Opposition to immigration in the United States is often phrased as a fear that newcomers will compete with citizens for jobs, drive down wages, and displace American workers. In response, immigrants' rights advocates advance several arguments. To counteract the claim that ongoing immigration is harmful to US workers, we cite the large majority of economists whose studies have found immigrant workers have either no impact or a net positive impact on native wages and the employment of natives at a national level. In shorthand, immigrants come to the United States to fill "jobs Americans won't do." To encourage support for the rights of immigrants in the workplace, we contend that reinforcing immigrant workers' rights should be of concern for all workers, because everyone in the job market is harmed when a set of workers is unable to demand compliance with basic laws, much less to organize for better treatment than these minimum standards provide. This essay explores the contradictions between these arguments, in the process seeking out a more complex truth behind the simplified assertions on which each rests. The most obvious conflict lies right on the surface, although I have not seen it explicitly discussed: if immigrants do not have a negative impact on natives' wages and employment rates, and if they are indeed taking jobs "Americans won't do," then they are not competing with natives for jobs. But if immigrants don't compete with natives, why (beyond human kindness) should native workers care about the enforcement of immigrant workers' rights? While I argue that this apparent conflict can be largely resolved through a closer examination of economists' findings, disaggregated on several levels, I go on to raise other concerns that I do not have such an easy time addressing. In search of a road out of these dilemmas, the essay concludes with thoughts about how we might advocate for immigrant workers rights and immigration reform in ways that are both more consistent with reality on the ground and more effective in fostering solidarity between immigrants and native workers.


Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world and its incidence is on the rise. Maintenance of continuous normoglycaemic conditions is the key goal for the management of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in patients. Glucose responsive insulin delivery (GRID) systems have the potential to act as artificial pancreas as they can modulate the insulin release relative to external glucose concentrations. GRIDs can not only achieve tighter glycaemic control by preventing both hypo- and hyperglycaemia, but also eliminate the need for frequent finger-stick glucose tests and multiple daily insulin injections. In this research, we examined the selectivity of and insulin release from two boronic acids (2-formyl-3-thienylboronic acid (FTBA) and 4-formylphenylboronic acid (FPBA)) to glucose when conjugated to chitosan as nanoparticles. Adsorption of glucose to BA: chitosan conjugates was dose-dependent up to 1:1 at 35 and 42% for FPBA and FTBA respectively but the FTBA conjugates adsorbed more glucose and fructose at respective FPBA ratios. The affinity of both BA conjugates to glucose decreased with increase in BA ratio. On the other hand, the affinity of both BA conjugates for fructose decreased from ratio 1:1 to 2:1 then rose again at 3:1. Insulin release from FPBA nanoparticles (FPBAINP) and FTBA nanoparticles (FTBAINP) were both concentration-dependent within glyceamically relevant values (1-3mg/ml glucose and 0.002mg/ml fructose). Furthermore, the total amounts of insulin released from FPBAINP in both the media were higher than from FTBAINP. Both FPBAINP and FTBAINP have the potential for development as a glucose-selective insulin delivery system in physiological settings.


Our concern is with how changes in organizational slack affect knowledge creation in product development projects. We operationalize a change in organizational slack as changed possibilities to depart from project deliverables in NPD projects. Through case research in high velocity industries we identify the effect a change in organizational slack has on knowledge creation processes inside product development projects. In particular we highlight the effects on tacit and explicit knowledge. More specifically we find that reduced slack creates a focus on explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge, which may reduce the ability to create knowledge creation and ultimately to innovate.


The requirement for tertiary education for officers in the Malaysian
Armed Forces (MAF) has long been recognised. In the 1960s there was some form of
tertiary education programme for selected officer cadets as well as young officers in
the Engineer Corps and Electrical and Mechanical Engineer Corps of the Malaysian
Army and corresponding branches in the Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) and the
Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF). Howevever, due to the absence of clear policy
guidance and directives from the Armed Forces Council (AFC), which i s the highest
governing body of the MAF. the programme unfortunately was haphazardly
administered and experienced many problems. This led to the introduction of the
Armed Forces Tertiary Education Scheme (AFTES) in 1980 with the fol lowing
objectives: first, to meet the MAF requirement for qualified officers in the
professional. managerial and technical fields: and second. to raise the general level of
academic education of military officers so that the quality of military professionalism
can be improved.


This paper considers the fundamental problem of learning a complete (orthogonal) dictionary from samples of sparsely generated signals. Most existing methods solve the dictionary (and sparse representations) based on heuristic algorithms, usually without theoretical guarantees for either optimality or complexity. The recent $\ell^1$-minimization based methods do provide such guarantees but the associated algorithms recover the dictionary one column at a time. In this work, we propose a new formulation that maximizes the $\ell^4$-norm over the orthogonal group, to learn the entire dictionary. We prove that under a random data model, with nearly minimum sample complexity, the global optima of the $\ell^4$ norm are very close to signed permutations of the ground truth. Inspired by this observation, we give a conceptually simple and yet effective algorithm based on `matching, stretching, and projection' (MSP). The algorithm provably converges locally at a superlinear (cubic) rate and cost per iteration is merely an SVD. In addition to strong theoretical guarantees, experiments show that the new algorithm is significantly more efficient and effective than existing methods, including KSVD and $\ell^1$-based methods. Preliminary experimental results on real images clearly demonstrate advantages of so learned dictionary over classic PCA bases.


We present a multi-modal approach for automatically generating hierarchical tutorials from instructional makeup videos. Our approach is inspired by prior research in cognitive psychology, which suggests that people mentally segment procedural tasks into event hierarchies, where coarse-grained events focus on objects while fine-grained events focus on actions. In the instructional makeup domain, we find that objects correspond to facial parts while fine-grained steps correspond to actions on those facial parts. Given an input instructional makeup video, we apply a set of heuristics that combine computer vision techniques with transcript text analysis to automatically identify the fine-level action steps and group these steps by facial part to form the coarse-level events. We provide a voice-enabled, mixed-media UI to visualize the resulting hierarchy and allow users to efficiently navigate the tutorial (e.g., skip ahead, return to previous steps) at their own pace. Users can navigate the hierarchy at both the facial-part and action-step levels using click-based interactions and voice commands. We demonstrate the effectiveness of segmentation algorithms and the resulting mixed-media UI on a variety of input makeup videos. A user study shows that users prefer following instructional makeup videos in our mixed-media format to the standard video UI and that they find our format much easier to navigate.


The paper links finance theory to labor economics and political economy in the context of migration and immigration policy. Most research treating the impact of immigration has focused on the consequences for employees as measured by wages, earnings, and employment. Less is known about the impact on employers. We lack answers to basic questions concerning the quantitative impact of immigrants on employer profit, and which employers are most likely to gain (suffer) increased (reduced) profits as a result of immigration. Using event study analysis, I measure the impact of immigration policy on the profit of employers and shareholders, particularly in those industries with high needs for skilled immigrants. The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) of 1998 nearly doubled the available number of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers in FY 1999. It was the first time that the U.S. government raised the annual cap of H-1B visa since 1990. I focus on this bill and analyze whether and by how much its passage increased shareholders' profit. The empirical results show that employers and shareholders in the top H-1B visa user industries enjoyed significant and positive returns with the passage of the ACWIA of 1998. Shareholders in high-tech industries (the top users of H-1B visa, 80% of total) such as "Computers and related equipment", and "Computer and data processing services" gained, respectively, an average 21.54% (15.88 if weighted) and 22.77% (18.11 if weighted) in cumulative excess returns in the month after the Act was passed, while industries with little need for H-1B visas experienced no significant changes in cumulative excess returns. Robustness testing including international factor comparisons, semiparametric modeling and a sample-split Chow structural break test support the results.


The Specialised Commercial Crime Court was established to hear cases of commercial criminality, brought to trial by the Specialised Commercial Crime Unit. The integration of the three main functions of the criminal justice system - investigation, prosecution and adjudication - is highly regarded as one of the best examples of successful criminal justice reform in South Africa. But before this particular model is replicated elsewhere, its undoubted success must be interrogated. However, it is difficult to be sure just what it is that has generated the service delivery improvements.


This honours thesis examines the history of the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre (LBCIC) and the representation and acceptance of it within the community of Lethbridge as well as the Centre's influence on the local community. The LBCIC represents the wider fight for women's reproductive rights, acceptance of all sexualities, and women's equality in the 1970s. This Southern Albertan organization is particularly significant because there is still a regional resistance to accessible contraception and women's reproductive rights. The purpose of this honours thesis is to fill the historical gap and to educate scholars and citizens of Southern Alberta on this significant history of regional women's activism. This research illustrates how the community of Lethbridge was divided in terms of social views, mores and acceptance of the services and education provided by LBCIC. The story of the struggle to establish the LBCIC in Southern Alberta enlarges the history of birth control activism in Canada. Moreover, I hope to inspire continued awareness of the importance of women's reproductive rights through this research. The first chapter, using material from interviews recognizes the organized activism of these five women, and how they raised consciousness about women's reproductive rights in Lethbridge, and Canadian, society during the 1970s. The first chapter also determines that their advocacy widens the national historical narrative on birth control and women's reproductive rights activism by including Southern Albertan, rural, and small town activist experiences. The second chapter investigates letters to Lethbridge City Council during the 1974 LBCIC funding controversy, analyzing public declarations of parental authority to argue against the supporters of the LBCIC. Chapter three discusses the eroding boundaries public/private divide posed by birth control debate. Karissa Patton Community, Contraception, and Controversy 8


Picasso called Dali "an outboard motor that's always running." Dali thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics - and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This lively monograph presents the infamous Surrealist in full color and in his own words. His provocative imagery is all here, from the soft watches to the notorious burning giraffe. A friend of the artist for over thirty years, privy to the reality behind Dali's public image, author Robert Descharnes is uniquely qualified to analyze Dali - both the man and the myth.


