess and decision aiding tool, thus we decide to build a decision tree ad hoc for the public policies. Such decision tree was constructed following the traditional model, but it is adding both the temporal dimension and the economic concept of costs and benefits. Moreover, we have also revised and integrated some ideas related to managerial flexibility arising from the ROT. In this way, the resulting "temporal decision tree" is able to consider and manage the specific needs of the public decision-making, remaining both in the normative rationality field through the economic evaluation concepts, and in the constructive rationality field, because the tool incorporates and revolves around the subjective preference of the policy-makers and those who legitimately represent.


This first of two volumes of Voegelin's miscellaneous papers brings together crucial writings, published for the first time, from the early, formative period of this scholar's thought. The book begins with Voegelin's dissertation on sociological method, completed under the direction of Othmar Spann and Hans Kelsen at the University of Vienna in 1922. It reveals an intimate knowledge of the writings of Georg Simmel and a skillful use of insights gained from Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas. The dissertation, and other smaller pieces written at this time, addresses problems that remained of great importance to Voegelin throughout his life: the relation of insight to language, the structure of the human being, and the human's spiritual center. They disclose both Voegelin's theoretical reference points during these early years, including the thought of Henri Bergson, Othmar Spann, Georg Simmel, and Edmund Husserl, as well the young scholar's remarkably independent approach to theoretical problems. Moreover, this volume includes a work that is fundamental to an understanding of Voegelin's theoretical development: his extended study on the "theory of governance," written between 1930 and 1932. It follows the issues that confront political society to their roots in the soul and in the soul's relationship to the ground of being. The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers presents a meditative-exegetic study of texts from Augustine, Descartes, and Husserl, early examples of the meditations that became central to Voegelin's later work. Other essays included in this volume such as "The Theory of Law" and "Political Science as Human Science" develop these theoretical insights and refine Voegelin's methodological tools. This volume will be of interest to all scholars of the work of Eric Voegelin and of the refoundation of political philosophy in the twentieth century in general.


In this article we assess competing interpretations of the Immigration and Nationalization Act's 'aggravated felony' provisions, specifically the determination of what state drug offenses properly constitute 'aggravated felonies,' thus subjecting non-citizens to deleterious collateral immigration consequences, including deportation. This issue is considered within the broader political and social context of the nation's 'war on drugs' and wide-ranging trends in American immigration policy. We argue that state drug offenses should be analogous to the traditional federal characterizations of a felony (i.e. yielding more than a year of imprisonment) in order to be appropriately considered aggravated felonies. We conclude that interpretations of the aggravated felony provisions that allow offenses falling below this threshold to be considered aggravated felonies are misguided, lead to unwarranted collateral immigration consequences for non-citizens, and fit within a broader pattern of inordinate burden sharing in the war on drugs by historically disempowered groups.


Today in 21 st century, we are living in a highly sophisticated environment. Computer is one of the most developed technologies which are used in present time by the children, the young and the old. More and more men are sitting in front of computer for longer and longer hours. Because computer is such a highly visually demanding task, but the eyes are still structured according to old hunting days and are unable to adjust themselves, which lead to discomfort coined as Computer Vision Syndrome) An emerging pandemic of 21 st century. Modern medicine doesn't have any definite treatment for the particular problem hence the ayurvedic scholars take it as a challenge to cure it by our various therapies like tarpana , etc. Ashtang Hridya Uttar Sthan (13/11) has the reference of Triphala Ghrita which is used in the present study in the Kriya kalpa procedure called Tarpana , a local eye refreshing and nourishing therapy.


The development of the Australian Tsunami Warning System (ATWS) was in recognition of the fact that the Australian coastline faces some 8000 km of active tectonic plate boundary capable of generating a tsunami that could reach Australia in two to four hours. The work reported in this paper complements an earlier questionnaire study (Paton, Frandsen & Johnston 2010) with detailed interview data to inform understanding of respondents' awareness of tsunami risk and their willingness (or lack of) to respond to a rare but possible natural hazard. A belief that no tsunami events had occurred in Australia (at least since colonial times) and that major causes (e.g. seismic and volcanic) were absent, supported the view of participants that tsunami is a non-existent or a very low-probability hazard for Australia. This view was reinforced by the lack of discussion of tsunami by government or in the media. The ensuing sense of 'risk rejection' resulted in respondents believing that no resources or effort should be directed to tsunami risk reduction. The data raises the possibility that the ATWS may not be fully effective unless action is taken to increase tsunami risk acceptance and readiness. Recommendations for doing so draw on participant discussions of how to localise risk reduction activities. Their suggestions for increasing tsunami readiness in coastal communities included integrating it with community-based, localised discussions around frequent flash floods, coastal storms, bushfires and climate change hazards. These concepts are discussed, as well as the use of local volunteer resources to develop preparedness activities.


We propose the use of statistical relational learning, and in particular the formalism of Markov Logic Networks, for transfer in reinforcement learning. Our goal is to extract relational knowledge from a source task and use it to speed up learning in a related target task. We do so by learning a Markov Logic Network that describes the source-task Q-function, and then using it for decision making in the early learning stages of the target task. Through experiments in the RoboCup simulated-soccer domain, we show that this approach can provide a substantial performance benefit in the target task.


Abstract The Apoptosis-Inducing Factor (AIF) is a moonlighting flavoenzyme involved in the assembly of mitochondrial respiratory complexes in healthy cells, but also able to trigger DNA cleavage and parthanatos. Upon apoptotic-stimuli, AIF redistributes from the mitochondria to the nucleus, where upon association with other proteins such as endonuclease CypA and histone H2AX, it is proposed to organize a DNA–degradosome complex. In this work, we provide evidence for the molecular assembly of this complex as well as for the cooperative effects among its protein components to degrade genomic DNA into large fragments. We have also uncovered that AIF has nuclease activity that is stimulated in the presence of either Mg2+ or Ca2+. Such activity allows AIF by itself and in cooperation with CypA to efficiently degrade genomic DNA. Finally, we have identified TopIB and DEK motifs in AIF as responsible for its nuclease activity. These new findings point, for the first time, to AIF as a nuclease able to digest nuclear dsDNA in dying cells, improving our understanding of its role in promoting apoptosis and opening paths for the development of new therapeutic strategies.


In this paper we seek to understand the relationship between the online popularity of an article and its intrinsic quality. Prior experimental work suggests that the relationship between quality and popularity can be very distorted due to factors like social influence bias and inequality in visibility. We conduct a study of popularity on two different social news aggregators, Reddit and Hacker News. We define quality as the number of votes an article would have received if each article was shown, in a bias-free way, to an equal number of users. We propose a simple Poisson regression method to estimate this quality metric from time-series voting data. We validate our methods on data from Reddit and Hacker News, as well the experimental data from prior work. Using these estimates, we find that popularity on Reddit and Hacker News is a relatively strong reflection of intrinsic quality.


BACKGROUND
This study aims to compare the seventh and eighth editions of the American Joint Commission on Cancer/Union for International Cancer Control (AJCC/UICC) tumor, node, metastasis staging system for patients with papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) in two national patient cohorts.

METHODS
Adult PTC patients undergoing surgery were selected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program (2004-2012) and the National Cancer Database (2004-2012). Staging criteria for the seventh and eighth AJCC/UICC editions were applied separately to each cohort. Survival probabilities were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the association of stage with survival in both settings. The Akaike information criterion was used to assess model performance.

RESULTS
About 23% of patients were downstaged from the seventh to the eighth edition in SEER, while 24% were downstaged in the National Cancer Database. Disease-specific survival (DSS) and overall survival (OS) were significantly related to stage at diagnosis when using both the seventh and eighth editions of the AJCC/UICC staging system (p < 0.001). Patients classified into higher stages (III and IV) in the eighth edition showed a worse prognosis than those classified into similar stages in the seventh edition. After adjustment, PTC stages as defined by both editions were significantly associated with DSS and OS. With respect to both DSS and OS, the eighth edition PTC model appeared to be a better fit to the data (smaller Akaike information criterion values) compared to the seventh edition.

CONCLUSION
Based on these large contemporary national cohorts, the eighth edition AJCC/UICC tumor, node, metastasis classification for PTC is superior to the seventh edition for predicting survival.


