Purpose – This study aims to shed some light on the concept of cognitive distance in relation to innovation performance, due to the various uses of the concept in literature, and lack of a clear overview. This study investigated the uses of the different concepts and the different results that are the outcome of innovation studies.Methodology – The study is conducted through a literary review using 28 relevant studies that have been search for in Business Source Premier. The studies have been analyzed using Provan et al (2007) typology of interorganizational network research.Key findings - The results show that the different uses of the concept and difference in results of the researched studies are due to the fact that scholars are researching different subjects on different levels. The differences are due to the different methodological approaches, investigated area and level of which the research is conducted. Significant finding is that most results in the researched studies agree that with cognitive distance, there is a higher chance forinnovation.


The potential advantage of platinum(iv) complexes as alternatives to classical platinum(ii)-based drugs relies on their kinetic stability in the body before reaching the tumor site and on their activation by reduction inside cancer cells. In this study, an analytical workflow has been developed to investigate the reductive biotransformation and kinetic inertness of platinum(iv) prodrugs comprising different ligand coordination spheres (respectively, lipophilicity and redox behavior) in whole human blood. The distribution of platinum(iv) complexes in blood pellets and plasma was determined by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) after microwave digestion. An analytical approach based on reversed-phase (RP)-ICP-MS was used to monitor the parent compound and the formation of metabolites using two different extraction procedures. The ligand coordination sphere of the platinum(iv) complexes had a significant impact on their accumulation in red blood cells and on their degree of kinetic inertness in whole human blood. The most lipophilic platinum(iv) compound featuring equatorial chlorido ligands showed a pronounced penetration into blood cells and a rapid reductive biotransformation. In contrast, the more hydrophilic platinum(iv) complexes with a carboplatin- and oxaliplatin-core exerted kinetic inertness on a pharmacologically relevant time scale with notable amounts of the compound accumulated in the plasma fraction.


We report on the structure of the solar atmosphere above active region (AR) 10923, observed on 2006 November 10, as deduced from multi-wavelength studies including combined microwave observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Owens Valley Solar Array (OVSA). The VLA observations provide excellent image quality at a few widely spaced frequencies, while the OVSA data provide information at many intermediate frequencies to fill in the spectral coverage. Images at 25 distinct frequencies are used to provide spatially resolved spectra along many lines of sight in the AR, from which microwave spectral diagnostics are obtained for deducing maps of temperature, magnetic field, and column density. The derived quantities are compared with multiwavelength observations from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and Hinode spacecraft, and with a current-free magnetic field extrapolation. We find that a two-component temperature model is required to fit the data, in which a hot (>2 MK) lower corona above the strong-field plage and sunspot regions (emitting via the gyroresonance process) is overlaid with somewhat cooler (∼1 MK) coronal loops that partially absorb the gyroresonance emission through the free–free (Bremsstrahlung) process. We also find that the extrapolated potential magnetic fields can quantitatively account for the observed gyroresonance emission over most of the AR, but in a few areas a higher field strength is required. The results are used to explore the coronal configuration needed to explain the observations. These results show that the bulk of free–free emission in both radio and X-rays emanates from two loop systems, distinguished by the location of their loop footpoints. We discuss the implications of such comparisons for studies of AR structure when better microwave spectral imaging becomes available in the future.


The author starts with a brief history of the 'discoveries' of modern portfolio theory and behavioral finance and suggests that the latter may well create just as much of a revolution in the wealth management world as the former did in institutional asset management. So which is better? modern portfolio theory, which describes how markets work, or behavioral finance, which describes how people work? The answer, of course, is that we need both. MPT and behavioral finance are both important tools in helping us design and manage successful investment portfolios. Both have advantages and disadvantages. MPT is very useful, but it is descriptive, not prescriptive, and relies on assumptions that may not always be valid. Behavioral finance picks up where modern portfolio theory leaves off, completing the circle, but the author identifies seven potential areas of weakness that can vitiate outcomes driven solely by it. He concludes by proposing an iterative combination of the two: for example, could one design the client's portfolio in the traditional manner, using MPT-based strategic asset allocation techniques and, simultaneously, design the client's portfolio using techniques informed by behavioral finance and then compare the two results in an instructive way.


The Voortrekkers and the indentured slaves which accompanied them during the Great Trek, 1835-1838. In 1833 the Imperial Government in London decided to abolish slavery throughout the Empire. As a result of that decision the slaves in the Cape Colony were freed on 1 December 1834, but were indentured for the next four years with their previous masters until they would finally be set free on 1 December 1838. After the decision to emancipate the slaves became known in the Cape Colony, the trekboers -who must be distinguished from the Voortrekkers -continued to take their indentured slaves with them when they crossed the northern boundary in times of drought to find temporary grazing for their stock. Thereupon the Colonial Government prohibited the removal of indentured slaves from the Colony. These prohibitions were still valid when the Voortrekkers left the Colony and took their indentured slaves with them. Only after the philanthropists and the British Government had realized the full implications of the Great Trek and the final date for the emancipation drew closer, they started having misgivings about the Voortrekkers freeing their indentured slaves before or on 1 December 1838. Therefore Fieldcornet Gideon Joubert of Colesberg was sent to the Transorangia and Natal to bring them back to the Colony. Gideon Joubert was a loyal supporter of the Colonial Government and a known opponent of the Great Trek. That was why his report on his mission carried much weight with the Colonial and Imperial Governments. This report showed that the Voortrekkers had no intention of keeping their indentured slaves in bondage i?½thus correcting the impression which existed in philanthropic and government circles about the Voortrekkers in this regard.


Many genes on the uni linkage group of Chlamydomonas affect the basal body/flagellar apparatus. Among these are five FLA genes, whose mutations cause temperature-sensitive defects in flagellar assembly. We present the molecular analysis of a gene which maps to fla10 and functionally rescues the fla10 phenotype. Nucleotide sequencing revealed that the gene encodes a kinesin-homologous protein, KHP1. The 87-kD predicted KHP1 protein, like kinesin heavy chain, has an amino- terminal motor domain, a central alpha-helical stalk, and a basic, globular carboxy-terminal tail. Comparison to other kinesin superfamily members indicated striking similarity (64% identity in motor domains) to a mouse gene, KIF3, expressed primarily in cerebellum. In synchronized cultures, the KHP1 mRNA accumulated after cell division, as did flagellar dynein mRNAs. KHP1 mRNA levels also increased following deflagellation. Polyclonal antibodies detected KHP1 protein in Western blots of purified flagella and axonemes. The protein was partially released from axonemes with ATP treatment, but not with AMP- PNP. Western blot analysis of axonemes from various motility mutants suggested that KHP1 is not a component of radial spokes, dynein arms, or the central pair complex. The quantity of KHP1 protein in axonemes of the mutant fla10-1 was markedly reduced, although no reduction was observed in two other uni linkage group mutants, fla9 and fla11. Furthermore, fla10-1 was rescued by transformation with KHP1 genomic DNA. These results indicate that KHP1 is the gene product of FLA10 and suggest a novel role for this kinesin-related protein in flagellar assembly and maintenance.


Introduction Breast feeding improves the health of mothers and infants; the UK has low rates, with marked socioeconomic inequalities. While trials of peer support services have been effective in some settings, UK trials have not improved breast feeding rates. Qualitative research suggests that many women are alienated by the focus on breast feeding. We propose a change from breast feeding-focused interactions to respecting a woman's feeding choices, inclusion of behaviour change theory and an increased intensity of contacts in the 2 weeks after birth when many women cease to breast feed. This will take place alongside an assets-based approach that focuses on the positive capability of individuals, their social networks and communities. We propose a feasibility study for a multicentre randomised controlled trial of the Assets feeding help Before and After birth (ABA) infant feeding service versus usual care. Methods and analysis A two-arm, non-blinded randomised feasibility study will be conducted in two UK localities. Women expecting their first baby will be eligible, regardless of feeding intention. The ABA infant feeding intervention will apply a proactive, assets-based, woman-centred, non-judgemental approach, delivered antenatally and postnatally tailored through face-to-face contacts, telephone and SMS texts. Outcomes will test the feasibility of delivering the intervention with recommended intensity and duration to disadvantaged women; acceptability to women, feeding helpers and professionals; and feasibility of a future randomised controlled trial (RCT), detailing recruitment rates, willingness to be randomised, follow-up rates at 3 days, 8 weeks and 6 months, and level of outcome completion. Outcomes of the proposed full trial will also be collected. Mixed methods will include qualitative interviews with women/partners, feeding helpers and health service staff; feeding helper logs; and review of audio-recorded helper–women interactions to assess intervention fidelity. Ethics and dissemination Study results will inform the design of a larger multicentre RCT. The National Research Ethics Service Committee approved the study protocol. Trial registration number ISRCTN14760978; Pre-results.


