Jacques Offenbach used a number of strategies to define the identity of the Theâtre des Bouffes Parisiens and the emergent genre of operette. Central to this self-positioning were attempts to situate the theatre and its products within the context of eighteenth-century comic opera in general and opera comique in particular. This was achieved by the promotion of eighteenth-century works at the Bouffes-Parisiens and by Offenbach's judicious moves to locate his new works in the context of the past. During the first three years of the life of the Bouffes Parisiens (1855-58), Offenbach attempted to mount four key works from the 'long' eighteenth century: Rousseau's Le devin du village, Pergolesi's La serva padrona, Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor and Rossini's Il signor Bruschino. Of these, the Rossini and Mozart both reached the stage, in versions that required varying degrees of modification. Le devin du village most likely fell foul of the imperial administration since it belonged to the repertory of the Academie Imperiale de Musique, and Gevaert's attempts to rework La serva padrona were diverted to the Opera-Comique where the work was presented in 1862. When Offenbach announced his competition for composers of new operettes in 1856, he took the opportunity to write the history of opera comique according to his own understanding and preferences. In his diagnosis of various phases of the development of the genre he emplotted its history in a way that stressed the inflation of the genre from its origins to the recent premiere of Meyerbeer's L'etoile du nord (1854), and that traced a progressive distancing of the genre from what Offenbach thought were its eighteenth-century origins. He called for a revival of the spirit of the works of Monsigny, Dalayrac and Gretry in the works of the competitors for his prize. This spirit was of course already embodied in those works currently in the repertory of the Bouffes Parisiens, and in emplotting the history of opera comique in this fashion, he was claiming a legitimacy for operette by allying it with the country's national lyric genre.


Introduction and Objective: liver is an important body organ without which life is impossible. Cyclophosphamide is an alkylating agent widely used as an anti-cancer ("antineoplastic" or "cytotoxic") chemotherapy drug. The present study aimed to find a suitable antioxidant and examine the effect of vitamin E and selenium on reducing the side effects of cyclophosphamide on liver as a vital organ. Materials and Methods: in this experiment, 42 mature female rats were divided into 6 groups. The control group did not receive any drug or solvent. The first experimental group received 1 mg / kg-B.W sodium selenite as intraperitoneal injection. The second experimental group received 200 mg / kg-BW 200 vitamin E orally. The third experimental group received 5 mg / kg-BW cyclophosphamide as intraperitoneal injection. The fourth and fifth experimental groups respectively received 5 mg / kg-BW cyclophosphamide as intraperitoneal injection in a daily manner and 1 mg / kg-BW 1 sodium selenite as intraperitoneal injection and 200 mg / kg-BW 200 vitamin E orally for 21 days. The hepatic tissue slides were prepared and examined. Results: the hepatic cells were normal in control group. No difference in hepatic tissue was observed in the first and second experimental groups. Cellular necrosis was observed in the third experimental group. Destruction of hepatocytes in hepatic cells was highly observed in the fourth and fifth experimental groups compared to the third experimental group. Furthermore, congested blood sinusoids and lymphocyte infiltration was less observed in the fourth and fifth experimental groups compared to the third experimental group. Conclusion: Cyclophosphamide cause damage to hepatic tissues with different mechanisms such as production of reactive oxygen species. Vitamin E and sodium selenite relatively reduce negative effects of cyclophosphamide.


Farmer profit can be increased and air quality improved Although intentional use of fires to transform land has decreased globally (1, 2), particularly among highly capitalized countries through regulatory and market-oriented approaches and moral suasion, regulatory strategies have been less effective in southern and eastern Asia (see table S21). Some densely populated agricultural regions in China and India buck the global trend, showing increases in agricultural fires (2). This is particularly true in northwestern India, where rice residue burning makes a substantial contribution to air pollution and short-lived climate pollutants (3, 4). Regulations are in place to reduce agricultural fires, but burning continues because of uncertainty regarding policy implementation and regarding access and returns to alternative technologies. With the field burning season soon upon us, we synthesize emerging evidence on alternatives to burning, clarify the business case for alternative practices, identify remaining uncertainties, and discuss approaches to increase their widespread adoption. Often, there are difficult trade-offs between environmental improvement and profitable economic opportunities. The case of crop residue management in northwestern India does not appear to fit this pattern and provides lessons that may be useful elsewhere.


In Lifelines Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai's busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma's moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us?


Pluripotent stem cells can be obtained from embryonic stage or generated by in vitro reprogramming of terminally differentiated somatic cells. Such reprogrammed cells possess similar developmental potential as embryonic stem (ES) cells and therefore are an indispensible source of diverse cell types, including cardiomyocytes (CMs), for basic research. CMs derived from ES cells and reprogrammed cells can provide possibilities for study of development, differentiation processes, stem cell malignancy and genetic diseases in vitro. Such studies can allow for development of novel compounds for drug discovery and toxicity testing which might help to develop more efficient and safer drugs
The present thesis is based on analyzing the impact of switching the cell fate on the differentiated state of reprogrammed cells using cardiomyocytes as a model. Detailed structural molecular and functional characterization of CMs derived from ES cells and reprogrammed cells like fusion hybrid (FH) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells was performed.
Somatic cells (spleenocytes and bone marrow cells) were fused with ES cells to generate FH cells. The formed hybrid cells were morphologically similar to pluripotent ES cells and retained a tetraploid genome through many passages. Spontaneous differentiation led to formation of embryoid bodies (EBs) with appearance of beating areas representing differentiation to cardiac lineage. The EBs derived from FH cells also retained tetraploid genome and expressed major histocompatibility (MHC) class I molecules of both fusing partners. FH derived CM expressed typical cardiac structural proteins and intact β-adrenergic and muscarinic signaling receptors. Atrial, ventricular and pacemaker cardiac subtypes could be found in FH-CMs. Thus, CMs derived from tetraploid FH cells appear to be structurally and functionally intact.
Ongoing research proved iPS cell technology to be more robust reprogramming strategy. In order to obtain homogenous population of CMs for further studies an iPS cell line TiB7.4 was genetically manipulated to allow for antibiotic-based purification of cardiomyocytes after spontaneous differentiation. We generated highly purified CMs from transgenic murine iPS and ES cell lines expressing puromycin N-acetyltransferase and EGFP under the control of α-myosin heavy chain promoter. iPS and ES cells differentiated into CMs at comparable efficiencies yielding highly purified CMs after drug selection. Purified iPS- and ES-CMs exhibited indistinguishable structural properties, similarly responded to pharmacological agents, expressed functional voltage-gated sodium, calcium and potassium channels and possessed comparable current densities. Global transcriptional profile and gene ontology signature of transgenic iPS-CMs were very similar to that of ES-CMs but clearly distinct from fibroblasts that were used to generate iPS cells and differentiated cells in iPS or ES cell-derived embryoid bodies. After puromycin selection, iPS-CMs did not contain any residual pluripotent cells nor formed teratoma in immunodeficient mice.
Therefore, cell fate switching brought about by reprogramming does not affect the structural, molecular and functional characteristics of cardiac derivatives of the reprogrammed cells.


Drawing on a case study of newswriting, this article presents media linguistics as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics (AL), dealing with a distinctive field of language use. Language in the media is characterized by specific environments, functions, and structures. Medialinguistic research, however, tends to overcome disciplinary boundaries. In multidisciplinary collaboration, it accesses a wide range of knowledge generation and transformation methods. In interdisciplinary collaboration, it contributes precise analyses of situated linguistic activity to the development of empirically-grounded communication studies. In transdisciplinary collaboration, it tests these theories against reality and solves practical problems. The article first outlines such a practical problem (Section 1). After explaining key concepts of media lingustics (2), it focuses on the linguistics of newswriting (3) and four related research methods (4). Finally, it discusses how the value media linguistics can add to both theory and practice of language use and the media (5).


This article presents a critical review and analysis of key studies that have been done in designing and production instructional aides and other areas on the effects and effectiveness of using multimedia in the learning of scientific-technical content. It also summarizes and reviews those studies that have students design, to express their understandings of the concepts and relationships that are present in the text they read and/or empirical data provided (i.e., student-generated adjunct multimedia productions). In general, the research and theory on instructional aides is fragmented and somewhat unsystematic with several flaws and number of key uncontrolled variables, which actually suppress and mask effects in the studies that have been done. The findings of these studies are compared to relevant literature and empirical research and findings in the areas of cognitive psychology, computer sciences, educational technology, and artificial intelligence that help to clarify many of the inconsistencies, contradictions, and lack of effects found for production instructional aids in educational sciences literature currently and in the past 25 years.