Cluster analysis has been identified as a core task in data mining for which many different algorithms have been proposed. The diversity, on one hand, provides us a wide collection of tools. On the other hand, the profusion of options easily causes confusion. Given a particular task, users do not know which algorithm is good since it is not clear how clustering algorithms should be evaluated. As a consequence, users often select clustering algorithm in a very adhoc manner. A major challenge in evaluating clustering algorithms is the scarcity of real data with a "correct" ground truth clustering. This is in stark contrast to the situation for classification tasks, where there are abundantly many data sets labeled with their correct classifications. As a result, clustering research often relies on labeled data to evaluate and compare the results of clustering algorithms. We present a new perspective on how to use labeled data for evaluating clustering algorithms, and develop an approach for comparing clustering algorithms on the basis of classification labeled data. We then use this approach to support a novel technique for choosing among clustering algorithms when no labels are available. We use these tools to demonstrate that the utility of an algorithm depends on the specific clustering task. Investigating a set of common clustering algorithms, we demonstrate that there are cases where each one of them outputs better clusterings. In contrast to the current trend of looking for a superior clustering algorithm, our findings demonstrate the need for a variety of different clustering algorithms.


Optomechanical devices in which a flexible SiN membrane is placed inside an optical cavity allow for very high finesse and mechanical quality factor in a single device. They also provide fundamentally new functionality: the cavity detuning can be a quadratic function of membrane position. This enables a measurement of "position squared" ($x^2$) and in principle a QND phonon number readout of the membrane. However, the readout achieved using a single transverse cavity mode is not sensitive enough to observe quantum jumps between phonon Fock states.
Here we demonstrate an $x^2$-sensitivity that is orders of magnitude stronger using two transverse cavity modes that are nearly degenerate. We derive a first-order perturbation theory to describe the interactions between nearly-degenerate cavity modes and achieve good agreement with our measurements using realistic parameters. We also demonstrate theoretically that the $x^2$-coupling should be easily tunable over a wide range.


Aim:
The negative correlation between temperature and body size of ectothermic animals (broadly known as the temperature‐size rule or TSR) is a widely observed pattern, especially in aquatic organisms. Studies have claimed that the TSR arises due to decreased oxygen solubility and increasing metabolic costs at warmer temperatures, whereby oxygen supply to a large body becomes increasingly difficult. However, mixed empirical evidence has led to a controversy about the mechanisms affecting species' size and performance under different temperatures. We review the main competing genetic, physiological and ecological explanations for the TSR and suggest a roadmap to move the field forward. Location:
Global. Taxa:
Aquatic ectotherms. Time period:
1980–present. Results:
We show that current studies cannot discriminate among alternative hypotheses and none of the hypotheses can explain all TSR‐related observations. To resolve this impasse, we need experiments and field‐sampling programmes that specifically compare alternative mechanisms and formally consider energetics related to growth costs, oxygen supply and behaviour. We highlight the distinction between evolutionary and plastic mechanisms, and suggest that the oxygen limitation debate should separate processes operating on short, decadal and millennial time‐scales. Conclusions:
Despite decades of research, we remain uncertain whether the TSR is an adaptive response to temperature‐related physiological (enzyme activity) or ecological changes (food, predation and other mortality), or a response to constraints operating at a cellular level (oxygen supply and associated costs). To make progress, ecologists, physiologists, modellers and geneticists should work together to develop a cross‐disciplinary research programme that integrates theory and data, explores time‐scales over which the TSR operates, and assesses limits to adaptation or plasticity. We identify four questions for such a programme. Answering these questions is crucial given the widespread impacts of climate change and reliance of management on models that are highly dependent on accurate representation of ecological and physiological responses to temperature.


Fresh water deficit is one of the most important global problems today. In the countries with scarce water resources, they often become a reason of armed conflicts. The peaceful settlement of relations connected with management and water consumption issues within and beyond the frontiers of the country is an important guarantee of the region stability. The said problem is urgent in Georgia as well because of its water objects are located at the borders and the transit run-off that is 12% of the total one. Fresh water resources are the major natural resources of Georgia. Despite of this, water supply of population at its Eastern part is an acute issue. Southeastern part of the country has been selected to carry out the research. This region is notable for deficiency of water resources in the country. The region tends to desertification which aggravates fresh water problem even more and presumably may lead to migration of local population from the area. The purpose of study was creation geographical information system (GIS) of water resources. GIS contains almost all layers of different content (water resources, springs, channels, hydrological stations, population water supply, etc.). The results of work provide an opportunity to identify the resource potential of the mentioned region, control and manage it, carry out monitoring and plan regional economy. Keywords—GIS, irrigation, water resources.


The nature of call centre `logics' and their predominance in routine commercial areas of the economy underscored much of the early research into call centre operations. Recent regulatory, structural and technological developments in advanced economies underscored subsequent migrations of call centres from the private to the public sector (Glucksman, 2004;Taylor and Bain, 2007). Further call centre migrations have also occurred into more skilled occupations in the public sector. Drawing on published and unpublished research on in-bound call centres operating in social work and nursing in the UK and Australia, this discussion analyses the dual migration of call centres from routine commercial operations to professional public sector services.The following discussion recognizes the viability of cost efficient and customer service dualities, however, given shifts into more complex areas of service delivery, pre-existing norms of professional practice became another important driver of call centre labour processes.


Hydra spectra of 85 G–K dwarfs in the young cluster M35 near the Li 6708 Å line region are analyzed. From velocities and Gaia astrometry, 78 are likely single-star members that, combined with previous work, produce 108 members with Teff ranging from 6150 to 4000 K as defined by multicolor, broadband photometry, E(B − V) = 0.20, and [Fe/H] = −0.15, though there are indications the metallicity may be closer to solar. The Lithium abundance A(Li) follows a well-delineated decline from 3.15 for the hottest stars to upper limits ≤1.0 among the coolest dwarfs. Contrary to earlier work, M35 includes single stars at systematically higher A(Li) than the mean cluster relation. This subset exhibits higher VROT than the more Li-depleted sample and, from photometric rotation periods, is dominated by stars classed as convective (C); all others are interface (I) stars. The cool, high-Li rapid rotators (RRs) are consistent with models that simultaneously consider rapid rotation and radius inflation; RRs hotter than the Sun exhibit excess Li depletion, as predicted by the models. The A(Li) distribution with color and rotation period, when compared to the Hyades/Praesepe and the Pleiades, is consistent with gyrochronological analysis placing M35's age between the older M34 and younger Pleiades. However, the Pleiades display a more excessive range in A(Li) and rotation period than M35 on the low-Li, slow-rotation side of the distribution, with supposedly younger stars at a given Teff in the Pleiades spinning slower, with A(Li) reduced by more than a factor of four compared to M35.


We propose a new classification of rain forest plants into eight fruit syndromes, based on fruit morphology and other traits relevant to fruit‐feeding insects. This classification is compared with other systems based on plant morphology or traits relevant to vertebrate fruit dispersers. Our syndromes are based on fruits sampled from 1,192 plant species at three Forest Global Earth Observatory plots: Barro Colorado Island (Panama), Khao Chong (Thailand), and Wanang (Papua New Guinea). The three plots differed widely in fruit syndrome composition. Plant species with fleshy, indehiscent fruits containing multiple seeds were important at all three sites. However, in Panama, a high proportion of species had dry fruits, while in New Guinea and Thailand, species with fleshy drupes and thin mesocarps were dominant. Species with dry, winged seeds that do not develop as capsules were important in Thailand, reflecting the local importance of Dipterocarpaceae. These differences can also determine differences among frugivorous insect communities. Fruit syndromes and colors were phylogenetically flexible traits at the scale studied, as only three of the eight seed syndromes, and one of the 10 colors, showed significant phylogenetic clustering at either genus or family levels. Plant phylogeny was, however, the most important factor explaining differences in overall fruit syndrome composition among individual plant families or genera across the three study sites.


The growth in agricultural productivity and significance of science and technology in contributing to this growth has been well documented by Bredahl, Cline, Evenson (1967), Griliches (1964), and Peterson. The results of these studies generally indicate that over the past several decades, investment in agricultural research has paid off with relatively high rates of return. Most of this previous work, however, has been directed at estimating returns to aggregate agricultural research in an ex post sense at the national level and does not address the question of potential future returns to research at a state or regional level (Norton). Thus, a particular need exists to develop a methodology for evaluating the potential returns to specific types of agricultural research at a subnational level. The allocation of agricultural research funds in the United States is determined in large part by political decisionmakers and research administrators at the state level. Although aggregated, national-level, ex post estimates of returns to research are useful to state-level research administrators as indicators of research potential and as a means of justifying funding requests, they are not directly applicable to the larger issues involved. A state-level assessment of the effects of agricultural research should be as situation specific as possible: considering at least the geographic distribution of benefits and the division of benefits between consumers and producers. Essentially, research administrators need to know which types of agricultural research can be expected to have the highest payoffs and to whom the gains will accrue. Answers to questions regarding the magnitude and distribution of agricultural research benefits depend on five primary factors: (1) the impact which a research finding has on production possibilities, (2) the rate and extent of adoption, (3) supply elasticities of the commodities affected, (4) price elasticities of demand for the commodities affected, and (5) agricultural policy. An analysis of potential returns to agricultural research at the state level must consider each of these factors. The purpose of this paper is to present a general conceptual framework for such analyses and also to describe how this framework is being applied in a study of potential returns to research in Nebraska.