Summary
An analysis of 306 cases of snake-bite accident admitted to Charity Hospital of Louisiana at New Orleans from 1907 through 1946 is presented. The distribution of admitted cases by years varied from 1 to 18. The largest number accidents occurred during the years 1929 to 1938. The period from April through October was the time of either greater hazard or exposure, or both, for over 80 per cent of the snake-bite accidents took place during these seven months. Over two-thirds of the bites occurred in individuals under 30 years of age. Sixty-one individuals were under 10 years of age, emphasizing the hazard in this age group. The ratio of males to females who received poisonous snake-bites was 5 to 1, respectively.
Children, farmers, fishermen, trappers, swampers and women engaged in activities about rural dwellings were most frequently involved in the accidents. A wide variety of activities, sometimes attended by carelessness and folly, exposed many individuals to attack by the reptiles.
The snakes involved included 5 of the 6 venomous species known to occur in Louisiana. Water moccasin and rattlesnake bites predominated.
More snake-bite accidents occurred during the afternoon and night than before noon. The great majority of bites took place during daylight hours, presumably due to greater activity of the individuals, with resultant increased exposure.
The feet and ankles received 150 injuries. The hands were wounded in 105 cases. The mouth was the site of two snake-bites. High-top shoes and stout gloves would have prevented a majority of the bites. Rubber boots and overalls did not afford complete protection from bites, since the fangs occasionally penetrated these articles of clothing.
One of the most significant facts extracted from this extensive series is that serious consequences arose from faulty first aid measures. Amputations of fingers, toes, arms and legs were necessitated as a result of improper use of tourniquets. Secondary infection of the wounds was common. A myriad of amusing, amazing and pathetic home treatment remedies were employed, which frequently produced more damage than that normally caused by the bite.
There were two fatalities in the series of 306 cases, which represents a mortality rate of less than one per cent. No fatalities occurred during the last 25 years. One of the fatalities resulted from septicemia subsequent to snake-bite.
A total of 114 deaths caused from poisoning by venomous animals are recorded for all of Louisiana from 1916 to 1945. Some of these deaths were caused by poisoning by the bites of black-widow spiders. Prompt medical treatment and hospital care probably contributed in part to the low fatality rate (less than one per cent) of cases of snake-bite poisoning admitted to Charity Hospital. The marked difference between the few fatalities at the hospital and the relatively large number throughout the state suggests additional factors for complete explanation.
Approximately one-half of the cases in this series arrived at the hospital within six hours after the bite occurred. In 136 patients in the series on whom urinalysis was done, only one had red blood corpuscles in the urine and none had evidence of hemoglobinuria.
Evaluation of methods of treatment is difficult in view of the low fatality rate and due to the fact that there was considerable change in the methods of treatment over the four decade period. Various combinations of the following procedures for treatment of snake-bite poisoning were employed: application of tourniquet, incision of the wound and of areas of swelling, suction of incised areas, injection of antivenin, use of tetanus antitoxin, injection of antigangrene serum (against Clostridium welchii), intravenous fluids, elevation of swollen extremities, application of heat or hot compresses to affected parts, rest and symptomatic measures, particularly to allay anxiety. In view of the large number of infected lesions due to either the snake-bite or to the first-aid measures, treatment should anticipate bacterial contamination of the wound to prevent its progression.
The sequelae of poor first-aid measures in some cases exceeded that of the average pathology produced by the bite of some of the venomous snakes. This should not be misconstrued as an argument against employing first-aid, but definitely indicates the need for better instruction of the public in the use of correct first-aid measures.


Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely applied to sequential data analysis. Due to their complicated modeling structures, however, the theory behind is still largely missing. To connect theory and practice, we study the generalization properties of vanilla RNNs as well as their variants, including Minimal Gated Unit (MGU), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Convolutional (Conv) RNNs. Specifically, our theory is established under the PAC-Learning framework. The generalization bound is presented in terms of the spectral norms of the weight matrices and the total number of parameters. We also establish refined generalization bounds with additional norm assumptions, and draw a comparison among these bounds. We remark: (1) Our generalization bound for vanilla RNNs is significantly tighter than the best of existing results; (2) We are not aware of any other generalization bounds for MGU, LSTM, and Conv RNNs in the exiting literature; (3) We demonstrate the advantages of these variants in generalization.


The shape of the moisture-density curve obtained from compaction tests has been explained in terms of capillarity and lubrication, viscous water, and physico-chemical interactions. None of these theories has been substantiated by diagnostic laboratory experiments and none has been extended to explain the effect, on the dry density, of foot pressure or number of stress applications. Probably the most important tool that has been used in the contemporary development of soil mechanics is the principle of effective stress. This principle has been used in analysis of the shearing properties of compacted soils and has been used, to a lesser extent, in analyzing the compaction process itself. However, it was not until recently (1960) that sufficient knowledge became available about the engineering properties of unsaturated soils to permit attempting a more definitive explanation of the shape of the moisture-density curve using the principle of effective stress. The effective stress theory developed herein is qualitative, as it has not been possible to determine the effective stresses and strains in the soil during compaction. Nevertheless, the theory provides an insight into the compaction process that was not available previously.


We apply infrared degenerate four-wave mixing (IR DFWM) spectroscopy to the investigation of CH4 and C2H2, making use of C—H stretching rovibrational transitions near 3000 and 3300 cm−1, respectively. The spectrum of C2H2 is fitted quite well by a two-level stationary-absorber model in the low-saturation limit, I ≪ Isat. The spectrum of CH4 is not accurately described by this model in the low-saturation limit, but it is described well by the same model in the high-saturation limit, I ∼ 10 Isat. The reason for the disagreement at low intensity is not clear, but the results indicate that approximations made to account for spectroscopic line broadening may be inadequate for the ν3 vibrational band of CH4. IR DFWM provides a sensitive diagnostic, ∼10 molecules/cm3 per quantum state, for the molecules investigated here, and we believe that it holds great promise for the investigation of polyatomic molecules that have IR active rovibrational transitions, in general.


This study investigates the role of authenticity in education. By applying Fred Newmann's theoretical framework of authentic achievement to a specific, K-12 setting operating in the real world, I examined Newmann's five facets of authentic education and looked for their practical manifestations. Those facets are higher-order thinking, depth of knowledge, connectedness to the world beyond the classroom, substantive conversation, and social support for student achievement. Parker Palmer inspired the addition of the criteria of the spiritual/ineffable to the framework, which is also examined in relation to authentic pedagogy. Combined, these qualities are referred to as the authentic education framework (AEF). Qualitative data from The Spring School (pseudonym) on the east coast of the United States has been collected and analyzed through the lens of educational connoisseurship and criticism. This research method permits the researcher to provide thick description, interpretation, and evaluation and to draw on themes presented in the data analysis. Qualitative methods of data collection including interview, observation, and artifact review were corroborated. Because the administration of the school changed during the data analysis phase and no longer operates under the philosophy under which this study occurred, this paper has become an historical narrative. The findings that emerged reveal that the following factors aid in the realization of authentic pedagogy at the elementary-school level: (1) school trust, (2) opportunities for iii aesthetic transformative experiences, (3) works toward a greater good, and (4) the role of the community. The notions of sincerity, honesty, relevance and wholisitic teaching in the school context were also evident. Findings also underscore the importance of a welldeveloped and thoroughly considered school philosophy. This study confirms that the processes of teaching and learning are personal in nature and relative to context and that prescribed curricula and confining pedagogical methods are antithetical to the development of opportunities for authentic teaching and learning.


The text of Ezekiel continues to present some challenges to students studying it. This is in view of what one school of thought identify in the Ezekiel text as extensive redactions and revisions, whilst another school of thought is hesitant to subject the Masoretic Text (MT) to such critical analysis. Amidst these differing viewpoints, I have discussed by means of literary analysis, the possibility that chapter 6 of Ezekiel may have been intended as a prophetic poetic message, or was later edited to conform to the genre of prophetic poetry. This is in the light of the so-called repetitions or 'additions' reflected in the MT if compared against the LXX, as well as the general problems associated with the Hebrew text of Ezekiel. The findings indicate that the text of Ezekiel 6 probably already had a complete theological corpus when it left the hand of the prophet Ezekiel or those who penned his words down. However, scribes saw it necessary to restructure, organise and colour the prophetic oracle in a literary form and structure they thought was necessary. This finding could be vital for solving literary and text critical problems in Ezekiel.


Participants in futures markets have money on the line and therefore have every incentive to collect and analyze as much information as possible. Academic evidence by Richard Just and Gordon Rausser at Berkeley suggests that futures-based price projections are more accurate than those created from econometric models. One problem with the use of futures contracts to project long-term prices is that there is low liquidity for contracts that trade more than three years into the future. Economists at Iowa State have developed a way to extrapolate futures prices for five or more years into the future.