The literature on economic and corporate law convergence has largely been a conversation about the West. In particular, it focuses on the influence of Anglo-American (and principally American) norms and practices, primarily on those of Western European nations. As such, it is unidirectional in concept. It also works through a common paradigm: Although Western nations differ they all accept Enlightenment values, making such influence more palatable and more possible. The rise and possible dominance of Asian economies, principally China, suggests that we consider whether Eastern norms and practices not born of the Enlightenment might come to influence Western norms and practices and the channels through which this might happen. This is a possibility the literature has not yet addressed. The paper introduces a theory of reciprocal convergences to provide a framework for analysis. After surveying the convergence literature and describing reciprocal convergences, it introduces indigenous Chinese ideas about corporate social responsibility as the vehicle that might embody these values, analyzing the literature on what those ideas look like and how they differ from Western ideas. Finally, the paper looks at two possible channels through which these influences might be transmitted: the multinational enterprise and China's One Belt, One Road initiative. It concludes with some tentative thoughts about future developments.


This Article considers the reach of the President's pardon power and its potential employment as one means of creating legal impunity for a President and his personal and political associates. It addresses, in particular, the possibility that a President might issue self-interested pardons to himself, family members, or political or business associates. The Article reviews the constitutional origins of the federal pardon power, and the law and practice of its use since the Founding era, and concludes:

A President cannot constitutionally pardon himself, though the point is untested. In theory, a President could resign, or under the Twenty-fifth Amendment withdraw temporarily from the office, transform the Vice President into the President or Acting President, and secure a pardon from the his former subordinate. But that seems improbable.

A President can pardon anyone but himself (both humans and corporations), and those pardons, once issued, are almost certainly unchallengeable and irrevocable. A presidential pardon can cover any (and perhaps all) federal crimes the beneficiary has ever committed, so long as such crimes occurred and were completed prior to the issuance of the pardon. A president cannot pardon crimes that have not yet been committed. Consequently, a pardon issued corruptly might itself constitute a crime that could not be pardoned.

The pardon power does not extend to state crimes or to any civil or administrative action brought by federal or state authorities. A presidential pardon cannot block congressional investigations. Finally, because a pardon effectively erases the Fifth Amendment privilege as to offenses covered by the pardon, it might make it easier for criminal and civil investigative authorities and Congress to compel testimony from the person pardoned.

Therefore, presidential pardons could inconvenience, but could not prevent, thorough investigations of the private and public actions of a former President or his associates. The Article concludes by recommending a thorough, but judicious, use of available investigative avenues to inquire into well-founded allegations of wrongful behavior by former presidents and their personal and political associates.


The spectral properties of plant leaves and stems have been obtained for ultraviolet, visible, and infrared frequencies. The spectral reflectance, transmittance, and absorptance for certain plants is given. The mechanism by which radiant energy interacts with a leaf is discussed, including the presence of plant pigments. Examples are given concerning the amount of absorbed solar radiation for clear sky and overcast conditions. The spectral properties of desert plants are compared with those of more mesic plants. The evolution of the spectral properties of plant leaves during the early growing season is given as well as the colorimetric behavior during the autumn.


Background: at a global level and among child bearing age women, the first leading disease burden cause is the depression. Nationally, scarce published data was related to the depression prevalence among pregnant especially with hyperemesis gravidarum women.
Aim: to assess the depression extent among hyperemesis gravidarum pregnant Thi-Qarnian women.
Methodology: A cross sectional, hospital based, analytical study was carried out in two teaching hospitals (Bent Al Huda and Al Habobi teaching hospitals) in from first week of September /2015 to end of July 2016. All attendants sufferer pregnant from HG to the obstetric outpatients included in this study. Based on previous Iraqi study (37.2%) for of depressive symptoms prevalence in pregnant women sample size had been calculated such prevalence rate with precision of 5%, confidence level of 95%, and added extra sample of 10%, to reach to 322. Beck depression inventory-II (Arabic version) (BDI –II score of > 20 depression was considered) had been used as a specialized questionnaire designed for the achieve the aim of the study. SPSS version 23 had been used for data analysis, P


Stream and riparian health is a major concern for state and federal land management agencies that are charged with oversight of extensive land holdings in the mountain west of the United States. Several federal agencies in the 1980s and 1990s determined that livestock grazing had adversely impacted a majority of federal lands in this region. In response, management was changed on grazing allotments to focus on stream system health. Recent advanced global positioning system (GPS) logging capabilities, both accuracy and frequency/duration of logging, coupled with rapidly developing geographic information system (GIS) analytical capabilities allowed evaluation of livestock use of streams and riparian zones on mountain rangelands. This study was undertaken to clarify spatiotemporal characteristics of cattle use of perennial streams and associated riparian areas under current US Forest Service (USFS) management and to suggest managerial strategies with the potential to maintain or improve riverine environments. We initiated a five year study in 2008 to evaluate the use by cattle of 30 m (98.4 ft) and 60 m (196.9 ft) buffers on permanent streams on three extensive study sites in northeastern Oregon. The three study sites cover 43,972 ha (108,700 ac) within a broader region 120 km (74.5 mi) north-south by 50 km (31 mi) east-west. Ten randomly selected cows from herds grazing each site were fitted with GPS collars that recorded position, date, and time at approximately five minute intervals throughout the grazing season. Nearly 3,750,000 cow positions were collected on the allotments during the study. The relative occupancy of cattle in buffers along both sides of perennial streams were determined on an annual and monthly basis by site. Each position was tagged with the date and time of occurrence. Relative use within 30 m of the stream varied substantially from site to site (0.74% to 2.54%), month to month (0.00% to 5.21%), and year to year (0.86% to 2.13%). In some months, GPS data indicated that watering was nearly exclusive from streams. In other months, stream use was low or nil, and watering was from water developments, small springs, seeps, puddles, or other source. Cattle preferred to access streams at specific locations where streambank slope, the lack of physical obstructions, and solid footing facilitated water access.


The angular reflectance of a graded-index layer, of arbitrary refractive-index profile, on the surface of a uniform substrate is calculated exactly by direct numerical integration of the wave equation for both states of polarization of the incident light. A study of the results for a number of selected profiles shows that (1) oscillations in reflectance versus wave-number graphs have an almost constant period, and (2) the period, when plotted against angle of incidence, gives a curve that is quite sensitive to the shape of the refractive-index profile. This sensitivity is the basis of a simple graphical procedure by means of which the inverse problem (i.e., deducing the index profile from reflectance measurements) can be solved. The procedure is applied to published reflectance data to determine both the thickness of a graded-index surface layer and the refractive-index profile.


Bionomics studies of Papilio demoleus L.( Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) in the Rainfed Ecology of Pakistan revealed the mating period of adults to be 20-60 mins. after a pre-mating duration of 6-11 hours. Twenty three to forty eight hours after mating a female laid 10-45 eggs within 35-60 hours. The eggs took 58-85 hours to hatch. All the events except the fecundity rate had positive correlation with air temperature. The average duration five larval instars varied from 3-8 days and is again temperature related. The highly temperature sensitive pupal development took 7-20.5 days. The insect overwinered as pupa. There were 8 or 9 generations per years and the length of the generations(26-59 days) varied wit temperature. The overwintering generation took 159-167 days. The effect of precipitation on the developments of the insect was not evident. Mortalities were high at the early and late stages of the life cycle with a break I the middle. Some of the mortality factors were identified. Degree days to predict phonological changes were worked out. A formulation of Bacillus thuringiensis, Bactospeine, was found highly effective in controlling the pest. The insect infested many citrus varieties with differential preferences


In this paper, we study the feasibility of implementing cognitive radio (CR) secondary network either on the primary Palestinian second generation (2G) global system for mobile communication (GSM) network or on the ultra-high frequency (UHF) television (TV) band. Particularly, we propose solutions for spectrum scarcity based on the three CR paradigms, namely: interweave CR, underlay CR, and overlay CR. In the first solution, an interweave CR system is suggested to efficiently utilise the so-called TV white spaces in the UHF TV band allocated for Palestine. In the second solution, an underlay CR system based on code division multiple access (CDMA) is introduced to underlay the primary GSM system. In the third solution, an overlay CR system is proposed based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to share the same spectrum band with the primary GSM system. It is confirmed that the proposed solutions can solve the spectrum scarcity and limit the interference levels, and consequently improve system capacity.


Germany's premier rock music export Rammstein has been controversial since its formation in 1994. This article analyzes Rammstein's sonic signature from the perspective of the "art of record production." It decodes the politics of Rammstein's sound, which is inextricably linked to the exaggeration of German attributes and the associations attached to them. The findings suggest that although Rammstein productions emphasize some specific German stereotypes in their sound, their overall aesthetic is international. This carefully crafted fine line between exotic otherness and conformity to pop standards has made Rammstein successful on the global pop music market for more than two decades. The production aesthetic must be understood against the background of the band's experience of German reunification. Rammstein were founded as a means for the band members to come to terms with their new "German" identity. Initially, the band dealt with the shock of reunification and the realities of Western capitalist societies. Later the band pursued two further goals: to improve the history of their country in foreign perception and to help the Germans make peace with their nation's past. These goals are achieved by adopting strategies of industrial music for their course, such as provocation, ambiguity, contrast, recontextualization, and humor.


Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race— Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism.

Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek , political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism.

Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.


Adults with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often experience stigma due to the reductionist narrative that accompanies its conceptualisation. The aim of this research was to challenge the reductionist narrative by exploring a relational understanding of BPD and integrating the construct of compassion. In Chapter 1, qualitative research that explored the relationships between adults with a diagnosis of BPD and mental health professionals was synthesised. Twenty-four themes that described relational dynamics emerged. These dynamics were reconceptualised by applying psychological theory to develop 12 3rd order interpretation themes. During this process, compassionate terminology based upon psychological theory was integrated into the understanding. In addition, four cycles of relational dynamics were identified between adults with a diagnosis of BPD and mental health professionals based upon these 3rd order interpretations. In Chapter 2, a qualitative research study was conducted which explored experiences of compassion in adults with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to further the development of the construct of compassion in relation to BPD. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to develop themes from the narratives of six adults with a diagnosis of BPD. Five themes emerged: Emotional Connection to Suffering, Empathic Understanding, Prioritisation of Needs, A Model of Genuine Compassion and Developing Self-acceptance and a Sense of Worthiness. The themes were integrated into a recovery model that highlighted the process of recovery through therapeutic relationships that model genuine compassion. In addition, barriers to compassion and factors which facilitate compassion emerged from the analysis which have implications for clinical practice. In Chapter 3, a critical appraisal was conducted which outlined the rationale for the research and compared findings from the previous two chapters to consider how a compassionate and relational understanding can be integrated into the BPD narrative to challenge stigma and inform positive therapeutic relationships.


Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP) is a program that allows employee participation to own company or parent company shares where they work. One of the companies that implement ESOP is Bank Central Asia (BCA) which has 25,023 employees as a whole. Employees who get ownership of these shares need to be equipped with how to manage them considering that the stock is a capital market product intended for long-term investment. Assistance for BCA employees is implemented with the aim of improving the understanding of bank employees on capital market instruments, especially stocks. This activity was held in BCA Kanwil VII Malang, attended by 53 participants. The workshop and public education methods were carried out through several meetings with the subjects presented are Aspects of Going Concern, Introduction to Capital Market and Access to Market Data, Analysis of Capital Market Instruments, and Stock Trading Mechanism in Indonesia through D'ONE Trade Pro software. This devotion program is implemented by involving three parties namely the Indonesia Stock Exchange (BEI), Universitas Ma Chung, and PT Danareksa Sekuritas as one of the IDX listed members. The results of this program are among others increased employee understanding of investment in the capital market as long-term financial planning and employees become investors who are proactive and sophisticated in making decisions.


Spore masses and isolated sporangia, containing laevigate hilate cryptospores attributable to the dispersed taxon Laevolancis divellomedia sensu lato, have been recovered on bulk maceration of Upper Silurian (Pridoli) and Lower Devonian (Lochkovian) deposits from the Welsh Borderland. Detailed morphological, anatomical and ultrastructural analysis, using light microscope, scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope techniques, reveals subtle differences between the specimens and they can be grouped into five distinct types. The different groups are distinguished principally by using sporangia-spore mass characteristics, presence or absence of extra-exosporal material and nature of spore wall ultrastructure. Of the groups, one has a uniformly homogeneous exospore and the other four groups have a bilayered exospore. In the former the spores lack extra-exosporal material and occur in a discoidal sporangium. Of the bilayered groups, two have exospores of homogeneous composition but with the two layers differing in electron density. They occur in discoidal sporangia and spore masses and are distinguished on the presence or absence of extra-exosporal material and differences in the widths of the two layers. Finally, two bilayered groups possess a lamellate inner layer, but vary in presumed sporangial shape. Elongate sporangia have spores with concentric continuous lamellae, lacking further ultrastructure. In contrast, spores from a discoidal spore mass have white-line-centred, presumably tripartite, lamellae which are laterally discontinuous, overlapping and irregularly spaced. These findings, which suggest that morphologically similar spores were produced by a number of plant taxa, have important implications regarding the assessment of early land-plant diversity. The affinities of hilate cryptospore-producing plants are unknown and problematic, particularly as no extant non-angiosperm plants produce dyads, other than through meiotic irregularity, and spore-sporangial characters have no exact counterpart in coeval plants. Studies of specimens with in situ hilate cryptospores suggest that they derive from rhyniophytoids, i.e. plants that resemble the simplest of vascular plants but lack evidence of vascular tissue, although hilate cryptospore-containing examples show no axial branching. It might be argued, based on evidence from spore wall ultrastructure, that some of the plants have more in common with lycopsids and filicopsids than bryophytes, a surprising finding bearing in mind the stratigraphic distribution of hilate cryptospores-dyads and inferences that the producers were bryophyte-like. Detailed studies of wall structure in the hilate cryptospores permit consideration of spore wall development. It is suggested that extra-exosporal material derives from a tapetum and is thus produced by the diploid sporophyte. The white-line-centred lamellae in a single specimen provide the earliest evidence for the presence of such structures in early land-plant spores and provide further evidence that sporopollenin deposition on such structures is the most primitive mode of sporopollenin deposition among land plants.


We present two globally convergent vision-based position controllers for a planar two-links manipulator in the so-called fixed-camera configuration, where the camera orientation and scale factor are considered unknown. This is a basic adaptive visual servoing problem whose solution was hampered by the nonlinear dependence of the system dynamics on the unknown parameters. The controller design techniques of immersion and invariance and nonlinear proportional integral (PI) are used to derive the smooth adaptive schemes that ensure global asymptotic regulation without overparameterization, projections, or persistency of excitation assumptions. In the case of tracking, we establish error bounds that are reduced, eventually to zero, as the speed of the reference trajectory decreases, and with improved prior knowledge on the camera scale factor, for the immersion and invariance controller, or increasing a tuning gain for the nonlinear PI. The efficacy of the approaches is shown through simulations.


Water supply and sanitation are important requisites for basic human needs and primary health care. Their inadequate provision has far reaching economic and humanitarian consequences. In Kenya this is well expressed in terms of child mortality. This paper analyses the mortality rate data from consecutive decennial population censuses conducted in the country from 1979. Water sources and type of sanitation are significant determinants of child mortality, as in any other developing country. The paper includes policy recommendations to help combat water- and sanitation- based child mortality – e.g. enforcing public health regulations, and making public investment in water and water treatment at point of use.


Local descriptors are increasingly used for the task of object recognition because of their perceived robustness with respect to occlusions and to global geometrical deformations. Such a descriptor--based on a set of oriented Gaussian derivative filters-is used in our recognition system. We report here an evaluation of several techniques for orientation estimation to achieve rotation invariance of the descriptor. We also describe feature selection based on a single training image. Virtual images are generated by rotating and rescaling the image and robust features are selected. The results confirm robust performance in cluttered scenes, in the presence of partial occlusions, and when the object is embedded in different backgrounds.


Even before soaring to the apparently impossible challenge of an outright majority at Holyrood in 2011, the Scottish National Party had long dominated the political narrative in Scotland. With the independence referendum in 2014 and their near clean sweep in the general election the following year, the full force of the SNP's power was felt throughout the UK. Now, with the party's rivals still trailing limply in their wake, this new account by two established SNP-watchers explains just how they have stormed to victory, changing the face of Scottish – and British – politics for ever.

Tracing the path from grassroots party of protest to professional, highly centralised electoral machine, Rob Johns and James Mitchell explore the differing leadership styles and often radical shifts in the party's image, from 'tartan Tories' to self-styled anti-austerity crusaders. Along the way, they analyse the internal battles between the leadership, members and activists; map the changing profile of the average SNP voter; and outline the new challenges that have come with increased electoral success.

Engaging, impartial and above all insightful, Takeover charts the rise and rise of Scotland's biggest party and asks: where now for the SNP in the wake of a historic third successive victory?


### Geochemistry and wellbore integrity in CO2 sequestration

Effective geologic sequestration of CO2 requires long-term storage with very low leak rates. Injection wells are an obvious leakage pathway for CO2 because they perforate the confining caprock. In addition, sequestration sites are likely to use monitoring wells to assess performance and, in the case of depleted oil and gas fields, may contain 10s to 1000s of older operating and abandoned wells.

All wells may have leakage pathways due to faulty construction or other defects. However, it is the subject of this chapter to consider whether geochemical reactions induced by CO2 could result in damage to wells and the development of leaks. This concern is based on the thermodynamic incompatibility of CO2-saturated fluids with the Portland cement and steel used to prevent fluid migration to the surface. Portland cement is an alkaline substance with pH > 12.5 and is not in equilibrium with CO2-bearing fluids (pH < 6). Low-carbon steel used as well casing is subject to aggressive corrosion by carbonic acid. As a result, well integrity has been a central issue in risk analysis of sequestration sites (Gasda et al. 2004; IPCC 2005; Viswanathan et al. 2008; Nordbotten et al. 2009).

