Seasonal climate prediction offers potentially useful information for water managers. However, implementing forecast infor- mation is challenging due to the probabilistic nature of forecasts and limited demonstrations of usefulness. In this study, an adaptive groundwater pricing model utilizing operational seasonal climate forecasts was evaluated for groundwater management. The price for groundwater in the upcoming season was selected according to an algorithm that incorporates the current groundwater elevation and a prediction of seasonal rainfall. A simulation based on 37 years of rainfall data and operational monsoon forecasts for Tamil Nadu, India, was conducted to assess the effect of forecast-based pricing on societal benefits, groundwater elevation, and farmer income. Results indicate the adaptive pricing model is far more effective at maintaining groundwater elevations and maximizing societal benefits than a static groundwater price. Current groundwater elevation was a more effective input to the pricing algorithm than the forecast of seasonal rainfall when evaluated separately. A comparison of forecast use by water managers to select prices and use by farmers to choose crop patterns found similar societal benefits for each approach. Controlling demand for groundwater through pricing will cause hardship for current groundwater users who currently access groundwater without tariffs. Water managers should consider using tariff revenue to provide drought relief and transitional assistance.


Research on counterfactuals ('If only…') has seldom considered the effects of counterfactual communication, especially in a defensive context. In three studies, we investigated the effects of counterfactual defences employed by politicians. We assumed that self-focused upward counterfactuals ('If only I…, the outcome would have been better') are a form of concession, otherfocused upward counterfactuals ('If only they…, the outcome would have been better') are a form of excuse, and self-focused downward counterfactuals ('If only I…, the outcome would have been worse') are a form of justification. In Study 1, a counterfactual defence led to a more positive evaluation of the politician than a corresponding factual defence. Of the two types of defence, the counterfactual defence reduced the extent to which the politician was held responsible for the past event and was perceived as more convincing. In Study 2, counterfactual excuse and counterfactual justification were equally effective and led to a more positive evaluation of the politician than counterfactual concession. In Study 3, the higher effectiveness of counterfactual justification was independent from perceived ideological similarity with the politician, supporting the strength of this defence. These results show that counterfactual defences provide subtle communication strategies that effectively influence social judgements. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Purpose: This study investigates the perceptions of academic librarians to the development and delivery of information literacy support programmes for off-campus students.

Methodology / approach: The approach was predominantly quantitative, with a self completed questionnaire being designed and disseminated to a purposive sample of academic librarians in Ireland with responsibility for information literacy development at their institution, to determine their approach in supporting off-campus students, and how this relates to their role in developing information literacy. The questionnaire also examines current practice in terms of library teaching methods and library support for remote students. Institutions chosen were from the university and institutes of technology sector in Ireland and the National College of Ireland. A literature review was carried out focusing in particular on international examples of best practice.

Findings: The results indicate a low level of academic librarian involvement on off-campus academic programmes and minimal collaboration between teaching staff and librarians in relation to planning, design and delivery of these courses. However, the findings do, reveal a willingness on the part of most academic librarians to take on additional responsibilities and new roles implicit in the support of off-campus students, if adequate support and resources are provided. The results indicate that there is a lack of knowledge and low level of awareness amongst librarians when it comes to educational theory. Very little pedagogical training is provided for academic librarians involved in teaching information skills. The findings also reveal that non campus based learners are generally being supported through traditional means, with new technologies (online information literacy tutorials, VLEs, eReference services), innovative communication tools and teaching aids not being exploited to the full by Irish academic libraries as a means of support. The paper also includes selected free text comments from survey respondents, which provide further qualitative information, on their viewpoints on information literacy development for off-campus students.

Originality / Practical implications: A survey to determine the attitude of Irish academic library managers to information literacy support for off-campus students and a review of current practice in terms of teaching methods and support has not been conducted before in Ireland. The findings and recommendations are likely to be of interest and of potential value to Irish academic library practitioners and policy makers and will inform future research to contribute to the development of information literacy in the Republic of Ireland.


In recent decades several diseases primarily associated with obesity have reached epidemic proportions and many of them such as high blood pressure, hyperlipidaemia and type 2 diabetes mellitus, are already an important social problem. It has been calculated that in 2030 type 2 diabetes mellitus per se will be responsible of 3% of deaths in the world together with ischaemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, which will account for 13 and 11% of all cause of deaths.1 Non-invasive, low-cost, easy to perform and reproducible diagnostic tools have been used in epidemiological studies to allow the screening of large populations. While the assessment of fasting glycaemia, oral glucose tolerance test blood pressure, and serum cholesterol and triglycerides is routine in clinical practice, the use of a hyperinsulinaemic–euglycaemic clamp in every patient with type 2 diabetes mellitus is clearly not feasible. Since the diagnostic accuracy, assessed by the value of the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC), of all 19 candidate indexes of insulin resistance to predict incident diabetes varies from 0.75 to 0.8,2 these variables are extensively used both in clinical practice and trials.

A very similar scenario occurs in clinical hepatology. Fatty liver (FL) or hepatic steatosis is a very common finding …


Artificial microswimmers have recently received a lot of attention due to the large number of applications in the development of biomimetic materials, microfluidic devices, and micromachines. A promising strategy to build such synthetic swimmers is based on phoretic phenomena. Phoresis refers to a directed particle motion in the presence of an external gradient. Janus particles generate a stable local gradient by an asymmetric structure which results in a self-propelled phoretic motion.
One of the interesting examples is a half-metal coated Janus particle in a critical binary mixture under laser irradiation. In the vicinity of the metallic cap, the temperature may be above the critical temperature and a droplet is formed at the Janus particle surface, such that propulsion is created. Although various theoretical studies have already investigated this system, simulations are still lacking. Providing a suitable simulation technique enables us to predict the behavior of more complicated cases which are not possible with theory e.g. a Janus particle in blood flow. Simulation of this system requires a technique which satisfies the three requisites at the same time: transport of mass and energy, phase separation and large size particles modeled during a large simulation time. A mesoscopic simulation technique that can achieve all these requirements is dissipative particle dynamics with energy conservation (DPDe). In this thesis, the DPDe technique is employed, and further developed
to investigate this system.
The starting point is the validation of the previously suggested DPDe. Although DPDe was designed to exactly conserve energy, significant drift of the total energy has been reported by using different algorithms. Here, an efficient integration scheme with velocity Verlet algorithm is used such that energy is conserved on the order of machine precision. Simulation results of mass and energy transport are verified by analytical approaches. Then, a partially heated Janus particle in a simple fluid is modeled as a thermophoretic particle. A pressure gradient, which is generated at the colloid poles as a consequence of temperature gradient, propels the particle. The direction of motion and its magnitude are determined mainly by the details of the interaction between fluid and colloid and, the Peclet number changes one order of magnitude. Interestingly, fluid properties such as viscosity,conductivity, etc. affect propulsive velocity but the related Peclet number does not change significantly.
A proper method necessitates in order to model a binary mixture near the critical point which involves the wetting phenomenon in the presence of a solid surface (Janus particle). The conservative force used in the original DPD cannot fulfill this promise. Therefore, a short-range repulsive and long-range attractive interaction is employed for the conservative force which succeeds in matching the properties of real physical systems, such as correct phase behavior with respect to temperature, sufficiently large surface tension to form a stable droplet in a flow, and the inclusion of varying wetting properties. Using the improved DPDe method, a Janus particle immersed in a binary mixture is simulated, in which droplet size, wetting properties, and surface tension can be varied by the model parameters. The value of the resulting propulsive velocity is mainly determined by the size of the adhering droplet. In agreement with experiments, a colloid with a smaller droplet displays larger propulsion, and a Janus with a very large droplet shows eventually motion in the reverse direction, this is towards the hot cap. Although the number fraction of binary mixture and the magnitude of the temperature gradient are the main parameters to determine the droplet size, a smaller surface tension also results in a smaller droplet. Besides, the shape of the droplet is influenced by the contact angle and affects the propulsion strength.


In this study, we investigated the larvicidal activity of the methanolic extracts from traditionally used medicinal plants namely Putranjiva roxburghii Wall., Coscinium fenestratum Colebr, and Nardostachys jatamansi DC against larvae of Aedes aegypti. The larvae were taken in beakers were exposed to methanolic extracts of the plants at concentrations of 1, 2.5 and 5mg/ml for 24hours followed by counting of dead larvae and percentage mortality was calculated. The LC50 was also determined for each extract.All extracts showed larval mortality. Larval mortality was 100%with the use of 2.5 and 5%concentration of extract of each plant. The LC50 for N. jatamansi, P. roxburghii and C.fenestratum was found to be 0.83mg/ml, 0.90mg/ml and 1.25mg/ml respectively suggestingN. jatamansi is more potent followed by P. roxburghii and C. fenestratum. Qualitative analysis of the extracts revealed the presence of tannin, alkaloid, steroid and flavonoid in all the extracts. Saponin was not detected in N. jatamansi, while terpenoid was not detected in all the extracts. The larvicidal activity could be mainly due to the presence of phytoconstituents in the methanol extract. It is suggested that all the three plants possess larvicidal properties and could be used as natural insecticides for mosquito control.