Recent improvements in positioning technology have led to a much wider availability of massive moving object data. A crucial task is to find the moving objects that travel together. In common, these object sets are called object movement patterns. Due to the emergence of many different kinds of object movement patterns in recent years, different approaches have been proposed to extract them. However, each approach only focuses on mining a specific kind of patterns. It is costly and time consuming to mine and manage various number of patterns, since we have to execute a large number of different pattern mining algorithms. Moreover, we have to execute these algorithms again whenever new data are added to the existing database. To address these issues, we first redefine movement patterns in the itemset context. Second, we propose a unifying approach, named GeT_Move, which uses a frequent closed itemset-based object movement pattern-mining algorithm to mine and manage different patterns. GeT_Move is developed in two versions which are GeT_Move and Incremental GeT_Move. To optimize the efficiency and to free the parameters setting, we further propose a Parameter Free Incremental GeT_Move algorithm. Comprehensive experiments are performed on real and large synthetic datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.


The experiments presented in this work are aimed at gaining a greater understanding of the semantic impairment in semantic dementia (SD) in terms of modality-specificity and category-specificity, and to consider the implications for the organisation of the semantic system. To this end, the semantic abilities of a group of twelve SD patients with varying impairment severity were examined using a variety of methods - tests from a traditional semantic battery and novel tests, which examined the verbal and nonverbal knowledge of concepts and the semantic attributes of those concepts. The methods of assessment were directly contrasted and relationships between them explored. Throughout this work, comparisons with normal performance were drawn using data collected from age-matched healthy subjects. Longitudinal analyses of the performance of a subset of the patients were also presented to investigate any decline in patient performance over time. The findings suggest a remarkable degree of consistency in semantic performance in the patient group, regardless of stimulus modality or feature type, with few exceptions. However, this consistency was not reflected in the influence of semantic domain. Some patients showed category-specificity while others did not. These differences could not be explained by reference to psycholinguistic variables or evolutionarily determined categories. Differential processing of feature types was more satisfactory as an explanation but required the implication of more fine-grained distinctions than the binary sensory/functional knowledge classification. Recent models of which consider multiple principles of organisation within the semantic system are more likely to be able to account for all the data showing both consistency and inconsistency within the present cohort of SD patients, and the myriad findings in the semantic memory literature.


The paper investigates the credibility of an intermediary's advice in a bilateral trade model. A seller and a buyer with private and independent valuations exchange a unit of good. Trade is mediated by an intermediary, who observes a coarse signal about the buyer's valuation and may reveal it to the seller before bargaining. We show that if the broker gets a fixed per-transaction fee, he can fully transmit information via cheap talk. This information transmission increases ex ante welfare of the seller and the broker but has an ambiguous impact on the buyer. We show that limits to informative communication may arise if the intermediary observes signals about valuations of both participants or because of competition between intermediaries. Finally, using mechanism design approach, we show that choosing an appropriate system of two-part tariffs allows the intermediary to secure the same expected profit as in the optimal direct mechanism.


While the interaction between a needle and the surrounding tissue is known to cause a significant targeting error in prostate biopsy leading to false-negative results, few studies have demonstrated how it impacts in the actual procedure. We performed a pilot study on robot-assisted MRI-guided prostate biopsy with an emphasis on the in-depth analysis of the needle-tissue interaction in vivo. The data were acquired during in-bore transperineal prostate biopsies in patients using a 4 degrees-of-freedom (DoF) MRI-compatible robot. The anatomical structures in the pelvic area and the needle path were reconstructed from MR images, and quantitatively analyzed. We analyzed each structure individually and also proposed a mathematical model to investigate the influence of those structures in the targeting error using the mixed-model regression. The median targeting error in 188 insertions (27 patients) was 6.3 mm. Both the individual anatomical structure analysis and the mixed-model analysis showed that the deviation resulted from the contact between the needle and the skin as the main source of error. On contrary, needle bending inside the tissue (expressed as needle curvature) did not vary among insertions with targeting errors above and below the average. The analysis indicated that insertions crossing the bulbospongiosus presented a targeting error lower than the average. The mixed-model analysis demonstrated that the distance between the needle guide and the patient skin, the deviation at the entry point, and the path length inside the pelvic diaphragm had a statistically significant contribution to the targeting error (p  <  0.05). Our results indicate that the errors associated with the elastic contact between the needle and the skin were more prominent than the needle bending along the insertion. Our findings will help to improve the preoperative planning of transperineal prostate biopsies.


This paper describes a novel Home Lift, Position, and Rehabilitation (HLPR) Chair, designed at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to provide independent patient mobility for indoor tasks, such as moving to and placing a person on a toilet or bed, and lift assistance for tasks, such as accessing kitchen or other tall shelves. These functionalities are currently out of reach of most wheelchair users. One of the design motivations of the HLPR Chair is to reduce back injury, typically, an important issue in the care of this group. The HLPR Chair is currently being extended to be an autonomous mobility device to assist cognition by route and trajectory planning. This paper describes the design of HLPR Chair, its control architecture, and algorithms for autonomous planning and control using its unique kinematics.


This paper draws on data from a broader study, the central objective of which was to explore the place of sport and physical activity in the lives of 1,010 young people in north-west England and north-east Wales. More particularly, the paper reports the findings of 24 focus groups conducted with 153 15-16-year-olds and examines: (i) young people's participation in leisure-sport; (ii) the leisure behaviours and sporting biographies of young people in the context of wider social processes; and (iii) the extent to which participation in leisure and sport contribute to existing social divisions between the sexes and social classes. The findings revealed that for many young people participation in sport and physical activity was an integral aspect of their lives but, as with other leisure behaviours, this was strongly related to, among other things, gender and social class. It was also clear that, particularly for the more frequent participants, playing sport was just one component in their generally busy and wide-ranging leisure lives that did not prevent them from engaging simultaneously in commercially-oriented leisure activities and consuming legal and illegal drugs that impact negatively on their health. In this regard, it is argued that it is only possible to understand adequately where sport and physical activity fit into the multi-dimensional lives of 15-16-year-olds by examining those lives 'in the round', and by locating young people within the increasingly complex and dynamic relational networks to which they have belonged in the past, and which they continue to form in the present.


Melia azedarach L. in addition to ornamental purposes and traditional usage of the plant, some potentially occured bioactive compounds from all parts of the plant that recently studied on can cause an increasing demand of the plant seedling. The present study aims to determine the effects of gibberellic acid (GA3), indole3-acetic acid (IAA) and water treatments on breaking seed dormancy, obtaining germination and to reach healthy acclimatized seedlings. The two plant growth regulators, water and different treatment durations have been applied for some plant genus or species as obtaining different germination activities. In the study for germination tests, seeds treated with 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 ppm GA3 or IAA separately for 6 hours or 24 hours besides water treatments and control in two different seed ages. Among the all treatments in both of the two seed ages (seeds from fresh fruits from tree and seeds from fruits after one year hanging on tree); GA3 doses gave the best germination and seedling results while controls and IAA treatments had no possitive effects on germination rates. The data was analysed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) of completely randomized block design and the groups that showed variance were then subjected to Duncan's Multiple Range Test with a significance value at P=.05. The percentage data was transformed by Arc Sin √% before carrying out ANOVA.


The study of music is always, to some extent, "empirical," in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kinds of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music. Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology, Empirical Musicology provides a guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit. Its nine chapters cover perspectives from music theory, computational musicology, ethnomusicology, and the psychology and sociology of music, as well as an introduction to musical data analysis and statistics. This book shows that such approaches could play an important role in the further development of the discipline as a whole, not only through the application of statistical and modeling methods to musical scores but also--and perhaps more importantly--in terms of understanding music as a complex social practice.


This project examines how reminders affect tax filing among lower-income nonfilers (individuals who did not appear on a filed tax return but had income reported by third parties to the Internal Revenue Service). We present novel data on this population and results from two randomized controlled trials. The results demonstrate that one-time reminders increase tax filing, both to claim tax refunds based in part on withholdings and Earned Income Tax Credit benefits, as well as to voluntarily pay balances owed to the IRS. However, these effects do not persist. Consistent with recency effects, individuals who owe a balance due appear more likely to recidivate into nonfiling than those who receive refunds. Follow-up reminders continue to increase tax filing, particularly among individuals who previously had to pay balances to the IRS instead of receive refunds.