Spreadsheets made their first appearance for personal computers in 1979 in the form of VisiCalc, an application designed to help with accounting tasks. Since that time, the diversity of applications of the spreadsheet program is evidenced by its continual reappearance in scholarly journals. Nowhere is its application becoming more marked than in the field of education. From primary to tertiary levels, the spreadsheet is gradually increasing in its importance as a tool for teaching and learning. By way of an introduction to the new electronic journal Spreadsheets in Education, the editors have compiled this overview of the use of spreadsheets in education. The aim is to provide a comprehensive bibliography and springboard from which others may develop their own applications and reports on educational applications of spreadsheets. For despite its rising popularity, the spreadsheet has still a long way to go before becoming a universal tool for teaching and learning, and many opportunities for its application have yet to be explored. The basic paradigm of an array of rows-and-columns with automatic update and display of results has been extended with libraries of mathematical and statistical functions, versatile graphing and charting facilities, powerful add-ins such as Microsoft Excel's Solver, attractive and highlyfunctional graphical user interfaces, and the ability to write custom code in languages such as Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications. It is difficult to believe that Bricklin, the original creator of VisiCalc could have imagined the modern form of the now ubiquitous spreadsheet program. But the basic idea of the electronic spreadsheet has stood the test of time; indeed it is nowadays an indispensable item of software, not only in business and in the home, but also in academe. This paper briefly examines the history of the spreadsheet, then goes on to give a survey of major books, papers and conference presentations over the past 25 years, all in the area of educational applications of spreadsheets.


The purpose of this research
was to investigate how work orientation (job, career, and calling) affects the professional life of
leaders; and how leaders perceive their work regarding these three dimensions. In
addition, this study aimed to relate work orientation to performance. Also, phenomenology approach allowed a deep investigation of the experience of leaders with regard to their work. For this purpose, two surveys were used; one
was on work orientation and the other on performance. After completion of the
surveys, six participants were invited to participate in an in-depth interview.
The participants were aligned with the calling orientation and had a high
performance at work. They described their work as integrated into their lives,
involving their families in decisions, helping people, and desiring to make a
difference in this world. Also, the findings showed that people who live a
calling feel that work and life have intertwined meanings. The motivation,
well-being, connection with an organization, engagement with work, and having a
purpose were factors that had significance for those who perceive work as a calling.
The main results were that the participants faced new challenges, built new
meanings and understandings about work during their careers. Each experience
helped them to improve the next, while also improving their performance. The
relationship between these factors revealed a cycle of meanings. The cycle
represents the evolution of the creation of new meanings which defines how
people perceive their work and how that influences performance. Furthermore, this
study showed that it is possible to change the perception of work through goals,
achievement, working context, the adversities faced, stages of life, and the work
environment. All of these lead to new meanings and becoming aligned to
different dimensions of work orientation.


In this thesis, we would like to present a new way to enhance the "depth map" image which is called as the fusion of depth images. The goal of our thesis is to try to enhance the "depth images" through a fusion of different classification methods. For that, we will use three similar but different methodologies, the Graph-Cut, Super-Pixel and Principal Component Analysis algorithms to solve the enhancement and output of our result. After that, we will compare the effect of the enhancement of our result with the original depth images. This result indicates the effectiveness of our methodology.


We investigate the onset of instability in a variety of fluid models, and present results and details of their computation in each case. The fluid models we consider are: convection in the setting of the Navier-Stokes equations with boundary slip; Poiseuille-type solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, again with boundary slip; Poiseuillfe-type solutions of the Green-Naghdi and dipolar fluid equations. In Chapter two we examine the onset of thermal convection in a thin fluid layer, with slip boundary conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the layer. We show that non-zero boundary conditions do not affect the classical steady state solution, and the principle of exchange of stabilities still applies. It is seen that boundary slip reduces the critical Rayleigh number at which convection begins, below that found in the setting of no-slip boundary conditions. The next two chapters concern the transition to turbulence of pressure driven flow in a microchannel, at the boundaries of which the fluid obeys slip boundary conditions. In Chapter three we perform linear and nonlinear stability analyses for this flow, and show that we do not have exchange of stabilities for such flows. In Chapter four we perform a linear stability analysis for channel flow in the case when the fluid viscosity is a function of temperature. We show that for pressure driven flow in the plane, boundary slip stabilizes the flow. In Chapter five we develop a model of thread-annular flow, in which we believe boundary slip to be an important part. As well as our development of the model, we present previously unpublished results on the linear stability of thread-annular flow to non-axisymmetric disturbances. Some surprising behaviour is observed in the neutral curves, including behaviour missed by the computations of previous authors. Finally, we use Chapter six to discuss two alternative fluid models: the Green- Naghdi equations and the dipolar equations. We find Poiseuille flow type solutions in both of these settings, and perform linear stability analyses. These fluid models are systems of fourth order differential equations, and we show that the fourth order derivative terms dominate the stability of the flow.


The ascorbic acid and total phenolic content to antioxidant activity of fresh juices of four ripe and unripe citrus fruits namely Citrus limon , C. reticulata , C. sinensis and C. aurantium were compared. The fruits were collected from local market and the pulp and seed free juices were collected. The pH and total acidity were determined. Ascorbic acid content and total phenolic content of fresh fruit juices were determined by volumetric and Folin-Ciocalteu reagent method respectively. Antioxidant activity of fruit juices was determined by two in vitro assays namely DPPH free radical scavenging assay and Ferric reducing assay. The pH was lesser in unripe fruit juices. Acidity, ascorbic acid and total phenolic contents were high in unripe fruit juices. Ascorbic acid and total phenolic content was high in C. aurantium and C. sinensis respectively. In DPPH assay, C. limon , C. reticulata and C. sinensis exhibited stronger scavenging potential when compared to C. aurantium . Ferric reducing potential was higher in C. sinensis followed by others. Overall, unripe fruit juices have displayed stronger antioxidant activity when compared to ripe fruit juices. In this study, the antioxidant activity of fruit juices was shown to be directly related to the content of ascorbic acid and total phenolics except in case of C. aurantium . The lower antioxidant activity of ripe fruit juices could be due to the possible reduction in the ascorbic acid and total phenolic content during ripening.


Objective: To evaluate the hepatoprotective effect of Ambrex, a polyherbal formulation against D–galactosamine (D-GLN) induced hepatotoxicity in Swiss albino mice as well as in Chang liver cell lines. Materials and Methods: Ambrex was orally administered for a period of 7 days at dose levels of 250 and 500 mg/kg b.wt. D-GLN (250 mg/kg b.wt, i.p) was administered 24h prior to sacrifice the animals. The protective effect of Ambrex was evaluated by measuring plasma levels of aspartate transaminase (SGOT), alanine transaminase (SGPT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), γ–glutamyltransferase (γGT) and total bilirubin. Its effect on antioxidants such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and reduced glutathione (GSH) and lipid peroxide(LPO) was also determined. Histopathological evaluation of liver tissues was carried out. Results: Data revealed that Ambrex was able to restore the levels of antioxidants such as SOD, Catalase, and Glutathione to near normal and reduced the elevated plasma levels of SGOT, SGPT, ALP, γ – GT and total bilirubin. It also inhibited the formation of hepatic malondialdehyde induced by D GLN. In vitro studies revealed that Ambrex protected DGLN induced hepatotoxicity (30μM/ ml) at dose levels of 5, 50 and 500ng/ml. Further, mRNA expression also illustrated that Ambrex inhibited the over expression of Bax, Caspase 3, TNF–α, IL–2 and CYP–450. A substantial decrease in the mRNA expression of anti-apoptotic marker Bcl2 was also observed. Conclusion: Results suggest that Ambrex has appreciable hepatoprotective effect which was evident from both in vivo and in vitro results.


Oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancer (oral cancer) is a deadly disease that is increasing in incidence. Worldwide 5-year survival is only 50% due to delayed intervention with more than half of the diagnoses at stage III and IV, whereas earlier detection (stage I and II) yields survival rates up to 80% to 90%. Salivary soluble CD44 (CD44), a tumor-initiating marker, and total protein levels may facilitate oral cancer risk assessment and early intervention. This study used a hospital-based design with 150 cases and 150 frequency-matched controls to determine whether CD44 and total protein levels in oral rinses were associated with oral cancer independent of age, gender, race, ethnicity, tobacco and alcohol use, and socioeconomic status (SES). High-risk subjects receiving oral cancer prevention interventions as part of a community-based program (n = 150) were followed over 1 year to determine marker specificity and variation. CD44 ≥5.33 ng/mL was highly associated with case status [adjusted OR 14.489; 95% confidence interval (CI), 5.973–35.145; P < .0001, vs. reference group CD44 <2.22 ng/mL and protein <1.23 mg/mL]. Total protein aided prediction above CD44 alone. Sensitivity and specificity in the frequency-matched study was 80% and 48.7%, respectively. However, controls were not representative of the target screening population due, in part, to a high rate of prior cancer. In contrast, specificity in the high-risk community was 74% and reached 95% after annual retesting. Simple and inexpensive salivary CD44 and total protein measurements may help identify individuals at heightened risk for oral cancer from the millions who partake in risky behaviors. Cancer Prev Res; 9(6); 445–55. ©2016 AACR.