The interleukin 1 (IL-1) receptor (IL-1R) activates a proinflammatory response through the activation of several signaling proteins and the transcription factors AP-1 and NF-κB. Burns et al. have molecularly cloned Tollip, an adapter protein involved in IL-1R signaling. In transfected cells, Tollip was shown to exist in a complex with the IL-1R-associated serine/threonine kinase (IRAK) before activation by IL-1. Upon stimulation with IL-1, the Tollip-IRAK complex associated with the IL-1R accessory protein (IL-1RAcP). However, activation of IRAK by another IL-1R-associated protein, MyD88, led to the dissociation of IRAK from Tollip, suggesting that IRAK dissociation is phosphorylation-dependent. Overexpression of Tollip led to decreased activation of NF-κB and JNK1. It is uncertain whether this represents a physiological effect of Tollip or reflects occlusion of limiting IL-1R binding sites for Tollip-IRAK complexes. Burns, K., Clatworthy, J., Martin, L., Martinon, F., Plumpton, C., Maschera, B., Lewis, A., Ray, K., Tschopp, J., and Volpe, F. (2000) Tollip, a new component of the IL-1RI pathway, links IRAK to the IL-1 receptor. Nature Cell Biol. 2: 346-351. [Online Journal]


Context: Since today mobile devices have limited battery life, the energy consumption of the software running on them can play a strong role with respect to the success of mobile-based businesses. Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are built using common web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and are commonly used for providing a better user experience to mobile users. Caching is the main technique used by PWA developers for optimizing network usage and for providing a meaningful experience even when the user's device is offline.Goal: This paper aims at assessing the impact of caching on both the energy consumption and performance of PWAs.Method: We conducted an empirical experiment targeting 9 real PWAs developed by third-party developers. The experiment is designed as a 1 factor - 2 treatments study, with the usage of caching as the single factor and the status of the cache as treatments (empty vs populated cache). The response variables of the experiment are (i) the energy consumption of the mobile device and (ii) the page load time of the PWAs. The experiment is executed on a real Android device running the Mozilla Firefox browser.Results: Our results show that PWAs do not consume significantly different amounts of energy when loaded either with an empty or populated cache. However, the page load time of PWAs is significantly lower when the cache is already populated, with a medium effect size.Conclusions: This study confirms that PWAs are promising in terms of energy consumption and provides evidence that caching can be safely exploited by PWA developers concerned with energy consumption. The study provides also empirical evidence that caching is an effective technique for improving the user experience in terms of page loading time of PWAs.


Design imposes a novel social choice problem: using a team of voting agents, maximize the number of optimal solutions; allowing a user to then take an aesthetical choice. In an open system of design agents, team formation is fundamental. We present the first model of agent teams for design. For maximum applicability, we envision agents that are queried for a single opinion, and multiple solutions are obtained by multiple iterations. We show that diverse teams composed of agents with different preferences maximize the number of optimal solutions, while uniform teams composed of multiple copies of the best agent are in general suboptimal. Our experiments study the model in bounded time; and we also study a real system, where agents vote to design buildings


We present the results of a series of laboratory economic experiments designed to study compliance behavior of polluting firms when information on the penalty is uncertain. The experiments consist of a regulatory environment in which university students face emission standards and an enforcement mechanism composed of audit probabilities and penalties (conditional on detection of a violation). We examine how uncertainty on the penalty affects the compliance decision and the extent of violation under two enforcement levels: one in which the regulator induces perfect compliance and another one in which it does not. Our results suggest that in the first case, uncertain penalties increase the extent of the violations of those firms with higher marginal benefits. When enforcement is not sufficient to induce compliance, the uncertain penalties do not have any statistically significant effect on compliance behavior. Overall, the results suggest that a cost-effective design of emission standards should consider including public and complete information on the penalties for violations.


Detailed sequence stratigraphic frameworks have been produced for most of the Cenozoic deposits around the North Atlantic and Greenland Sea. However, the sequence stratigraphic evolution of the NE Greenland shelf, a significant part of the Atlantic Ocean margin, has so far never been interpreted. This study provides, for the first time, a detailed sequence stratigraphic interpretation of the NE Greenland shelf since the late Eocene. The tectonic evolution, eustatic sea-level change and the impact of glaciations are integrated into a consistent geological history. Based on the identification of pronounced unconformities and their correlative conformities, ten stratigraphic sequences are identified. The onset of deposition is defined by a pronounced erosional event, where late Paleocene tectonic activity caused mass wasting of the uplifted footwall of the Danmarkshavn Ridge along a c. 200 km section of the ridge. A second pronounced unconformity developed across the margin during the mid-Miocene, which caused forced regressive submarine fans to prograde across the margin. The following tectonic quiet period is overlain by glaciomarine deposits, with evidence of ice deformation reaching the present day shelf break. Unknown super-regional plate tectonic forces are suggested as a driver of sequence formation based on correlation with the Canadian Arctic.


Materials science increasingly focuses on generating "smart", i.e. highly functional, advanced matrices. Selective recognition can be implemented into man-made polymers by template-assisted synthesis. The method covers a surprising size range: it is possible to generate sensitivity and selectivity towards bivalent metal cations, such as Cu 2+ , in polyacrylate matrices. Despite the template being substantially smaller in size than the monomers, recognition can be achieved. Furthermore, acrylates can be templated with much larger species, such as influenza viruses. This leads to a nanostructured polymer surface that selectively re- binds the respective virion. Additional enhancement of sensitivity can be achieved by composite materials. Silver sulphide nanoparticles for instance show very appreciable affinity towards butanol vapors. When blending into butanol-imprinted polyurethane, the material incorporates three times more of the alcohol. Copyright © 2011 VBRI press.


Very little is known about how bond market participants react to insider stock trades. Our study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the bond market reactions around insider transactions in U.S. firms during the period from 2002 to 2009. Our dataset covers 993 stock purchases and 6,562 stock sales by corporate insiders. We employ event study methodology to determine the cumulative abnormal bond price returns in a number of predetermined subperiods around the publication date and find that insider purchases negatively influence corporate bond prices, whereas insider sales appear to convey a positive signal to the bond market. The results for purchases are most obvious for financial firms and for investment-grade firms. The results for sales are larger in the subsamples including non-financial firms and non-investment-grade firms. For both purchases and sales, the effect is largest when the transactions are executed by insiders who are both corporate executive officers and chairmen or during the crisis period. The results of our regression analysis support the findings from the event study and reveal that purchases related to benefit plans transmit a less negative signal to the market than other purchases.


Self-healing concrete is regarded as a promising solution to reduce the high maintenance and repair cost of concrete infrastructure. Due to the limited autogenous healing capacity of concrete as such, additives are needed to enhance its self-healing properties. Among various strategies, microbial-based self-healing has gained increasing attention because of its distinct features including environmental friendliness, long-term viability and low cost. Within the framework of this strategy, bacteria and the relevant bio-reagents are pre-added into the concrete during the casting and are expected to play their role (heal cracks) when cracking occurs. Due to the high alkalinity and small pore sizes of concrete, bacteria cannot be added directly, and hence an immobilization process is required prior to incorporation into concrete.
In the present work, a bio-compatible hydrogel was evaluated as the carrier to encapsulate an efficient carbonate precipitating bacteria, Bacillus sphaericus, which was selected based on previous research. As proof of concept, the activity of bacterial spores after immobilization, the carbonatogenesity of the hydrogel encapsulated spores, the influence of the bio-agents on the hydrogel swelling properties, and the crack healing efficiency were investigated. Interestingly, no significant viability loss was observed after the immobilization process. The precipitation of CaCO3 in/on the hydrogel matrix by the encapsulated spores was demonstrated by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The swelling capacity of the hydrogel was slightly increased after incorporation of the bio-agents. In addition, the specimens combined with the bio-hydrogels showed an obvious superiority in crack healing efficiency, both with respect to the healing rate as well as the maximum healed crack width. A maximum crack width of about 0.5mm can be healed in the specimens containing bio-hydrogels within 7d, while no crack healing was observed in the reference specimens.
The feasibility of using hydrogel immobilized bacteria for self-healing concrete is therefore demonstrated.


A scenario with two single-user links, one licensed to use the spectral resource (primary) and one unlicensed (secondary or cognitive), is considered. According to the cognitive radio principle, the activity of the secondary link is required not to interfere with the performance of the primary. Therefore, in this paper, it is assumed that the cognitive link accesses the channel only when sensed idle. Moreover, the analysis includes: (1) random packet arrivals; (2) sensing errors due to fading at the secondary link; (3) power allocation at the secondary transmitter based on long-term measurements. In this framework, the maximum stable throughput of the cognitive link (in packets/slot) is derived for a fixed throughput selected by the primary link. The model is modified so as to allow the secondary transmitter to act as a ldquotransparentrdquo relay for the primary link. In particular, packets that are not received correctly by the intended destination might be decoded successfully by the secondary transmitter. The latter can, then, queue and forward these packets to the intended receiver. A stable throughput of the secondary link with relaying is derived under the same conditions as before. Results show that benefits of relaying strongly depend on the topology (i.e., average channel powers) of the network.


We provide the first systematic, international decomposition of possible financial benefits of sustainable real estate investment on corporate performance metrics across the two leading country-markets in terms of sustainable property certifications. In the UK, where a baseline level of environmental reporting is mandatory, listed property companies benefit somewhat from investments in sustainability-certified properties through higher cash flow and valuation outcomes. In the US, which features no requisite reporting, the benefits of sustainable investment are stronger and comprise distinct cash flow, risk, information and corporate valuation effects. Our results suggest benefits of improved transparency and benchmarking from environmental performance reporting.