Human neuroblastoma cell lines frequently express the TRK-A proto-oncogene and bind nerve growth factor (NGF) but do not differentiate when exposed to NGF. Transient transfection of an exogenous TRK-A gene into SH-SY5Y and LA-N-5 neuroblastoma cells restored the ability of these tumor cells to differentiate with NGF. Stable TRK-A-transfected SH-SY5Y cell clones were isolated, and they responded to NGF by autophosphorylation of p140trk-A, c-fos induction, morphological differentiation, and increased expression of two neuronal marker genes, neuropeptide tyrosine and GAP-43. In phorbol ester-induced differentiated wild-type cells, TRK-A expression was increased with no change in NGF responsiveness. Thus, the restoration of the NGF-induced differentiation pathway by exogenous TRK-A presents a system of NGF-responsive human cultured cells and focuses attention on the trk-A protein and its function or malfunction in neuroblastoma.


Precopulatory mate guarding is a complex behavior, influenced by many social and physiological factors, representing a case of intersexual conflict. Mate guarding has often been analyzed with the aid of theoretical models. In these models, it is commonly predicted that mate-guarding time is influenced by encounter rates between males and females, the contenders' relative sizes, and the possible interaction among males (i.e., "takeovers": one guarding male displacing another). The factors influencing male and female guarding decisions have been measured in laboratory experiments but never under natural field conditions. In this field-based study, we observed mate-guarding couples of the clam shrimp Limnadia badia in ephemeral pools on granite rock outcrops in Western Australia. We recorded guarding duration, focusing on the factors considered important in mate-guarding models: male and female size, population density, sex ratio, operational sex ratio, and the status of female receptivity. We also estimated time budgets for males, the possibility of male takeovers, and the potential role of female resistance. We found that female receptivity stage (how close the female was to molting), small male size, and low absolute female presence are key factors in decreasing mate-guarding duration. This study adds a field dimension to manipulative laboratory projects and theoretical models of mate guarding. We were able to observe the simultaneous interactions of multiple factors in the field and to make a robust examination of the ideas of intersexual conflict during mate guarding in these crustaceans. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.


BACKGROUND
Aortic valve stenosis is the most prevalent valvulopathy in the elderly, but it is frequently undertreated.

AIM
To assess early and long term results of valve replacement with bioprostheses in patients 70 years old or older with aortic stenosis.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
A review of the database of the Cardiovascular Surgery Service of our hospital, for the period 1990-2007, identified 156 patients with aortic valve stenosis, aged 76.7 ± 4.5 years (67% males), that were subjected to an aortic valve replacement with bioprosthesis. Seventy eight (50%) were in functional class III-IV. Six patients had emergency surgery. In 67 patients (43%) coronary artery bypass graft were performed. Long term mortality was ascertained obtaining death records from Chilean death registry.

RESULTS
Operative mortality was 3.2% (5 patients). Four patients (2.6%) required a reoperation due to bleeding. The mean follow up was 66 ± 41 months. The survival rate at 1, 3 and 5 years was 94%, 88% and 80%, respectively. Forty two patients (27%) were 80 years old or older. In this sub-group, 1 patient (2.3%) died during the peri operative period and the estimated survival rate at 1, 3 and 5 years was 97%, 92%, and 80%, respectively. Multivariate risk analysis, for the whole group, identified low ejection fraction and concomitant coronary artery bypass graft surgery as predictors of late mortality.

CONCLUSIONS
Aortic valve replacement for aortic stenosis with bioprostheses in patients 70 years old or older had low perioperative mortality and morbidity and a good long term survival.


The US military's surge in Afghanistan from 2009 through 2012 was designed to blunt Taliban momentum and ultimately allow international forces to significantly reduce their presence and transition full responsibility for security to the Afghan government by 2015. In May of 2011, near the height of the surge, the Taliban leadership countered the international coalition by opening a distinct new front in their asymmetric battle; one waged not with bullets and bombs, but with regular English language posts on Twitter. This article utilizes public relations and communications theory to analyze a sample of these Tweets alongside Mullah Omar's yearly Eid messages. In doing so, the argument is made that Taliban information operations on both the tactical and strategic levels promoted a narrative of the conflict designed to weaken the international public's resolve to actively oppose the Taliban through a long-term deployment of primarily Western military forces to the country. For policymakers, the Taliban's own chronicling of the war on social media indicates that insurgent forces are not nearly as capable of waging a jihad across all regions of the country as they might wish to be, nor are they in command of a large network of infiltrators willing and able to attack their international trainers and Afghan military partners on command. Academically, the Taliban's use of Twitter reinforces other research showing that even in the more diffuse, less restrictive atmosphere of social media, the leadership of armed Islamist groups often attempt to exert control over internet-based information operations through the establishment of official social media accounts.


Cultured anthers of Nicotiana sylvestris produced 70% haploid, 14% diploid, 8% triploid, 2% tetraploid and 6% mixaploid plantlets. Immediately pre-mitotic anthers produced no plantlets; mitotic and immediately post-mitotic ones did so. Stage of anther development at initiation of culture was not related to production of non-haploids. Embryoids arose from divisions of the vegetative nucleus. In microspores containing globular embryoids 0, 1 or 2 nuclei derived from the generative nucleus could be recognised; these, however, contributed few if any viable cells to the developing plantlets. Metaphase plates with higher than the haploid number of chromosomes were seen and probably arose through nuclear fusion at an early stage.


We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We find robust evidence that female primary school attainment, relative to that of males, is positively associated with the medieval pattern of commerce, along the routes that connected Italian cities among themselves and with the rest of the world. The effect of medieval commerce is particularly strong at the non-compulsory upper-primary level and persists even after controlling for alternative long-term determinants reflecting the geographic, economic, political, and cultural differentiation of medieval Italy. The long-term influence of medieval commerce quickly dissipates after national compulsory primary schooling is imposed at Unification, suggesting that the channel of transmission was the larger provision of education for girls in commercial centers.


Experimental enlargement of sexually selected traits that are energetically cheap to produce is expected to reveal costs resulting from increased risk of predation or social competition. Given a trade–off between sexually selected traits and life history traits such costs may be expected to affect not only the males themselves but also their offspring. In this study I manipulated the size of the forehead patch, a sexually selected trait that functions as a badge of status in male collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis). First, I found that a male's likelihood to establish a breeding territory with respect to his original badge size was affected by the treatment such that old males (older than or equal to two years) with relatively small original badges enjoyed an increased likelihood of establishing a breeding territory while young males (yearlings) suffered a reduced likelihood of establishment when their badges were enlarged as compared to unchanged. Second, young males with enlarged badges that were able to establish a territory fed their nestlings less in relation to their females compared to the control males. However, the females adjusted their parental effort to such an extent that no significant differences were observed in total feeding rate nor in reproductive success between the two groups of males. These results suggest that experimentally enlarged badge size in the collared flycatcher may result in increased male competition and that males have to trade their effort spent in male contest against their parental effort.


The conflict between Jupiter and Juno in the Aeneid is commonly read as a battle between the forces of order (masculinity, rationality, good) and chaos (femininity, irrationality, evil). The present article argues that this schematization, though morally and aesthetically satisfying, fails to account for most of the data. Virgil's Jupiter is in fact concerned solely with power ( imperium ) and adulation ( fama ), despite persistent attempts by readers——and characters in the poem——to see him as benign. By systematically discussing every appearance of Jupiter in the poem, the article seeks to correct the distorted or incomplete views of the god that arise from selective examination. The first section looks at Jupiter's own speeches to illustrate his motivations. The second section demonstrates how these motivations, though frequently misconstrued by the human characters, are confirmed by the glimpses of Jupiter focalized through the omniscient narrator. The third discusses the implications of this portrait of Jupiter for Virgil's vision of Rome and of human happiness.


The Santa Rosa mylonite zone is part of a 100-km-long belt of deformation along the eastern margin of the northern Peninsular Ranges batholith, southern California. In the northern Santa Rosa Mountains, complexly deformed mylonitic plutonic and metasedimentary tectonites are cut by a stacked sequence of five low-angle faults. Evidence from field relationships and the analysis of minor structures, microstructures, and textures (preferred orientation) suggest that the coaxial component of deformation ("pure shear") dominated over a noncoaxial ("simple shear") component. It is proposed that mylonitic deformation and low-angle faulting, which appear to be kinematically associated, are the result of Late Cretaceous extension and thinning of the continental margin.