Trust is vital for market development, but how can trust be enhanced in a marketplace? A common view is that more trusting may help to build trust, especially in less developed economies. In this paper, we argue that more trusting may lead to less trust. We set up a rational expectation model in which a marketplace uses buyer protection to promote buyer trusting. Our results show that buyer protection may reduce trust in equilibrium and even hinder market expansion because it triggers differential entry between honest and strategic sellers and may induce more cheating from strategic sellers. Using a large transaction-level data set from the early years of Eachnet.com (an eBay equivalent in China), we find evidence that is consistent with the model predictions. Stronger buyer protection leads to less favorable evaluation of seller behavior and is associated with slower market expansion. These findings suggest that a trust-promoting policy aiming at buyer trusting may not be effective if it is not accompanied by additional incentives to improve seller trustworthiness.


Zircon typology was developed nearly half a century ago as a tool for constraining the thermochemical conditions in granitic magmas from the morphology of zircon prismatic and pyramidal crystal surfaces. Although the method precedes experimentally constrained zircon-based thermometers (zircon saturation, Ti-in-zircon), the morphology of zircon remains an important criterion for zircon studies commonly relying on visual recognition of crystals during sample purification via hand-picking. This may introduce selection bias if morphologically distinct zircon crystals are present in a population. We conducted a comparison between zircon typology and thermochemical constraints from zircon thermometry and whole rock compositions. Therefore, we focused on zircon populations from diverse volcanic rocks from the Central Anatolian Volcanic Province (CAVP), which erupted during the Upper Miocene to Quaternary in a continental environment in a postcollisional extensional regime. Neogene rhyolitic volcanism produced widespread pyroclastic rocks (ignimbrites, and subordinate fall-out deposits), which are interstratified with fluviolacustrine sediments and local lava flows originating from various volcanic centers in the region. Zircon crystals from Neogene ignimbrites are mostly intermediate-temperature, calc-alkaline hybrid type, whereas zircons from Quaternary rhyolitic domes/lavas fall into typology trends assigned to subalkaline mantle-type granites with low temperatures and high alkalinity indices. Trends in zircon saturation and zircon crystallization temperatures in CAVP ignimbrites are broadly consistent with typology temperature estimates, but temperature differences between these estimates are slightly higher or lower. However, these deviations may partly result from zircon typology relying on crystal shape, and thus the latest crystallization event, which could result in bias between the granitic rocks used for the original typology development and the volcanic rocks investigated here. Our results show that typology differences exist between zircon populations from both Miocene ignimbrites and Quaternary rhyolitic domes/lavas of the CAVP. These differences affect the temperature values obtained from zircon typologies that also correlate with conventional quantitative thermometric calculations.


Oblique scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (oSLO) is a recently developed technique to provide three-dimensional volumetric fluorescence imaging in retina over a large field of view, without the need for depth sectioning. Here in the paper, we present high-speed volumetric fluorescein angiography (vFA) in mouse retina in vivo by oSLO. By simply using a low-cost industrial CMOS camera, we improved the imaging speed by ~10 times comparing to our previous results, achieving vFA at 2 volumes per second. Enabled by high-speed vFA, we visualized hemodynamics at single capillary level in 3D and provided methods to quantify capillary hematocrit, absolute capillary blood flow speed, and detection of capillary flow stagnancy and stalling. The quantitative metrics for capillary hemodynamics at 3D retinal capillary network can offer valuable insight in vision science and retinal pathologies.


This investigation of Upper Cretaceous and lower Paleogene sediments from the Tibetan Himalayas, based on three stratigraphic sections from the southern margin of Asian Plate and nine sections from the northern Indian Plate margin, provides the first high resolution biostratigraphic description of the region. The sedimentary successions from these two plate margins evolved during the following depositional stages, which we here divide into eleven new biozones (TLK2-3 and TP1-9); (i) an outer neritic stage from the Coniacian to the Maastrichtian, dominated by keeled planktonic foraminifera (PF), such as Globotruncana (TLK2); (ii) a latest Maastrichtian forereef assemblage dominated by Lepidorbitoides, Omphalocyclus andOrbitoides (TLK3); (iii) an early Paleocene, intermittently occurring backreef/shallow reefal warm environment with benthic assemblages dominated by small miliolids and rotaliids, such as Daviesina and Lockhartia (TP1-2); (iv) a late Paleocene-early Eocene, shallow reefal environment dominated by warm water forms, such as Alveolina, Assilina and Nummulites (TP3-7); (v) a depositional stage showing a slight deepening of the reef, with forereef assemblages, lasting until the end of theYpresian (TP8); (vi) a final, early Lutetian depositional stage characterised by the complete disappearance of the larger benthic foraminifera (LBF) and their reefal environment, which was replaced by PF assemblages with intense reworking of pelagic facies triggered by the tectonics of the India-Asia collision (TP9). During the course of this study two unnamed species have been identified and described, Lepidorbitoides sp. A and Discocyclina sp. A, from the Xigaze forearc basin. The high resolution depositional and biostratigraphic scheme defined here for the southern Himalayan region gives greater insight into the general evolution of this globally important tectonic region.We have confirmed earlier observations that many LBF forms appear about 1Ma later in the eastern part of Tethys than they do in the west, reflecting their previously inferred gradual eastern paleogeographic migration. Additionally, this study has allowed us to refine the biostratigraphic ranges of some LBF of the Eastern Tethys, and for the first time to exactly correlate these Eastern Tethyan zones with the Shallow Benthic Zones (SBZs) of the Western Tethys.


AbstractNuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has been used as a common and powerful tool for petrophysical investigation of fluid-bearing porous media. A major complication of NMR analysis occurs, however, when diffusion of fluid protons through magnetic field heterogeneities becomes nonnegligible. A quantity called the secular relaxation rate (1/T2 sec) has been defined as the difference in transverse and longitudinal relaxation rates (1/T2-1/T1) and can be shown to isolate the effects of diffusion as a function of pore system parameters. We have developed results that extract internal magnetic field gradient strengths based on changes in T2 sec as a function of the NMR interecho spacing. We also indicated that an optimization algorithm can be used to invert for volumetrically weighted mean pore sizes. The benefit of these types of analyses is to provide simple methodologies for inferring the average strengths of internal magnetic field gradients and pore sizes from NMR measurements without the need for inde...


Expanded glass particles (EGP) are used to manufacture Al syntactic foams using a simple vacuum casting method. Clamping of the casting in the stainless steel mold is observed when preheating the mold to >400 C, causing damage to the EGP, resulting in a weaker foam but with the significant advantage of eliminating the yield drop, improving the energy absorption characteristics. The same effect in castings that are not clamped (for mold preheats <400 °C) can be achieved by quenching in liquid nitrogen. These "low strength" syntactic metal foams are a cost‐effective alternative to metal foams and porous metals (in terms of specific strength, stiffness, and energy absorption) rather than "conventional" syntactic foams which contain smaller, stronger, hollow microspheres.


OBJECTIVE
This study was designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of reduced B vitamins as monotherapy in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) who were also positive for at least 1 methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) polymorphism associated with depression and further test the hypothesis that reduced (metabolized) B vitamins will lower homocysteine in a majority of clinically responding patients.

METHODS
330 adult patients with MDD (DSM-5) and positive for either MTHFR C677T or A1298C polymorphism were enrolled in a trial conducted between August 1, 2014, and April 3, 2015. 160 patients received placebo, while 170 received a capsule containing a combination of reduced B vitamins. Plasma homocysteine levels were measured at baseline and week 8. The Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) was used to evaluate efficacy for MDD.

RESULTS
159 of 170 vitamin-treated patients and 123 of 160 placebo-treated patients were completers. Of the active treatment group, 131 (82.4%) showed a reduction in homocysteine (for a mean in this subgroup of 25%, P < .001), while 28 (17.6%) showed no significant change. Placebo patients demonstrated a small elevation in homocysteine. Active-treatment patients demonstrated, on average, a 12-point reduction on the MADRS by week 8, and 42% achieved full remission (P < .001). No side effect was significantly different between groups. No patients experienced mania.

CONCLUSIONS
A combination of reduced B vitamins and micronutrients, when used in the treatment of MDD in patients with MTHFR polymorphism, resulted in a separation from placebo by week 2, and 42% of the treatment arm achieved remission by week 8. Further, clinical improvement correlated with a significant reduction in homocysteine levels in a majority of responders. These results support the homocysteine theory of depression and the safety and therapeutic benefit of reduced B vitamins as monotherapy for MDD, particularly in patients with MTHFR polymorphism.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02709668.