This paper estimates the economic value that consumers place on energy efficiency (EE) labels for appliances in the Spanish market. It uses the hedonic method to calculate the price premium paid in the market for that attribute isolated from others. Furthermore, the Quantity Based Demand System (QBDS) is applied to calculate the own and cross price elasticities of demand for both EE appliances and others. These elasticities are useful for improving the design of policies to promote EE. The paper looks at three different appliances marketed in Spain during 2012: washing machines, fridges and dishwashers.


Intended for being informative to both legal and engineer communities, this chapter raises awareness on the implications of recent patents in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) studies. Google patented the use of cloud robotics to create robot personality(-ies). The broad claims of the patent could hamper many HRI research projects in the field. One of the possible frustrated research lines is related to robotic therapies because the personalization of the robot accelerates the process of engagement, which is extremely beneficial for robotic cognitive therapies. This chapter presents, therefore, the scientific examination, description, and comparison of the Tufts University CEEO project "Data Analysis and Collection through Robotic Companions and LEGO® Engineering with Children on the Autism Spectrum project" and the US 8,996,429 B1 Patent on the Methods and Systems for Robot Personality Development of Google. Some remarks on ethical implications of the patent will close the chapter and open the discussion to both communities.


Parallel performance optimization is being applied and further improvements are studied for parallel linear algebra on clusters. Several parallelization guidelines have been defined and are being used on single clusters and local area networks used for parallel computing. In this context, some linear algebra parallel algorithms have been implemented following the parallelization guidelines, and experimentation has shown very good performance. Also, the parallel algorithms outperform the corresponding parallel algorithms implemented on ScaLAPACK (Scalable LAPACK), which is considered to have highly optimized parallel algorithms for distributed memory parallel computers. Also, using more than a single cluster or local area network for parallel linear algebra computing seems to be a natural approach, taking into account the high availability of such computing platforms in academic/research environments. In this context of multiple clusters, there are many interesting challenges, and many of them are still to be exactly defined and/or characterized. Intercluster communication performance characterization seems to be the first factor to be precisely quantified and it is expected that communication performance quantification will give a starting point from which analyze current and future approaches for parallel performance using more than one cluster or local area network for parallel cooperating processing.


This article explores representations of history and history for the present in Fallout 4 to illuminate how the gameworld makes clever use of common historical tropes and aesthetics, as well as the genre of the counterfactual in its presentation of a compelling and interactive narrative. Set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Massachusetts, Fallout 4 employs various sites of historical Massachusetts (Concord, Lexington, Boston) in order to draw the user into the story of the 'lone survivor,' the avatar that he or she takes control of. This analysis is interested in the ways that Fallout 4 employs history and the genre of the counterfactual in the production of a compelling narrative that not only invites but impels the player into action to chart a new course for this devastated virtual landscape. The power of counterfactual history lies in its capacity to unravel assumptions about the static nature of historical events, and in its denial of a linear trajectory of history broadly. In the case of Fallout 4, the implementation of a counterfactual story, wherein the nuclear event that shrouded the Cold War period in uncertainty, takes place. It serves as a rejection of the popularly rehearsed narrative of American supremacy triumphing over Communist forces to present the player with a more nuanced interpretation of some of the internal and external tensions that came to define the Cold War period (i.e. cultural malaise, economic instability, the growth of a military-industrial complex). This conflicting presentation of histories both real and imagined provides an opportunity for the player to experience and interact with the game critically as a counterfactual reimagining of the Cold War era. Viewed in this way, the virtual world of Fallout 4 becomes a space where the player can reassess their own understanding of the period, and the nature of historical knowledge production more broadly.


This study analyses how established SMEs respond to potentially disruptive inno-vations and business models in the course of increasing digitization. Drawing on the strategic entrepreneurship approach we argue that SMEs showing strategic entrepreneurial behaviour are more likely to respond to potentially disruptive innovations and business models proactively. We find that established SMEs recognizing disruptive innovations and business models as a business opportunity apply significantly more frequently strategic measures to exploit these opportunities. Observing and evaluating relevant new technologies and devel-opments is a key determinant of belonging to the group of SMEs demonstrating strategic en-trepreneurial behaviour. In our sample only a minority belongs to the group of proactive es-tablished SMEs.


Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events that can have negative, lasting effects on health and well-being.1 These experiences range from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse to parental divorce or the incarceration of a parent or guardian. A growing body of research has sought to quantify the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences and illuminate their connection with negative behavioral and health outcomes, such as obesity, alcoholism, and depression, later in life. However, prior research has not reported on the prevalence of ACEs among children in a nationally representative, non-clinical sample.2 In this brief, we describe the prevalence of one or more ACEs among children ages birth through 17, as reported by their parents, using nationally representative data from the 2011/12 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH). We estimate the prevalence of eight specific ACEs for the U.S., contrasting the prevalence of specific ACEs among the states and between children of different age groups.


Health care-associated infections (HAIs) are among the most common and serious adverse events in hospitals globally, occurring in about one in 10 admissions overall. A recent meta-analysis shows that HAIs are a much bigger problem in the hospitals of developing countries, than in those in the industrialised world. HAI prevalence is 15.5 per 100 patients, at least double the overall rate in Europe, while the incidence of HAIs acquired in intensive care units (ICUs) is 34.2 per 1 000 patient days, triple the rate in the USA.


Abstract Due to conservation measures, the breeding population of the Raven significantly strengthened over the last decades in Hungary, also nesting on the lowlands. Nowadays, observing large flocks is not rare. Compared to other European countries, the urbanization of the species began relatively late in Hungary, in the '90s, first breeding in the urban areas of Baranya County. There were another five similar known cases after the millennium across the country. Because of the advanced adaptive capacity of species, this number is likely to grow in the future. In Hungary, the brood is typically complete in the second half of February and the young birds fledge in the first days of May. There are two known cases after the millennium when the Ravens bred in a significantly different time than usual. In these cases, the young birds fledged on 20 January and the second half of February. In both cases, the nests were found on overhead transmission line poles in lowland agricultural areas. It is uncertain what led to the unusual breeding time, but it is most likely that the breeding pair was accustomed, having successfully raised several brood before, and they could rely on the abundant food base near the nests during the breeding period.


In this assignment, we focus on creating scheduling approaches for the optimizer in
PLANWISE, a scheduling system created by ORTEC that supports the user in scheduling
operations on different resources, such as machines and operators. The scheduling
approaches must be able to solve a scheduling problem specified by the optimizer. In other
words: The approaches must be able to create a schedule in which a set of operations is
scheduled on a set of resources.
The scheduling approaches have to meet two requirements:
1. The approaches should be generic and be able to handle different scheduling
situations that occur in practice.
2. The approaches need to be able to handle manual adjustments made by users. More
specifically: The approaches must be able to solve scheduling problems that contain
fixed operations. These operations have already been scheduled on a set of
resources and they may not be rescheduled: i.e. they may not be reassigned to
different resources and they may not obtain different starting and completion times.
To create scheduling approaches that meet these requirements, we first determine which
scheduling problem the approaches should be able to solve. After considering the scheduling
situations at different PLANWISE customers and potential customers, we create a general
scheduling problem that contains the constraints and objectives mentioned most often by the
PLANWISE customers. In the resulting scheduling problem, we have a set of jobs that each
consist of one or more operations. These operations each need to be scheduled on a set of
resources for their processing. The objective is now to schedule the operations on the
available resources such that the total tardiness of the jobs in the schedule is minimized. The
main constraints that we consider in our scheduling problem are general finish-start
precedence relations, unique resources, preemptive and non-preemptive downtimes, setup
times, routing constraints, resource-dependent processing times, and fixed operations.
Subsequently, we determine which scheduling approaches we use to solve our scheduling
problem. After performing a literature study on different scheduling approaches, we create
two approaches to solve the general scheduling problem: One approach based on an
integrated architecture and the regret-based random sampling algorithm and one approach
based on the hierarchical architecture and local search algorithms. These approaches are
able to handle the following constraints of the general scheduling problem: Finish-start
precedence relations, unique resources, preemptive and non-preemptive downtimes, and
setup times. The integrated approach is also able to handle routing constraints. In addition,
we expect that the approaches are also able to handle fixed operations.
We test both approaches on a set of scheduling instances and we subsequently compare the
performance of the approaches to each other. In this comparison, we use the integrated
approach as the benchmark approach, because ORTEC currently uses this approach in
certain PLANWISE optimizers. Based on the test results, we can make a number of
conclusions: First, on the tested instances the hierarchical approach generally performs
better than the integrated approach with respect to tardiness minimization. Among the
different versions of the hierarchical approach, we obtain the best results when we use
simulated annealing to solve the assignment problem. In addition, a good initial solution and
frequent iteration between the assignment and sequencing steps are also beneficial for the
performance of the approach.
4
However, improvements can still be made to both approaches with respect to both tardiness
minimization and calculation time. Based on test results, we are able to conclude that the
characteristics of a scheduling instance have a lot of influence on the performance of the
integrated approach. Specifically, the characteristics of the jobs in the scheduling instance
have a lot of influence on the decision sets created to choose a next operation to schedule
and the operation chosen from this decision set. Therefore, further research is required to
fine tune the integrated approach to the scheduling instance. Also, further tests need to be
done to determine the influence of the initial solution and communication scheme on the
performance of the hierarchical approach. Finally, both approaches need to be adjusted so
they are able to handle all constraints of the general scheduling problem: First, both
approaches need to be adjusted so they can handle resource-dependent processing times.
In addition, at present the approaches can only solve scheduling problems where all
resources have the same intervals of preemptive downtime. In practice, however, resources
often have different intervals of preemptive downtime. Finally,


This draft paper describes the preliminary outcomes of a model-based investigation of longterm strategies to reduce the impacts of coastal flooding in Bangladesh. Specifically, a system dynamics model was constructed to simulate the effect of flood mitigation methods on the population, rural economy, housing and welfare of Bangladeshis in the coastal district of Cox's Bazar, if they were to be implemented. The model shows how microfinance-based investments could endogenously contribute to such infrastructures, in the context of policies for climate adaptation and rural development. Additional policy insights were observed by analyzing overall system behavior using techniques for Exploratory System Dynamics Modeling and Analysis (ESDMA).