Robot-assisted therapy has been successfully used to help children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) develop their social skills, but very often with the robot being fully controlled remotely by an adult operator. Although this method is reliable and allows the operator to conduct a therapy session in a customised child-centred manner, it increases the cognitive workload on the human operator since it requires them to divide their attention between the robot and the child to ensure that the robot is responding appropriately to the child's behaviour. In addition, a remote-controlled robot is not aware of the information regarding the interaction with children (e.g., body gesture and head pose, proximity etc) and consequently it does not have the ability to shape live HRIs. Further to this, a remote-controlled robot typically does not have the capacity to record this information and additional effort is required to analyse the interaction data. For these reasons, using a remote-controlled robot in robot-assisted therapy may be unsustainable for long-term interactions. To lighten the cognitive burden on the human operator and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience, it is essential to create some degrees of autonomy and enable the robot to perform some autonomous behaviours during interactions with children. Our previous research with the Kaspar robot either implemented a fully autonomous scenario involving pairs of children, which then lacked the often important input of the supervising adult, or, in most of our research, has used a remote control in the hand of the adult or the children to operate the robot. Alternatively, this paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of a robotic system called Sense- Think-Act which converts the remote-controlled scenarios of our humanoid robot into a semi-autonomous social agent with the capacity to play games autonomously (under human supervision) with children in the real-world school settings. The developed system has been implemented on the humanoid robot Kaspar and evaluated in a trial with four children with ASC at a local specialist secondary school in the UK where the data of 11 Child-Robot Interactions (CRIs) was collected. The results from this trial demonstrated that the system was successful in providing the robot with appropriate control signals to operate in a semi-autonomous manner without any latency, which supports autonomous CRIs, suggesting that the proposed architecture appears to have promising potential in supporting CRIs for real-world applications.


ABSTRACT My primary aim is to call into question an influential notion of paternal responsibility, namely, that fathers owe support to their children due to their causal responsibility for their existence. I argue that men who impregnate women unintentionally, and despite having taken preventative measures, do not owe child support to their children as a matter of justice; their children have no right against them for support. I argue for this on the basis of plausible principles of responsibility which have been used to defend abortion rights. I then consider the morally relevant differences between men and women, arguing that while in some cases these differences may justify differential treatment, their import should not be overstated — in many cases, the burden of child support will be too great to impose justly on fathers. This conclusion is not as undesirable as it may seem: I suggest feminist considerations in favour of revising the notion of paternal responsibility and consider alternative arrangements of child support.


BACKGROUND This study proposes a definition of futile care and quantifies its cost in injured elders. METHODS This was a retrospective study of Medicare patients with an International Classification of Diseases-9 injury diagnosis admitted to 171 Oregon and Washington facilities from January 1, 2001, through December 31, 2002, who died within 6 months of admission. Futile care was defined as death within 7 days of discharge from a hospitalization of at least 14 days. We compared health care costs in the last 6 months of life with those who did and did not meet our definition of futility. To simulate predicting and preventing futility early in the hospital course, we examined the effect of reducing spending on the futile care cohort to the level of those who survived 7 to 10 days after injury. RESULTS There were 6,832 elders who died within 6 months of injury, of whom 230 (3.4%) met our definition of futility. The median cost of care in the last 6 months of life was $33,373 for those not meeting our definition of futility and $87,391 for the futile care group (p < 0.001). The 3.4% receiving futile care incurred 8.9% of total costs. Reducing expenditures in the futile care group to the level of those who died from 7 to 10 days after injury (median, $25,633) would result in an overall cost savings of 6.5%. CONCLUSION End-of-life health care costs were significantly higher for those who received futile care. However, even aggressive reductions in futile care would result in small savings overall. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Economic analysis, level III.


Hospital information systems (HIS) have been in use for decades worldwide and for many years now in the area of the Middle East. Many hospitals in Saudi Arabia started to adopt HIS, where this adoption process is still facing challenges from different aspects. On top of these come the technical and the human challenges which might complicate the implementation of HIS as well as the training of healthcare professionals on using such systems. The main objective of this study was to identify, analyze and evaluate technical and human challenges perceived by healthcare professionals to the adoption of HIS in order to provide system implementers with suggestions on proper actions. The study used a questionnaire to collect data from a random sample of different healthcare professionals at two Saudi hospitals known for their experience implementing HIS; one private and the other is governmental, and then analyzed the results to identify, describe and evaluate various challenges. The study identified more than 50 challenges; 18 technical and 17 human challenges were validated and selected then used in the questionnaire to collect data about the participants' experiences regarding each item of these challenges. The study sorted challenges from the most to the least important. The governmental hospital users had more complains and concerns than the private hospital regarding the human challenges, related to awareness, training and usability of systems as well as the technical challenges, related to hardware and software of HIS. The study recommended increasing the awareness, training resources and adding hospital information system training to the undergraduate and postgraduate medical and nursing education. The study also recommended improving the condition of hardware and software used through more frequent updating of the devices, computers and their installed systems in addition to enhancing the usability of systems through different approaches.


Some recent empirical evidence suggests that stock prices are not properly modeled as the present discounted value of expected dividends. In this paper, we estimate a present value model of stock price that is capable of explaining the observed long-term trends in stock prices. The model recognizes that firm managers control cash dividend payments. The model estimates indicate that stock price movements may be explained by managerial behavior.


The rise of radical right-wing leaders, parties, movements, and ideas have transformed not only domestic political landscapes but also the direction and dynamics of international relations. Yet for all their emphasis on nationalist identity, on "America First" and "Taking Back Control," there is an unmistakable international dimension to contemporary nationalist, populist movements. Yet these movements are also often transnationally linked. We argue that a constitutive part of this globality is the New Right's (NR) own distinctive international political sociology (IPS). Key thinkers of the contemporary NR have, over several decades, theorized and strategically mobilized globalized economic dislocation and cultural resentment, developing a coherent sociological critique of globalization. Drawing on the oft-neglected tradition of elite managerialism, NR ideologues have borrowed freely from Lenin and Schmitt on the power of enmity, as well as from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School on counterhegemonic strategies. Against the temptation to dismiss right-wing ideas as "merely" populist and by implication as lacking in ideological and theoretical foundations, we are faced with the much more challenging task of engaging a position that has already developed its own international political sociology and incorporated it into its political strategies.


Abstract. A month (4 May to 8 June 2008) of ambient aerosol, air ion and gas phase sampling (Finokalia Aerosol Measurement Experiment 2008, FAME-08) was conducted at Finokalia, on the island of Crete, Greece. The purpose of the study was to characterize the physical and chemical properties of aged aerosol and to investigate new particle formation. Measurements included aerosol and air ion size distributions, size-resolved chemical composition, organic aerosol thermal volatility, water uptake and particle optical properties (light scattering and absorption). Statistical analysis of the aerosol mass concentration variations revealed the absence of diurnal patterns suggesting the lack of strong local sources. Sulfates accounted for approximately half of the particulate matter less than 1 micrometer in diameter (PM1) and organics for 28%. The PM1 organic aerosol fraction was highly oxidized with 80% water soluble. The supermicrometer particles were dominated by crustal components (50%), sea salt (24%) and nitrates (16%). The organic carbon to elemental carbon (OC/EC) ratio correlated with ozone measurements but with a one-day lag. The average OC/EC ratio for the study period was equal to 5.4. For three days air masses from North Africa resulted in a 6-fold increase of particulate matter less than 10 micrometers in diameter (PM10) and a decrease of the OC/EC ratio by a factor of 2. Back trajectory analysis, based on FLEXPART footprint plots, identified five source regions (Athens, Greece, Africa, other continental and marine), each of which influenced the PM1 aerosol composition and properties. Marine air masses had the lowest PM1 concentrations and air masses from the Balkans, Turkey and Eastern Europe the highest.


This work deals with the problem of parameter estimation of dynamical systems intended to model demonstrated motion profiles for a system of interest. The regression problem is formulated as a constrained nonlinear least squares problem. We present an approach that extends the concept of dynamical movement primitives to account for multiple demonstrations of a motion. We maintain an implicit dynamical system that resembles the demonstrated trajectories in a locally optimal way. This is achieved by solving a quadratic program (that encodes our notion of resemblance) at each sampling time step. Our method guarantees predictable state evolution even in regions of the state space not covered by the demonstrations.


INTRODUCTION Basically, two approaches have been used in the past to estimate the relationship among sales (demand) and marketing-mix variables at various levels of aggregation. Most commonly, a regression model is estimated which includes e.g., advertising expenditure (or a proxy) among its explanatory variables and appropriate dynamics. The list of such studies is rather long; only Clarke (1976) reviews 69 of them. The second, and more recent, approach is to estimate a Box-Jenkins time series model as was done by Helmer and Johansson (1977), Hanssens (1980), Bhattacharyya (1982), and Heyse and Wei (1985). The direction of causality is usually assumed to run from advertising to sales whereas the possibility of an effect of sales on advertising, whereby advertising budgets are set as a percentage of sales, although recognized (Schmalensee, 1972), it has received much less attention. Ashley et al. (1980) and Heyse and Wei (1985) present evidence supporting causality from consumption (sales) to advertising rather than the reverse. The causal chain (among sales and other marketing activity such as advertising, price, and promotions) implied by the existing marketing paradigms still remains ambiguous. The issue, therefore, as to the dynamic causal relationships (even in the Granger temporal sense rather than in the structural sense) remains unresolved and is an empirical one (1). In order to empirically resolve the issue of the direction of causation in a bivariate context, a lot of causality tests have been applied based mainly on the standard Granger (1969), Sims (1972), and the modified Sims suggested by Geweke et al. (1983). But the studies applying these tests suffered from the following methodological deficiencies: (i) These standard tests did not examine the basic time series properties of the variables. If the variables are cointegrated, then these tests incorporating different variables will be misspecified unless the lagged error-correction term is included (Granger 1988). (ii) These tests turn the series stationary mechanically by differencing the variables and consequently eliminated the long-run information embodied in the original level form of the variables. The error-correction model (ECM) derived from the cointegrating equations, by including the lagged error-correction term reintroduces, in a statistically acceptable way, the long-run information lost through differencing. The error-correction term (ECTs) stands for the short-run adjustment to long-term equilibrium trends. This term also opens up an additional channel of Granger causality so far ignored by the standard causality tests. (iii) Moreover, although recently, there has been a beginning of the application of ECM in causality testing in the bivariate context, such as Baghestani (1991), Chowdhury (1994), Dekimpe and Hanssens (1995), Jung and Seldon (1995), Lee, Shin and Chung (1996), and Zanias (1994), there has been very little attempt at testing the Granger causality channel in a dynamic multivariate Marketing context through vector error-correction modelling (VECM), variance decompositions (VDC) and impulse response functions (IRF). The primary purpose of this research is to conduct empirical tests to discern the dynamic causal relationships (in the Granger (temporal) sense rather than in the structural sense) among sales and other marketing-mix variables such as total advertising expenditures, and price in the context of the Portuguese car market. As mentioned before, at the moment a very few works (only about three or four) exist on the application of ECM in testing Granger causality. But even these few works are set in a bivariate context, and also do not apply the techniques of variance decompositions and impulse response functions to Granger causality. This study will make an attempt to improve and extend the existing few ECM-based works on Granger causality in the following ways: (a) It will try to discern Granger causality in a car market in a multivariate framework and within the environment of vector error-correction modelling. …