At the outset, it is important to bear in mind that geochemical reactions alone do not yield insight into wellbore integrity, which is governed primarily by the effective permeability of the Portland cement seal and the mechanical integrity of the system. Thus the significance of chemical reactions must be considered with respect to their impact to changes in permeability or in strength. There is an unfortunate tendency in the literature to not distinguish between reaction and impact. Often CO2 reactions are described as "degradation of cement" or "corrosion of cement" without adequately defining what these terms …


State-of-the-art deep learning based stereo matching approaches treat disparity estimation as a regression problem, where loss function is directly defined on true disparities and their estimated ones. However, disparity is just a byproduct of a matching process modeled by cost volume, while indirectly learning cost volume driven by disparity regression is prone to overfitting since the cost volume is under constrained. In this paper, we propose to directly add constraints to the cost volume by filtering cost volume with unimodal distribution peaked at true disparities. In addition, variances of the unimodal distributions for each pixel are estimated to explicitly model matching uncertainty under different contexts. The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on Scene Flow and two KITTI stereo benchmarks. In particular, our method ranked the 1st place of KITTI 2012 evaluation and the 4th place of KITTI 2015 evaluation (recorded on 2019.8.20). The codes of AcfNet are available at: https://github.com/youmi-zym/AcfNet.


Electronic predistortion (EPD) to compensate for chromatic dispersion is an attractive option to replace inline optical dispersion compensation (ODC). In this paper, we present a study on the impact of intra- and interchannel nonlinearities in EPD systems compared to optimized ODC systems at 10 and 40 Gbit/s for NRZ-OOK modulation. First, the theoretically achievable nonlinear tolerance of EPD and ODC systems is studied by neglecting the EPD transmitter's hardware limitations and the dispersion compensating fiber's loss and nonlinearity. At 10 Gbit/s, EPD shows stronger degradations due to intra- and interchannel nonlinearities than optimized ODC. We extend existing studies for 10 Gbit/s EPD by analyzing the relevant launch power levels before interchannel nonlinearities limit the performance. The limit is 8 dB larger for ODC than EPD at 10 Gbit/s. In contrast, operating at a bit rate of 40 Gbit/s significantly reduces this difference in the nonlinearity tolerance between EPD and ODC both for single channel and WDM transmission. The maximum power per channel of 40 Gbit/s EPD is only 1 dB smaller compared to ODC. We then conduct a more realistic comparison at 40 Gbit/s by including the effects of 60 GSa/s digital-to-analog conversion with 4-bit quantization in the EPD transmitter and by considering the loss and nonlinearity of the dispersion compensating fiber. Analyzing the optical signal-to-noise ratio margins confirms that the performance of the realistic EPD system is similar to optimized ODC making EPD more attractive for electronic dispersion compensation at bit rates of 40 Gbit/s and above.


For many people todays, sport is one of the stress relieving activities. People usually get involved in sport to achieve attractive shape, healthy lifestyle and better feeling. However, some people get involved in sport to compete professionally. Competitions were recently reserved for the professionals only. Few years ago, the professional community became more open to amateur athletes whose main objective is not competing. Nowadays, these can join to professional sports communities (Rauter, & Doupona Topič, 2011). Especially in massive sports events (running marathons, triathlons, cycling competitions), organizers give the opportunity to amateurs for competing with professionals in the same competition. Amateurs need to train properly in order to fulfill their competition goals. Performing hard training is difficult not only for amateurs, but even for professionals. Athletes usually train at different stages and places to improve the effectiveness of training – gym, fitness, swimming pool, road, macadam, etc. Another obstacle that usually makes planning sports training sessions difficult for amateurs are properly balancing the two typical training phases, i.e., resting and eating that accompany each end of the training session. Consequently, athletes need to hire personal sports trainers in order to continuously improve their performance. Unfortunately, this hiring becomes very expensive after some time for amateur athletes. Recent expansion of smart sports watches and smart phones allow athletes to carry out the sports training sessions smarter. Usage of mobile devices (Baca, Dabnichki, Heller, & Kornfeind, 2009, Baca, Kornfeind, Preuschl, Bichler, Tampier, & Novatchkov, 2010) typically causes production of the dozens of activity datasets containing data about athlete's position, speed, hearth rate and power rating over the sports training sessions. Analyzing these activity datasets enable an athlete to gain the deeper insight into every training session. Furthermore, a computer program using the latest data mining methods is even able to extract athlete's habits during sports training. Moreover, it may notify the athlete for possible over-training syndrome to prevent injury, advice nutrition using prediction and in the end, generate various sports training plans by clustering similar activities together. Consequently, there is a lot of possibilities how to use these data for a further analysis and apply them for improving the athlete's performances. In a nutshell, these activity datasets offer an infrastructure for developing the artificial sports trainer (AST) as proposed by (Fister, Ljubič, Suganthan, Perc, & Fister 2015) that will be capable to help athletes during all sports training phases. Unfortunately, the most of athletes (especially amateurs) are not familiar with sports training theory and thus every assistance in any phase of sports training is welcome. As a matter of fact, the proposed AST computer framework based on Computational Intelligence (CI) algorithms that is open and therefore suitable for incorporating the new features easily. The primary objective of the AST is to generate the sports training sessions of similar quality as a real trainer. At the moment, the AST serves as a Iztok Fister Jr. University of Maribor, Slovenia


Native American rates of graduation are extremely low in comparison to the rest of the United States public and the classes which are considered "assimilative" classes have among the worst success rates for Native American students. Among these assimilative classes is the field of literature. This thesis explores how literature is assimilative and progresses through how it can be empowering for students. The thesis discusses the importance of incorporating Native American worldviews into the literary classroom and provides specific suggestions for teaching literature to Native Americans to enable it to be empowering rather than assimilative. These new methods of teaching will lead to better success rates among Native American students as well as increased self-esteem and pride in culture.


This study examines how the use of causal language in conveying relative performance feedback impacts subsequent task performance and affect. Studies on performance feedback and evaluation in accounting research have focused on the use of quantitative performance measures and the availability of relative performance information; few studies have examined whether the qualitative comments influence employee reactions to the reviews. Research in linguistics has shown that causal language, defined as language reflecting the search for reasons (commonly expressed through words such as "because" and "thus"), impacts how recipients process information that they have received. We posit that causal language clearly links explanations to relative performance feedback and in turn impacts subsequent task performance and affect by impacting how employees process the information. However, like much research on performance feedback, we predict that the effect of causal language in relative performance feedback depends on whether the feedback is positive or negative. Using a 2x2 between-subjects experiment, we find that greater use of causal language in delivering negative performance feedback leads to improved subsequent performance and affect; on the other hand, greater use of causal language in delivering positive feedback actually diminishes performance (while having no significant effect on affect). These seemingly contradictory results are explained by causal language's role in facilitating employee sense-making after receiving relative performance feedback. Our results indicate that employees' cognitive processes and reactions to performance feedback are influenced by the language used in explanations. Our study contributes to the call to greater research on the provision of performance feedback, which is considered an essential part of an organization's management control systems.


This thesis is concerned with the practical results of the use of electronic tools as a means of gathering public input for urban development projects. Of particular interest was the capacity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to improve levels of public engagement in urban development, within a context of declining democratic participation throughout the developed world. To this end, a questionnaire was distributed to project leaders of urban developments in a diverse set of cities, asking them to comment on the successes and failures of the e-participation processes they experienced. In conjunction with the relevant literature on urban development and civic engagement, the questionnaire results show both the potential and the limitations of the use of ICT tools in contemporary cities. While those surveyed were generally satisfied with the results of e-participation initiatives, noting a wider variety of contributions, they did share a common disappointment with the generally low numbers of participants. However there were reasons to be optimistic that levels of participation will improve along with improvements to methodology, and citizen habit formation.


Single point incremental forming SPIF is a flexible manufacturing process that does not require a special die for each part and is conducted on CNC milling machine that control on the motion of the forming tool. The formability is very important in any forming process therefore this work is concentrated on the influence of some factors on formability during SPIF. The factors that were studied are: type of tool path, depth step, feed rate and tool rotational speed. Three factors (depth step, feed rate and tool rotational speed) are examined depending on three levels (low, medium and high levels) while the type of the tool path was examined depending on two levels (low and high levels). In this work the total number of experiments is 18 experiments except the screening experiments that were made before the main experimental tests. Response surface method is used to build the predictive model to predict the value of effective strain for experiments that are not experimentally conducted. The results show that the feed rate and interaction between step size and type of tool path have the largest effect on formability. It is found that the maximum value of formability in terms of effective strain was ( ̅ ) while the minimum value was ( ̅ . It is also found that SPIF is affected by the friction at the interface between forming tool and sheet metal as in other metal forming processes.