The effects of nutrients and planting season on root growth were investigated in transplants of the seagrasses Posidonia australis and P. sinuosa. Difficulties with sampling and estimating root growth of these submerged plants were overcome by growing transplants, with all roots removed initially, in pots containing a standardized sand medium. Nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and nitrogen and phosphorus combined (N + P) were added to pots. Root elongation and productivity were measured after harvesting at 1 month, 4 months, and 6 months in consecutive experiments beginning in autumn and spring. Roots formed within a month, growing into extensive root systems. Posidonia australis root growth was three‐fold less over winter (10 mm d−1 per plant) than summer (33 mm d21 per plant), with some plants producing up to 9 m of roots in 6 months. Posidonia sinuosa root‐growth rates were significantly lower than those of P. australis and did not vary between winter and summer (6 mm d−1 per plant). Root productivity was lower with N and N + P addition for P. sinuosa and with N addition for P. australis in summer. In contrast, P addition had little effect on root growth, reducing only primary root growth in P. australis. Addition of nutrients did not result in the expected increases in fine roots in the zone around the nutrient source. This technique for measuring root growth demonstrated the potential of these Posidonia transplants to produce extensive root systems within months of planting, in contrast to the much slower growth of roots in mature seagrass meadows.


For Resilience Engineering, 'failure' is the result of the adaptations necessary to cope with the complexity of the real world, rather than a breakdown or malfunction. The performance of individuals and organizations must continually adjust to current conditions and, because resources and time are finite, such adjustments are always approximate. This definitive new book explores this groundbreaking new development in safety and risk management, where 'success' is based on the ability of organizations, groups and individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm occur. Featuring contributions from many of the worlds leading figures in the fields of human factors and safety, "Resilience Engineering" provides provocative insights into system safety as an aggregate of its various components, subsystems, software, organizations, human behaviours, and the way in which they interact. The book provides an introduction to Resilience Engineering of systems, covering both the theoretical and practical aspects. It is written for those responsible for system safety on managerial or operational levels alike, including safety managers and engineers (line and maintenance), security experts, risk and safety consultants, human factors professionals and accident investigators.


CAPITAL BUDGETING MODELS BASED ON CONSTRAINED PROFIT MAXIMIZING AND NON-PROFIT MAXIMIZING BEHAVIOR Siert E. de Jong Although economic literature traditionally assumes maximization of total profits to be the only goal of the firm, recently some alternative entrepreneurial motivations have received much attention. Nevertheless, in the theory of investment practically all the existing models, positive and normative, are based on profit maximization. Attempting to fill this gap this dissertation develops a series of capital budgeting models based on a few of the best known of these alternative objectives. Since the purpose was not to construct new goals or to argue for the plausibility of some, the goals and motives of the firm were taken as given. Four different goals were used. Two are constrained profit maximizing, one is revenue maximization, and the fourth is the maximization of the manager*s own utility* The capital budgeting problem, broadly interpreted, requires three interrelated decisions: first, the determina¬ tion of the total volume of investment the firm will undertake, second5 the optimal financing of the proposed investment outlay and third, the selection of the optimal combination of investment projects, These sub-problems are successively analysed (respectively in Chapters III, IV.1 and IV.2), and a model to solve each for the four different objectives is constructed in each chapter. Optimality conditions, optimality rules and micro investment equations correspond¬ ing to the various goals are derived. The thesis actually begins in Chapter II with a review of well known capital budgeting models which are similar in that all conclude investment should (will) be carried on by the firm until the marginal rate of return equals the marginal cost of capital. But since all define the cost of capital differently the models in fact lead to quite different investment behavior. It is shown that the differences in opinion about the "correct" definition of the cost of capital are due to different interpretation of the profit maximiza¬ tion hypothesis. This chapter serves a threefold purpose. First, it serves as an introduction by presenting some traditional capital budgeting models against which the models of Chapter III and IV can be compared. Second, it helps to clear a confusing discussion that has been going on for years in financial literature by showing that each model is internally consistent and that differences in outcome are caused by differences in initial assumptions as to what constitutes the goal of the firm. Third, by showing how even minor variations on the profit maximisation theme can cause quite different investment behavior, it demonstrates the need for models integrating more radically different objectives with the theory of investment. The model used in Chapter III is a modified and generalized version of the so-called ''wealth-model". The unrealistic and special behavioral assumption of that model is replaced by the more basic "balance-equality constraint" and the result¬ ing model is made to accept the various non-profit maximizing goals. The problem in Chapter IV.1 is structured so that it can be solved by existing programming methods. Although the mathematical technique is known, the application to the financing problem in this form is quite new. In Chester IV.2 existing programming methods for determining the optimal project mix under profit maximization are proven to be applicable to most of the other objectives as well.


The traditional iRODS mechanisms for file sharing, including user groups, often require some form of iRODS administrative privilege. In the HydroShare project for enabling hydrology research, we perceived a need for more flexible file sharing, including unprivileged creation and management of user groups according to policies quite distinct from the Linux/Unix policies that initially motivated iRODS protections. This is enabled by a policy database in PostgreSQL and management API written in Python that are deployed in parallel to iCAT. Innovations in iRODS 4.1 allow access control based upon this PostgreSQL database rather than the default iCAT server, by interposing access control code before the access event using iRODS Policy Enforcement Points. The result is an access control mechanism that closely matches scientific needs for file sharing, and brings "dropbox-like" file sharing semantics to the network filesystem level.


Methods for designing and building perceptual agents should be clean, powerful and practical. But no methodology satisfies all three criteria, yet. Our methodologies are evolving dialectically. The symbolic methods of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (GOFAIR) constitute the original thesis. The antithesis is reactive Insect AI. The emerging synthesis, Situated Agents, needs formal rigor and practical tools. A robot is a hybrid intelligent dynamical system, consisting of a controller coupled to its body. The Constraint Net (CN) model of Zhang and Mackworth is a unitary framework for building hybrid intelligent systems as situated agents. Most other robot design methodologies use hybrid models of hybrid systems, awkwardly combining offline computational models of high-level perception, reasoning and planning with online models of low-level sensing and control. In CN, the designer specifies the robot's vision, control and motor systems uniformly as online systems. The constraint-based architecture for agent perceiver/controllers consists of multi-layer constraintsatisfying modules. If the perceptual and control systems are designed as constraint-satisfying devices then the total robotic system, consisting of the robot symmetrically coupled to its environment, may, sometimes, be proven correct. In some cases, a controller may be synthesized from a constraint-based specification. This framework has co-evolved with applications to several robotic tasks, including the the challenge of building various visually-controlled robot soccer players. The dynamics of intelligence can be captured by constraintsatisfying hybrid systems.


Separation from the (evil) world based on 2 Tim 2.19-21 is a defining characteristic of exclusive brethrenism, both in its most extreme form, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and in other exclusive brethren groups. I examine this text in its context and then critically assess John Nelson Darby's reading of it, working from his translation and his comments elsewhere in his writings. Darby misread the text as separation from "evil people" rather than avoidance of wrongdoing, with disastrous consequences. I conclude with some reflections on how his reading of v. 19 arose and on the dangers associated with translation work undertaken by influential individuals working in isolation from other scholars.


We examine the cosmic growth of the red sequence in a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation that includes a heuristic prescription for quenching star formation that yields a realistic passive galaxy population today. In this prescription, haloes dominated by hot gas are continually heated to prevent their coronae from fuelling new star formation. Hot coronae primarily form in haloes above ∼1012 M⊙, so that galaxies with stellar masses ∼1010.5 M⊙ are the first to be quenched and move on to the red sequence at z > 2. The red sequence is concurrently populated at low masses by satellite galaxies in large haloes that are starved of new fuel, resulting in a dip in passive galaxy number densities around ∼1010 M⊙. Stellar mass growth continues for galaxies even after joining the red sequence, primarily through minor mergers with a typical mass ratio ∼1:5. For the most massive systems, the size growth implied by the distribution of merger mass ratios is typically approximately two times the corresponding mass growth, consistent with observations. This model reproduces mass–density and colour–density trends in the local Universe, with essentially no evolution to z = 1, with the hint that such relations may be washed out by z ∼ 2. Simulated galaxies are increasingly likely to be red at high masses or high local overdensities. In our model, the presence of surrounding hot gas drives the trends with both mass and environment.