Decision-making in institutional/professional settings has remained an established theme for social science and communication researchers. In contemporary western societies, the conditions of decision making are rapidly changing with the foregrounding of division of professional labour and distributed expertise against the backdrop of a client-centred ideology that legitimises shared decision-making. Increasingly, in health and social care settings, key decisions concerning clients are arrived at in team meetings, which have consequences both for the decisional processes and outcomes. This edited volume for the first time brings together a number of empirically grounded studies focusing on how team talk is functional to decision-making (in terms of problem formulation, generation of options, assessment of solutions etc.), with tensions, at the interactional level, between institutional and professional ways of categorising people, events and evidence


Governments in Europe have emphasized the development of more autonomous public universities over the last couple of decades. Often, the aim of these reform policies has been to stimulate to a more competitive and agile higher education sector, where increased formal autonomy is perceived as a key condition to strengthen the strategic capacity of universities. These reforms have resulted in considerable shifts in the internal governance models of some universities, while others have kept their traditional governance models. In this article, instrumental and cultural perspectives derived from organizational theory are used as lenses to compare how universities with different internal governance models organize and structure their strategic development processes. Our findings suggest that internal governance models have little impact on the design and organization of strategic processes. In conclusion, it is argued that changes in internal governance arrangements alone are not enough to drive transformation in higher education institutions, and the issue of formal institutional autonomy is intimately linked to how various policy instruments at the system level are designed and coordinated.


In this paper, we present an AR Petite Theater, a story book that enables role-play using augmented reality (AR) technology. It provides an opportunity for children to learn the ability of empathy through interactive reading experience by thinking and speaking in accordance with the character's role of the story. In general, empathy is one of most important elements for children to make friends at school and to expand their social relations. In particular, it is crucial for early school-age children who have difficulties in getting along with friends due to their egocentric perspective. Through the experiment with 24 six-year-old children, we measured children's role-playing participation and perspective taking state. As a result, more empathic behaviors were revealed in the AR group. Children in the AR condition were more actively involved in role-playing and showed less unrelated perspectives than children in the non-AR condition. Therefore, we verified that AR Petite Theater had the potential of expanding children's ability to empathize with others.


The last two decades have seen great economic change in Asia and this has impacted upon the vexed question of access to affordable healthcare and medicines in many Asian states. In this book Locknie Hsu examines the issue of access to medicines in Asia from a fresh perspective which embraces trade and investment law, innovation, intellectual property law, competition policy and public health issues. Hsu explores the key evolving legal issues in these areas, including ASEAN integration, free trade agreement negotiations (such as those for the TPP), bilateral investment agreements and significant court decisions. The book goes on to present proposals for steps to be taken in addressing access to medicines in Asia and will be useful to academic researchers, regulators, law-makers and global organizations involved in the issues surrounding access to affordable healthcare and medicines.


At the heart of this book is the argument that the fact that so many post-structuralist French intellectuals have a strong 'colonial' connection, usually with Algeria, cannot be a coincidence. The 'biographical' fact that so many French intellectuals were born in or otherwise connected with French Algeria has often been noted, but it has never been theorised. Ahluwalia makes a convincing case that post-structuralism in fact has colonial and postcolonial roots. This is an important argument, and one that 'connects' two theoretical currents that continue to be of great interest, post-structuralism and postcolonialism. The re-reading of what is now familiar material against the background of de-colonial struggles demonstrates the extent to which it is this new condition that prompted theory to question long-held assumptions inscribed in the European colonial enterprise. The wide-ranging discussion, ranging across authors as different as Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, Althusser, Cixous, Bourdieu and Lyotard, enables the reader to make connections that have remained unnoticed or been neglected. It also brings back into view a history of struggles, both political and theoretical, that has shaped the landscape of critique in the social sciences and humanities. This clear and lucid discussion of important and often difficult thinkers will be widely read and widely debated by students and academics alike.


The whistleblower programs that the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd–Frank) created within the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) offer large monetary rewards for actionable information. These "bounties" have attracted commentary from the academy, the bar, and corporate America. Less often discussed is section 1057 of Dodd–Frank, which creates a private cause of action for informants who experience retaliation for reporting violations of federal consumer financial law to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). These informants could be a valuable tool for discharging the CFPB's supervisory and enforcement responsibilities. Unfortunately, the history of whistleblower protection under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes–Oxley) demonstrates that section 1057 alone is not a viable long-term incentive for insiders to come forward. Therefore, this Comment argues that Congress or the CFPB should offer bounties for information that protects consumers' financial welfare, much as existing Dodd–Frank programs remunerate individuals who contact law enforcement for the benefit of investors.


INTRODUCTION Premature discontinuation rates among second language students in New Zealand are higher than for most other subjects in secondary schools (McLauchlan, 2006), although this phenomenon has not given rise to a great deal of debate within the NZ language teaching community. Rather, researchers have focused on reasons for students' initial uptake of languages. This paper argues that the difficulty of vocabulary acquisition is a key factor behind the high number of students prematurely dropping out of their second language learning programs. It also argues the case for allowing the use of standardised bilingual dictionaries in written second language examinations as a possible way of reducing the burden of memorising vocabulary, the stress and dissatisfaction associated with this task, and of enhancing the work of language students. In spite of the evidence supporting the value of dictionaries in second language assessment, NZ lacks the enlightened and eminently more practical approach of most Australian State and Territory senior secondary assessment boards which allow students to use a monolingual and/or bilingual dictionary in language exams (see ACACA, 2006). METHOD In a recent study into premature discontinuation in Christchurch, NZ, the most frequently cited study-related reason for premature second language discontinuation was 'too difficult' (McLauchlan, 2006). Moreover, among students who cited 'too difficult', vocabulary learning was the most frequently cited biggest problem. Because attrition and persistence are dynamic phenomena and immeasurable by cross-sectional research, for the Christchurch study a three-year longitudinal method was used. The project began in 2004 when 765 Year 11 (third year of secondary school in NZ) language students of Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish were surveyed as to why they had chosen to learn a second language and their intended study duration. In subsequent years of the study, all students who had discontinued their language learning (excluding those who had left school altogether) were contacted and asked why they had prematurely given up the subject they had so willingly chosen. (All students indicated having voluntarily selected their language course without pressure from parents or school.) DISCOURSE Most research into bilingual dictionaries has been conducted in Great Britain in response to their own high second language attrition rate and calls to ease the burden of vocabulary memorisation. The debate gained considerable momentum in 1998 when educational authorities in the UK announced that bilingual dictionaries would be permitted in GCSE second language examinations, and again in 2003 when dictionaries were suddenly banned once more. British research into the issue has typically involved very small samples and writers have focused on the subjective attitudes of teachers and pupils towards dictionaries and how to use them, rather than on dictionaries themselves as * legitimate tools of trade of second language learners * a means of creating a more level playing field in subject selection * away of augmenting academic performance. Concluding that 'design and quality of the dictionary is crucial to ensure its rapid and effective use', Tall and Hurman (2000) evaluated a range of dictionaries used in the UK experiment and found, not surprisingly, that language students preferred dictionaries which provided more than just vocabulary, namely verb forms, expressions, and useful phrases. Asher (1999) looked at the practicalities of dictionaries and the attitudes of language teachers, concluding that most language students were ill-informed about the correct use of bilingual dictionaries. Asher's 'howler' examples of the pitfalls stemming from poor dictionary skills such as Ich Testament nicht ('I will not', using the German noun for 'will' and not the verb) and je feutre ('I felt', using the French noun for 'felt' and not the verb) are relevant and totally credible. …


Investment plays an important role in influencing short-term aggregate demand and in determining the long-run growth potential of the economy. Despite the current debate concerning the potential problem of low investment, there have been few recent empirical studies of aggregate investment in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of Tobin's "q theory" of investment in explaining aggregate investment in Australia, over the period from December 1966 to December 1986. The first part of the paper derives a q theory of investment behaviour based on a model of an optimising firm facing costs to adjusting its capital stock. The second part of the paper explores the empirical relevance of the theory. In testing the q theory we relax the implicit assumption that firms have unlimited access to capital markets, allowing a proportion of aggregate investment to be determined by current profits. Using standard capital stock data, the q theory performs poorly. However, the cost of adjustment model implies that the conventional capital stock data needs to be revised to allow for these adjustment costs. Once this is done, it is found that the q theory is empirically supported. For plausible values of the cost of adjustment, the results indicate that a lower bound of 10 percent of aggregate investment is explained by q theory and 90 per cent by current profits.


This paper uses the control function to develop a framework for testing for selection bias. The idea behind our framework is if the usual assumptions hold for matching or IV estimators, the control function identifies the presence and magnitude of potential selection bias. Averaging this correction term with respect to appropriate weights yields the degree of selection bias for alternative treatment effects of interest. One advantage of our framework is that it motivates when is appropriate to use more efficient estimators of treatment effects, such as those based on least squares or matching. Another advantage of our approach is that it provides an estimate of the magnitude of the selection bias. We also show how this estimate can help when trying to infer program impacts for program participants not covered by LATE estimates.