A rapidly growing area of economic research investigates the top of the income distribution using data from income tax records. This volume brings together studies of top incomes for twelve countries from around the world, including China, India, Japan, Argentina and Indonesia. Together with the first volume, published in 2007, the studies cover twenty two countries. They have a long time span, the earliest data relating to 1875 (for Norway), allowing recent developments to be placed in historical perspective. The volume describes in detail the source data and the methods employed. It will be an invaluable reference source for researchers in the field. Individual country chapters deal with the specific nature of the data for each of the countries, and describe the long-term evolution of top income shares. In the countries as a whole, dramatic changes have taken place at the top of the income distribution. Over the first part of the century, top income shares fell markedly. This largely took the form of a reduction in capital incomes. The different authors examine the impact of the First and Second World Wars, contrasting countries that were and were not engaged. They consider the impact of depressions and banking crises, and pay particular attention to the impact of progressive taxation. In the last 30 years, the shares of top incomes have increased markedly in the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries, reflecting the increased dispersion of earnings. The volume includes statistics on the much-discussed top pay and bonuses, providing a global perspective that discusses important differences between countries such as the lesser increase in Continental Europe. This book, together with volume 1, documents this interesting development and explores the underlying causes. The findings are brought together in a final summary chapter by Atkinson, Piketty and Saez. (presentation editeur)


We have investigated a possible involvement of GTPases in nuclear protein import using an in vitro transport system involving digitonin- permeabilized cells supplemented with exogenous cytosol. Transport in this system was measured with a novel ELISA-based assay that allows rapid quantitative analysis. GTP gamma S and other nonhydrolyzable analogues of GTP were found to rapidly inhibit the rate of in vitro nuclear import. Transport inhibition by GTP gamma S was dependent on the concentrations of permeabilized cells and cytosol, and was strongly enhanced by a cytosolic factor(s). The predominant cytosolic component responsible for this inhibition was found in a 20-30-kD fraction in molecular sieving chromatography. Furthermore, a component(s) of this 20-30-kD fraction was itself required for efficient nuclear import. Biochemical complementation with bacterially expressed protein demonstrated that this essential GTP gamma S-sensitive transport factor was Ran/TC4, a previously described GTPase of the Ras superfamily found in both nucleus and cytoplasm. Ran/TC4 and its guanine nucleotide release protein RCC1 have previously been implicated in DNA replication, cell cycle checkpoint control, and RNA synthesis, processing and export. Our results suggest that Ran/TC4 serves to integrate nuclear protein import with these other nuclear activities.


Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and laptops are intensively used every day by a large part of the population. These devices--which are equipped with Wi-Fi interfaces--can form disconnected mobile ad hoc networks (DMANETs) dynamically. These networks may allow service providers, such as local authorities, to deliver new kinds of services in a wide area (e.g., a city) without resorting to the infrastructure-based networks of mobile phone operators. This paper presents OLFServ, a new location-aware forwarding protocol dedicated to service-oriented opportunistic computing in DMANETs. This protocol implements several self-pruning heuristics allowing mobile nodes to decide whether they efficiently contribute in the message delivery. The protocol has been implemented in a service-oriented middleware platform, and has been validated through simulations, which proved its efficiency.


During the last few years, users ail over the world have become more and more accustomed to the availability of broadband access. This has boosted the use of a wide variety both of established and recent multimedia applications. However, there are cases where it is too expensive for network providers to serve a community of users. This is typically the case in rural and suburban areas, where there is slow deployment (or no deployment at all) of traditional wired technologies for broadband access (e.g., cable modems, xDSL). In those cases, the most promising opportunity rests with broadband wireless access technologies, such as the IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX. One of the features of the MAC layer of 802.16 is that it is designed to differentiate service among traffic categories with different multimedia requirements. This article focuses on mechanisms that are available in an 802.16 system to support quality of service (QoS) and whose effectiveness is evaluated through simulation


Environmental regulation in the United States has succeeded, to a certain extent, in solving the problems it was designed to address; air, water, and land, are indisputably cleaner and in better condition than they would be without the environmental controls put in place since 1970. But Daniel Fiorino argues in The New Environmental Regulation that -- given recent environmental, economic, and social changes -- it is time for a new, more effective model of environmental problem solving. Fiorino provides a comprehensive but concise overview of U.S. environmental regulation -- its history, its rationale, and its application- -- and offers recommendations for a more collaborative, flexible, and performance-based alternative. Traditional environmental regulation was based on the increasingly outdated assumption that environmental protection and business are irreversibly at odds. The new environmental regulation Fiorino describes is based on performance rather than on a narrow definition of compliance and uses such policy instruments as market incentives and performance measurement. It takes into consideration differences in the willingness and capabilities of different firms to meet their environmental obligations, and it encourages innovation by allowing regulated industries, especially the better performers, more flexibility in how they achieve environmental goals. Fiorino points to specific programs -- including the 33/50 Program, innovative permitting, and the use of covenants as environmental policy instruments in the Netherlands -- that have successfully pioneered these new strategies. By bringing together such a wide range of research and real world examples, Fiorino has created an invaluable resource for practitioners and scholars and an engaging text for environmental policy courses.


The New Zealand Digital Library offers several collections of information over the World Wide Web. Although full-text indexing is the primary access mechanism, musical collections can also be accessed through a novel melody retrieval system. In offering this service over a three-year period, we have had to face many practical challenges in building, maintaining and administering diverse collections of different kinds of information, involving different search and retrieval systems, with different user interfaces. This paper describes the design of the software we have built to support the service. Interface server programs provide a uniform interface between the search engine and the client, irrespective of the nature of the collection. Search engines that embody completely different index styles operate under a single distributed framework-we describe as examples MG (Managing Gigabytes), a full-text retrieval system, and the MR (Melody Retrieval) system. A flexible protocol for communicating between an interface server and a search engine is defined. The resulting architecture simplifies library administration and the creation of new collections by providing a unified framework under which vastly different user interfaces and search engines can co-exist in a distributed computing environment.


Can anything be constitutional that violates clear and concrete commands contained in the Constitution? Most all constitutional theorists say "No." As much as they disagree on how to interpret the Constitution's vague clauses, they agree that nothing can justify a departure from the Constitution's many rule-like directives. As Randy Barnett has recently quipped: "To remain faithful to the Constitution...we must never forget it is a text we are expounding."Nevertheless, constitutional practice gives a different answer. On the one hand, there are "constitutional workarounds," which Mark Tushnet describes as instances where "[f]inding some constitutional text obstructing our ability to reach a desired goal, we work around that text using other texts — and do so without (obviously) distorting the tools we use." On the other hand, there the writings of other scholars who, in the course of investigating particular constitutional clauses and controversies, discuss constitutional doctrines or governmental practices that they say violate clear and concrete constitutional text without a workaround to provide cover.This Article explores and supplements these many scholarly claims. It contends that our constitutional tradition contains an array of doctrines and practices that depart from clear and specific constitutional rules. Constitutional praxis evidently has different norms, and teaches different lessons, from constitutional theory.This Article supports its contention in two ways. First, it discusses a variety of constitutional doctrines and governmental practices that other commentators have already noted as conflicting with clear constitutional text; and second, it provides a thorough study of a well-known and important constitutional doctrine that is not generally recognized as a departure from the Constitution's clear requirements. The example is the petty crime exception to the right to jury trial.The Constitution enshrines the right to jury trial in Article III, § 2, which peremptorily commands that "The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury." However, according to the petty crime exception defendants facing no more than six months in jail, or a fine of no more than $500, have no right to a jury trial. The petty crime exception, at least at first blush, appears to depart from the Constitution's literal requirement of jury trial for "all crimes." The full argument is more complex, but it reaches the same conclusion.In addition, in its initial analysis of Article III's jury provision, this Article employs the interpretive approach of modern textualism. Only after a textualist analysis is complete are the alternative interpretive norms of originalism and living constitutionalism brought into the discussion. Because of the varying results produced by these three interpretive modes, this Article, in the process of establishing that the petty crime exception is a departure from a clear and concrete constitutional command, provides a telling example of the extent to which the varying interpretive norms of textualism, originalism, and living constitutionalism have shaped our constitutional development.