We address some of the key questions that arise in forecasting the price of crude oil. What do applied forecasters need to know about the choice of sample period and about the tradeoffs between alternative oil price series and model specifications? Are real or nominal oil prices predictable based on macroeconomic aggregates? Does this predictability translate into gains in out-of-sample forecast accuracy compared with conventional no-change forecasts? How useful are oil futures markets in forecasting the price of oil? How useful are survey forecasts? How does one evaluate the sensitivity of a baseline oil price forecast to alternative assumptions about future demand and supply conditions? How does one quantify risks associated with oil price forecasts? Can joint forecasts of the price of oil and of U.S. real GDP growth be improved upon by allowing for asymmetries?


The Geno project intent to participate in the development of the next generation of construction IT systems. Goals for this research should be to:
 * loose the design process from the production of design documents
 * free the geometry from orthogonal projection
 * make possible a full, variable, complete detailing without loosing consistency
 * move the development of building component specific IT modeling
 * tools closer to the end user
 * improve the efficiency and capability of these modeling tools
 The Geno project works with three developer / user layers:
 * GenoObjectClasses, the basic standardized data and functional structure, developed by IT specialists in a close dialog with the IAI IFC development.
 * ProtoObjectClasses: IT tools for modeling spaces, construction elements and parts. Developed by IT specialized architects,engineers, on the bases of Genotypes. Made available to the end user through Internet by component vendors.
 * PhenoObjects: spaces, construction elements and parts, specified, dimensioned and placed and interrelated by the designer, to be analyzed and supply project information for all participants in the construction and management process. Modeling, analyzing and information seeking and presentation done by Prototypes.
 The idea of this structure is to improve dynamic and user influence in IT modeling tool development.
 The standardized class structure for this, the GenoObjectClasses has to support three concurrent models, namely the:
 * SpaceModel, an interrelated surface model, a non detailed division of the project space in functional spaces (living room, kitchen,bath etc.) and construction spaces (foundation, wall, roof, slap etc.).
 * ComponentModel, a successive partitioning, ore filling theSpaceModel with building elements, components (facing wall, inner wall, insulation, window, door, ceiling, roof construction, inventory, furniture etc.), interrelated and related to the SpaceModel.
 * EntityModel, a similar fill to the Componentmodel with buildingparts (brick, joint, plaster, fitting, gutter etc.) to make a complete consistent productmodel possible.
 The "three model structure" to be filled out successively, add flexibility to the designprocess. When calculations and visualizations is performed the detailed model is used, but in areas with no detailing the model on the lower detailing level is used. This means that the total model will be "complete", if only the SpaceModel has been modeled.
 The development of GenoObjectClases will build as close as possible on IFC, and seek to expand IFC where it is nessesary.
 Status for the Geno project is that implementation has been started with AutoCAD ObjectARX.


Remoras are fishes that piggyback onto larger marine fauna via an adhesive disc to increase locomotor efficiency, likelihood of finding mates and access to prey. Attaching rapidly to a large, fast-moving host is no easy task, and while research to date has focused on how the disc supports adhesion, no attention has been paid to how or if remoras are able to sense attachment. We identified push-rod-like mechanoreceptor complexes embedded in the soft lip of the remora adhesive disc that are known in other organisms to respond to touch and shear forces. This is, to our knowledge, the first time such mechanoreceptor complexes are described in fishes as they were only known previously in monotremes. The presence of push-rod-like mechanoreceptor complexes suggests not only that fishes may be able to sense their environment in ways not heretofore described but that specialized tactile mechanoreceptor complexes may be a more basal vertebrate feature than previously thought.


The examinations of conditions for establishing a variety independent Agrobacterium-mediated transformation procedure for wheat are preferable since many of cultivars and breeding lines remain recalcitrant for biotechnological manipulation, mainly due to low efficiency of plant regeneration in vitro, which is highly genotype specific. This paper describes and discusses an improved protocol for enhanced and low-genotype dependent Agrobacterium-mediated transformation using a super-binary vector LBA4404/pTOK233 carrying reporter gus-intron gene and hygromycin (hpt) and kanamicyn (nptII) selectable marker genes. The protocol was optimized on highly responsive common wheat cv. Vesna. Transient expression monitored by the gus-intron on explants after 3, 6 and 25 days of co-cultivation, followed by GUS expression and hygromycin resistance in whole plants indicated the protocol including a co-cultivation of freshly isolated immature embryos in the presence of ascorbic acid, and acetosyringone added only in the bacteria-containing infection medium combined with a delayed and stepwise increasing hygromycin B selection procedure significantly enhanced the transformation efficiency in cv. Vesna that exceed 7% of treated explants from previously 0.41%. Explant pre-cultivation did not additionally improve transformation efficiency. The optimized protocol was successful in evoking satisfactory transformation efficiencies from 3.6% to 10.8% in 5 less-responsive wheat genotypes. All 57 T0 hygromycin-resistant and GUS-positive lines were phenotypically normal and fertile. Therefore, the conditions employed in this study may serve as a base to facilitate the transformation in other, particularly recalcitrant wheat cultivars.


This paper describes the design of a new FEC fueled rate and congestion controller (RCR) which is targeted primarily at one to many reliable bulk multicast data transfer. The concept of RCR is validated by analytical and simulation results. The heuristic analysis is based on a new extended model for flows, which implement a congestion control algorithm similar to TCP. The main goal was to develop an algorithmwhich is TCPfriendly and competes with the control loop of TCP. Large delays in the control circuit, scaling issues and high packet loss probabilities are among the major challenges of a reliable multicast rate controller implementing TCP-fair congestion control. The controller presented in this paper shows that layered forward error correction (FEC) redundancy coding not only reduces the controland retransmissions in reliable multicast environments using automatic repeat requests (ARQ) to trigger retransmissions but also helps a congestion controller to compete with TCP. FEC permits the receivers to tolerate losses in a way that they only need to signalize loss levels which are significant for them. This high-pass filtering of the loss signal reverts the disadvantage of reacting slowly to loss into an advantage in direct comparison to TCP. The greater responsiveness with respect to rate increment ensures that TCP always receives its share of the total available bandwidth. Simulations and analytical analysis for multicast as well as unicast setups show that already a very moderate level (some %) of redundancy suffices to strengthen a connection suffering from long delays and high loss probabilities.


Some people recall more positive memories in negative moods than in neutral moods, which is called mood-incongruent effect. Although previous research suggested that structure of self-knowledge influences mood-incongruent effect (Sakaki, 2004), it is possible that motivation for mood-regulation mediates relation between structure of self-knowledge and mood-incongruent effect. The present study aimed at exploring this possibility by using self-complexity. In Study 1, participants with higher self-complexity, whose self-knowledge has more self-aspects with a higher level of differentiation, recalled more positive memories in negative moods (compared to neutral moods) than participants with lower self-complexity, whose self-knowledge has a fewer self-aspects with larger overlap. Study 1 also revealed that these effects hold even when the motivation for mood-regulation was partialed out. Study 2 examined mood-incongruent effect under positive moods, in which participants are unlikely motivated to alter their moods, and it was found that participants with higher self-complexity recalled more negative memories in positive moods (compared to neutral moods) than participants with lower self-complexity.


OBJECTIVE Several reports have described inflammatory mass lesions at the tip of intraspinal drug administration catheters. We evaluated the number of patients reported with this condition and whether data support hypotheses that have been put forth regarding the cause of these lesions. METHODS Information that was reported in the medical literature, and by Medtronic, Inc., to the United States Food and Drug Administration as of November 30, 2000, was reviewed. RESULTS Forty-one cases were identified, including 16 from the literature and 25 that were not published previously in the literature. Because of voluntary reporting and other methodological limitations, the actual number of cases must be higher than reported. All of the patients had chronic pain. The mean duration of therapy was 24.5 months. Most masses were located in the thoracic region. Intrathecal drugs included morphine or hydromorphone, either alone or mixed with other drugs, in 39 of 41 cases. No masses were reported in patients who received baclofen as the only intrathecal medication. Thirty patients underwent surgery to relieve spinal cord or cauda equina compression. Eleven patients were nonambulatory at last follow-up, and one died of a pulmonary embolus. Surgical specimens revealed noninfectious chronic inflammation, granuloma formation, and fibrosis or necrosis. DISCUSSION The most plausible hypothesis with regard to the cause of intrathecal catheter tip mass lesions implicates the administration of relatively high-concentration or high-dose opiate drugs or the use of drugs and admixtures that are not labeled for intrathecal use. CONCLUSION Patients who require high-dose intraspinal opioid therapy and those who receive drugs or admixtures that are not approved for intrathecal use should be monitored closely for signs of an extra-axial mass or catheter malfunction. Prompt diagnosis and treatment may preserve neurological function.