Background: A serogroup B meningococcal vaccine (4CMenB) has been licensed by the European commission for use in various infant schedules. However, data are limited on persistence of serum bactericidal antibodies (SBA), which is necessary to inform cost-effectiveness analysis. Methods: Sera were obtained from 3 groups of 5-year-old children previously immunized at 6, 8, 12 and 40 months with either 4CMenB or rMenB (which lacks the outer membrane vesicle of 4CMenB) or at 40 and 42 months with 4CMenB only. Forty-nine control children were also recruited and blood obtained before and after 2 doses of 4CMenB at 60 and 62 months of age. Sera were tested for SBA to meningococcal B reference strains. Results: At 5 years of age, 67% of those receiving 4CMenB in infancy had SBA titers ≥1:4 for strain 44/76, 100% for 5/99, 17% for NZ98/254 and 45% for M10713. Results for rMenB recipients varied from 0 (NZ98/254) to 100% (5/99). Of those immunized with 4CMenB at 40 and 42 months, 38% had SBA titers ≥1:4 at age 5 for 44/76, 100% for 5/99, 0% (NZ98/254) and 83% (M10713). Among controls, SBA titers were ≥1:4 in 4% (H44/76, 5/99), 0% (NZ98/254) and 67% (M10713) at baseline, increasing to 100% (H44/76 and 5/99), 89% (NZ98/254) and 97% (M10713) postimmunization. Conclusion: The variable rates of waning of antibody to the 4 components of 4CMenB complicates estimates of duration of protection and should be taken into account in cost-effectiveness analyses. A 2-dose schedule of 4CMenB in 5-year-old children was immunogenic.


Greek mythology tells of Narcissus, a young man punished by the gods for scorning the many women who fell in love with him. Coming across a pool of clear water, Narcissus saw his own reflection. Made to believe that a spirit lived in the pool, he admired the beauty of the face reflected back at him; unwittingly, Narcissus fell in love with himself and died in the futility of his obsession. Narcissus's downfall wrought by his inability to identify the reflection as his own can be viewed as a metaphor for the fundamental importance of distinguishing what is self from what is not, in many aspects of life. In this special issue, we consider self/nonself discrimination from a range of biological and evolutionary perspectives. Because the idea for this issue originated from concepts in immunology, this is where we start.

Immunity represents an evolutionary response to pathogens, and Medzhitov and Janeway (p. [298][1]) discuss how the innate immune system has developed to distinguish infectious nonself from noninfectious self. Receptors identify molecular cues and activate immune responses. Resemblances to certain receptors in invertebrates suggest that elements of the innate immune system of mammals evolved from more primitive antimicrobial defenses. A Report by Choe et al. (p. [359][2]; also see the accompanying Perspective by Khush, p. [273][3]) describes a pathway in Drosophila for responding to pathogens. Matzinger (p. [301][4]) presents the countersuggestion that the immune system has evolved not to discriminate self from nonself, but rather to recognize "danger" signals within the body, regardless of source.

A different application of the ability to discriminate self from nonself is apparent in certain plant reproductive systems. As Nasrallah describes (p. [305][5]), plants that carry perfect (hermaphroditic) flowers risk evolutionarily destructive inbreeding if self-fertilization isn't discouraged. Self-incompatibility systems of some plants identify, and discriminate against, pollen from the same plant. On the opposite tack from the immune system, action is taken against self rather than nonself.

The organism must also recognize self-identity on higher levels, to effectively manage its interactions with others of its community. The nervous system allows complex multicellular organisms to sense themselves as part of and as distinct from their environment. Churchland (p. [308][6]) discusses how we are just starting to understand how the brain represents self-identity. She suggests that the capacity to distinguish between "inner" and "outer" depictions of self and nonself helps to build a representational model of their relation to one another and may start to explain consciousness itself.

Self may be described in terms of genes that an individual inherits, but distilling descriptions of self and nonself in this way is not easy. Queller and Strassmann (p. [311][7]) discuss how social insects identify themselves both as individuals and as members of their community. Hierarchies of identity exist, and a type of conflict may arise in social insect systems in which genomic imprinting could lead to a fractured sense of communal self. Finally, Brock (p. [314][8]) discusses the interplay between genome, environment, and identity that guides our perspective on the individuality of our human selves and other mammals in the context of new technologies that could enable reproductive cloning.

Whether facing a marauding bacterium or listening to the voices in our heads, we and many other organisms depend for survival, as the ill-fated Narcissus should have, on an ability to effectively distinguish self from nonself.

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1068883
 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1070216
 [3]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1071208
 [4]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1071059
 [5]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.296.5566.305
 [6]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1070564
 [7]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1070671
 [8]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1070371


In Dutch child care it is generally assumed that group functioning influences children's wellbeing and development. Yet, a clear definition of the functioning of a child care group is lacking. This article describes a conceptual framework for child care group functioning based on Robert Hinde's model of social complexity (1987). Group functioning is defined as a relatively stable pattern of interactions between group members, associated with cognitions (expectations) and emotions, that develops over time as a function of internal (group) and external (contextual) influences. Each group has its own unique pattern, which may be described on two dimensions, namely group cohesion and emotional climate. Cohesion is the extent to which interactions within a group reflect togetherness and connectedness. It concerns the number and pattern of dyadic interactions (network structure), the extent to which the behaviour of individual group members is mutually coordinated (joint action) and the degree of positive involvement between group members. The emotional climate concerns the positive versus negative tone of the emotions expressed in the group. Although little is known about group functioning in the child care setting, it is plausible that it influences children's socio-emotional and cognitive development. Therefore group functioning can be seen as a relevant part of child care quality. Additional empirical research is needed to acquire more knowledge about group functioning in child care.


We summarize broadband observations of the TeV-emitting blazar 1ES 1959+650, including optical R-band observations by the robotic telescopes Super-LOTIS and iTelescope, UV observations by Swift Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope, X-ray observations by the Swift X-ray Telescope, high-energy gamma-ray observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope, and very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray observations by VERITAS above 315 GeV, all taken between 2012 April 17 and 2012 June 1 (MJD 56034 and 56079). The contemporaneous variability of the broadband spectral energy distribution is explored in the context of a simple synchrotron self Compton (SSC) model. In the SSC emission scenario, we find that the parameters required to represent the high state are significantly different than those in the low state. Motivated by possible evidence of gas in the vicinity of the blazar, we also investigate a reflected emission model to describe the observed variability pattern. This model assumes that the non-thermal emission from the jet is reflected by a nearby cloud of gas, allowing the reflected emission to re-enter the blob and produce an elevated gamma-ray state with no simultaneous elevated synchrotron flux. The model applied here, although not required to explain the observed variability pattern, represents one possible scenario which can describe the observations. As applied to an elevated VHE state of 66% of the Crab Nebula flux, observed on a single night during the observation period, the reflected emission scenario does not support a purely leptonic non-thermal emission mechanism. The reflected emission model does, however, predict a reflected photon field with sufficient energy to enable elevated gamma-ray emission via pion production with protons of energies between 10 and 100 TeV.


Deep learning (DL) has achieved notable successes in many machine learning tasks. A number of frameworks have been developed to expedite the process of designing and training deep neural networks (DNNs), such as Caffe, Torch and Theano. Currently they can harness multiple GPUs on a single machine, but are unable to use GPUs that are distributed across multiple machines; as even average-sized DNNs can take days to train on a single GPU with 100s of GBs to TBs of data, distributed GPUs present a prime opportunity for scaling up DL. However, the limited bandwidth available on commodity Ethernet networks presents a bottleneck to distributed GPU training, and prevents its trivial realization.
To investigate how to adapt existing frameworks to efficiently support distributed GPUs, we propose Poseidon, a scalable system architecture for distributed inter-machine communication in existing DL frameworks. We integrate Poseidon with Caffe and evaluate its performance at training DNNs for object recognition. Poseidon features three key contributions that accelerate DNN training on clusters: (1) a three-level hybrid architecture that allows Poseidon to support both CPU-only and GPU-equipped clusters, (2) a distributed wait-free backpropagation (DWBP) algorithm to improve GPU utilization and to balance communication, and (3) a structure-aware communication protocol (SACP) to minimize communication overheads. We empirically show that Poseidon converges to same objectives as a single machine, and achieves state-of-art training speedup across multiple models and well-established datasets using a commodity GPU cluster of 8 nodes (e.g. 4.5x speedup on AlexNet, 4x on GoogLeNet, 4x on CIFAR-10). On the much larger ImageNet22K dataset, Poseidon with 8 nodes achieves better speedup and competitive accuracy to recent CPU-based distributed systems such as Adam and Le et al., which use 10s to 1000s of nodes.