Business travel is not as glamorous as it seems - no matter how exotic the location, much business travel comprises shuttling between the airport, the office, and the hotel. But given the weakness of the South African Rand against most major currencies, not to mention the tightening of corporate budgets, trying to sweeten the deal with a few days of holiday time is simply becoming too expensive nowadays.


Context Disease management interventions for heart failure (HF) are inconsistent and very seldom incorporate the views and needs of patients and their caregivers into intervention design. Objective and data To improve intervention effectiveness and consistency, a systematic review identified 49 studies which examined the views and needs of patients with HF and their caregivers about the nature and determinants of effective HF self-care. Results The findings identify key drivers of effective self-care, such as the capacity of patients to successfully integrate self-care practices with their preferred normal daily life patterns and recognise and respond to HF symptoms in a timely manner. Conclusions Future interventions for HF self-care must involve family members throughout the intervention and harness patients' normal daily routines.


Restorative justice is a comparative newcomer to the world of the probation service; however, there are new imperatives and drivers such as the recent paper 'Punishment and Reform: Effective Community Sentences' (2012) which signal a changing mood and a willingness to investigate the possibilities of restorative justice. It also makes reference to resources made available. In other parts of the criminal justice system, particularly within the youth justice service, restorative justice has been around, 'officially' – by means of legislation – for 14 years, and unofficially (in innovative practice), for longer. The knowledge and skills associated with restorative justice have slowly but surely migrated to other services, such as education, with startling results. Significantly, numerous police forces have begun to adopt the use of restorative justice. The plenary session at the National Conference explored some personal insights and took some time to examine important underlying concepts and thinkers who have influenced restorative work. The session posed the question of whether we are on the cusp of significant change in our outlook toward the purpose of justice. This article will reflect that as well as exploring later some of the broader implications for the probation service in the immediate future.


Child molesters have been a key focus of public fear so much that many policies have been created that focus on reducing public panic rather than being supported by empirical evidence. Knowing the psychological motivations and patterns of this particular population is important in order to advance research that can affect future investigations, policies and laws concerning the safety of the public. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the use of crime scene characteristics can accurately predict child molester typology using the MTC:CM3 Axis I Fixation and Social Competence levels. The crime scene characteristics: control methods (use of threat or weapons), violence, and location (whether offense was in a child-dense location or not) were used in order to predict high or low levels on both the MTC Fixation and MTC Social Competence scale. It was hypothesized that those with higher levels of fixation and lower levels of social competence would be more likely to use control methods, violence, and choose a child dense location for the offense than those with lower levels of fixation and higher levels of social competence. Archival data from 439 child molesters was gathered and coded from offender files in a state prison system. Two binary logistic regressions were performed and results indicated that these did not predict MTC Fixation and MTC Social Competence levels, thus would not aide in the prediction of child molester typology. Future research should examine additional variables as well as the entirety of the MTC:CM3 scale in order to obtain more information that can aid in the use of crime scene characteristics as predictors for child molester typologies.


In this study five 200 mL acid mine drainage (AMD) samples were treated with 5g clay (bentonite) alone or mixed with 0.1 M Al3+ in AlCl3 and 0.1 M Mg 2+ in Mg(OH)2 polymer. The AMD samples were poured into five 500 mL glass beakers and dosed with 5 g/L of clay in a jar test, (250 rpm for 2 minutes and reduced to 100 rpm for 10 minutes) and the samples were allowed to settle for 1 hour after which the pH, conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen (DO) and oxidation reduction potential (ORP) were measured. In the next step, 200 mL of the supernatant was poured into five 500 mL glass beakers and dosed with a af-PACl (acid-free polyaluminiumchloride) polymer of 0.1 M Al3+ in AlCl3, mixed with 0.1 M Mg2+ in Mg(OH)2, and treated in a similar manner in a jar test, settled for 1 hour, after which similar measurements were conducted, depicted as experiment (A). Another similar set of experiments was conducted, where the AMD sample was dosed with a polymer of 5 g of clay, 0.1 M Al3+ in AlCl3 and 0.1 M Mg(OH)2 in a jar test. Similar measurements were conducted after 1 hour of settling, depicted as experiment (B). The results showed that the addition of the clay to the AMD sample as a reagent (A) or a polymeric component (B) does not affect the turbidity removal, but the rate of hydrolysis (pH changing pattern) and ORP are affected. The experimental results showed that there is a correlation between the ORP and the pH, and also showed that oxidation takes place during the destabilization-hydrolysis process. The results also showed that the conductivity plays a role during the destabilization-hydrolysis process, i.e. correlation between changing rate of the conductivity and the turbidity.


Voluminous amounts of data have been produced, since the past decade as the miniaturization of Internet of things (IoT) devices increases. However, such data are not useful without analytic power. Numerous big data, IoT, and analytics solutions have enabled people to obtain valuable insight into large data generated by IoT devices. However, these solutions are still in their infancy, and the domain lacks a comprehensive survey. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art research efforts directed toward big IoT data analytics. The relationship between big data analytics and IoT is explained. Moreover, this paper adds value by proposing a new architecture for big IoT data analytics. Furthermore, big IoT data analytic types, methods, and technologies for big data mining are discussed. Numerous notable use cases are also presented. Several opportunities brought by data analytics in IoT paradigm are then discussed. Finally, open research challenges, such as privacy, big data mining, visualization, and integration, are presented as future research directions.


The mutual influence of second-harmonic generation and nondegenerate downconversion inside the same cavity is studied. The threshold behavior and the stability of a semiclassical solution with all four modes oscillating resonantly is investigated. It is shown that under certain conditions the self-pulsing instability that occurs in second-harmonic generation is absent in the combined system. The squeezing spectra for the quadrature-phase amplitudes in the second harmonic and the fundamental, as well as the photon statistics in the downconverted modes, are derived analytically. As one of the various nonclassical features of this system, the second harmonic is found to exhibit excellent noise suppression at very large frequencies, with the frequency component of best squeezing being tunable by the pump parameter. The intricate interaction of the two nonlinear processes can give rise to twin beams of correlated photons, with sub-Poissonian statistics in each beam. These results are contrasted with the results for each nonlinear process by itself.


This paper examines wartime as a form of time, arguing that assumptions about the temporality of war are a feature of American legal thought. Time is thought to be linear and episodic, moving from one kind of time (peacetime) to another kind of time (wartime) in sequence. In this way of thinking, war is by definition temporary, so that war's impact on law is limited in time. This understanding of war and time, however, is in tension with the practice of war in 20th century U.S. history, for American involvement in overseas military action has been continuous. Drawing upon works on the history of time, the paper argues that our conception of "wartime" is not inevitable. Instead, like other forms of time, it is a product of social life. The paper turns to World War II, which is thought of as a traditional war, with clear temporal limits. But this war is harder to place in time than is generally assumed, as the different legal endings to the war span over a period of seven years. The fuzziness in the war's timing affects scholarship on rights and war, as scholars who believe themselves to be writing about the same wartime are not always studying the same years. The difficulty in confining World War II in time is an illustration of a broader feature of the twentieth century: wartimes bleed into each other, and it is hard to find peace on the twentieth century American timeline. Meanwhile, as all twentieth century wars occurred outside U.S. borders, a feature of American military strategy has sometimes been to increase the engagement of the American people in a war, and at other times to insulate them. Isolation from war enabled the nation to participate in war without most citizens perceiving themselves to be in a wartime. The paper closes with a discussion of the way anxiety about temporality surfaces in contemporary cases relating to Guantanamo detainees, as the Supreme Court confronted the possibility that endless war might mean endless detention.


In this moving memoir of an unusual childhood, John Muir recalls his younger days in East Lothian with a startling clarity, depicting a wild boy whose quiet individuality and determination were already emerging. Born in mid nineteenth-century Scotland, Muir was eleven when his fanatically religious father took the family to build a new life in America's vast wilderness. Muir charts their pioneering years in Wisconsin, where his battles for survival powerfully anticipate the extraordinary career which was to follow. They reveal a free spirit who perceived bonds between man and nature that were subtle and far reaching for both.


Childhood obesity is a worsening epidemic in the UK. Schools are increasingly being targeted as an intervention setting for this problem. Currently, teachers are poorly equipped to educate pupils on healthy eating as they frequently lack experience in this area. The Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme (UAS) provides a framework for awarding academic credits to undergraduates primarily from science and technology disciplines to take on the role of an ambassador for their subject. The UAS scheme includes a placement in a school or college setting. In the context of a BSc in Nutrition, the undergraduate can, therefore, act as a nutritional ambassador within the school environment, contributing their specialist knowledge of healthy eating. In doing so the student can potentially influ- ence the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of pupils in relation to healthy eating, whilst enhancing their own key skills base including communication and reflective learning skills. The aim of this project was to examine the effect an undergraduate ambassador for nutri- tion had on the dietary knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of secondary school pupils in Year 10 (aged 14 and 15, National Curriculum Key Stage 4). A major objective of the project was to develop and deliver a lesson plan centred on healthy eating. The impact the lesson had on dietary knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of pupils was assessed using questionnaires and food diaries, completed by pupils before and after the lesson. There was a small increase in healthy eating knowledge. However, there was no significant effect on healthy eating attitudes or behaviours of secondary school pupils. In addition, pupils gave negative responses towards learning about healthy eating in school. These results indicate the school environment may be an unsuitable setting for childhood obesity interventions.