This essay will first examine the attempts to categorize and label procedural systems, an impulse that many comparatists cannot, but should, resist because the very exercise of creating categories invites undue generalizations. The focus will then shift to procedural harmonization, a term that encompasses a number of topics of increasing importance to proceduralists. This section forms the centrepiece of the essay because it is here that most opportunities to benefit from comparative scholarship present themselves—and are still being missed. After illustrating the dynamics and results of regional, particularly European, and supra-regional harmonization initiatives, this section identifies trends towards harmonization through private rule making and examines principles that determine the scope of, and limits to, procedural harmonization. The final section addresses the growing concern about access to justice, specifically cost considerations and claim aggregation techniques, which prompt the somewhat related questions of whether and to what extent one legal system can borrow procedural rules from another one.


Any viable method of protecting property, dissuading the theft of property or ensuring the swift recovery of stolen property could be considered essential to general society. A number of crime preventive measures have been used in an attempt to achieve this objective. One such measure is property marking, employing various techniques to make property more readily identifiable. The study assesses technology to investigate effectiveness, both for dissuasion and for tracing once stolen. Mechanism for the disposal of stolen property forms an important part of this study, commencing with the mapping of the theft‐supply‐chain. Using a mixed methods approach, the research project has set out to identify if security technology could be used to break what is termed the 'theft‐chain‐cycle', whereby articles are stolen, stolen to order or for barter. The theft‐supply‐chain is not a single linear model; rather property passes through a number of formal and informal chains prior to reaching its "new" illegal owner. A significant factor is the ease of disposal linked to ease of detection using property marking to aid conviction. Based upon the findings, potential strategies and changes in legislation that better direct limited resources can be developed to assist in curbing the growing level of burglaries.


The last decade witnessed a great surge of fruitful studies in the new paradigm of quantum computing. Remarkable progress has been made in all the areas including quantum algorithms, quantum complexity theory, quantum error-correcting code, quantum information theory, quantum cryptography and physical implementations of quantum computers. However, quantum algorithm design, probably the most important task in quantum computing, did not make as much progress as people expected. This thesis aims at both designing new quantum algorithms and studying why efficient quantum algorithms are so hard to design by proving many lower bounds on quantum query complexity for various problems.
We first review (and generalize) known techniques for designing quantum algorithms and for proving quantum lower bounds. Using these techniques, we then study the quantum query complexity for many problems, including some specific problems such as Graph Matching and other natural graph properties, the general tuple search, and local search. We also study the lowest possible quantum query complexity for a class of functions as a whole, such as graph properties, circular functions, and functions invariant of a transitive permutation group, where tight results are given in all these cases.
Finally for the quantum lower bounds techniques themselves, we study the main two techniques and show that they are incomparable in power. For the most widely used one, which has a lot of parameters to choose, we show limitations for it in terms of certificate complexity. This implies that we cannot use the method to prove better lower bounds for almost all known open problems in this area.


In a previous article we introduced extended logical operators, based on the Dubois family of T‐norms and their dual T‐conorms, to induce a semantics for a language involving and, or, and negation. Thus, given these logical operators and an arbitrary set‐up S (a mapping from atomic formulas into a set of truth‐values), we extended S to a mapping of all formulas into a set of truth‐values defined as belief/disbelief pairs. Then using a particular partial order between belief/disbelief pairs to define entailment we were able to derive a many‐valued variant of the so‐called relevance logic. Here we introduce the notion of the so‐called information lattice built upon another type of partial order between belief/disbelief pairs. Furthermore, we introduce specific meet and join operations and use them to provide answers to three fundamental questions: How does the reasoning machine represent belief and/or disbelief in the validity of the constituents of a complex formula when it is supplied with belief and/or disbelief in the validity of this complex formula as a whole; how does it determine the amount of belief and/or disbelief to be assigned to complex formulas in an epistemic state, that is, a collection of set‐ups; and finally, how does it change its present belief and/or disbelief in the validity of formulas already in its data base, when provided with an input bringing in new belief and/or disbelief in the validity of these formulas.


This chapter focuses on cybercriminal activities that cannot easily be regulated by states via existing means, either because new criminal elements are involved or because the scale and the transnational dimension of a particular activity necessitate international cooperation. While many crimes committed by means of a computer are not essentially new crimes and can be subsumed under extant definitions and be dealt with by domestic legal systems, some criminal activities require specific legal responses at the international level. The chapter gives an overview of these crimes, examines initiatives that have been undertaken to fight them, and discusses particular challenges, notably with respect to jurisdiction. It concludes that the various multilateral initiatives, above all the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, are valuable, since they lay the groundwork for greater cooperation between states. However, more comprehensive approaches that integrate a deeper understanding of the functioning of information technology may be required. Global cooperation, beyond state or regional boundaries, and across the state/non-state divide, is needed to deal with many forms of cybercrime.


Despite vast improvements in the measurement of the cosmological parameters, the nature of dark energy and an accurate value of the Hubble constant (H0) in the Hubble–Lemaitre law remain unknown. To break the current impasse, it is necessary to develop as many independent techniques as possible, such as the use of Type II supernovae (SNe II). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of SNe II for deriving accurate extragalactic distances, which will be an asset for the next generation of telescopes where more-distant SNe II will be discovered. More specifically, we present a sample from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program (DES-SN) consisting of 15 SNe II with photometric and spectroscopic information spanning a redshift range up to 0.35. Combining our DES SNe with publicly available samples, and using the standard candle method (SCM), we construct the largest available Hubble diagram with SNe II in the Hubble flow (70 SNe II) and find an observed dispersion of 0.27 mag. We demonstrate that adding a colour term to the SN II standardization does not reduce the scatter in the Hubble diagram. Although SNe II are viable as distance indicators, this work points out important issues for improving their utility as independent extragalactic beacons: find new correlations, define a more standard subclass of SNe II, construct new SN II templates, and dedicate more observing time to high-redshift SNe II. Finally, for the first time, we perform simulations to estimate the redshift-dependent distance-modulus bias due to selection effects.


Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called "women's secrets," by which they meant female sexuality and generation. At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them, culminating in the great illustrated anatomical treatise of Andreas Vesalius in 1543. Katharine Park traces these two closely related developments through a series of case studies of women whose bodies were dissected after their deaths: an abbess, a lactating virgin, several patrician wives and mothers, and an executed criminal. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, she explores the history of women's bodies in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries in the context of family identity, religious observance, and women's health care. Secrets Of Women explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy, arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of anatomy during that time. The opened corpses of holy women revealed sacred objects, while the opened corpses of wives and mothers yielded crucial information about where babies came from and about the forces that shaped their vulnerable flesh. In the process, what male writers knew as the "secrets of women" came to symbolize the most difficult challenges posed by human bodies-challenges that dissection promised to overcome. Park's study of women's bodies and men's attempts to know them-and through these efforts to know their own-demonstrates the centrality of gender to the development of early modern anatomy.


ABSTRACT:The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.


Background & Aims
The association of liver biochemistry with clinical outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection is currently unclear and the utility of longitudinally-measured liver biochemistry as prognostic markers for mortality is unknown. We aimed to determine whether abnormal liver biochemistry, assessed at baseline and at repeat measures over time, was associated with death in hospitalised patients with COVID-19 compared to those without COVID-19, in a UK population.

Approach & Results
We extracted routinely collected clinical data from a large teaching hospital in the UK, matching 585 hospitalised SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive patients to 1165 hospitalised RT-PCR-negative patients for age, gender, ethnicity and pre-existing comorbidities. 26.8% (157/585) of COVID-19 patients died, compared to 11.9% (139/1165) in the non-COVID-19 group (p<0.001). At presentation, a significantly higher proportion of the COVID-19 group had elevated alanine aminotransferase (20.7% vs. 14.6%, p=0.004) and hypoalbuminaemia (58.7% vs. 35.0%, p<0.001), compared to the non-COVID-19 group. Within the COVID-19 group, those with hypoalbuminaemia at presentation had 1.83-fold increased hazards of death compared to those with normal albumin (adjusted HR 1.83, 95% CI 1.25-2.67), whilst the hazard of death was ~4-fold higher in those aged ≥75 years (adjusted HR 3.96, 95% CI 2.59-6.04) and ~3-fold higher in those with pre-existing liver disease (adjusted HR 3.37, 95% CI 1.58-7.16). In the COVID-19 group, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) increased (R=0.192, p<0.0001) and albumin declined (R=-0.123, p=0.0004) over time in patients who died.

Conclusion
In this UK population, liver biochemistry is commonly deranged in patients with COVID-19. Baseline hypoalbuminaemia and rising ALP over time could be prognostic markers for death but investigation of larger cohorts is required to develop a better understanding of the relationship between liver biochemistry and disease outcome.


The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the name we have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a 'society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed.