This Article contributes to the debate on the efficacy of third party gatekeeping in regulating the capital markets, by presenting empirical evidence of the efficacy of one kind of gatekeeper, a qualified independent underwriter (QIU). Under NASD rules, when an investment bank participating in a securities offering has one of several enumerated conflicts of interest, the securities cannot be sold at a price higher than that recommended by a QIU. Examining 1,188 IPOs from 1997 through 2000 discloses a negative, statistically significant relationship between IPO initial returns and each of (i) the fact that participating NASD members (or their affiliates) are receiving more than 10% of the IPO proceeds and (ii) the fact that a participating NASD member (or its affiliates) owns at least 10% of the issuer's preferred stock or subordinated debt. On the other hand, there is a positive, statistically insignificant relationship between IPO initial return and the fact that a participating NASD member (or its affiliates) beneficially owns at least 10% of the issuer's common stock. For purposes of assessing the impact of potential endogenity, the ATT on initial IPO return using propensity score matching for each of these three types of conflicts requiring QIUs was estimated, producing similar results. These results are not consistent with the certification hypothesis of preexisting investment bank/issuer relationships. The conflict involving greatest certification (common stock ownership) is associated with more, not less, underpricing. The results also indicate proposals to subject all IPO pricing to approval by independent broker-dealers - on which the NASD solicited comments - are likely to be ineffectual. Now forthcoming, Tulane Law Review (2005). The accepted paper version of this abstract can be accessed using the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=596102


To examine the miscoding properties of modified guanine residues bearing increasingly bulky O6-substituents, Rat4 cells, grown in the presence of O6-benzylguanine to deplete the DNA repair protein O6-alkylguanine-DNA alkyltransferase, were transfected with plasmids carrying H-ras genes in which O6-methyl, O6-ethyl- and O6-benzylguanine were substituted for the first, second or both the first and second guanine residues of codon 12 (GGA). DNA from isolated transformed colonies was amplified by PCR and directly sequenced by high-temperature manual and automated methods. The results show that O6-ethylguanine and O6-benzylguanine induced semi-targeted as well as targeted mutations, in contrast to O6-methylguanine, which induced only targeted mutations. When incorporated in place of the first guanine of H-ras codon 12, the targeted mutations induced by all these modified guanines were exclusively G-->A transitions. When incorporated at the second position of codon 12, O6-benzylguanine induced G-->A, G-->T and G-->C mutations. O6-Ethylguanine at the second position induced chiefly G-->A transitions, and O6-methylguanine induced G-->A transitions exclusively. Semi-targeted mutations were strictly G-->A at the base 3' to a position 1 adduct or 5' to a position 2 adduct. The mechanism for induction of targeted mutations probably involves decreasing preference to thymidine incorporation opposite an O6-modified guanine as the size of the O6-substituent increases, while the mechanism for non-targeted mutations may be related to abasic site formation or to translesion synthesis which might be made error-prone by obstructive DNA lesions in this context.


During the 1940s game theory emerged from the fields of mathematics and economics to provide a revolutionary new method of analysis. Today game theory provides a language for discussing conflict and cooperation not only for economists, but also for business analysts, sociologists, war planners, international relations theorists, and evolutionary biologists. Toward a History of Game Theory offers the first history of the development, reception, and dissemination of this crucial theory.Drawing on interviews with original members of the game theory community and on the Morgenstern diaries, the first section of the book examines early work in game theory. It focuses on the groundbreaking role of the von Neumann-Morgenstern collaborative work, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). The second section recounts the reception of this new theory, revealing just how game theory made its way into the literatures of the time and thus became known among relevant communities of scholars. The contributors explore how game theory became a wedge in opening up the social sciences to mathematical tools and use the personal recollections of scholars who taught at Michigan and Princeton in the late 1940s to show why the theory captivated those practitioners now considered to be giants in the field. The final section traces the flow of the ideas of game theory into political science, operations research, and experimental economics.Contributors. Mary Ann Dimand, Robert W. Dimand, Robert J. Leonard, Philip Mirowski, Angela M. O'Rand, Howard Raiffa, Urs Rellstab, Robin E. Rider, William H. Riker, Andrew Schotter, Martin Shubik, Vernon L. Smith


Teenage Pregnancy is recognized as one of this country's most critical social issues. Each year, one out of ten females aged 15 to 19 becomes pregnant. In addition, there are a number of documented complications and consequences for the pregnant teenagers, their children, families and society. In response a number of health education programs have been developed to meet the myriad needs of this aggregate. Unfortunately, most of this cohort do not participate in these health education programs. This study, a part of a larger study, was conducted to identify the health education program elements most important to attract and sustain the participation of pregnant and parenting teens in a health education program. The sociodemographics of the pregnant and parenting teens were identified and linked to program elements. Since sociodemographics are often the first information known about a target group, linking these demographics to health education program elements has implications for program development and marketing. An exploratory survey methodology was used in this study and data were analyzed by measures of central tendency, dispersion, and analysis of variance to understand better the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and importance of the health education program environment for pregnant and parenting teens.


We study of the connection between operator valued central limits for monotone, Boolean and free probability theory, which we shall call the arcsine, Bernoulli and semicircle distributions, respectively. In scalar-valued non-commutative probability these measures are known to satisfy certain arithmetic relations with respect to Boolean and free convolutions. We show that generally the corresponding operator-valued distributions satisfy the same relations only when we consider them in the fully matricial sense introduced by Voiculescu. In addition, we provide a combinatorial description in terms of moments of the operator valued arcsine distribution and we show that its reciprocal Cauchy transform satisfies a version of the Abel equation similar to the one satisfied in the scalar-valued case.


Providing the ability to any law enforcement officer to remotely transfer an image from any suspect computer directly to a forensic laboratory for analysis, can only help to greatly reduce the time wasted by forensic investigators in conducting on-site collection of computer equipment. RAFT (Remote Acquisition Forensic Tool) is a system designed to facilitate forensic investigators by remotely gathering digital evidence. This is achieved through the implementation of a secure, verifiable client/server imaging architecture. The RAFT system is designed to be relatively easy to use, requiring minimal technical knowledge on behalf of the user. One of the key focuses of RAFT is to ensure that the evidence it gathers remotely is court admissible. This is achieved by ensuring that the image taken using RAFT is verified to be identical to the original evidence on a suspect computer.


In this work, we investigate various techniques from the fields of shape analysis and image processing in order to construct a semi-automatic transcription tool for ancient manuscripts. First, we design a shape matching procedure using shape contexts, introduced in [1], and exploit this procedure to compute different distances between two arbitrary shapes/words. Then, we use Fischer discrimination to combine these distances in a single similarity measure and use it to naturally represent the words on a similarity graph. Finally, we investigate an unsupervised clustering analysis on this graph to create groups of semantically similar words and propose an uncertainty measure associated with the attribution of one word to a group. The clusters together with the uncertainty measure form the core of the semi-automatic transcription tool, that we test on a dataset of 42 words. The average classification accuracy achieved with this technique on this dataset is of 86%, which is quiet satisfying. This tool allows to reduce the actual number of words we need to type to transcript a document of 70%.


Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness. In particular, we investigate the role of directed interaction between pairs---such as wall posts, comments, and "likes" --- and consumption of friends' content, including status updates, photos, and friends' conversations with other friends. We find that directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, but has only a modest relationship with bridging social capital, which is primarily related to overall friend network size. Surprisingly, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. Implications for designs to support well-being are discussed.


The past conditional is used in Louisiana French (LF) in two distinct ways that are strikingly different from Standard French (SF) norms, both of which concern the temporal conditional (i.e. the conditional as a tense, as opposed to the modal conditional). First, for many speakers the past conditional has come to be the most frequent and usual way to express the future in the past, regardless of whether the subordinate verb is logically future anterior or simple future in the past. Thus the present conditional is freed up to be used only or principally as a modal conditional. Secondly, the past conditional is not uncommonly used instead of the imparfait. Possible explanations for these two patterns are explored. These innovations do not appear to be survivals of older patterns since they are attested only in two other places which are sociolinguistically similar to Louisiana, namely Missouri French, and marginally in Maritime Acadian. Rather, these developments are in keeping with a larger tendency in LF to prefer analytic over synthetic forms. Additionally, these developments can be understood as partial convergence with English since the auxiliary (almost always /ore/) comes to function like a positional equivalent of English WOULD.


Tunable diode laser based gas detectors are now being used in a wide variety of applications for safety and environmental interest. A fiber-distributed multi-channel open-path H2S sensor based on tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) is developed, the laser used is a telecommunication near infrared distributed feed-back (DFB) tunable diode laser, combining with wavelength modulation spectroscopy technology, a detection limit of 20 ppm.m is demonstrated. Multi-channel detection is achieved by combining optical fiber technique. An on-board reference cell provides on-line sensor calibration and almost maintenance-free operation. The sensor is suitable for large area field H2S monitoring application.