We quantify agglomeration spillovers by estimating the impact of the opening of a large new manufacturing plant on the total factor productivity (TFP) of incumbent plants in the same county. Articles in the corporate real estate journal Site Selection reveal the county where the "Million Dollar Plant" ultimately chose to locate (the "winning county"), as well as the one or two runner-up counties (the "losing counties"). The incumbent plants in the losing counties are used as a counterfactual for the TFP of incumbent plants in winning counties in the absence of the plant opening. Incumbent plants in winning and losing counties have economically and statistically similar trends in TFP in the 7 years before the opening, which supports the validity of the identifying assumption. After the new plant opening, incumbent plants in winning counties experience a sharp relative increase in TFP. Five years after the opening, TFP of incumbent plants in winning counties is 12% higher than TFP of incumbent plants in losing counties. Consistent with some theories of agglomeration, this effect is larger for incumbent plants that share similar labor and technology pools with the new plant. We also find evidence of a relative increase in skill-adjusted labor costs in winning counties, indicating that the ultimate effect on profits is smaller than the direct increase in productivity.


This project, commissioned by Gateshead Council and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (£21M), concerned the renovation of Saltwell Park, back to its former Victorian splendour, and the rebuilding of Saltwell Towers, designed and built by William Wailes, a local glass manufacturer, around 1850-1862. McKelvey led the multimedia design team; managing collaboration and liaison with the client. She gathered and edited video and stills diary footage for the touch-screen and television display. She also researched material to gain an understanding of the history and renovation of the park to aid with editing image content, logging video footage, utilising storyboards and editing explanatory voice-overs. McKelvey further devised and added subtitles for accessibility purposes and carried out a variety of tests and rough cuts with the footage before deciding on an approach that communicated exactly what was required. A building was created to educate visitors about the park, using the pedagogic materials developed by McKelvey. The target market was the local community and tourists. The project elements included; an interactive touch-screen and video diary, screened on a television, triggered by the movement of the user showing an 'interpretation' of the renovation of Saltwell Park. This educational tool has a deliberately 'immediate' mode of instruction, designed to encourage the audiences to enquire further about the subject. This is the innovative, inclusive usability element of the tool. It is currently displayed in Saltwell Towers, Saltwell Park, Gateshead. Extra footage was added to the interface in 2005, for the 'One Year On' phase, which included final planting, completion of the Towers and the official opening. The project explores the communication design process but instead of print-based medium McKelvey's interest is in the underlying research question of how to utilise digital media to research, organise, evaluate, create, and communicate design content to a relevant audience.


The use of dogs in biomedical diagnosis, detection and alert as well as for the search and monitoring of species-at-risk is an emerging field of research. Standard practices are converging towards models that are not necessarily consistent with the well established field of (animal) psychophysics. We briefly discuss the different challenges of applied canine olfactory processing and discuss the adoption of more valid and reliable methods. For mostly historical reasons it seems, scent processing dogs are trained and tested using multiple alternative stimuli in choice tasks (e.g., line-ups including 6 alternative choices, or 6AFC). Data from psychophysics suggest that those methods will reduce or at the very least misrepresent the accuracy of canines. Unless canines are an exception to the rule, sensory, perceptual and cognitive arguments (e.g., Gadbois & Reeve, 2014) can be made against most multiple alternative forced choice tasks (mAFC's) in favor of detection tasks (yes/no and go/no-go procedures) or, as a compromise, simpler discrimination tasks (2AFC or 3AFC at most). We encourage the use of Signal Detection Theory as it focusses on two important factors in defining the validity and reliability of scent processing dogs: 1) It is a robust measure of sensitivity, an important factor in both diagnosis and sensory detection, and, 2) It describes the type of errors (false alarms vs. misses) that a given dog is most likely to commit, allowing for a solid assessment of performance and potentially a readjustment in training. We give an example with Diabetes Alert Dogs (DAD's) specialized in Hypoglycemia Detection in vitro and discuss the potential advantages of keeping a low number of alternatives during training and testing, the importance of low saliency training (LST), as well as adopting pure detection tasks requiring a response commitment from the dogs for both "yes" and "no" responses. The value of d' (a detectability or discriminability measure) and bias measures (criterion) are discussed in the context of canine selection, performance assessment and diagnostic accuracy across applications.


On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors – an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic routes. With no domestic agriculture to speak of, Qatar's external logistics networks are essential for maintaining its food supply. The country's 2.6 million residents, many of whom flooded the grocery stores, were understandably concerned about their ability to secure food when news about the embargo broke. Eventually, new food supply chains were established, primarily with the assistance of partners in Iran and Turkey. The ongoing rift between Qatar and its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, manifested only in part by this effort to undermine the country's material supply networks raises a number of questions about an old idea: that of food as a 'weapon'. This article puts this concept in historical and regional perspective in the Arabian Peninsula through the lens of critical geopolitics, tracing the securitizing discourses about food security and their intertwining with narratives about territorial sovereignty, nationalism, and essentialist understandings of geography to explain the causes and effects of the food embargo in the ongoing Qatar–Gulf rift.


Existing diesel engines are under stringent emission regulation particularly of smoke and particulate matter in their exhaust. The potential benefits of using liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as an alternative fuel in diesel engines are both economical and environmental. In the present paper, an experimental research was carried out on an I.C. engine laboratory single cylinder, four-stroke variable compression ratio, direct injection diesel engine converted to LPG-diesel dual fuel mode to analyse the performance and emission characteristics of pure diesel first and then LPG-diesel dual fuel mode. The measurements were recorded for the compression ratio of 16, 17 and 18 at LPG substitution rates of 10%, 15%, 20%, 25% and 30% and varying the load from idle to rated load of 5.2 kW. Comparative results are given at constant engine speed, variable compression ratio and various engine loads for diesel and different LPG substitution rates, revealing the effect of diesel and different LPG substitutions combustion on engine performance and exhaust emissions.


Recent research documents the importance of uncertainty in determining macroeconomic outcomes, but little is known about the transmission of uncertainty across such outcomes. This paper examines the response of uncertainty about inflation and output growth to shocks documenting statistically significant size and sign bias and spillover effects. Uncertainty about inflation is a determinant of output uncertainty, whereas higher growth volatility tends to raise inflation volatility. Both inflation and growth volatility respond asymmetrically to positive and negative shocks. Negative growth and inflation shocks lead to higher and more persistent uncertainty than shocks of equal magnitude but opposite sign.