Many significant engineering and scientific problems involve optimization of some criteria over a combinatorial configuration space. The two methods most often used to solve these problems effectively-simulated annealing (SA) and genetic algorithms (GA)-do not easily lend themselves to massive parallel implementations. Simulated annealing is a naturally serial algorithm, while GA involves a selection process that requires global coordination. This paper introduces a new hybrid algorithm that inherits those aspects of GA that lend themselves to parallelization, and avoids serial bottle-necks of GA approaches by incorporating elements of SA to provide a completely parallel, easily scalable hybrid GA/SA method. This new method, called Genetic Simulated Annealing, does not require parallelization of any problem specific portions of a serial implementation-existing serial implementations can be incorporated as is. Results of a study on two difficult combinatorial optimization problems, a 100 city traveling salesperson problem and a 24 word, 12 bit error correcting code design problem, performed on a 16 K PE MasPar MP-1, indicate advantages over previous parallel GA and SA approaches. One of the key results is that the performance of the algorithm scales up linearly with the increase of processing elements, a feature not demonstrated by any previous parallel GA or SA approaches, which enables the new algorithm to utilize massive parallel architecture with maximum effectiveness. Additionally, the algorithm does not require careful choice of control parameters, a significant advantage over SA and GA.


Using a loop–cluster algorithm we investigate the spin- Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a square lattice with exchange coupling J and an additional four-spin interaction of strength Q. We confirm the existence of a phase transition separating antiferromagnetism at J/Q>Jc/Q from a valence bond solid (VBS) state at J/Q<Jc/Q. Although our Monte Carlo data are consistent with those of previous studies, we do not confirm the existence of a deconfined quantum critical point. Instead, using a flowgram method on lattices as large as 802, we find evidence for a weak first-order phase transition. We also present a detailed study of the antiferromagnetic phase. For J/Q>Jc/Q the staggered magnetization, the spin stiffness and the spinwave velocity of the antiferromagnet are determined by fitting Monte Carlo data to analytic results from the systematic low-energy effective field theory for magnons. Finally, we also investigate the physics of the VBS state at J/Q<Jc/Q and we show that long but finite antiferromagnetic correlations are still present.


"The oxygen evolving complex (OEC) of photosystem II (PSII) requires chloride as a critical cofactor. The Cl- content of PSII was determined to be 1 Cl-/PSII by the AgCl colloid assay. The dissociation constant for Cl- in NaCl-washed PSII was determined using the Cl- sensitive microelectrode. Two classes of Cl- binding sites were found with Kd values of 53 mM and 4.2 mM. The effects of anions on the S2' oxidation state of the OEC were investigated using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. It was found that chloride was required for the formation of the S2' state. The effect of iodide, which is an activator of oxygen evolution at low concentrations and an inhibitor at high concentrations, was also tested. Both low and high concentrations of I- supported the formation of the S2' state, suggesting that I- inhibition occurs in some state higher than the S2' state."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


The precise measurement of the wavelengths of emission or absorption bands on spectrographic plates is a vexing and difficult problem. The usual commercial microphotometer when coupled with a strip chart recorder does not give accurate results because the rate of plate travel is not constant. This error may be traced ultimately to the plate drive mechanism which operates by means of a screw or by means of a friction clutch arrangement.


Adaptive immune responses depend on interactions between T cell receptors (TCRs) and peptide major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) ligands located on the surface of T cells and antigen presenting cells (APCs), respectively. As TCRs and pMHCs are often only present at low copy numbers their interactions are inherently stochastic, yet the role of stochastic fluctuations on T cell function is unclear. Here, we introduce a minimal stochastic model of T cell activation that accounts for serial TCR-pMHC engagement, reversible TCR conformational change and TCR aggregation. Analysis of this model indicates that it is not the strength of binding between the T cell and the APC cell per se that elicits an immune response, but rather the information imparted to the T cell from the encounter, as assessed by the entropy rate of the TCR-pMHC binding dynamics. This view provides an information-theoretic interpretation of T cell activation that explains a range of experimental observations. Based on this analysis, we propose that effective T cell therapeutics may be enhanced by optimizing the inherent stochasticity of TCR-pMHC binding dynamics.


Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) achieve latency tolerance by exploiting massive amounts of thread level parallelism. Each core executes several hundred to a few thousand simultaneously active threads. The work scheduler tries to maximize the number of active threads on each core by launching threads until at least one of the required resources is completely utilized. The rationale is, more threads would give the thread scheduler more opportunities to hide memory latency and thus would result in better performance. In this work, we show that launching the maximum number of threads is not always necessary to achieve the best performance. Applications have an optimal thread count value at which the performance saturates. Increasing the number of threads beyond this value results in no better and sometimes worse performance. To this end, we develop Perf-Sat: a mechanism to detect the optimal number of threads required on each core at runtime. Perf-Sat is integrated into the hardware work scheduler and guides it to either increase or decrease the number of active threads. We evaluate the performance impact of our scheduler on two GPU generations and show that Perf-Sat scales well to different applications as well as architectures. With performance loss of less than 1%, Perf-Sat is able to achieve core resource savings of 18.32% on average.


The growing challenge of microbial resistance emphasizes the importance of new antibiotics or reviving strategies for the use of old ones. Macrolide antibiotics are potent bacterial protein synthesis inhibitors with a formidable capacity to treat life-threatening bacterial infections, however, acquired and intrinsic resistance limits their clinical application. In the work presented here, we reveal that bicarbonate is a potent enhancer of the activity of macrolide antibiotics that overcomes both acquired and intrinsic resistance mechanisms. With a focus on azithromycin, a highly prescribed macrolide antibiotic, and using clinically relevant pathogens, we show that physiological concentrations of bicarbonate overcome drug resistance by increasing the intracellular concentration of azithromycin. We demonstrate the potential of bicarbonate as a formulation additive for topical use of azithromycin in treating a murine wound infection caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Further, using a systemic murine model of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection, we demonstrate the potential role of physiological bicarbonate, naturally abundant in the host, to enhance the activity of azithromycin against macrolide-resistant MRSA. In all, our findings suggest that macrolide resistance, observed in the clinical microbiology laboratory using standard culturing techniques, is a poor predictor of efficacy in the clinic and that observed resistance should not necessarily hamper the use of macrolides. Whether as a formulation additive for topical use or as a natural component of host tissues, bicarbonate is a powerful potentiator of macrolides with the capacity to overcome drug resistance in life-threatening bacterial infections.


The year of 2015 is set to be a milestone for sustainability as governments are increasingly called upon to adopt the UN Post-2015 Development Agenda. Tourism has the potential to contribute directly and indirectly to the Sustainable Development Goals. Particularly, Tourism is seen to be able to play a key role in adopting and implementing sustainable use and management of natural resources, through environment-friendly practices and solutions. Hotels and Food and Beverage business (F&B) are one of the most important components of the tourism sector. Large number of visitors and guests visit hotels and F&B businesses, and waste is automatically generated. Qatar's tourism sector is amongst the fastest growing globally, and the number of tourists that Qatar aims to attract by the year 2030 is projected to reach seven million. The growth in the sector equally means a similar (and natural) increase in the waste generated. Handling solid waste has remained one of the main problems that directly affect the environment. Mismanagement of waste endangers the health of populations especially ones residing near landfills. The problem this research identified was the lack of data and information much needed for policy recommendation addressing recycling of different materials including Food Waste in the hotel industry in Qatar. This study was primarily set up to achieve two folded goal. First, it aims at exploring the current practices within the Hotel Industry in Qatar regarding recycling of waste materials including food. Second, it examines the effect of awareness on Food Waste reduction. To achieve these goals, first, a survey questionnaire was designed to gather the information from a number of 111 hotels (including designated hotel-apartments). Second, an experiment was designed to measure the effect of awareness-cards on Food Waste reduction through comparing the findings from the control and the experiment groups. The survey was conducted during the months of June, July and August, 2015, while the Food Waste experiment took place during the month of Ramadan, 2015. Some of the findings related the two research objectives are presented in the following graphs: The Graph above clearly indicates the average amount of food-waste (FW) generated per guest per day throughout the experiment period of 20 days. The first day of the experiment for the Control Group, i.e. without awareness cards, the average amount of food waste started at 0.6 Kgs per person (i.e. guest), but reduced through the experiment period. For the experiment group when awareness cards were provided on tables the food waste remained very consistent at around 0.2 Kgs per guest. The overall results showed overwhelmingly that awareness, once generated has an immediate, clear and positive influence on customer behaviour, and in this case reduced the average food waste. The experiment measured total food-waste during the 20 days within this restaurant at 1,335 Kgs. Several important points constituted the conclusion and recommendations drawn from the results and analysis of both efforts. The summary highlights the vital importance and need for investments across all aspects of material recycling, which should be encouraged at a government level, and extended to SMEs, to develop local businesses within the recycling sector in Qatar. More efficiency is also required between F&B organisers and charities, and great incentives should be put in place for those participating in recycling efforts, and conversely penalties should be implemented for those organisations not actively pursuing "reduction" strategies to waste. Food cost reduction, without impact on food quality or perceived value, could be conservatively reduced by about 50% through spreading awareness of the impacts of Food Waste on the environment.