Dr B. J. Walton said that Dr Oxburgh appeared to imply that convection currents were likely to be responsible for plate movements. This did not seem to be necessary if, for example, a lithospheric dome developed by radioactive heating at the base of a large initially stationary area of continental crust, with the result that the lithosphere slid off the dome under its own weight, and started to descend into the lighter asthenosphere at subduction zones. In this case the flow through the asthenosphere would be from the trench to the oceanic ridge, opposite to that generally envisaged for convection currents. Dr R. B. McConnell referred to the outflow of heat at the mid-ocean ridges referred to by Dr Oxburgh and asked whether he thought that the present plan of the world-wide rift system was due to an original pattern of convection cells in the Earth's mantle, as had been formerly suggested, or whether it was not more likely that the heat produced in the mantle by radioactive decomposition found its outlet by making use of segments of a pattern of deep dislocations imposed on the Earth in the early Precambrian? It had been pointed out by several authors that some of the ancestral pre-drift fractures, which were to develop into spreading oceans, can be seen to continue into the continents as deep faults which had been shown in some instances to be resurgent Precambrian lineaments, some segments of which might have served as outlets for convection heat and developed


Many studies have evaluated why male mammals form social groups; few however have investigated how these groups are formed and maintained. We observed behavioral interactions of 15 male river otters (Lontra canadensis) captured in Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska, and held in captivity for 10 mo. Because the otters were captured in various areas and differed in age and relatedness, we were able to test how kinship and age influenced social interactions. We also explored how kinship, age and social interactions in captivity related to geographic spacing after the otters were released back in PWS. In 284 h of observations, the otters exhibited more positive than negative interactions. Social network models indicated that in the early stage of captivity, there were more links among individuals than in the late stage. In the late-stage period, older animals that had higher testosterone levels exhibited increased social distance and lower information centrality (a network connectivity metric). Social distance was not related to genetic distance, nor did it relate directly to age, although both social distance and age were correlated with post-release geographic distance. Thus, the formation of male groups in coastal river otters is largely influenced by familiarity and past experience, rather than kinship. The maintenance of groups, especially during the mating season, is a function of reproductive status and age, with older animals withdrawing from the social network during that time. What other phenotypic characters may contribute to the formation and maintenance of river otter groups merit future exploration.


ABSTRACT: The prenatal encounter is the beginning of the continuum of human life towards self-realization. It presents a unique opportunity for the primary prevention of psychological, emotional, and physical disorders in later life and inspires a new interdisciplinary dialogue that replaces isolation and disagreement. Prenatal science demands a new level of harmony and integration among specialties to understand the nature of all life and supports the needed renaissance of human empathic relationships and spiritual unity in ecological peace. INTRODUCTION The prenatal stage of life represents a unique opportunity for the primary prevention of psychological, emotional and physical disorders in later life. At this stage we can also develop preventive procedures to decrease premature birth and perinatal morbidity and mortality. In order to understand the enormous potential power of the prenatal processes and their impact on the individual's prenatal and postnatal health, we have to ask ourselves what the prenatal stage of life implies. The encounter with the unborn is the beginning of the continuum of human life towards self-realization. The key to this life impulse is for everyone and especially each one of us in psychology and medicine to extend the standard definition of life's continuum to include the prenatal experience because it is an indivisible part of life's continuum. We need to do this because the prenatal stage is what shapes us. And, it determines who we are and what we will become. For the unborn, it is primarily through the imprinting process that this experience is initiated and realized. For the mother, pregnancy, the encounter with the unborn, is her chance for self-realization. For the rest of us this encounter with the unborn is the opportunity to extend and deepen our own understanding of this life continuum wherein there can be found no possible separation between the physical and psychological dimensions of our existence.1 A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE Prenatal and perinatal psychology and medicine is a relatively new interdisciplinary scientific field within medical and psychological research, the practice of which attempts to integrate different disciplines dealing with the basic questions of life and its disturbances. Emphasis is placed on the interdisciplinary character, which enables different scientific specialties such as medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, human ethology, sociology, philosophy and others to meet. And, in dialogue, each is able to find a common language and go through the process of a mutually creative influence or, as it were, a 'cross fertilization'. Prenatal and perinatal psychology and medicine can also serve as a 'psychosomatic' model stressing the indivisibility of 'psychological' and 'physical' processes in the continuum of human life from its very beginning and also the indivisible development of all functions of the central nervous system and the immunological and neuroendocrinological processes. One of the important intentions of this new scientific field is the publication of different methodologies, both from experimentally oriented methods and studies and also from more introspective methods. This new attitude invites us to look for and find a common language. And, through a common language to diminish semantic misunderstandings. It also enables us to define a scientific theory applicable to this new interdisciplinary and integrative approach. Integration linguistically means, among other things, assimilation, fusion, incorporation, combination, unification and harmony. The latter, harmony, should be stressed in particular-harmony and cooperation between different integrated approaches and views, methods and methodologies, theories, ideologies and practices, rather than confrontation and disagreement. Society at large must encourage a sense of responsibility in parentsto-be and counsel couples long before conception about their commitment toward the new life; it is essential that this new life be highly respected from the very beginning and be considered as an equal partner in a dialogue. …


Economic infrastructure hubs, such as ports, are crucial sites for exploring new political geographies. In such environments, mobilities are enabled and rigidly channelled premised on the stasis of the port-as-checkpoint. Such nodes are part of an ever-growing political geography of zones that requires more attention. This article proposes a 'topolographical' approach – a combined heuristic drawing from political topography and topology – to comprehend more fully the transformations in the political geographies of large-scale infrastructures. The cardinal nature of the port of Dar es Salaam makes it a crucial site through which to illustrate the purchase of this framework. The topographical analysis puts forward the port of Dar as archipelago of global territories, within which heterogeneous actors claim graduated authority. Drawing on topology, the article shows what is folded into the port, constantly shaping not only who governs but, more importantly, how power and authority are exercised. It will be shown how imaginaries of the port – as gateway, seamless space, and modernity 'from scratch' – as much as new technological devices work to produce historically and geographically distinct political geographies, and indeed bring new ones into being.


Cullen, Sean. The Prince of Two Tribes . Toronto: Puffin Canada. 2010. Print. Brendan is an ordinary teenager. Or at least he thought he was until he discovered he was a Faerie adopted as an infant into a human family with powers he can barely control and expectations to participate in life-and-death skirmishes between the forces of good and evil. Fortunately he has a few close friends to help him – some his own age and some the very elite of Faerie world who believe he has the power to bring the world back to rights if nurtured properly but without actually knowing too much until the right time. Of course, his is ultimately a lonely path with mysterious connections to the other side he won't share even with his friends and mentors.  He also has an annoying half-sister. Oh, and it turns out the Faerie world overlaps significantly with the human world although we are blissfully unaware most of the time. The above was largely revealed in Book One of the Chronicles of the Misplaced Prince (a.k.a The Prince of Neither Here Nor There) and grudgingly summarised (official complaint to the "Narrators' Grievance Committee" pending) in an introductory note to this volume (i.e. Book Two). It is not-so-gently suggested, in said introductory note, that the first book should be required reading before continuing. However,  as the cover gives little indication this is Book Two of something, a reader might be excused for unwittingly starting in the middle.  Fortunately, the author seems inherently unable to resist the additional role of narrator so the story is littered (or, more generously, "strategically sprinkled") with additional information in the form of introductory notes, footnotes, and chapter introductions. Getting back to the actual story…, it sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? A little Harry Potter-ish, perhaps? Indeed, there are many similarities, but enough difference to set it apart. One obvious difference is a Canadian comedian as author. This is significant. The author's voice comes through strongly not only the thorough footnotes and explanatory additions but also the almost overly-obvious Toronto setting; the language,  conversations, and daily concerns of young teenagers in Canada; the underlying comedic sense;  and, one might surmise but without any real evidence other than the author's age, the youthful influences of Gordon Korman novels, Barenaked Ladies songs (e.g. Grade 9), and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. But I digress (although not unlike the novel itself) [1] . In this instalment, Brendan must prepare physically and mentally for a "proving" ceremony; he has no idea what this entails except that it could prove deadly to himself. In addition, he must deal with the teenage angst of having secrets he thinks no one else could possibly understand as well as an ever-looming Social Studies group presentation assignment. Exciting throughout and lump-in-the-throat emotional at the end. I hate to play along with the "boys don't like to read so you have to trick them into it" stereotype but, if it were true, this one would likely "trick" them (having never been a teenage girl, I'm no expert, but I suspect many girls might like it, too). Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: David Sulz [1] I've tried to capture somewhat the tone of the novel in this review; if you like this style of writing, you might like the book (and vice versa). David is a librarian at the University of Alberta working mostly with scholars in Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. His university studies included: Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics. On the education front, he taught various grades and subjects for several years in schools as well as museums. His interest in Japan and things Japanese stands above his other diverse interests.


This article discusses the construction and representation of nature in the composition and performance of Meredith Monk's song cycle "Facing North" by analyzing the quality of the performing voices, their physicality, and by bringing them into relation to the associations and contexts evoked by the songs' titles. Based on voice and nature concepts in cultural studies, this article argues that this approach creates a very specific concept of nature, which is artistic and artificial at the same time. Through contextualising the concept of nature established in "Facing North" with a specific, gendered construction of nature as basis of a narrative of North American identity as depicted by musicologist Denise Von Glahn, it becomes evident how the composition and performance of "Facing North" at once accord with and oppose to a gendered concept of nature.


In this investigation faba rust Uromyces viciae-fabae was studied for its host range and spore morphology. Three Viciae faba cultivars (Barekat, Saraziry ,Shakh Bozi) and four Pisum sativum cultivars (Green AgroAtriloDorangoMr. Big) comonly grown in Iran were inoculated with urediniospores produced from a single pustule isolate collected from Shushtar and increased on faba bean in the greenhouse. Disease symptoms were recorded 12 days after inoculation. Infection type of the entries, recorded according to Stakman's method, indicated that all the broad bean and pea cultivars were susceptible to the rust isolate. Lens culinaris and Vicia spp. and Lathyrus spp., which have been reported as hosts of this rust, were inoculated by three methods of dusting, brushing and mist spray. However, no rust pustules were produced on any of these plants. Morpholgical studies on photomicrographs and scanning electron micrographs showed that urediniospores have fine echinulations and teliospores are smooth. Morpholgical studies of urediniospores of this isolate from broad bean and pea and also urediniospores of herbarium specimen of this rust on lentils revealed no significant differences for the parameters of spore length, width, number of germ pores and their positions. Also, teliospores of this isolate from the two hosts of faba bean and pea were identical in morphological features. However, statistical analysis showd that teliospores of faba rust isolate differ from those of lens isolate in parameters of spore length, apex length and pedicel length. Germinated teliospores produced four basidiospores on sterigmata. Based on the results of host range and morphological studies, and in accordance with the results of studies by Emeran et al. (2005 and 2008), the rust isolate in this investigation is suggested to be Uromyces viciae-fabae f sp. vicia faba.