Praise for Project Management Accounting: Budgeting, Tracking, and Reporting Costs and Profitability "You don't need to be a Six Sigma Black Belt or a CPA to understand the principles and the practical tools presented by Callahan, Stetz, and Brooks in Project Management Accounting. Their approach focuses on sound financial practices that will improve the ROI of your project whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first experience." —Barry Van Dyck, PhD Director of Degree Programs, Executive Education, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame "Project Management Accounting serves as a solid resource for the project manager seeking to leverage the tools of accounting and finance to maximize the quality of project outcomes." —Jeffrey J. Lampe, CFA Vice President, Hopewell Ventures "Project Management Accounting clearly communicates fundamental accounting principles and applies them skillfully to the field of project management . . . even seasoned accounting managers will likely benefit from the application to project management. Talented project managers will find enough finance and accounting tools to transition toward profit and loss responsibility. This book will serve as a handy reference." —Warren Davidson CEO, Global Source Mfg. "This is a must-read for everyone in business, whether you have made a career in project management, operations, facilities, or anywhere else. Project Management Accounting provides the framework to understand not only how to manage any project, but how the project interacts with the different functions of the company for the overall good. When applied, [this book] will improve the profitability of the company through an understanding of the costs and benefits of each project." —Michael Alte Management Director, ArvinMeritor Today's project managers need to understand finance and accounting concepts in order to make both informed decisions and a greater contribution to their organization. Written for readers with limited business backgrounds, Project Management Accounting is an invaluable guide to successfully performing projects using sound finance and accounting concepts. With the collected insights of authors and respected industry experts Kevin Callahan, Gary Stetz, and Lynne Brooks, Project Management Accounting offers guidance that project managers can use right away to know how to budget appropriately. Brief in presentation and rich in content, Project Management Accounting equips the leaders of today and tomorrow to hit the ground running with a profound business perspective in their current work and in future projects.


Abstract A new species of Tapirus (Perissodactyla: Tapiridae) is described from the upper Pleistocene of the Rio Madeira Formation in Araras, Nova Mamoré Municipality, Rondonia State, Brazil. Tapirus rondoniensis sp. nov. is represented by a nearly complete skull with a unique combination of characters that differ from those of extant and fossil species of Tapirus described from South America. It is diagnosed mainly by its broad frontals that bear a pneumatization extending to the frontoparietal suture, a high sagittal crest, a weakly molarized P2 lacking a protoloph, and a metaloph that merely reaches the base of the ectoloph. T. rondoniensis sp. nov. is similar in some respects to T. terrestris, but it retains some primitive dental and cranial character states in common with T. pinchaque, such as broad frontals and a weakly molarized P2.


Finally face-to-face with his ultimate nemesis, Naruto finds out there's way more to the true Pain than he could have ever imagined. As the consequences of the tumultuous politics of the past come to light, an unexpected turn of events put a new ninja in power in Konoha. And the first act by the new leader will change Naruto's world forever.


The present study was done with aimed to investigate and select overseas suppliers with emphasis on risk indicators in Iran's manufacturing companies in Khorasan province. This research was applied in terms of its purpose and is also part of descriptive-analytical research. A questionnaire was used to collect information. Given that contracting or contracting by low-cost overseas suppliers is an attractive topic in the global economy, Unfortunately, these decisions are made without due consideration to the requirements, market demand and proper delivery system, which usually results in bad results. Determining the risk factors affecting the supply chain of a manufacturing company, determining the decision making options for adopting its purchasing or manufacturing policies, and how to interact with the company's experts can help companies make better decisions about making or purchasing final products or parts. By reviewing the literature of research and using expert opinions, a list of effective criteria for the assessment and selection of overseas suppliers was identified in five general categories (demand, supply, infrastructure, regulatory, environmental, and catastrophic risks). According to the results of this study, among the main criteria, the risk of supply has the highest weight, so it is more important than other major criteria.


Programming languages must be defined precisely so that programmers can reason carefully about the behavior of their code and language implementers can provide correct and efficient compilers and interpreters. However, until quite recently, mainstream languages such as Java and C++ did not specify exactly how programs that use shared-memory multithreading should behave (e.g., when do writes by one thread become visible to another thread?). The memory model of a programming language addresses such questions. The recently-approved memory model for C++ effectively requires programs to be "data-race-free": all executions of the program must have the property that any conflicting memory accesses in different threads are ordered by synchronization. To meet this requirement, programmers must ensure that threads properly coordinate accesses to shared memory using synchronization mechanisms such as mutual-exclusion locks.
We introduce a new abstraction for reasoning about data-race-free programs: interference-free regions. An interference-free region, or IFR, is a region surrounding a memory access during which no other thread can modify the accessed memory location without causing a data race. Specifically, the interference-free region for a memory access extends from the last acquire call (e.g., mutex lock) before the access to the first release call (e.g., mutex unlock) after the access. Using IFRs, we can reason sequentially about code that contains synchronization operations. IFRs enable entirely thread-local reasoning, meaning we do not need to have the whole program available in order to make useful inferences. We develop IFRs as a abstract concept, and also present two practical applications of IFRs.
First, IFR-based reasoning can be used to extend the scope of compiler optimizations. Compilers typically optimize within synchronization-free regions, since the data-race-freedom assumption permits sequential reasoning in the absence of synchronization. We make the observation that this rule of thumb is overly conservative: it is safe to optimize across synchronization calls as long as the calls are interference-free for the variable in question. (We say that a variable is interference-free at a call if the call falls in the interference-free region for an access to that variable.) We have developed two symmetric compiler analyses for determining which variables are interference-free at each synchronization call, thereby allowing later optimization passes to optimize in larger regions that may include synchronization.
Second, we have developed an algorithm for dynamic data-race detection based on the concept of IFRs. Data-race detection is an important problem to the programming languages community: programmers need to eliminate data races during software development in order to avoid costly bugs in production systems. Our algorithm monitors active IFRs for each thread at runtime, reporting a data race if conflicting IFRs in different threads overlap in real time. Conservative approximations of IFRs are inferred using a static instrumentation pass. We compare our algorithm to two precise data-race detectors, and determine that our algorithm catches many data races and provides better performance on most benchmarks.
As a final step, we extend the compiler analyses used in both projects to be interprocedural (i.e., analyzing more than one function at a time). Specifically, we classify functions according to their synchronization behavior, making it easier to infer when IFRs propagate through function calls. On the compiler optimization side, this change means that we can optimize across calls that contain internal synchronization. On the data-race detection side, we are able to statically infer longer IFRs, meaning that we are more likely to detect data races.


Luminescent SiN-based multilayers were prepared in a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system followed by subsequently laser crystallization of ultrathin amorphous Si-rich SiN sublayers. The cross-sectional TEM analysis reveals that grain size of Si nanocrystals embedded in the Si-rich SiN sublayers is independent of the laser fluence, while the grain density can be well controlled by the laser fluence. The devices containing the laser crystallized multilayers show a low turn-on voltage of 5 V and exhibit strong green light emission under both optical and electrical excitations. Moreover, the device after laser-irradiated at 554 mJ/cm(2) shows a significantly enhanced EL intensity as well as external quantum efficiency compared with the device without laser irradiation. The EL mechanism is suggested from the bipolar recombination of electron-hole pairs at Si nanocrystals. The improved performance of the devices was discussed.


South Africa is classified as one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, yet half of its population lives below the poverty line and over a quarter of its labour force is unemployed. Foreign aid was one of the major sources of capital for the country. It poured in from many developed countries and it was very successful in promoting a stable society, especially during the first few years after apartheid ended in 1994. Thus, South Africa is a good case study for determining the relationship between and the effect of foreign aid on growth. The data on aid flow as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) in South Africa was only available from 1980, thus limiting the data from 1980 to 2009. Given the limitations in the data, a co-integration analysis of the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) was adopted, using the method of the conditional unrestricted error correction model (UECM), which accommodates small samples. The result shows that the relationship between aid and growth is negative both in the short and the long run.


A field trial was established of a mixed grass sward grown on three types of golf green construction. These consisted of a topsoil, a sand, peat and soil mixture, and a pure
sand. Experimental treatments applied were three levels of irrigation, five of nitrogen fertiliser and two of phosphate. The trial was maintained as a golf green, and artificial wear was applied. Soil moisture deficit predictions by the Meteorological Office conformed with measurements from the soil construction, but the sand-based
construction types showed higher deficits. The overall rate of evapotranspiration was around 65 % of predicted values. Pore structure of the sand-based rootzones changed slowly over time, but water infiltration rates fell markedly. The soil constructions showed a reduction in the proportion of larger pore spaces in the top of the profile, and
infiltration rates were consistently low. Plant death was associated with both high and low rates of nitrogen fertiliser, low rates of irrigation, and was especially apparent on the sand constructions not receiving phosphate fertiliser. Ingress of the weed species Poa annua (L.) occurred mainly on the soil constructions and its rate of ingress was enhanced by increased nitrogen input. Golf ball roll and various aspects of their behaviour after impact onto the turf with simulated 5-iron flight characteristics were measured. Roll length declined with increasing fertiliser rate. Hard greens produced long, high bounces
and shallow pitch marks. High rates of both irrigation and nitrogen produced deeper pitchmarks and were associated with the tendency of balls to "screw back". A multivariate
method of classifying the quality of golf greens on the basis of a small number of objective measurements was developed. The classes of greens derived were described in
terms of their average visual merit, green "speed", bail behaviour after impact, and the treatment factors which they had received.