Multifunctionality is a multifaceted concept and the economic literature that treats the concept has mushroomed over the last couple of years. This paper surveys that literature. With respect to quantification of multifunctional production, it is concluded that jointness in production is at the core of the multifunctionality problem and that scale issues may be highly important. A large share of the paper considers the policy design literature. It is shown i.a. that the level of transaction costs has to be considered when developing policies, that even optimal policies may be controversial from a trade perspective and that the spatial variation both in production and values should be accounted for. One of the main problems from a policy perspective is the identification and valuation of the objects that are to be paid for.


Agglomeration economies are among the most important factors in increasing firm productivity. However, there is little evidence supportive of this in Africa. Using the firm registry database in Tanzania, this paper examines a new application of the logit approach with two empirical issues taken into account: spatial autocorrelation and endogeneity of infrastructure placement. The paper finds significant agglomeration economies. It is also found that firms are more likely to be located where local connectivity and access to markets are good. The paper finds that dealing with infrastructure endogeneity and spatial autocorrelation in the empirical model is important. According to the exogeneity test, infrastructure variables are likely endogenous. The spatial autoregressive term is significant. As expected, therefore, there are positive externalities of firm location choice around the neighboring areas.


This volume serves as a federal securities laws supplement, providing selected statutes, rules, and forms. It is the most complete supplement available and is regularly updated and revised. Contents include the Securities Act of 1933, Security Exchange Act of 1934, Investment Company Act of 1940, Investment Advisers Act of 1940, SEC Rules of Practice, and related federal laws. This edition has a cutoff date of October 15th, 2015.


This thesis investigates how head tracking can be implemented by using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware for a 6× 3 meter high-resolution display wall. The tracking system has been integrated into to an existing event system, Shout, that allows for inter-program communication. An application called htsim has been developed that is used for testing different head tracking configurations in a virtual environment. Developing in a virtual environment does not require access to head tracking hardware. Tracking algorithms developed in the virtual environment can directly be used for head tracking in a physical environment. The tracking system is able to track a user's head with cameras that are placed behind the user. htsim is also used for configuring the head tracking system used in the physical environmet. Experiments detail out the overall latency in the system and sources of jitter.


This thesis is concerned with the challenging tasks of automatic and real-time vehicle detection and tracking from aerial video. The aim of this thesis is to build an automatic system that can accurately localise any vehicles that appear in aerial video frames and track the target vehicles with trackers.
Vehicle detection and tracking have many applications and this has been an active area of research during recent years; however, it is still a challenge to deal with certain realistic environments. This thesis develops vehicle detection and tracking algorithms which enhance the robustness of detection and tracking beyond the existing approaches. The basis of the vehicle detection system proposed in this thesis has different object categorisation approaches, with colour and texture features in both point and area template forms. The thesis also proposes a novel Self-Learning Tracking and Detection approach, which is an extension to the existing Tracking Learning Detection (TLD) algorithm. There are a number of challenges in vehicle detection and tracking. The most difficult challenge of detection is distinguishing and clustering the target vehicle from the background objects and noises. Under certain conditions, the images captured from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are also blurred; for example, turbulence may make the vehicle shake during flight. This thesis tackles these challenges by applying integrated multiple feature descriptors for real-time processing.
In this thesis, three vehicle detection approaches are proposed: the HSV-GLCM feature approach, the ISM-SIFT feature approach and the FAST-HoG approach. The general vehicle detection approaches used have highly flexible implicit shape representations. They are based on training samples in both positive and negative sets and use updated classifiers to distinguish the targets. It has been found that the detection results attained by using HSV-GLCM texture features can be affected by blurring problems; the proposed detection algorithms can further segment the edges of the vehicles from the background. Using the point descriptor feature can solve the blurring problem, however, the large amount of information contained in point descriptors can lead to processing times that are too long for real-time applications. So the FAST-HoG approach combining the point feature and the shape feature is proposed. This new approach is able to speed up the process that attains the real-time performance. Finally, a detection approach using HoG with the FAST feature is also proposed. The HoG approach is widely used in object recognition, as it has a strong ability to represent the shape vector of the object. However, the original HoG feature is sensitive to the orientation of the target; this method improves the algorithm by inserting the direction vectors of the targets.
For the tracking process, a novel tracking approach was proposed, an extension of the TLD algorithm, in order to track multiple targets. The extended approach upgrades the original system, which can only track a single target, which must be selected before the detection and tracking process. The greatest challenge to vehicle tracking is long-term tracking. The target object can change its appearance during the process and illumination and scale changes can also occur. The original TLD feature assumed that tracking can make errors during the tracking process, and the accumulation of these errors could cause tracking failure, so the original TLD proposed using a learning approach in between the tracking and the detection by adding a pair of inspectors (positive and negative) to constantly estimate errors. This thesis extends the TLD approach with a new detection method in order to achieve multiple-target tracking. A Forward and Backward Tracking approach has been proposed to eliminate tracking errors and other problems such as occlusion. The main purpose of the proposed tracking system is to learn the features of the targets during tracking and re-train the detection classifier for further processes.
This thesis puts particular emphasis on vehicle detection and tracking in different extreme scenarios such as crowed highway vehicle detection, blurred images and changes in the appearance of the targets. Compared with currently existing detection and tracking approaches, the proposed approaches demonstrate a robust increase in accuracy in each scenario.


Nowadays, cameras and other exteroceptive sensors are on board of a large variety of automatic platforms, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), space exploration probes and missiles. However, apart from this latter application, they are mostly used as payload and not to pilot the vehicle itself. In this paper, we focus on the use of computer vision for UAV perception to navigate through the environment and model it. This function is typically needed at low altitude in unknown or GPS-denied conditions. The measurements from exteroceptive sensors can then be processed to obtain information about the motion of the UAV, or the 3D structure of the environment. Our contribution is presented starting with the vision-based closed control loop, where image-based navigation is integrated to UAV control. Then, we focus on proper motion estimation techniques, like mapless relative terrain navigation or map-based GPS alternatives. Eventually, environment mapping solutions are proposed. In most cases, real image sequences coming from an aircraft or a hand-held sensor are used for validation. Our research underlines the need for new co-designed 3D sensors and massivelyparallel computation technologies to go further in vision-based UAV navigation.


Employers are the heart of the American pension system and yet they are not well understood by policy makers despite the great influence of Congress on pension design through both regulation and favorable tax treatment of retirement accounts. Employer contributions to employee pensions have remained stagnant and, in some cases, even declined. We conclude that the cause is a flawed system and one that is subsidized by Congress, making employers "race to the bottom."


Typically, all undecomposed metazoans found in formalin‐poisoned cups of sediment traps are considered to be active intruders (or "swimmers") and are removed to prevent an overestimation of the downward particle flux. However, intact metazoans dead before entering the trap should be included in the estimation of downward flux of carbon. Arctic copepods collected in the field were killed either by formalin to mimic death by actively swimming into the formalin‐poisoned cups, or by crowding or high temperature and then preserved in formalin to simulate death before entering the trap. In the crowding and heat treatments, 64% of Calanus hyperboreus and C. glacialis and 44% of Pareuchaeta glacialis differed from copepods killed by formalin in the postmortem posture of the antennules or swimming legs. These frequencies were used to estimate the contribution of passively sinking copepods (PSCs) to the particulate organic carbon (POC) flux measured by a sediment trap moored at 70 m in the Beaufort Sea (Canadian sector of the Arctic Ocean). PSCs represented only a small fraction (<5%) of the copepods collected in the trap, thus justifying the removal of swimmers from samples to avoid a massive overestimation of fluxes. Nevertheless, PSCs contributed 36% of the overall POC flux of 6.8 g C m‐2 yr‐1, and discarding them along with the swimmers would have resulted in a significant underestimation of downward export. Given their rich carbon content (up to 50%), PSCs could be an important food resource for pelagic and benthic scavengers.


The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) consists of over twenty possible symptoms that can be divided into six broad categories. These categories correlate with specific brain networks that regulate emotions, behaviors, and autonomic function. Normal functioning of these networks depends on two key regions: the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex provides top-down executive control over amygdala, whereas the amygdala is critical for threat detection and activation of the 'fight or flight' response. Events that trigger extreme and/or prolonged fear can cause persisting dysregulation within the prefrontal-amygdala circuit, resulting in PTSD symptomatology. Studies indicate that effective treatment of PTSD, either psychotherapy or medication, reverses this prefrontal-amygdala dysregulation. This review article summarizes current knowledge and theories available in the medical literature from NCBI's PubMed database regarding the underlying brain networks involved in PTSD.