T helper type 0 (Th0), Th1, and Th2 CD4+ T cell clones derived from a T cell receptor alpha/beta (TCR-alpha/beta) transgenic mouse were activated by antigen presented on "artificial" antigen-presenting cells that expressed or lacked the costimulatory molecule B7-1, and were analyzed for single cell cytokine mRNA expression by in situ hybridization. There was significant heterogeneity in the frequency of T cells that expressed individual cytokine mRNAs within each clonal population, suggesting that transcriptional control of each of the cytokine genes was not coordinate within an individual cell. The majority of antigen-stimulated Th1 cells expressed mRNA for interferon gamma (IFN-gamma), but far fewer cells in the same population expressed interleukin 2 (IL-2). Similarly, the frequency of IL-4-expressing cells was greater than that of IL-5- or IL-10-expressing cells in the same Th2 population, but the difference in expression frequencies was more variable between clones. The expression frequencies of each of the cytokines was quite heterogeneous in the antigen-activated Th0 population. The principal effect of increased antigen on the activation of individual cytokine genes in each of the clonal populations was to increase recruitment of mRNA-positive cells, with little or no effect on the level of cytokine mRNA expression in individual positive cells. The effects of B7 costimulation were variable depending on the cytokine gene analyzed. B7 costimulation markedly increased the frequency and the level of IL-2 mRNA expression in individual positive cells in the Th1 and Th0 populations, with less effect on the recruitment and single cell expression level of IFN-gamma. IL-4 frequencies were modestly increased by B7 costimulation of the Th2 clones, but there was no detectable increase in single cell IL-4 expression level. The observed patterns of cytokine mRNA expression favor a model of T cell activation in which all-or-none, rather than graded, responses of cytokine genes are dominant.


The 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act dramatically affects the decision-making environment of farms by introducing provisions for reducing farm income support payments. These program changes are likely to affect not only farm incomes, but also farm capital asset markets. The combined effect of these two financial variables is expected to alter the risk position and the debt repayment capacity on farms. Empirical results of this analysis indicate that the absence of farm income support payments reduces debt repayment capacity and increases the risk position on a representative Louisiana cotton-soybean farm.


Background Evaluation of the direct costs of chronic diseases has become an essential tool in the adequate provision of health resources, which also implies an attempt to optimise treatments. Due to the high cost of biological drugs, this evaluation has a considerable importance in the treatment of rheumatic diseases. Purpose To evaluate the dose patterns of etanercept (ETN), adalimumab (ADA) and infliximab (IFX) for the treatment of patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) or Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) in a tertiary hospital. To calculate the yearly average cost per patient of each drug according to clinical practice. Materials and methods Retrospective study of patients treated with ETN, ADA and/or IFX for at least six months between January/2009 and April/2013 and diagnosed with RA, AS or PsA by the Rheumatology Department. Periods of treatment, doses dispensed in the hospital pharmacy and periods of temporary interruption, were obtained. The cost of each drug (official data) was: ADA 40 mg, 494.6 €; ETN 50 mg, 227.8 €; ETN 25 mg, 113.9 €; and IFX 100 mg, 516 €. Administration costs were added for the infusion of IFX (173.7 €). Results 507 patients, 200 men/307 women, with a mean age of 57 years were included. 73.2% (371) of the patients had RA, 14.8% (75) PsA and 12% (61) AS. The cost per patient/year of biological treatment is shown in the following table. Statistically significant differences were also observed between the average percentage value of doses received and the theoretical dose (summary of product information): 85.0% for ETN, 101.66% for ADA and 112.48% for IFX (p < 0.001). No statistically significant differences were observed in the average length of treatment: 37.61 months, 38.32 months and 36.07 months for ADA, ETN and IFX, respectively (p = 0.444). Conclusions Compared to the most common biological treatments, etanercept proved to be the most cost-effective treatment in these rheumatic diseases. Because there is a lack of studies evaluating the safety and efficacy between these drugs, establishing a cost-usefulness algorithm in the selection of these drugs should be considered, always paying attention to the presence of possible contraindications. This would result in a containment of the healthcare expenditure and an improvement in the efficiency of these treatments. Abstract CP-069 Table 1 Adalimumab Etanercept Infliximab Total Cost per patient/year of biological treatment N 216 159 132 507 Mean 13,073.19€ 10,172.64€ 12,283.52€ 11,957.96€ IC95% L_Lower 12,076.63€ 9,849.49€ 11,481.93€ 11,659.83€ IC95% L_Upper 13,439.75€ 10,495.79€ 13,085.10€ 12,256.08€ P_value (biological treatment) < 0.001 (S) P_value (ADA vs. ETN) < 0.001 (S) P_value (ADA vs. INF) 0.065 (N. S) P_value (ETN vs. INF) < 0.001 (S) No conflict of interest.


On the afternoon of August 19, 1991, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Lubavitch Hasidic movement headquartered in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, visited the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens to pray at the grave of his predecessor. A police car from the 71st Precinct accompanied him. On their return, they were joined by a station wagon containing four young members of the Lubavitch community, who had arrived earlier at the cemetery to prepare for Schneerson's arrival. Traveling west, the procession reached Utica Avenue. Gavin Cato, the seven-year-old son of Guyanese immigrants, was on the sidewalk near his apartment on President Street, repairing his bicycle chain. His seven-year-old cousin Angela was playing nearby. The police car and Schneerson's automobile crossed Utica on a green light and proceeded along President Street at a normal speed. But the third car had fallen behind. Not wishing to lose sight of Schneerson's car, it either crossed Utica on a yellow light or ran a red light - and collided with a car moving north on Utica. The station wagon veered onto the sidewalk on President Street, knocking over a 600-pound stone pillar from a building and striking both Gavin and Angela Cato, pinning them beneath the car. Angela survived; Gavin did not. Gavin Cato's death set off three days of riots. Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Orthodox Jew doing research in New York City for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Melbourne, was stabbed to death a few blocks away by a group of young black men. Cato's and Rosenbaum's deaths became heated symbols in a political and cultural struggle that pitted not just Hasidic Jews against black residents of Crown Heights, but also black radicals against the black-dominated Brooklyn political establishment; the black mayor and his black police commissioner against the largely white police force; the United States Department of Justice against New York politicians; and the leadership of Manhattan-based Jewish organizations against Jews from the outer boroughs. The riot strained race relations in the city, led some to question the viability of urban liberalism and the black-Jewish political entente, raised concerns about the extent of black antisemitism, and led the federal judiciary to broaden the scope of federal civil rights legislation to include Jews.


The 1990s witnessed the widespread formation of political parties organized around indigenous identity throughout the Latin American region. This project examines that phenomenon within the case of Bolivia. Bolivia was home to the region's first and most successful indigenous political parties. Three primary areas of interest are examined: emergence, support, and representative efforts. Traditional explanations for political party emergence and support fall into social and institutional explanations. Concerning emergence, these theories are incomplete when applied to indigenous political parties because of inattention to the environment in which changes occur. This project argues that economic recession, increased coca eradication efforts, and decentralization policies provided the stimulus for indigenous groups to form political parties. This theory is applied to Bolivia and its indigenous political parties. Concerning political party support, social and institutional explanations are compared using the region's most successful indigenous party, Movimiento al Socialismo. Social explanations carry the most explanatory weight while institutional factor pale in comparison. Finally, the representation efforts of Movimiento al Socialismo are examined in the first review of representation provided by indigenous political parties. The review finds legislative efforts directed at natural resources and cultural preservation, but little attention given to autonomy and native justice issues.


Against the background of the current literature on (interpreter-mediated) doctor-patient interactions, and of a study of real interpreting situations recorded in Italy and Belgium, this paper presents an analysis of medical role-plays recorded in one of the major Italian universities training interpreters. The paper sets out to check to what extent participants fulfil the "ideal template" of dialogue interpreting (AIBIA turn pattern), locating departures and raising questions like: who initiates them and how do the interlocutors position themselves? Are there any differences with departures in real data? Is role-playing a good way of introducing students to role-taking in healthcare? Combining notions from Conversation Analysis and Interpreting Studies, this paper discusses what works and what is missing in role-plays.