One of the main goals of aggression research is to examine the conditions that heighten the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Many studies with a variety of laboratory paradigms have been conducted to address this question. However, many of these studies and the applied paradigms suffer from shortcomings, including a large distance between victim and aggressor, demand characteristics or cues permitting the ostensible aggressive behavior, as well as disregard of participants' affective states, motivations and intentions.
In modern laboratory research some of these shortcomings have been overcome and new paradigms like the Hot Sauce Paradigm – a commonly used paradigm in modern laboratory research – have evolved. Paralleling real assault and child abuse cases, in which hot sauce was put in the food of other people or children with the intention to cause them harm, this paradigm measures aggression via the amount of hot sauce participants allocate to another person that allegedly provoked them beforehand. As most paradigms the Hot Sauce Paradigm still has shortcomings that need to be improved. One major shortcoming the Hot Sauce Paradigm shares with some classical paradigms is that participants are not provided with non-aggressive choice options. Without choice options it is impossible to answer questions about conditions under which people choose to act aggressively, since participants do not actually have a choice in regard to their behavior. It is only possible to answer questions regarding the amount of aggression presupposing that participants do act aggressively.
One of the main goals of this dissertation was to analyze the effect of choice options on aggression in a modified Hot Sauce Paradigm. With 5 studies presented in this dissertation, I attempted to answer the overriding question whether or not the validity of the Hot Sauce Paradigm, as one commonly used paradigm to measure and analyze aggression, could be improved by providing response options (pleasant, neutral, aggressive option) to participants. In general, over the course of five studies I found evidence questioning the traditional paradigm's validity to capture aggressive behavior but also evidence for an enhanced validity of the paradigm when choice options were included.
To test the effect of choice options on the behavior observed in the Hot Sauce Paradigm I used a modified version of the paradigm in the first study. Participants chose one juice out of three juices (pleasant, neutral, spicy juice) to be consumed by a target person that had allegedly just chosen either a sour (provocation) or neutral (no provocation) juice for them. This condition with choice options was contrasted with three control conditions in which participants could only administer different amounts of either the pleasant, neutral or spicy juice. Provoked participants that were provided with a spicy juice only administered more spicy juice than non-provoked participants, replicating previous findings with the Hot Sauce Paradigm. However, there also was a main effect of provocation on the allocated juice with provoked participants generally allocating larger amounts of any type of juice than non-provoked ones. With choice options, critically, only three of the 18 provoked participants did not choose the pleasant juice and chose the neutral (1 participant) or spicy juice (2 participants) instead. None of the 20 unprovoked participants chose the spicy juice. These findings question the original Hot Sauce Paradigm's validity to capture aggressive behavior with an intention to harm another person. The low choice rates for the aggressive option also highlight the importance of providing non-aggressive response options to participants to avoid an overestimation of aggressive and an underestimation of non-aggressive behavior.
I hypothesized that the main effect of provocation on the allocated amount that I found in Study 1 was due to provoked participants' higher responsiveness to the paradigm's demand in the direction of applying more juice resulting from a lowered self-control after experiencing a provoking event. The aim of Study 2 and 3 was to test this assumption. In Study 2, I replicated the result of provoked participants allocating more spicy juice than non-provoked ones in conditions without alternative choice options. However, this effect disappeared with less guiding instructions and thus, again, questioning the traditional paradigms validity. To test whether or not this responsiveness to the demand of the paradigm is associated with the participants' self-control, I measured participants' state self-control in both Study 2 and 3, in which I applied the same provocation method as Study 1, and in Study 4, in which I used a more intense interpersonal provocation. In none of these studies I found a difference in self-control between provoked and non-provoked participants after the provocation. This makes the proposed self-control explanation for the allocation amount results unlikely.
The amount of aggressive choices shown in Study 1 was relatively low (2 of 18 provoked participants chose the spicy juice). To test whether a more intense form of provocation would increase aggressive choices, which would make additional analyses and ultimately the application of the modified paradigm in aggression research possible, I used a more intense interpersonal provocation in Study 4. The provocation included waiting for another alleged participant and rude behavior toward the actual participant shown by the unpunctual confederate. To also test the effect of victim visibility – another shortcoming of modern laboratory research – on the behavior shown in the Hot Sauce Paradigm, I orthogonally manipulated the visibility of the victim with the provocation manipulation. To assure that the measured behavior captures aggression, I measured the key aggression defining variable harmful intentions of participants. The results of Study 4 indicated that descriptively aggressive choices occurred more often than in Study 1 and that provoked participants chose the spicy juice significantly more often than non-provoked ones. This effect of provocation on spicy juice choices was mediated by the participants' harmful intentions indicating the validity of juice choices as a measurement of behavioral aggression. The visibility of the victim was not significantly associated with differences in the juice choices.
To gain further evidence for a connection of juice choices and harmful intentions and to externally validate juice choices as aggression measures I analyzed the perception of intentions behind juice choices from the victim's point of view in Study 5. In a scenario study, modeled after Study 4, participants imagined to receive a sample of the spicy juice from another participant in a study for which they arrived 15 minutes late. Intentions behind the juice allocation were perceived as more harmful if the person who made the allocation was provided with choice options in comparison to if the person was not provided with choice options (like in the traditional Hot Sauce Paradigm). This finding supports the claim that the inclusion of choice options heightens the paradigm's validity, since the connection with a key aggression defining construct was strengthened with choice options in comparison to without them.
The present research underlines the importance of providing non-aggressive choice options to participants in laboratory aggression research. Particularly if the conditions under which aggressive behavior occurs are examined, participants have to be able to make a choice of what kind of behavior they want to show. With the modified Hot Sauce Paradigm introduced in this dissertation a research instrument is provided to achieve this goal.


SUMMARY The data from 161 experiments testing the response of sugarbeet yield to nitrogen fertilizer were assembled in a database. Three commonly used N response models (Mitscherlich, linear plus exponential and bilinear) were fitted to each set of fertilizer application rates and the models were then assessed on how well they fitted all the data. The bilinear model was judged the most appropriate model for fitting to beet root yield adjusted to a standard sugar concentration. The optimum N application was determined for each experiment. Attempts were then made to correlate these optima with factors associated with the site and the season (winter rainfall, soil texture, amount of soil mineral N at sowing, sowing date, summer rainfall and harvest date). Beet grown in peat soil never responded significantly to any applied N fertilizer and neither did crops treated recently with organic manure supplying large amounts (>150 kg N/ha) of available N. Variation in N optima between other sites could not be explained by factors that could be used to predict the amount of fertilizer to apply. In the absence of any method to make reliable predictions of variations in fertilizer need, the most economical uniform amount was calculated. At present fertilizer prices and beet values, this amount is between 100 and 110 kg N/ha. It is possible that the N fertilizer need of beet crops does not vary predictably because this variation is an experimental error. The crop needs a reasonably standard application of fertilizer because much N has to be taken up early in the crop's development, rapidly and predominantly from the topsoil that, at this stage, contains most of the small fibrous root system.


In the wake of the global financial crisis, Keynesianism has had something of a revival. In practice, governments have turned to Keynesian policy measures to avert economic collapse. In the theoretical area, mainstream economists have started to give grudging attention to Keynesian perspectives previously dismissed in favor of New Classical theories. This theoretical and practical shift is taking place at the same time that environmental issues, in particular global climate change, are compelling attention to alternative development paths. Significant potential now exists for "Green Keynesianism" -- combining Keynesian fiscal policies with environmental goals. But there are also tensions between the two perspectives of Keynesianism and ecological economics. Traditional Keynesianism is growth-oriented, while ecological economics stresses limits to growth. Expansionary policies needed to deal with recession may be in conflict with goals of reducing resource and energy use and carbon emissions. In addition, long-term deficit and debt problems pose a threat to implementation of expansionary fiscal policies. This paper explores the possibilities for Green Keynesianism in theory and practice, and suggests that these apparent contradictions can be resolved, and that Green Keynesian policies offer a solution to both economic stagnation and global environmental threats.


US drug control agencies have not made progress in achieving most of the goals set in a 2010 national drug policy strategy document, concludes a report by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), an auditing and investigative agency of the US Congress.

In the 2010 National Drug Control Strategy the US Office of National Drug Control Policy laid out strategy that President Barack Obama's administration said would emphasize prevention and treatment. It set seven goals to be achieved by 2015 (box).

In its new report the GAO found that the government was set to achieve only one of five goals for which preliminary data were available. On that goal—to cut by 15% the lifetime prevalence of eighth graders who …


Phenolic compounds are secondary metabolites synthesised in response to biotic or abiotic stress in plants.  This stress-induced increase in phenolic compound concentrations is generally activated by internal levels of abscisic acid (ABA). The exogenous application of ABA or calcium chloride on grapevines is also known to increase grape yield and alter the phenolic composition of grapes. Residues of cement industries such as calcium carbonates (CaCO3) are a safe environmental source of calcium that could be used to induce the synthesis of phenolic compounds and act as a yield promoter in grapes and other crops. Consequently, the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of cement industries' CaCO3 residues (CaCO3R) on the yield and concentration of phenolic compounds in Shiraz grapes. Thirteen phenolic compounds were identified and quantified by HPLC-DAD. Malvidin-3-O-glucoside was the major anthocyanin found in Shiraz grapes, and its concentration increased by more than 200% in CaCO3R-treated vines. Similarly, the concentration of cinnamic acid, the main precursor of phenolic compounds, increased by more than 900% in grapes treated with CaCO3 residues at harvest time. Finally, catechin, epicatechin and procyanidin B1 and B2 increased significantly at harvest time in CaCO3R-treated grapes relative to the controls. In general, it was found that foliar application of CaCO3 residues from the cement industry at veraison induced an increase in yield, and in the concentration and composition of phenolic compounds in grapes.


Recently, emerged an easy way to fabricate to a nano fiber-optic sensor (NFOS) using the inscription on the silica fiber. A simple etching reactor was developing to obtain reproducible tapers of desired diameter and length. This approach is reflected on-line monitoring of the etching using the transmitter and receiver system. The experimental data indicate that the diameter of the optical fiber decreases linearly with the time of survival of hydrofluoric acid, and etching was used at room temperature. In this study, we were examined the best rate of etching that used for the fabrication of such sensors. In the aforementioned technique, this method aims to determine the diameter of the reduced core and show the evolution of the two different processes from the nano fiber regime to the fixed regime in which the mode was remote from the surrounding evanescent field, intensity can propagate outside the segment fiber when the core diameter is less than 100 nm. To expire a easy-going has developed the diameter of the fibre after etching to the process has been done successfully.


Machiavelli in Love introduces a complex concept of sex and sexual identity and their roles in the culture and politics of the Italian Renaissance. Guido Ruggiero's study counters the consensus among historians and literary critics that there was little sense of individual identity and almost no sense of sexual identity before the modern period. Drawing from the works of major literary figures such as Boccaccio, Aretino, and Castiglione, and rereading them against archival evidence, Ruggiero examines the concept of identity via consensus realities of family, neighbors, friends, and social peers, as well as broader communities and solidarities. The author contends that Renaissance Italians understood sexual identity as a part of the human life cycle, something that changed throughout stages of youthful experimentation, marriage, adult companionship, and old age. Machiavelli's letters and literary production reveal a fascinating construction of self that is highly reliant on sexual reputation. Ruggiero's challenging reinterpretation of this canonical figure, as well as his unique treatment of other major works of the period, offer new approaches for reading Renaissance literature and new understandings of the way life was lived and perceived during this time.


