Most coral reef fishes have non-migratory adults and depend on a pelagic larval stage for dispersal. Species with long pelagic larval duration (PLD) can have tremendous dispersal potential and thus display little geographic-genetic differentiation among reef habitats. Restricted adult niche breadth due to habitat specialization can have the opposite effect of fragmenting populations and increasing geographic-genetic differentiation. If long PLD suffices to ensure widespread gene flow among reef populations, we predict similar geographic-genetic homogene- ity within species whose adults differ in niche breadth. We tested this hypothesis using a compar- ative phylogeographic study of 4 sympatric moray eel species that differ in the amount of available habitat within their reported ranges. We generated molecular genetic data for Echidna nebulosa (N = 79) and Gymnomuraena zebra (N = 67) to measure geographic-genetic structure within these species, whose adult habitat is very restricted for moray eels, and compared these results to iden- tical measurements previously published for habitat generalists Gymnothorax undulatus and Gymnothorax flavimarginatus. These 4 species share an ocean-wide distribution with adults occu- pying the same reefs; however, adults of E. nebulosa and G. zebra are restricted to shallow waters and occupy only 20% of the area occupied by the Gymnothorax species. Mitochondrial (632 bp of cytochrome b and 596 bp of cytochrome oxidase I) genomic sequences revealed high genetic vari- ation (h = 0.995 to 0.998) and low geographic-genetic differentiation (pairwise ΦST < 0.07 and not significant) for each species across 22 000 km of the Indo-Pacific. Nuclear genomic sequences (420 bp of RAG-1 and 746 bp of RAG-2) demonstrated 16 to 25 haplotypes per marker within each species with minimal geographic-genetic differentiation among populations. This suggests that in cosmopolitan and highly dispersive species such as morays, larval life history can ensure wide- spread gene flow despite a 5-fold difference in the habitat breadth occupied by adult populations.


Studies aimed at optimizing resource allocation between different sampling stages are characterized by both simplicity and incompleteness in optimization and economic analysis. The aim of this study was therefore to completely resolve the allocation problem for a four-stage strategy devoted to observational assessment of workrelated postural loads with the precision of the mean estimate considered as 'output'. The derived demand functions for inputs to the four stages were used to derive functions for the minimized cost and the maximized precision of the assessment strategy. The application of the theoretical results to a working posture assessment study led to increased cost efficiency of the assessment strategy investigated in the study. Under the additional constraint that the optimal values must be integers, optimization of this strategy would result in either a 12% reduction in cost or a 7% increase in precision.


Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum Mill) is an important crop in terms of its economic and nutritional value. Many factors, including cultivar, climate, geography, geochemistry, and agricultural practice, can affect its nutrient concentrations. An HJ-biplot study was performed to examine the effects of cultivar (Dorothy, Boludo, Dominique, Thomas, and Dunkan), agricultural practices, climatic factors, and their interactions. Significant differences were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA. All samples were collected and assayed at the same degree of ripeness. In the conventional and organic tomato samples, those harvested from December to April had the highest concentrations of fructose, glucose, citric acid, malic acid, ascorbic acid, protein, Na, and Mg, while those harvested in October had the highest concentrations of lycopene and hydroxycinnamic acid. There were high concentrations of Ca, P, Zn, and Cu in the no-soil tomatoes. Conventional and organic cultivation practices showed similar results with respect to the collection period, both presenting high organic compound concentrations, while high mineral concentrations seemed to correspond to the no-soil practice. No clear pattern was observed among the different cultivars, perhaps due to all the samples having been collected at the same degree of ripeness.


Everywhere we go there are birds, and they all have mysteries to be unravelled. These mysteries include the way they look, from bizarre to apparently mundane, why they live where they live, and the things they do, many of which are far too incredible ever to be imagined as fiction.

Birds in Their Habitats is a collection of stories and experiences, which introduce fascinating aspects of birdlife, ecology and behaviour. Informed by a wealth of historical and contemporary research, Ian Fraser takes the reader on a journey through four continents: from places as unfamiliar as the Chonos Archipelago of southern Chile and the arid Sahel woodlands of northern Cameroon to those as familiar as a suburban backyard. This is a book of discovery of birds and the places they live. And with humour and personal insight, it is a book about the sometimes strange world of the people who spend a life absorbed in birds.