The Secche di Lazzaro formation (ca. 6.2-7 kys BP) is a phreatomagmatic deposit situated in the southwestern part of the island of Stromboli (Aeolian Archipelago, Italy). The volcanic sequence is comprised of three main units. In the lower unit accretionary lapilli are particularly abundant and are characterized by strong cementation between the particles and an uncommon resistance to breakage. To understand the processes behind the formation of the Secche di Lazzaro (SdL) accretionary lapilli a multi-analytical approach was used on the lapilli Aggregate Tuff (AT), and on single Accretionary Lapilli (AL). We carried out granulometric analysis, Field Emission – Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM), Electron Microprobe Analysis (EMPA), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) and 3D imaging by X-ray micro-tomography (X-mCT). The granulometric data show that most particles in the AT have a diameter equal to Φ -1 corresponding to 2 mm. The EMPA, FE-SEM and XRPD analyses reveal the presence of different mineral phases, mainly plagioclase, K-feldspar, halite, and clinopyroxene, together with volcanic glass. From the X-mCT analysis, we constrained the particle distribution and estimated the porosity of AL. The results of the FE-SEM images provided the chemical distribution within individual lapilli allowing the identification of rim and core zoning as well as the presence of halite located both on the border of single lapilli and on the juncture between different lapilli. Moreover, halite occurs among different aggregates in single AL, thus acting as a binding agent, as well as within rim pores. The results of this work shed new light into the formation of accretionary lapilli in phreatomagmatic eruption a t volcanic island involving marine water.


Reflectivity and spectral properties of a thick reflection grating are discussed for the second-order Bragg diffraction regime. Analytical expressions for the reflection and gain coefficients are obtained with the help of the developed theory. A procedure is proposed for determining the wavelength of laser oscillations generated in an optically active grating. The influence of the second harmonic of dielectric permittivity spatial modulation on reflection and spectral characteristics of a grating was also analyzed. Comparison of the approximate results obtained by the proposed approach and by the numerical solution is carried out, and their excellent agreement is demonstrated.


In this paper, a combined approach for enhancement and segmentation of mammograms is proposed. In preprocessing stage, a contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) method is applied to obtain the better contrast mammograms. After this, the proposed combined methods are applied. In the first step of the proposed approach, a two dimensional (2D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is applied to all the input images. In the second step, a proposed nonlinear complex diffusion based unsharp masking and crispening method is applied on the approximation coefficients of the wavelet transformed images to further highlight the abnormalities such as micro-calcifications, tumours, etc., to reduce the false positives (FPs). Thirdly, a modified fuzzy c-means (FCM) segmentation method is applied on the output of the second step. In the modified FCM method, the mutual information is proposed as a similarity measure in place of conventional Euclidian distance based dissimilarity measure for FCM segmentation. Finally, the inverse 2D-DWT is applied. The efficacy of the proposed unsharp masking and crispening method for image enhancement is evaluated in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and that of the proposed segmentation method is evaluated in terms of random index (RI), global consistency error (GCE), and variation of information (VoI). The performance of the proposed segmentation approach is compared with the other commonly used segmentation approaches such as Otsu's thresholding, texture based, k-means, and FCM clustering as well as thresholding. From the obtained results, it is observed that the proposed segmentation approach performs better and takes lesser processing time in comparison to the standard FCM and other segmentation methods in consideration.


In this paper we investigate two hypothesis regarding the use of deep reinforcement learning in multiple tasks. The first hypothesis is driven by the question of whether a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, trained on two similar tasks, is able to outperform two single-task, individually trained algorithms, by more efficiently learning a new, similar task, that none of the three algorithms has encountered before. The second hypothesis is driven by the question of whether the same multi-task deep RL algorithm, trained on two similar tasks and augmented with elastic weight consolidation (EWC), is able to retain similar performance on the new task, as a similar algorithm without EWC, whilst being able to overcome catastrophic forgetting in the two previous tasks. We show that a multi-task Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (GA3C) algorithm, trained on Space Invaders and Demon Attack, is in fact able to outperform two single-tasks GA3C versions, trained individually for each single-task, when evaluated on a new, third task—namely, Phoenix. We also show that, when training two trained multi-task GA3C algorithms on the third task, if one is augmented with EWC, it is not only able to achieve similar performance on the new task, but also capable of overcoming a substantial amount of catastrophic forgetting on the two previous tasks.


We study the negative correlation between natural resource-abundance and long-term income focusing on the savings-investment channel. We first present empirical evidence on this channel and then develop an OverLapping-Generations (OLG) model to study the issue. In this model, savings adjust downwards to income from natural resources, and investment in capital contributes to knowledge creation, a feature based on endogenous growth theory. We analyze the link from resource income future income through savings and investment. Natural resources have two counteracting effects on income. In the short term, resource wealth augments income, but in the long-term, it decreases income through a crowding-out effect on capital and knowledge. We discuss different scenarios under which the resource curse is most likely to take place.


In this article the authors analyze a century of research on the causes and consequences of wrongful convictions in the American criminal justice system while explaining the many lessons of this body of work. This article chronicles the range of research that has been conducted on wrongful convictions; examines the common sources of error in the criminal justice system and their effects; suggests where additional research and attention are needed; and discusses methodological strategies for improving the quality of research on wrongful convictions. The authors argue that traditional sources of error (eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, perjured testimony, forensic error, tunnel vision, prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, etc.) are contributing sources, not exclusive causes, of wrongful conviction. They also argue that the research on wrongful convictions during the last hundred years has uncovered a great deal about how these sources operate and what might prevent their effects. Finally, the authors urge criminal justice professionals and policy-makers to take this research more seriously and apply the lessons learned from a century of research into wrongful convictions.


Presents a control design strategy for a class of single-input nonlinear dynamical systems. The design consists in transforming the system into a new controllable canonical form which we call the Jordan controllable canonical form (JCCF). In fact, the Brunowski controllable canonical form is a special case of the JCCF. We first show that any controllable pair can be transformed into the JCCF. We next extend the result to a controllable pair which is state dependent. Using this extended Jordan controllable canonical form we propose a control design strategy for a class of single-input control affine systems. The design is simple and systematic and provides two degrees of freedom to fix the convergence of the closed-loop system. An example is given to illustrate the control design.


The Secret Service, FBI, NSA, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and George Washington University have all identified Insider Threats as one of the most significant challenges facing IT, security, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals today. This book will teach IT professional and law enforcement officials about the dangers posed by insiders to their IT infrastructure and how to mitigate these risks by designing and implementing secure IT systems as well as security and human resource policies. The book will begin by identifying the types of insiders who are most likely to pose a threat. Next, the reader will learn about the variety of tools and attacks used by insiders to commit their crimes including: encryption, steganography, and social engineering. The book will then specifically address the dangers faced by corporations and government agencies. Finally, the reader will learn how to design effective security systems to prevent insider attacks and how to investigate insider security breeches that do occur. Throughout the book, the authors will use their backgrounds in the CIA to analyze several, high-profile cases involving insider threats. * Tackles one of the most significant challenges facing IT, security, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals today* Both co-authors worked for several years at the CIA, and they use this experience to analyze several high-profile cases involving insider threat attacks * Despite the frequency and harm caused by insider attacks, there are no competing books on this topic.books on this topic


The information revolution has brought demand-side effects to the fore of economic activity, business strategy, and intellectual property jurisprudence and policy. Intellectual property doctrines play a central role in harnessing network effects, promoting innovation to overcome excess inertia, and balancing consumer welfare, competition, and innovation. This chapter surveys and integrates the economic, business strategy, and legal literatures relating to network effects and intellectual property. Part I introduces the topic of network effects and provides an overview of this Chapter. Part II describes the functioning of network markets. Part III examines the interplay of business strategy, contract, standard setting organizations, intellectual property, and competition policy. Part IV presents three principles for tailoring intellectual property regimes and competition policy for network technologies. Part V traces the evolution of intellectual property protection for network features of systems and platforms. Part VI discusses the interplay of intellectual property protection and competition policy. Part VII assesses the extent to which intellectual property protection and competition policy align with the normative design principles. Part VIII identifies promising areas for future research.