High strength concrete (HSC) provides high strength but lower ductility than normal strength concrete. This low ductility limits the benefit of using HSC in building safe structures. On the other hand, when designing reinforced concrete beams, designers have to limit the amount of tensile reinforcement to prevent the brittle failure of concrete. Therefore the full potential of the use of steel reinforcement can not be achieved. This paper presents the idea of confining concrete in the compression zone so that the HSC will be in a state of triaxial compression, which leads to improvements in strength and ductility. Five beams made of HSC were cast and tested. The cross section of the beams was 200×300 mm, with a length of 4 m and a clear span of 3.6 m subjected to four-point loading, with emphasis placed on the midspan deflection. The first beam served as a reference beam. The remaining beams had different tensile reinforcement and the confinement shapes were changed to gauge their effectiveness in improving the strength and ductility of the beams. The compressive strength of the concrete was 85 MPa and the tensile strength of the steel was 500 MPa and for the stirrups and helixes was 250 MPa. Results of testing the five beams proved that placing helixes with different diameters as a variable parameter in the compression zone of reinforced concrete beams improve their strength and ductility.


Unexpected, spontaneous waves of strikes in the Turkish automotive industry in main industrial centres as Bursa, Ankara, Sakarya, Eskisehir and Kocaeli crashed the labour relations model of the industry designed by the 1980 military government. Over 20.000 metal workers in Renault, Fiat, Ford, Turk Traktor and some suppliers of these MNCs initiated spontaneous strikes to protest both the employers' association (Metal Employers Association; MESS) and the labour union (Turk Metal). Also in Mercedes and some other suppliers, employees initiated different forms of protests to raise their joint demands. Employees claim that the labour union has been betraying its members by signing an undesired collective agreement without consulting members and their wages do not allow them to live in decent conditions.


Generalizing eye tracking to new subjects/environments remains challenging for existing appearance-based methods. To address this issue, we propose to leverage on eye movement dynamics inspired by neurological studies. Studies show that there exist several common eye movement types, independent of viewing contents and subjects, such as fixation, saccade, and smooth pursuits. Incorporating generic eye movement dynamics can therefore improve the generalization capabilities. In particular, we propose a novel Dynamic Gaze Transition Network (DGTN) to capture the underlying eye movement dynamics and serve as the topdown gaze prior. Combined with the bottom-up gaze measurements from the deep convolutional neural network, our method achieves better performance for both within-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations compared to state-of-the-art. In addition, a new DynamicGaze dataset is also constructed to study eye movement dynamics and eye gaze estimation.


ABSTRACT The recent novel coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has affected humanity and education worldwide as continued learning amidst massive school closures required the unprecedented decision to make a rapid transition from in-person learning to remote online learning. This abrupt and temporary shift to remote online learning due to crisis circumstances was described as emergency remote teaching (ERT). Using a multi-method approach, this study aimed to explore college students' emergency remote teaching experiences during the COVID-19 crisis. Analysis of online survey data revealed the various detrimental effects of the recent outbreak of COVID-19 and emergency remote teaching on the participants' educational and personal experiences. The results revealed not only that the participants have experienced learning loss and lack of motivation, but also that the pre-existing educational and social inequities seemed exacerbated and amplified during ERT and the COVID-19 crisis. Issues in terms of accessibility, digital divide, inequity, and mental/emotional/physical health that the participants, more likely females, experienced during emergency remote learning were especially concerning. The results highlighted the importance of addressing and combating the inequities, creating and maintaining a sense of community, and most significantly providing socio-emotional support, 'TLC' (Tender Loving Care; TLC (Tender Loving Care) is an expression, describing extra attention to make someone or something look or feel better), and compassion, to college students and the instructors during the uncertain times and as we move forward.


Most navigation systems today rely on global navigation satellite systems (gnss), including in cars. With support from odometry and inertial sensors, this is a sufficiently accurate and robust solution, but there are future demands. Autonomous cars require higher accuracy and integrity. Using the car as a sensor probe for road conditions in cloud-based services also sets other kind of requirements. The concept of the Internet of Things requires stand-alone solutions without access to vehicle data. Our vision is a future with both invehicle localization algorithms and after-market products, where the position is computed with high accuracy in gnss-denied environments. We present a localization approach based on a prior that vehicles spend the most time on the road, with the odometer as the primary input. When wheel speeds are not available, we present an approach solely based on inertial sensors, which also can be used as a speedometer. The map information is included in a Bayesian setting using the particle filter (PF) rather than standard map matching. In extensive experiments, the performance without gnss is shown to have basically the same quality as utilizing a gnss sensor. Several topics are treated: virtual measurements, dead reckoning, inertial sensor information, indoor positioning, off-road driving, and multilevel positioning.


In The Philosophical Baroque, Erik Roraback brings a fresh, interdisciplinary eye to a selection of texts from across modernity's four hundred years—from the explosive energy of the early seventeenth century to the spectacle society of the present.


Building on Katherine Schaap Williams's (2009) reading of the play,
this article uses a disability studies approach to consider Richard Loncraine's
1995 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. Loncraine's adaptation allows
modern-day viewers to experience a highly visual (and often intimate)
exchange with Sir Ian McKellen as Richard Gloucester. Specifically, Gloucester's
verbal claims of a disability that renders him unsuitable as a leader and a lack
of sexual prowess are juxtaposed alongside sexually violent visual actions and
imagery—particularly in the form of phallic symbols. The juxtaposition of
verbal passivity in opposition to visual aggression demonstrates how Richard
showcases or hides his disability as he pursues the throne: the first half of the
film features Richard masquerading ability, while the second half features him
masquerading disability.


Situations unfold around us every day in our professional and personal lives. We make decisions and move on, often acting out of routine or instinct. But sometimes we encounter an overwhelming sense of not knowing what to say or do and yet having to act. We are in a predicament. In this phenomenological inquiry, I explore the lived experience of a predicament, an experience that resonates with being stopped in our tracks, the illusion of using logic, indecision while in-decision, and drawing on knowledge of the moment. Experiential data in this study is integrated with Heidegger's notions of Befindlichkeit and Dasein, Ricoeur's writings on choice, and Gadamer's ideas about moral knowledge. Insights suggest that a predicament can provide a window for discovering something about whom and how we are. A predicament may be a self-conscious way of learning: a way of bringing ourselves to ourselves.


In 2015, Naomi Wolf warned that "the most empowered generation of women ever — today's twentysomethings in North America and Britain — is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices." She was referring to the phenomenon referred to as "vocal fry" — a speech quality in which the speaker lowers her natural pitch and produces a "creaking" sound as she talks. Naomi Wolf is not alone in her warnings; vocal fry has received quite a bit of negative attention recently. Specifically, these critics warn that those who speak in vocal fry are doing themselves great harm by undermining the speakers' overall perceived effectiveness. In fact, recent studies even lend some support to these arguments, showing that listeners tend to rate those who speak in vocal fry more negatively.The problem, however, is that much of this criticism is directed at young women, and for that reason, some defenders of vocal fry have countered that these criticisms are merely attempts to regulate how women talk. In other words, a preference for speech that does not contain vocal fry is actually motivated by pernicious stereotypes about how women "should" talk.Thus, on the one hand, there are those studies supporting the argument that women who engage in vocal fry are less likely to be perceived positively, yet on the other hand, there exists the very real likelihood that these perceptions are based on gender stereotypes. Accordingly, the question emerges: what should a young woman do? Should she eliminate all instances of vocal fry from her speech so as to maximize her perceived effectiveness as a public speaker if, in so doing, she is reinforcing the very gender stereotypes upon which such preferences are based? Or should she openly confront such stereotypes and employ vocal fry as much as she likes, knowing that, by taking that approach, she is taking the risk that she might be hurting not only herself but also those upon whose behalf she speaks?This essay, by first discussing this background on vocal fry, delves into that very dilemma. It does so specifically in the context of female attorneys given that 1) public speaking is a key component upon which their effectiveness is gauged, and 2) to the extent their public speaking is judged to be less than ideal, they are not only harming themselves, but also potentially a client. Finally, in wrestling with this question, this essay hopes to shed light on a bigger concern — specifically, how useful are studies on effective nonverbal behavior when the results of those studies are largely driven by underlying societal prejudice?


PURPOSE
To validate the new convolution-based dose calculation algorithm within the Leksell GammaPlan 10.1.1 treatment planning system (TPS) and to compare the new algorithm with the TMR 10 classical algorithm.

METHODS
Using both the convolution and the TMR 10 algorithms, two test cases, a single 18 mm shot plan (Rx = 10 Gy to the 50% isodose) and a plan with 4 overlapping 18 mm shots (Rx = 15 Gy to the 50%) were separately computed on the spherical phantom used for GammaKnife output calibration (diameter of 16 cm, density = 1.06 g/cm3). The dose at the center of the phantom was measured using a micro chamber and gafchromic film. The ISP FilmQA Pro program was used to compare the films with TPS-predicted planar doses.