OBJECTIVE The study objective was to determine the key early mechanisms underlying the beneficial redistribution, function, and inflammatory profile of adipose tissue in 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 knockout (11β-HSD1−/−) mice fed a high-fat (HF) diet. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS By focusing on the earliest divergence in visceral adiposity, subcutaneous and visceral fat depots from 11β-HSD1−/− and C57Bl/6J control mice fed an HF diet for 4 weeks were used for comparative microarray analysis of gene expression, and differences were validated with real-time PCR. Key changes in metabolic signaling pathways were confirmed using Western blotting/immunoprecipitation, and fat cell size was compared with the respective chow-fed control groups. Altered adipose inflammatory cell content and function after 4 weeks (early) and 18 weeks (chronic) of HF feeding was investigated using fluorescence (and magnetic)-activated cell sorting analysis, immunohistochemistry, and in situ hybridization. RESULTS In subcutaneous fat, HF-fed 11β-HSD1−/− mice showed evidence of enhanced insulin and β-adrenergic signaling associated with accretion of smaller metabolically active adipocytes. In contrast, reduced 11β-HSD1−/− visceral fat accumulation was characterized by maintained AMP kinase activation, not insulin sensitization, and higher adipocyte interleukin-6 release. Intracellular glucocorticoid deficiency was unexpectedly associated with suppressed inflammatory signaling and lower adipocyte monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 secretion with strikingly reduced cytotoxic T-cell and macrophage infiltration, predominantly in visceral fat. CONCLUSIONS Our data define for the first time the novel and distinct depot-specific mechanisms driving healthier fat patterning and function as a result of reduced intra-adipose glucocorticoid levels.


Purpose
Skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) cause about 15 million cases of infection that result in more than 869,000 annual hospitalizations in the United States. Cellulitis accounted for 63% of all patients hospitalized with SSTIs between 2009 and 2011. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate physician adherence rates to evidence-based practice guidelines. Secondary objectives included evaluating antibiotic selection preferences and duration of therapy. The goal of the project was to generate data to inform the development of a hospital-based protocol for nonnecrotizing SSTI treatment.

Methods
This study was a single-center, retrospective, electronic chart review of patients admitted to the hospital for nonnecrotizing SSTI. We reviewed charts of patients who were admitted with a diagnosis of cellulitis and abscess infection from August 2014 to August 2015.

Results
Vancomycin, piperacillin/tazobactam, and clindamycin were the initial empiric antibiotics used most frequently. The adherence rates to guideline-recommended empiric antibiotic therapy and duration of treatment were about 40% and 70%, respectively. The median duration of antibiotic therapy was 12 days. Male gender and presence of purulent discharge as independent variables led to poor adherence to guideline-recommended empiric antibiotic therapy (male versus female gender, 35% versus 50.8%; P = 0.045; purulent discharge [yes versus no], 23.9% versus 60.4%; P < 0.0001).

Conclusions
The results showed substantial noncompliance with guideline recommendations on empiric antibiotic selection for the treatment of nonnecrotizing SSTIs. There is a substantial opportunity for clinical pharmacist intervention in ensuring the efficient utilization of hospital resources to improve guideline compliance; promote appropriate antibiotic selection; reduce unnecessary antibiotic exposure; and reduce cost of hospitalization.


High performance distributed computing environments have traditionally been designed to meet the compute demands of scientific applications, supercomputers have historically been producers and not consumers of data. The Apache Hadoop ecosystem has evolved to address many of the traditional limitations of HPC platforms. There exist a whole class of scientific applications that need the collective capabilities of traditional high-performance computing environments and the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. For example, the scientific domains of bio-molecular dynamics, genomics and high-energy physics need to couple traditional computing with Hadoop/Spark based analysis. We investigate the critical question of how to present both capabilities to such scientific applications. Whereas this questions needs answers at multiple levels, we focus on the design of middleware that might support the needs of both. We propose extensions to the Pilot-Abstraction so as to provide a unifying resource management layer. This provides an important step towards integration and thereby interoperable use of HPC and Hadoop/Spark, and allows applications to efficiently couple HPC stages (e.g. simulations) to data analytics. Many supercomputing centers have started to officially support Hadoop environments either in a dedicated environment or in hybrid deployments using tools, such as myHadoop. However, this typically involves many intrinsic, environment-specific details that need to be mastered, and often swamp conceptual questions like: How best to couple HPC and Hadoop application stages? How to explore runtime trade-offs (data localities vs. data movement)? This paper provides both conceptual understanding and practical solutions to questions central to the integrated use of HPC and Hadoop environments. Our experiments are performed on state-of-the-art production HPC environments and provide middleware for multiple domain sciences.


Increasing environmental awareness throughout the world has greatly impacted materials engineering and design. Renewed interest in the utilization of natural materials addresses ecological issues such as recyclability and environmental safety. Currently synthetic fibers like glass, carbon and aramids are widely being used in polymer-based composite because of their high stiffness and strength; However the fibers have serious draw-backs in terms of their bio degradability, initial processing cost, recyclability, energy consumption, machine abrasion, health hazards, etc. Despite these, most significantly, adverse environmental impacts alter the attention from synthetic fibers to natural/renewable fibers. The introduction of natural fibers from annually renewable sources is now popularly used as reinforcement in polymer matrix. The use of banana based natural fiber composite plays important role, due its vast advantage over synthetic fiber. Hence this project would be based on using banana fiber reinforced phenol formaldehyde composite, and testing its application for automobile.


The non-linear magnetoelectric (ME) response of Metglas/PMN-PT based sandwiched ME laminate composites has been studied for various thicknesses of the magnetostrictive layer. A significant increase in the non-linear ME coefficient under zero direct current bias was observed with a decreased Metglas thickness ratio for a fixed number of Metglas layers of n = 2. The non-linear ME effect was further improved by driving the laminate at the electromagnetic resonant frequency. The approach offers the potential to modulate low frequency magnetic signals to higher frequencies, where the noise floor is much lower and the signal to noise ratio higher.