Abstract This article explores the relationship between the three aspects of the social agenda of the ecumenical movement captured in the motto of "Justice, peace and care for creation". It investigates the moral, spiritual and theological issues that are at stake from a South African perspective, drawing especially on a recent document entitled "Climate Change--A challenge to the churches in South Africa" (2009), published and endorsed by the South African Council of Churches. It examines the underlying tensions between these concepts and the ways in which one is sometimes prioritized over the other. It concludes that the themes of justice, peace and sustainability may be associated with different aspects of God's work on earth and that this can only be dealt with on the basis of a deeper theological assessment of the whole of God's work. Introduction There can be little doubt that the ecumenical calls for a "Just, Participatory and Sustainable Society" (Nairobi, 1975) and for "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation" (Vancouver, 1983) have been able to capture the social agenda of the church in a particularly lucid way. The struggles against economic injustice and inequalities, to address various forms of conflict (domestic violence, inter-group conflict, genocide, xenophobia, civil war, inter-religious conflict) and environmental destruction, are hereby combined in one phrase. Moreover, the phrase has been fruitful because one could explore the complex interplay between these agenda items. It is also helpful to analyze what is at stake with regard to any one issue--for example, climate change--on this basis. It is therefore not surprising that these phrases have elicited so much discussion over the last 35 years. Nevertheless, the phrase remains contested for at least three reasons that I will explore below. Firstly, one may debate the relative priority of the three components in terms of contextual considerations. Why is the theme of justice placed first and sustainability last? Secondly, how is the social agenda of the church (if captured accurately in this call) related to the identity of the church (its roots, nature, beliefs, spirituality and mission)? What difference does it make to address these agenda items in the church and theologically and not merely in the sphere of civil society? This continues to beg questions about the relationship between "ecclesiology and ethics". Thirdly, and precisely because of the previous question, there is a need to explore the theological issues underlying these concerns. How is God's justice related to the peace that passes all understanding and to God's mercy that endures forever and that nourishes and sustains the whole earth? Only on this basis can one capture the deepest spiritual dimensions of the quest for justice, peace and the integrity of creation. In this contribution I will explore first the moral and then the spiritual and theological issues that are at stake from a South African perspective, drawing especially on a recent document entitled "Climate Change--A challenge to the churches in South Africa" (2009), published and endorsed by the South African Council of Churches (SACC). (1) This document is not primarily a prophetic call to influence political decision-making on climate change. Instead, it invites self-critical reflection, calling for an ecological transformation, renewal and conversion amongst Christians in South Africa. An order of priority? South African reflections The relative weight attributed to (economic) justice, peace and care for creation has been a matter of perception and a bone of contention in the South African context. The nature conservation policies of the apartheid era provoked the suspicion that conservation boils down to the establishment of game reserves for a privileged few, often at the expense of the dislocation of local people. Many urban blacks view issues of nature conservation as a concern of the white middle class, the hobby of an affluent, leisured minority who would like to preserve the environment for purely aesthetic reasons and who seem more concerned about wildlife than about the welfare of other human beings. …


Today, mass customization has emerged as a manufacturing paradigm for a number of enterprises to efficiently and effectively satisfy customers requirements for product variety. The competitive nature of todays market makes it necessary for designers to have a methodology for designing customized products in such a dynamic environment.

The Product Platform Constructal Theory Method (PPCTM), developed by Dr. Gabriel Hernandez, provides designers a methodical approach for synthesizing multiple modes of managing variety in the development of product platforms for customized products. The use of the PPCTM results in a hierarchical organization of the modes of managing customization, as well as the specification of their range of application across the product platform. The focus in this thesis is to augment the PPCTM in order to develop an effective product platform design method that alleviates three of its major limitations: inability to deal with uncertain distributions of demand, changing design parameters and changing extents of marketplaces. The infusion of concepts of robustness helps to address the first two limitations making the product platforms unaffected by large variations in demand and design parameters. The compromise Decision Support Problem is proposed to address the third limitation of changing extents of marketplaces by making tradeoffs between objectives of the initial market extent and future probable extensions.

The result of this work is an augmented PPCTM that facilitates the synthesis of multiple modes for managing product variety in the presence of a dynamic environment. The augmented method is used to design a line of customizable pressure vessels and hand exercisers.


The computing resources of the TeraGrid are a powerful tool for research by graduate students throughout the world. In this paper we analyze the usage of the TeraGrid by a sample of 876 graduate students from the institutions that form the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. We investigate demographic information and usage of TeraGrid resources and present visualizations. We also analyze the sample using data mining algorithms, specifically rule association learning and hierarchical clustering, and create interactive visualizations. This work reveals interesting patterns about the research done by graduate students on the TeraGrid and the resources they use.


Soxhlet, Ultrasonic extract of Morinda citrifolia L. fruit and four extracts from high pressure extraction at 10 MPa using ethanol, ethyl acetate as solvent and dried by vacuum oven and spray dryer were analyzed for their antioxidant activity by peroxide value method and diphenylpicrylhydrazyl radical scavenging method. The five extracts along with the reference samples, butylated hydroxyl toluene and tannic acid were further analyzed to determine their total phenolic content by Folin-Ciocalteau method and total flavonoid content by Dowd method. The M. citrifolia extract by high pressure extraction with ethyl acetate as solvent and spray dried was found to exhibit highest antioxidant activity and total flavonoid content. High total phenolic content was determined in the high pressure extract using ethyl acetate as solvent and vacuum dried. It was interesting to note that ultrasonic extract exhibited significant antioxidant activity, total phenolic and flavonoid content. High pressure extracted M. citrifolia in ethanol was found to express lesser values comparatively. The significant difference in activity among the high pressure extracts was found to be due to the polarity of the solvents used for extraction as M. citrifolia fruit contains relatively larger quantity of non-polar antioxidant compounds. It was also found that the drying methods had significant impact on the antioxidant activity, total phenolic and flavonoid content of the extracts.


SUMMARY This paper describes an analytical framework for the weighted max-min flow control of elastic flows in packet networks using PID and PII 2 controller when flows experience heterogeneous round-trip delays. Our algorithms are scalable in that routers do not need to store any per-flow information of each flow and they use simple first come first serve (FCFS) discipline, stable in that the stability is proven rigorously when there are flows with heterogeneous round-trip delays. We first suggest two closed-loop system models that approximate our flow control algorithms in continuous-time domain where the purpose of the first algorithm is to achieve the target queue length and that of the second is to achieve the target utilization. The slow convergence [1] of many rate-based flow control algorithms, which use queue lengths as input signals, can be resolved by the second algorithm. Based on these models, we find the conditions for controller gains that stabilize closed-loop systems when round-trip delays are equal and extend this result to the case of heterogeneous round-trip delays with the help of Zero exclusion theorem. We simulate our algorithms with optimal gain sets for various configurations including a multiple bottleneck network to verify the usefulness and extensibility of our algorithms.


This paper presents the results from 10 minidrum centrifuge tests conducted at the Schofield Centre, compiled with 4 additional test results from Thusyanthan et al., 2008. All these tests were designed to measure the uplift resistance of a pipeline installed into stiff clay by trenching and backfilling, then uplifted approximately 3 months after installation. All tests were conducted at 1:30 scale using soil obtained from offshore clay samples. Experimental results show that clay blocks remained intact after 3 prototype months of consolidation, and were lifted rather than sheared during pipe pullout. The uplift resistance therefore depends on the weight of the soil cover and the shearing resistance mobilised at the softening contact points between the intact blocks and within the interstitial slurry. Slow drained pullout led to lower resistance than fast pullout, indicating that the drained response is critical for design. The varying scatter shows that peak uplift resistance is very sensitive to the arrangement of the backfill blocks when the cover and pipe diameter are comparable to the block size. Copyright © 2009 by The International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE).


Drilling through the edifice of Rangitoto, the youngest and largest volcano in the "monogenetic" Auckland volcanic field, reveals the multistage eruptive and magmatic history of a small basalt shield volcano. Activity commenced calendar year (cal.) 6000 cal. yr B.P., involving minor effusive and pyroclastic volcanism until 650 cal. yr B.P. This period either represents an early, less productive phase of a single polygenetic volcano, or, alternatively, Rangitoto is better described as a volcanic complex that includes one or more buried edifices concealed by the main structure. A voluminous shield-building phase occurred 650–550 cal. yr B.P., erupting isotopically uniform subalkalic basalts (Mg# 60–64). Four batches of magma distinguished by trace-element chemistry were erupted sequentially, but they lack genetic connection via fractional crystallization or assimilation. Two of the magma batches display linear trends of decreasing incompatible trace-element abundance and increasing ratios of moderately incompatible to highly incompatible elements with decreasing age. This is consistent with cycles of progressive partial melting at the source. The final phase of activity (ca. 550–500 cal. yr B.P.) was explosive and less voluminous, producing scoria cones at the summit. This phase involved more diversity in magma compositions, including more mafic subalkalic basalt, and alkali basalt, pointing to sourcing of magmas simultaneously from different depths in the mantle. Rangitoto volcano contributes to a growing body of evidence showing that major periods of volcanism in "monogenetic" basalt fields occur at centers that have experienced multiple eruption episodes. Changes in magma composition accompany changes in eruption style, but a lack of an obvious shared pattern in magmatic evolution at various volcanoes points to the localized mantle heterogeneity and conduit systems. Hazard scenarios for regions traditionally classified as "monogenetic" need to encompass the possibility of prolonged episodes of activity and reawakening of volcanoes, a significant implication where infrastructure is built on such regions.