RESULTS
For the single-shot plan, the predicted mean dose to the ion chamber was 19.6 Gy and 19.9 Gy for convolution and TMR 10, respectively. The measured dose was 20.2 Gy, which was 3% higher than the convolution prediction and 1.5% higher than TMR 10 predicted. For the four-shot case, the predicted dose was 19.3 Gy for convolution and 19.6 Gy for TMR 10. The measured dose was 20.4 Gy (5.7% higher than convolution and 1.4% higher than TMR 10). For the single shot, gamma analysis (2% and 1 mm) produced passing rates of 99.8 % for convolution and 98.3% for TMR 10. For the four-shot plan, the passing rates were 99.8% and 96.8% for convolution and TMR10, respectively.

CONCLUSION
The convolution algorithm produced better gamma passing rates than TMR 10; however, convolution under-predicted absolute dose and its error was exacerbated with addition of shots. This can in part be explained by fact that the output calibration of the machine is done assuming that the sphere is composed of water, but further investigation is needed.


Current techniques for generating animated scenes involve either videos (whose resolution is limited) or a single image (which requires a significant amount of user interaction). In this paper, we describe a system that allows the user to quickly and easily produce a compelling-looking animation from a small collection of high resolution stills. Our system has two unique features. First, it applies an automatic partial temporal order recovery algorithm to the stills in order to approximate the original scene dynamics. The output sequence is subsequently extracted using a second-order Markov Chain model. Second, a region with large motion variation can be automatically decomposed into semiautonomous regions such that their temporal orderings are softly constrained. This is to ensure motion smoothness throughout the original region. The final animation is obtained by frame interpolation and feathering. Our system also provides a simple-to-use interface to help the user to fine-tune the motion of the animated scene. Using our system, an animated scene can be generated in minutes. We show results for a variety of scenes.


Abstract The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was the first shaped tokamak of mega-ampere scale to achieve plasma utilizing a fully superconducting poloidal field coil system, and it is addressing ITER relevant superconducting constraints associated with the breakdown, plasma formation, and initial plasma current ramp. Electric field production for plasma start-up is severely limited in fully superconducting machines as a consequence of constraints associated with coil and lead voltages and eddy current heating in the superconducting coils. Such constraints motivate the use of electromagnetic modeling codes to design start-up scenarios for these devices. The successful first plasma campaign of the EAST superconducting tokamak was greatly facilitated by extensive and careful planning, development of appropriate modeling, simulation and diagnostic tools, a highly flexible plasma control system, and a highly experienced international collaboration team. We describe the design and modeling tools used to develop the first plasma scenario along with results of their application in the start-up campaign. Control design tools and plasma control algorithms utilized during the first campaign are discussed. Key physics, engineering, and operations results of the first plasma campaign are presented, including observations relevant to future devices such as ITER.


The objective for this thesis is to implement and compare four multi-agent architectures proposed to manage utilisation levels in distributed computing. The main part of this is to find and analyse the attributes that describe how the architectures differ from each other and make them excel in different contexts. The intelligent network concept from the telecommunication industry is used as sample application for the empirical examinations.


This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical uses of evaluative language in Greek lyric and elegiac poetry and inscribed epigram of the period from the seventh to the fifth century B.C.E. The discussion focuses on the poets' evaluations of human worth in three areas, each of which forms a separate chapter: martial valour, the relationship between physical appearance and inner virtue, and political or social values. Within each chapter, particular aspects of the subject under discussion are treated under separate headings. Although the literary material has been treated in various ways in the past, the inclusion of inscribed epigram alongside the other literature in this case offers evidence from a related but distinct branch of poetic tradition for the development and expression of these values; divergences between the literary and the inscriptional tradition can be quite marked, as can the different approaches taken by poets of various genres within the literary material. The attempts of previous scholarship to define clear and consistent systems or codes of value represented in the poetry and to trace their development over this period have been generally unconvincing, but the poets' deployment of evaluative language does show some discernible patterns which appear to be related more to genre and poetic tradition than to the purely chronological processes of development that have been proposed by other scholars.


This article analyses whether computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are suitable for projecting the likely consequences of implementing a national minimum wage. Referring to modelling exercises undertaken by the National Treasury and the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU), it shows that their projection of a strongly negative impact on employment and other macroeconomic indicators is a direct result of the architecture and assumptions of these models. By design these models preclude alternative outcomes; this renders them rather unsuitable as guides to policymaking.


The article's principal purpose is to provide an initial set of costings relating to the proposal to end PFIs in the UK through nationalising the Special Purpose Vehicles. The article uses book value to estimate that the cost of compensating the shareholders of the SPVs on HM Treasury database would be between £2.3bn and £2.5bn. It further analyse the potential savings to public authorities. The article proposes that service contracts are renegotiated so that the public authorities contract directly with the providers, not via the SPV. This secures significant annual savings from the elimination of operating profits, of £1.4bn, indicating that nationalisation will pay for itself within two years. Further the article proposes to honour all outstanding liabilities but to secure substantial refinancing through a new body in which ownership of the SPVs will be vested. Finally the article suggests that as service contracts are ended, either through break clauses or other reasons, the public authorities must bring provision 'in-house', ending outsourcing and also providing further savings from more rational and integrated provision. The approach has been developed on the basis of significant research into how PFIs operate and consideration of the range of alternative solutions to the PFI problem that have been put forward so far. These issues are also explained and developed in the article.


The authentication of Indian Vehicles by their number plates is the most interesting and challenging research topic from past few years. As the technology is getting advanced day by day, there are many different aspect of designing number plates to the vehicle of each country. For the several respective regular administrative tasks the license number plate is used for various purposes like tracking of number plates by the traffic police, for the analysis of theft cars, for managing of parking of vehicles and toll collection etc. Unique numbers are assigned to all the motorized vehicles in India. These unique numbers are designated to the vehicles by district-level Regional Transport Office (RTO). This paper presents a different technique for license plate recognition (LPR). Images of rear end of the car will be considered. The license plate will be extracted from the whole image and segmentation will be done in order to extract the characters from the image. A suitable algorithm will be used to recognize the characters which are extracted from the image and the recognized number plate will be displayed as a result. The characters will be recognized from the image and the authorized number plate will be displayed as a result. Keywords—License Plate Recognition, Indian vehicles, Adaptive Thresholding, Template


Rapid population declines of wild cats (family Felidae) are often related to widespread conflicts with people over the livestock depredation they are causing. In spite of increasing literature on wild felids, there is no overview on the evidence‐based effectiveness of livestock protection interventions in reducing depredation inflicted by these animals. We collected and analyzed 92 cases from 57 publications describing the percentage of damage reduction from the application of 11 interventions to 10 felid species. We found that the effectiveness of interventions differed significantly between species. Interventions tested for cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) and snow leopards (Panthera uncia) were very effective, reducing damage by 70–100% due to species shyness, good fit of interventions to these species and local conditions, and strong social involvement. The most variable and often the lowest effectiveness of interventions was found for leopard (Panthera pardus), puma (Puma concolor) and caracal (Caracal caracal), which are more common and tolerant to humans. In other felids, interventions were generally effective, but some of them reportedly failed because of local contexts and intervention performance. Much more effort is required to invigorate the research of intervention effectiveness in little studied species and regions.


In a two-year study, participatory variety selection (PVS) was employed to evaluate the performance of 19 okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) c. v. Moench genotypes in a semi-arid agro-ecology in northern Ghana. The PVS sessions were organized at 65, 80 and 95 days after planting for 272 farmers to select the most preferred genotypes base on plant growth, maturity period and yield components. Results of this study indicate high significant differences among the genotypes (P< 0.0001) for most essential agronomic yield traits evaluated. Five most recurring preference traits were high fruit yield, early maturing, multiple harvest frequency, drying quality and long tender-life. Glabrous leaf, stem and fruit were important to farmers because most of the production operations are still being manually done. Genotypes with high potential included: NOKH 1004 (9.55 ton\ha), FV-Unn-manna (5.85 ton\ha), NOHK 1003 (5.17 ton\ha), NOKH 1002 (2.83 ton\ha), FV-Kpazeya (2.83 ton\ha), TZ-SMN-86 (2.30 ton\ha), AAK (2.11 ton\ha), NB-55-Srivan (1.98 ton\ha), Sasilon (1.70 ton\ha), FV-Unn (2.20 ton\ha) and Ex-Makutopora (1.27 ton\ha). Genotypes Sasilon, NOKH-1004, NB-55-Srivan and NOKH-1003 recorded the highest ranking among farmers during the PVS. High yielding and early maturing genotypes which are amendable to drying may show wide adoption rate due to the premium on dehydrated okra. These genotypes can be suggested as candidates for inspection by the National Variety Release and Technical Committee for release to farmers to increase access to improved okra varieties.

 Key words: Okra genotypes, Sudan savanna, drying quality, participatory variety selection, preference traits.


Most of us believe that the mad are "mentally" ill, having a disease of the brain, either psycho-chemical or neurobiological in nature. This view is shared widely, by professionals in the field, and popularized in books, films, and other media. Professional diagnosis by psychiatrists of the various disorders is based on behavioral symptoms, as defined and classified by the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition1 (DSM-5). Much of the behavior of those afflicted with a mental disorder, by definition, is not rational. But, could it be?