We consider the task of learning latent community structure from multiple correlated networks. First, we study the problem of learning the latent vertex correspondence between two edge-correlated stochastic block models, focusing on the regime where the average degree is logarithmic in the number of vertices. We derive the precise information-theoretic threshold for exact recovery: above the threshold there exists an estimator that outputs the true correspondence with probability close to 1, while below it no estimator can recover the true correspondence with probability bounded away from 0. As an application of our results, we show how one can exactly recover the latent communities using multiple correlated graphs in parameter regimes where it is information-theoretically impossible to do so using just a single graph.


Nitrification rates, bacterial abundance and productivity, and the diversity of ammonia- oxidizing bacteria were measured at 5 sites in Elkhorn Slough, a small estuary in central California, between 1997 and 1999. Of the sampling sites, 2 received high nutrient runoff from agricultural fields and other non-point sources, and 3 received runoff from grasslands and woodlands. The diversity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria in terms of DNA sequences was investigated at 3 of the sites in August 1998. Both 16S and amoA sequences from sediment samples were more closely related to those of Nitrosomonas marina than to any other cultured nitrifier, but there was considerable diversity within the group, and site-specific patterns were not detected. Potential nitrification was seasonally and spa- tially variable, with the highest rates occurring at the head of Elkhorn Slough in late winter and fall. Bacterial productivity was highest during the summer and generally higher at a site adjacent to grasslands compared to the 2 agricultural sites. The variability in nitrification rates was not directly correlated with hydrographic and environmental variables. Physical factors may affect nitrification rates indirectly by controlling salinity and bottom-water oxygen concentrations. Potential nitrification rates were positively correlated with pore water NH4 + concentrations under well flushed conditions but were negligible in the presence of high NH4 + concentrations under poorly flushed conditions, due to low oxygen availability, hypersaline conditions or both. Sediment nitrogen budgets for 3 of the sites suggested that denitrification removed about 25% of the mineralized nitrogen at the poorly flushed site, but 50% or more at well flushed sites. Poorly flushed systems appear to be less efficient at removing high nitrogen inputs than well flushed systems because of the low rates of coupled nitri- fication-denitrification in the former, implying that physical factors such as the flushing regime or residence time can significantly affect nitrogen removal by denitrification.


Learning how to design innovatively is a critical process skill for undergraduate engineers in the 21st century. To this end, our paper discusses the development and validation of a Bayesian network decision support tool that can be used by engineering educators to make recommendations that positively impact the innovativeness of product designs. Our Bayesian network model is based on Dym's design process framework and actual design process data collected from 26 undergraduate engineering capstone teams over multiple terms. Cross validation using all available outcomes data and a sensitivity analysis showed our model to be both accurate and robust. Our model, which is based on data from teams that produced both innovative and non-innovative products, can be used to formatively assess the process used by a design team and the level of innovativeness, thereby contributing to more innovative final design outcomes.


With the growing body of literature on governance styles in which nonprofit organizations are involved in creating and implementing public services, there is a need for robust evidence on the effects of public funding on nonprofit revenues. This paper systematically reviews previous studies on the crowding-out hypothesis, which holds that private charitable donations are lower in situations of higher government support and vice versa. We find that about two-thirds of previous estimates find a negative correlation (crowding-out), while one-third of the estimates find a positive correlation (crowding-in). The results are strongly shaped by the research methods that are used. In experiments, a $1 increase in government support is associated with an average $0.64 decrease in private donations, while nonexperimental data analyses find an average increase of $0.06. Random-effects regression models show that, contrary to arguments that are prevalent in the literature, studies that take subsidies to organizations as a measure of government support are less likely to estimate crowding-out than studies that use a measure of direct government expenditures. Central government support is associated with higher charitable donations, while measures that include multiple levels of government tend to find negative correlations. The results challenge the consistency of prior research findings and demonstrate the contextual dependence of the validity of the crowding-out hypothesis.


Frequency performances and sensitivities for three types of organic photo-detector (OPD) were studied for an opto-electrical conversion device. A high efficiency of 19.4 % of the external conversion efficiency and a high cutoff frequency response of 16 MHz were achieved using a mixed-layer between copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) and N, N'-bis (2,5-di-tert-butylphenyl) 3,4,9,10-perylene dicarboximide (BPPC) at a reverse bias voltage of 8 V under red incident light. These results were achieved by increasing exciton dissociation and charge carrier generation and to reduce the number of trapped carriers at the interfaces between CuPc and BPPC. The transmission of a moving picture was successfully demonstrated using mixed-layer OPD as an opto-electrical conversion device. These results indicate that it is possible for an OPD to be used as an opto-electrical conversion device in high-speed optical transmission systems


Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) and related species all contain gossypol, a polyphenolic compound that is an integral part of the cotton plant's self-defense system against insect pests and possibly some diseases. Gossypol also has been reported to have antitumor activity, medicinal effects, and contraceptive properties. However, the compound can be toxic to animals, which limits the usefulness of cottonseed as animal feed. Breeding projects to manipulate seed gossypol levels usually require the analysis of numerous samples and often small amounts of material. Our objective was to use a scaled-down version of the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) Official Methods to measure gossypol and develop an easy, low-cost method for preparing small amounts of seed for analysis. Results show that gossypol analysis can be conducted on ground dehulled seed samples as small as 50 mg without significant loss in reproducibility. Comparison of dehulling methods used to obtain seed kernel tissue for analysis showed that wet dehulling of seed results in slightly higher estimates of gossypol levels. Preliminary results for a range of cotton lines, analyzed each year over a 3-y period, indicated that although the percent of total gossypol measured varied slightly across years, these values were generally consistent for the cultivars or genetic stocks tested. These modified methods give consistent results and allow for handling many small seed samples.


Beam search executes a state-space search, but may abandon nonpromising search avenues in order to reduce complexity. Although it has existed for more than two decades and has been applied to many real-world problems, beam search still suffers from the drawback of possible termination with no solution or a solution of unsatisfactory quality. In this paper, we first propose a domain-independent heuristic for node pruning, and a method to reduce the possibility that beam search will fail. We then develop a complete beam search algorithm. The new algorithm can not only find an optimal solution, but can also reach better solutions sooner than its underlying search method. We apply complete beam search to the maximum boolean satisfiability and the symmetric and asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problems. Our experimental results show that the domain-independent pruning heuristic is effective and the new algorithm significantly improves the performance of its underlying search algorithm.


Bayesian inference, of posterior knowledge based on prior knowledge and observed evidence, is typically implemented by applying Bayes's theorem, solving an equation in which the posterior multiplied by the probability of an observation equals a joint probability. But when we observe a value of a continuous variable, the observation usually has probability zero, and Bayes's theorem says only that zero times the unknown is zero. To infer a posterior distribution from a zero-probability observation, we turn to the statistical technique of disintegration. The classic formulation of disintegration tells us only what constitutes a posterior distribution, not how to compute it. But by representing all distributions and observations as terms of our probabilistic language, core Hakaru, we have developed the first constructive method of computing disintegrations, solving the problem of drawing inferences from zeroprobability observations. Our method uses a lazy partial evaluator to transform terms of core Hakaru, and we argue its correctness by a semantics of core Hakaru in which monadic terms denote measures. The method, which has been implemented in a larger system, is useful not only on its own but also in composition with sampling and other inference methods commonly used in machine learning.


Extracted from text ... A
Conflict or crisis:
the way we behave or react
20 Management Today October 2005
Paul Bridle is a specialist in leadership
who lives in England, but travels
throughout the world including South
Africa where he consults regularly.
At the moment the US president and his
administration are being taken to task by
the American people for the handling of
the New Orleans disaster. People feel that
the government acted too slowly and very
indecisively at a time when people were
looking for strong leadership.
People are rightly asking if nothing has
been learnt from 11 September? I sit ..


The interactions that define how spins arrange themselves in a material play a fundamental role in a wide variety of physical phenomena. Frustrated quantum magnets are systems for which the exchange interactions governing the interacting spins cannot be simultaneously satisfied, leading to a highly degenerate ground state and new states of matter such as unconventional superconductivity and quantum spin liquid in which spins are predicted to point simultaneously in different directions while they stay highly entangled even over relatively large distances. In geometrically frustrated systems, competition between neighboring spin interactions arises from the geometry of the lattice. In this talk I will discuss how hydrostatic pressure can be utilized to alter the atomic bond distances while application of magnetic field regulates the underlying spin interactions, ultimately driving the ground state across the phase diagram and leading to emergent quantum critical phenomena.


The effect of absorption enhancement with metallic nanoparticles on solar cell surfaces is often confused with various optical processes. In this work, the effective absorption rates in the active materials of solar cells are explicitly calculated including all possible factors. The results show that, although the total absorption is highly enhanced in general, the effective absorption in the active region is not much enhanced and even strongly reduced in the blue-violet regime. As the solar spectrum is considered, the integrated absorbed power in the solar cell materials is shown to be similar for structures with or without metallic nanoparticles.