The recognition of speech in meetings poses a number of challenges to current automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques. Meetings typically take place in rooms with non-ideal acoustic conditions and significant background noise, and may contain large sections of overlapping speech. In such circumstances, headset microphones have to date provided the best recognition performance, however participants are often reluctant to wear them. Microphone arrays provide an alternative to close-talking microphones by providing speech enhancement through directional discrimination. Unfortunately, however, development of array front-end systems for state-of-the-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition suffers from a lack of necessary resources, as most available speech corpora consist only of single-channel recordings. This paper describes the collection of an audio-visual corpus of read speech from a number of instrumented meeting rooms. The corpus, based on the WSJCAM0 database, is suitable for use in continuous speech recognition experiments and is captured using a variety of microphones, including arrays, as well as close-up and wider angle cameras. The paper also describes some initial ASR experiments on the corpus comparing the use of close-talking microphones with both a fixed and a blind array beamforming technique


The Earth Is Full By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?


Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data, the paper examines Russian workers' fear of unemployment under different economic and labour market conditions during the last 15 years. We employ two alternative measures for this fear. The first one looks at the workers' fear of losing their current jobs, while the second deals with the fear of not finding relevant re-employment in case of displacement. In order to get the best possible measurement of unemployment for those local and social environments where our respondents live and work, we design unemployment rates for narrowly defined regional and demographic (peer) groups. Estimating ordered probit models for both fear measures, and controlling for various worker and job characteristics, we do not find significant causal effects of unemployment on these fears in most of our specifications. These results are robust to exclusion of potentially endogenous variables; they hold for different periods, subsamples, and levels of job security. Moreover, our simulations show that even a large increase in the unemployment rate has little impact on conditional probabilities of expressing a strong or weak fear of unemployment. These results suggest that the high level and persistence of fear of unemployment in Russia may be caused by non-economic factors.Jel codesI21, J12, J620


We use a large-scale representative survey of households from October 19-21 that elicits respondents' expectations about the presidential election's outcome as well as their economic expectations to document several new facts. First, people disagree strongly about the likely outcome of the election, despite widespread publicly available polling information. Most Democrats are very confident in a Biden win while most Republicans are very confident in a Trump win. Second, respondents predict a fairly rosy economic scenario if their preferred candidate wins but a dire one if the other candidate wins. Since most respondents are confident in their favored outcome, unconditional forecasts are similar across parties despite the fact that underlying probability distributions and conditional forecasts are very different. Third, when presented with recent polling data, most voters change their views by little unless they are independent and/or have relatively weak priors about the outcome. Information that emphasizes the uncertainty in polling data has larger effects in terms of reducing polarization in expected probabilities over different electoral outcomes. Fourth, exogenous information that changes individuals' probability distribution over electoral outcomes also changes their unconditional forecasts in a corresponding manner. These changes in economic expectations in turn are likely to affect household economic decisions.


There is increasing evidence of a local population of short duration gamma-ray bursts (sGRB), but it remains to be seen whether this is a separate population to higher redshift bursts. Here we choose plausible luminosity functions (LFs) for both neutron star binary mergers and giant flares from soft gamma repeaters (SGR), and combined with theoretical and observed Galactic intrinsic rates we examine whether a single progenitor model can reproduce both the overall Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) sGRB number counts and a local population, or whether a dual progenitor population is required. Though there are large uncertainties in the intrinsic rates, we find that at least a bimodal LF consisting of lower and higher luminosity populations is required to reproduce both the overall BATSE sGRB number counts and a local burst distribution. Furthermore, the best-fitting parameters of the lower luminosity population agree well with the known properties of SGR giant flares, and the predicted numbers are sufficient to account for previous estimates of the local sGRB population.


The existing material bearing on the first part of the subject was meagre and in certain important respects misleading and incorrect necessitating extensive research in manuscripts. I. Concerning the author of the Nau Tarz i Murassa I have traced fresh particulars, examining 34 sources, the following being new:- (1) 'Ayarush Shu'ara. (2) Tazkira e Sarvar. (3) 'imadus Sa'adat. (4) Tazkira of Hindustani Poets. (5) Anonymous Tazkira e Shu'ara e Shu'ara e Urdu. II. Discovered:- (a) a work by Tahsin, hitherto unknown, namely, the Ruqqa'at i Nadirat i Rozmarra Navisi; (b) the original name of the Nau Tarz i Murassa'; (c) the fact that the composition of the Murassa' was begun in 1768 and not after as hitherto supposed by all authorities; (d) move manuscripts of the Nurassa', and in Germany, of one of which I secured Photostats, collating its 9 copies, tracing, out important omissions, rehandlings and interpolations and preparing its complete text for publications; (e) Poetry by Tahsin of which critical estimate is given. III. (a) Cleared the confusion about the sources of the Murassa' and the real author of the stories by comparing it with 8 manuscripts of the Persian Cahar Darvesh and by determining Anjab, the Spaniard, as the probable author of the Persian. (b) Shown that the Murassa' was probably translated into Persian. IV. Discovered one more Urdu version, the Car Gulshan, of the Cahar Darvesh and compared the Murassa' with seven Urdu renderings in all, providing much new information. The scope of the second part of the thesis is videned by manuscript-study. I. Traced out and discussed (a) Six new prose writers:- (1) shekh Mahmud; (2) Ketelaer, (a Dane); (3) Schultz, (a German); (4) 'Uzlat; (5) Sh seirou Ihrda renderings in all providing much now information. kir; (6) Asrarullah. (b) Two unkown prose works:- (1) The Dakhni incomplete translation of Abdul Fazl's abridged Tuti Nama. (2) The Bengali - Hindustani rendering of the Anvar i Suhaili. (c) Two known but hitherto untraceable pieces of prose:- (1) Sauda's Preface; (2) Fazli's Preface. II. Furnished further information regarding:- (1) Gesu Daraz; (2) Shah Miraji; (3) Miraji of Hyderabad. Many errors of catalogues and writers on the subject have been datected and rectified, and the present writer has set forth original views on numerous points at issue.


The generation of isolated attosecond hard x-ray pulse has been studied under the enhanced self-amplified spontaneous emission (ESASE) scheme with the density and energy modulation of an electron bunch. It is demonstrated in simulation that an isolated attosecond hard x-ray pulse of a high contrast ratio can be produced by adjusting a driver laser wavelength and the energy distribution of an electron bunch. An isolated attosecond pulse of ~146 attosecond full-width half-maximum (FWHM) at 0.1 nm wavelength is obtained with a saturation length of 34 meter for the electron beam parameters of Korean X-ray Free Electron laser.


ABSTRACT Leading up to the 2014 festival of Sukkot, the Sala-Manca Artists' Group, directors of the Mamuta Art and Media Centre at Hansen House, decided to create a public sukkah on the Hansen grounds as a temporary dwelling for its activities during the holiday. Rather than constructing an extravagant or innovatively designed sukkah, Sala-Manca, together with Itamar Mendes-Flohr and Yeshayahu Rabinowitz, chose to delve into the sukkah's charged meaning in the Israeli context and to highlight the temporary nature of the structure and its associations with exile, thus evoking connotations related not only to Jewish history but also to the current Israeli context and proposing a contemporary reading of the sukkah, both as a concrete object and as a symbol. A structure from the Jahalin Bedouin community, refugees from the Negev (Israel) on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, is therefore purchased, dismantled, and reassembled on the grounds of the Hansen House. This article discusses The Eternal Sukkah project in its historic, political, and cultural context, and in the context of the history of Israeli art. I deal with the relations between the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Bedouin architecture, and Israeli ethno-politics, as expressed in this project in which I was also involved as artist.


The purpose of this review is to summarize cases of Chinese doctors who have committed suicides between years 2008 and 2016. Moreover, we would like to appeal to the government and the public to increase their efforts to reduce death among Chinese doctors. We have reviewed public reports from local media, medical websites, official documents, and articles published in PubMed, Google Scholar, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and www.dxy.cn (a popular medical web in China) between years 2008 and 2016. Identified articles were published in either English or Chinese. A total of 51 cases (16 females and 35 males) of doctor suicides were reported or published between 2008 and 2016. Most incidents of death occurred between 20-59-year-olds, with a higher number observed within the 30-39 age group. Notably, the Jiangsu province had the highest number of reported doctor suicides (9 cases). Furthermore, detailed analysis revealed that the department of pediatrics (18%, 9/51) topped the number of suicidal rates when compared to the other hospital units. Suicides occurred more often in the full-service, tertiary hospitals, accounting for 63% (32/51) of the reports. Jumping from a building was the most common way of death recorded, accounting for 55% (28/51) of total cases. Suicide is not just a medical issue but also a social concern. A key to reducing deaths by suicide in Chinese doctors should be a commitment of both the Chinese government and medical organizations to establish and implement a coordinated plan of action.