Mycotoxicosis caused by Fusarium fungi holds a huge risk considering economic and food safety issues worldwide. By applying milling technologies, we attempted to reduce the concentrates of DON toxin, as it is the most often found toxin in wheat.
The processes of sieving, aspiration and combination had been used on wheat with high DON toxin concentration. As a next step, grains were sorted using a horizontal cylinder separator, assorted by an optical and a gravity separator, and finally, the products were scoured and ground. The contamination level of the wheat and flour samples were defined by the HPLC-MS method.
Regarding the results, it can be stated that toxin concentration was most effectively reduced by optical separation and scouring, and by applying these milling techniques, food safety can be increased significantly.


Basaltic andesite lavas belonging to the Grande Ronde Formation constitute ∼87% of the Columbia River Basalt Group. Although these lavas are chemically evolved, they generally contain <5% phenocrysts. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain this observation. The first hypothesis suggests that Grande Ronde lavas were near-primary melts generated by large-scale melting of eclogite from the inferred Yellowstone plume. The alternative hypothesis proposes that Grande Ronde magmas were extremely hydrous and rose rapidly from the mantle such that the dissolved water kept the magmas close to their liquidi. We present new information on textures and mineral chemistry of phenocrysts in two well-characterized field sections through the Grande Ronde Formation. The new data lead us to conclude that at least some of the Grande Ronde primary magmas were highly hydrous; however, they all underwent extensive fractionation, magma mixing, and degassing in a shallow intrusive network prior to eruption as lava.


Intensive aphasia treatment has been employed with equivocal results likely due to variability in the severity of participants as well as in the parameters that comprise intensity (e.g., session duration). Constraint Induced Language Therapy (CILT; Pulvermuller et al., 2001) is an intensive aphasia therapy that has been replicated successfully and also tends to use similar dosage parameters across replication studies (e.g., Barthel, et al, 2008; Maher, 2006). Meinzer and colleagues (2008; 2007) found that it was their most severely affected participants who tended to benefit most from treatment of CILT, positing that those who had withdrawn from verbal communication the most were those most likely to benefit from the forced use inherent to CILT. It is also possible that since CILT and associated treatment materials was designed for more impaired participants; those more mildly affected may have been insufficiently challenged during the treatment period. If so, it follows that that neural change would be less likely.

The present study employed a multiple probe technique (McReynolds & Kearns, 1983) in which CILT was delivered at a dosage of three hours per day for twenty days. A hierarchy of complex stimuli was created to pose adequate challenge for two individuals with mild aphasia. Discourse analysis and naming response time were used to quantify changes in language efficiency. In addition, fMRI scanning was performed at four time points throughout the treatment process in order to compare potential language changes to changes in neural activation patterns. These results are expected to add to the limited fMRI data currently available for intensive aphasia treatment.


In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay's first paragraph. "With some sorrow, we must confess that unkind comment has reached our ears. Several of our "foreign" students, undoubtedly enmeshed in a web of ignorance, have been heard casting somewhat vitriolic criticisms at our citizenry because of a particular policy of this fair city. The brunt of their remarks seems to be directed toward the use of a certain crystalline compound designed to free city streets of snow and ice. These harsh opinions bring a deep pang to the hearts of we natives who have lived here in Nature's Wonderland all our lives. Being merely victims of circumstance, we feel obliged to set these poor souls aright, placing the responsibility where it properly belongs." Cover Page Footnote Appeared in the issue: Volume 2, Issue 1, 1957. This prose is available in The Angle: http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/angle/vol1957/iss1/9


Australian dryland rivers have distinctive ecologies, intimately linked to their variable flows. The contrasting states of flood and drought mean that dryland rivers fluctuate between being highly connected (during floods: low fragmentation) to being highly disconnected (during droughts: high fragmentation) with the degree of connection between waterbodies on a spatial scale and the time since last connection on a temporal scale strongly influencing community composition. Flow regulation reduces the frequency and duration of flooding, thereby decreasing flow variability and imposing stable low flow conditions and high connectivity between waterbodies. Using macroinvertebrate assemblage data from four Australian dryland rivers (River Murray, Darling River, Cooper Creek and Diamantina River), we calculated various indices of flow variability from 30‐year hydrographs and assessed how well long‐term flow variability, and therefore variable levels of habitat connection, could explain broad patterns of macroinvertebrate assemblage composition. Where hydrological connection between sites was strong (River Murray pool sites) there was extreme similarity between assemblages at each site. Also, for sites where hydrological disconnection was extreme there was similarity between assemblages. There were strong associations between the complex measures of flow variability and the assemblage composition of the four rivers, suggesting that flow variability, and therefore, variable levels of habitat connectivity, may be strong determinants of broad‐scale assemblage composition in dryland rivers. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


By providing guidance about future economic developments, central banks can affect private sector expectations and decisions. This can improve welfare by reducing private sector forecast errors, but it can also magnify the impact of noise in central bank forecasts. I employ a model of heterogeneous information to compare outcomes under opaque and transparent monetary policies. While better central bank information is always welfare improving, more central bank information may not be.


This example-packed overview of contemporary Japanese illustration showcases the works of 100 of Japan's most successful and exciting artists and designers. The images embrace a huge range of styles, from traditional to futuristic, from classic ukiyo-e prints to the worlds of manga and anime. Some look towards urban street culture or build their own surreal dreamscapes, while others revisit a playful world of childhood innocence or explore darker realms of violence and terror. The book also includes ten interviews in which the illustrators discuss their work and what inspires them. The range of amazing images and subjects in this book is hugely memorable, an exciting journey to the utterly idiosyncratic but wonderful world of the Japanese sensibility.


This paper studies learning the representations of whole graphs in both unsupervised and semi-supervised scenarios. Graph-level representations are critical in a variety of real-world applications such as predicting the properties of molecules and community analysis in social networks. Traditional graph kernel based methods are simple, yet effective for obtaining fixed-length representations for graphs but they suffer from poor generalization due to hand-crafted designs. There are also some recent methods based on language models (e.g. graph2vec) but they tend to only consider certain substructures (e.g. subtrees) as graph representatives. Inspired by recent progress of unsupervised representation learning, in this paper we proposed a novel method called InfoGraph for learning graph-level representations. We maximize the mutual information between the graph-level representation and the representations of substructures of different scales (e.g., nodes, edges, triangles). By doing so, the graph-level representations encode aspects of the data that are shared across different scales of substructures. Furthermore, we further propose InfoGraph*, an extension of InfoGraph for semi-supervised scenarios. InfoGraph* maximizes the mutual information between unsupervised graph representations learned by InfoGraph and the representations learned by existing supervised methods. As a result, the supervised encoder learns from unlabeled data while preserving the latent semantic space favored by the current supervised task. Experimental results on the tasks of graph classification and molecular property prediction show that InfoGraph is superior to state-of-the-art baselines and InfoGraph* can achieve performance competitive with state-of-the-art semi-supervised models.


Disability rolls have escalated in developed nations over the last 40 years. The UK, however, stands out because the numbers on these benefits stopped rising when a welfare reform was introduced that integrated disability benefits with unemployment insurance (UI). This policy reform improved job information and sharpened bureaucratic incentives to find jobs for the disabled (relative to those on UI). We exploit the fact that the policy was rolled-out quasi-randomly across geographical areas. In the long-run the policy improved the outflows from disability benefits by 6% and had an (insignificant) 1% increase in unemployment outflows. This is consistent with a model where information helps both groups, but bureaucrats were given incentives to shift effort towards helping the disabled find jobs and away from helping the unemployed. Interestingly, in the short-run the policy had a negative impact for both groups, suggesting important disruption effects. We estimate that it takes about six years for the estimated benefits of the reform to exceed its costs, which is beyond the time horizon of most policy-makers.


This project documents the recent explosion of Chinese contemporary art on the international stage. The participants in this zone of cultural encounter include artists and art professionals from around the world who, in repeated encounters in China and abroad, negotiate what counts as Chinese and what counts as art.Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in China's Capital is an ethnography of worlding: the multiple ways of visualizing the world, and China's place in it, that artists draw upon in their images and lives. Gender plays a central role in the various worldings—semicolonial, revolutionary, and postsocialist—that have accumulated over the twentieth century and continually resurface in Chinese image making practices. What it means then for Chinese contemporary art to go global demands feminist attention to questions of gender, power, and aesthetic form immanent in the social world of visual production. For more information, please seehttp://faculty.washington.edu/swelland/research/ [3].