In his second book in a series (Figure (Figure1),1), Matthew Blakeway contends that madness is indeed logical in structure. This assertion derives from his view (see Blakeway, 2014) that our brains are biological computers with algorithms for action based on emotional drivers. However, humans can out-think their biology by calculating an action to achieve an emotional goal (either current or future). This requires an understanding of the emotion involved and this is achieved by observing behavior. But what if that behavior has been modified by tactical deception (pretence)? This results in a misunderstanding of emotions, and leads to self-destructive actions. Humans perform tactical deception all the time. For example, how many of us would frequent a cafe or restaurant without being greeted with a friendly smile? The calculation is correct, but the input is faulty. Is the waitress really happy to see us, or would she rather be elsewhere? Blakeway places mental illness within the same framework, and argues that mental illness is simply self-destruction of a higher order of complexity.

Figure 1

Book Cover.

Blakeway takes us on a historical journey of our understanding of madness from an affliction sent by God as punishment for our moral faults, to Freud's psychological theories of relationships and developmental frameworks, and the current understandings of neurological/biological causes with notions of "illness." Cures for illness are dependent on causal theories. The point Blakeway makes is that we have no idea about the causal structure of the symptoms that are being treated. Psychopharmacological cures work, but we don't know why. They have an added bonus: drugs are cheap to administer compared with asylums, psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy. Szasz (1961) comes to mind here, although Blakeway believes madness is more than a myth, or social construct (Foucault, 2006). He contends that the particular behavioral pattern exhibited by the "mad" is dependent on the specific combination of inputs. It is rational behavior in response to a compound misunderstanding of various emotions.

The starting point of Blakeway's theory is a basic algorithm that converts an emotion into an action that optimizes biological fitness. Depending upon the circumstances, an action state is driven by the emotion having the highest calculated value. He divides emotions into four categories, basic survival (e.g., fear, hunger), reproductive (e.g., lust, jealousy), social (e.g., guilt, anger), and strategic (e.g., anxiety, regret). Most of these biologically derived emotions are shared with other animals, especially chimpanzees, although there is the question of whether other animals can perform tactical manipulation with intent. Humans can do so, which leads to misconceptions of emotion that become quite complex depending on whether we are performing the deception or someone else.

Blakeway separates mental disorders into three categories that overlap nicely with those of the DSM-5: compulsions (neuroses), impulsions (acute personality disorders), and delusions (psychoses), and he explains theoretically how and why they might occur. Set out in a series of tables and textual examples, he pulls apart the various emotional drivers and inhibitors that can lead to very different outcomes. He demonstrates how compulsions occur because two emotions get confused, and one becomes replaced by another. For example, if hunger (an emotional driver), was misinterpreted as shame (an inhibitor), then the appearance of food would lead to the suppression of the urge to eat, and in extreme cases, anorexia nervosa. As Blakeway notes, current medical opinion is that low self-esteem is a symptom of anorexia nervosa, but this could just as easily be the result of the systematic affectation of shame. This same mechanism can work in another way. If emotional inhibitors (e.g., shame) are confused, and act as drivers, this results in "libertine compulsions" where actions that should be suppressed (such as child molestation) become compulsions. Depression is an interesting case where all of the driving emotions "flatline," so there is no desire to do anything. Like alcoholism, it is the aftermath (e.g., loss of relationships) that is the problem, not the action state itself.

Mental illness and criminality are closely connected. Prisons have an alarming number of people characterized with antisocial personality disorder, seen by Blakeway as a "proactive impulsion" resulting in the misidentification of shame as anger (a humiliation-revenge driver) resulting in an unprovoked attack on someone. Similarly, fear is the natural expressed emotion in situations of physical abuse, however, if flight is impossible and fear is suppressed, it can be mistaken for shame, leading to what Blakeway calls a "deviant anti-impulsion." Thoughts can operate in the same way without the actual physical stimulus being present, and without biological brain dysfunctions. There is a strong correlation between dopamine and schizophrenia. Dopamine release is usually taken as causal, but what if it's the other way round? What if you can trick the brain into releasing dopamine, which is a pain inhibitor producing a feeling of euphoria? Being "away with the fairies" is perhaps not such a strange euphemism.

Blakeway has created a model of self-destructive complex action states that we commonly called "madness." This is a provocative and radical new way of thinking, and one that deserves our attention. It opens the door to new therapies that specifically target the corrupted emotions. This could lead to better psychiatric care of the "mentally ill," diminish drug therapies, and start to replace them with talk therapies combined with targeted cognitive re-training. These ideas should be given careful consideration if we are to provide the best help possible for those who need it the most.


Although the adverse consequences of changes in social behavior following traumatic brain injury (TBI) are well documented, relatively little is known about possible underlying neuropsychological deficits. Following a model originally developed for social behavior deficits in schizophrenia, we investigated whether impairments in emotion recognition, understanding of other people's intentions ("theory of mind"), and cognitive flexibility soon after first TBI or 1 year later were associated with self and proxy ratings of behavior following TBI. Each of the three functions was assessed with two separate tests, and ratings of behavior were collected on three questionnaires. Patients with TBI (n = 33) were impaired in emotion recognition, "theory of mind," and cognitive flexibility compared with matched orthopedic controls (n = 34). Proxy ratings showed increases in behavioral problems 1 year following injury in the TBI group but not in the control group. However, test performance was not associated with questionnaire data. Severity of the impairments in emotion recognition, understanding intention, and flexibility were unrelated to the severity of behavioral problems following TBI. These findings failed to confirm the used model for social behavior deficits and may cast doubt on the alleged link between deficits in emotion recognition or theory of mind and social functioning. (JINS, 2008, 14, 318–326.)


Recently, short animated image sequences have become very popular in social networks. Most animated images are represented in GIF format. In this paper we propose an animated JPEG format, called aJPEG, which allows the standard JPEG format to be extended in a backward compatible way in order to cope with animated images. After presenting the proposed format, we illustrate it using two prototype applications: the first in form of a GIF-to-aJPEG converter on a personal computer and the second in form of an aJPEG viewer on a smart phone. The paper also reports the performance evaluation of aJPEG when compared to GIF. Experimental results show that aJPEG outperforms animated GIF in both file size overhead and image quality.


Salinia is an out-of-place granitic terrane in central coastal California whose debated origin is critical to understanding the tectonic history of southwestern North America. Salinian metasedimentary and sedimentary rocks that respectively host and cover its predominant arc rocks should contribute important data about its origin and kinematic history, but pervasive intrusion, high-grade metamorphism and Cenozoic erosion of the Salinian block have inhibited their widespread characterization and correlation. To further address these problems, we report 605 U-Pb detrital-zircon geochronologic ages collected by laser-ablation multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-MC-ICP-MS) from seven Salinian metasedimentary framework (Sur Series) and sedimentary cover samples. Samples collected from the Sur Series contain Late Archean (2.5–2.9 Ga), late Paleoproterozoic (1.6–1.9 Ga), Mesoproterozoic (0.9–1.5 Ga), Neoproterozoic (0.65–0.8 Ga), Paleozoic (250–450 Ma), and possibly Mesozoic U-Pb detrital-zircon ages. Samples collected from Upper Cretaceous cover units have various age-peak distributions, which collectively include late Paleoproterozoic (1.6–1.8 Ga), early Mesoproterozoic (1.35– 1.55 Ga), Permo-Triassic (220–290 Ma), and Jurassic-Cretaceous (80–190 Ma) peaks. From these data, several interpretations are made. (1) Maximum depositional ages of the Sur Series and cover intervals are 280– 360 Ma and 78–90 Ma, respectively. (2) The presence of Late Archean, early Paleoproterozoic, and Neoproterozoic zircons in Salinian metasedimentary rocks suggest that uplift and erosion of adjacent basins recycled sediment onto Salinia. (3) The abundant pre-Mesoproterozoic detrital-zircon ages in Sur Series and cover units preclude the possibility that Salinia originated in southern Mexico, as has been previously suggested. (4) Five of six key detrital-zircon age peaks identifi ed in Salinian basement and cover units are nowhere more closely arranged than in the Mojave Desert–Peninsular Ranges region of Baja and southern Alta California. (5) Paleozoic and early Mesozoic detrital zircons in Sur Series and cover units match the ages of several plutonic events that occurred along the western margin of North America—however, Permian ages favor a Mojave Desert origin over other candidates. Collectively, these and other data suggest that Salinia resided in the Mojave Desert–Peninsular Ranges region from the late Paleozoic until the Late Cretaceous, after which it was rapidly exhumed, deposited upon, and then translated outboard and northward to its current position.


Normally, in every industrial context strategic decisions design the business expected evolution. Fine tuned balances between customer needs and resources' expected reward have to be pursued when economically evaluating how designed strategies impact on the Water Utilities' competitive position. With such a purpose, strategies have to care for both the economic value produced for the stakeholders and the options and actions required. Evaluating dimensional strategies' effectiveness in qualitative terms of market appraisal rather than in quantitative terms of growing bargaining power seems to be the best model to assess profitability and sustainability of designed strategies. Moreover, particular aspects affect the water business and need to be carefully considered when designing well-defined strategies aiming at speeding the required change. What efficiency is and then how to measure it is thus the major challenge for water managers.