Entering the Frame is the first complete study of the cinema of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, pioneers of archival and found-footage films that testify to war, genocide and colonialism in the twentieth century. It explores their early performance-based «scented films» of the 1970s, before focusing on the historical films, such as From the Pole to the Equator, for which they are best known. The book analyses how Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi manipulate rare footage through re-photographing, hand-tinting and altering film speeds, to produce work of an other-worldly quality.
Retrospectives of the films of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2006) and at MoMA in New York (2009) have signalled international recognition at the highest level, as have appraisals by leading scholars of cinema such as Scott MacDonald and Raymond Bellour. Their work is unusual in attracting different audiences, and in relating art practices to wider ethical, historical and political issues. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have transformed old documentary footage into works that resonate in debates about postcolonialism as well as about the documentary form, the corporeality of the viewing experience and the metamorphoses of cinema.
The volume includes a preface by the cultural historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of Italian and History at New York University.


We propose a distance phrase reordering model (DPR) for statistical machine translation (SMT), where the aim is to learn the grammatical rules and context dependent changes using a phrase reordering classification framework. We consider a variety of machine learning techniques, including state-of-the-art structured prediction methods. Techniques are compared and evaluated on a Chinese-English corpus, a language pair known for the high reordering characteristics which cannot be adequately captured with current models. In the reordering classification task, the method significantly outperforms the baseline against which it was tested, and further, when integrated as a component of the state-of-the-art machine translation system, MOSES, it achieves improvement in translation results.


In order to determine the macrobenthic invertebrate fauna of Lake Egrigol, located at 2000 m in the central Taurus Mountains, 4 field studies were conducted between June and September, 2000, and June and September, 2001. The specimens were obtained by collection of mud samples using an Ekman-Birge grab and by sifting with a fine 500 µm sieve, and were preserved in 4% formaldehyde solution. Additional samplings were also performed from the shore with hand nets with a mesh size of 180 µm. On average, 1036 benthic invertebrate specimens were found per square meter in Lake Egrigol; 939 of these specimens were oligochaets, 95 were chironomid larvae and 2 were chaoborid larvae. With regard to the rational distribution of these groups, oligochaets were the predominant group with 90.64%, followed by chironomid larvae (9.17%) and chaoborid larvae (0.19%). With regard to the rational distribution of these groups by station, Station 4 (25.90%) was the richest and Station 3 (15.05%) the poorest. Since all, the mollusk specimens from the mud samples were already dead and their shells were decalcified, mollusk species are not included in the averages. Amphipod specimens were sampled from a spring just beyond the lake, and Decapoda specimens sampled from the shore are also not included in the averages. As a result of samplings performed from each meter from the shore to 9 m in depth in the first station, the maximum number of specimens was found at the seventh meter. It was also noticed that oligochaets were abundant at the seventh and eighth meters, whereas chironomids were abundant at the second and sixth meters. The abundances of the groups in respect of months were analyzed using the chi-square test and differences between distributions of the groups according to depths were analyzed using 2-way variance analysis. All of the determined taxa were first records from the lake. Furthermore, Potamothrix moldaviensis (Oligochaeta) is reported from Turkey for the first time.


The ability of pointing is recognised as an essential skill of a robot in its communication and social interaction. This paper introduces a developmental learning approach to robotic pointing, by exploiting the interactions between a human and a robot. The approach is inspired through observing the process of human infant development. It works by first applying a reinforcement learning algorithm to guide the robot to create attempt movements towards a salient object that is out of the robot's initial reachable space. Through such movements, a human demonstrator is able to understand the robot desires to touch the target and consequently, to assist the robot to eventually reach the object successfully. The human–robot interaction helps establish the understanding of pointing gestures in the perception of both the human and the robot. From this, the robot can collect the successful pointing gestures in an effort to learn how to interact with humans. Developmental constraints are utilised to drive the entire learning procedure. The work is supported by experimental evaluation, demonstrating that the proposed approach can lead the robot to gradually gain the desirable pointing ability. It also allows that the resulting robot system exhibits similar developmental progress and features as with human infants. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).


Trust represents an important issue for adopting cloud services. A trust management framework is essentially, about user rating. Hence, correctly addressing user feedback and filtering out malicious rating is a main step in providing reliable services. In order to process their feedback and calculate a reliable trust degree. Thus, new opportunities can be offered for the establishment of a trust relationship among involved entities. We propose a technique to process user rating by statistical methods. Then, we proceed to classify the users into different groups to detect malicious users. The users are grouped according to their rating by a k-means clustering technique, and the evaluation will show that the proposed solution gives better results than the traditional filtering solution.


Ann Arbor, MI—Close on the heels of the discovery that cancer has its own rejuvenating stem cells, a University of Michigan research team has found a way to distinguish these bad-actors from the normal stem cells that they so closely resemble, and to kill the cancer stem cells without harming the normal stem cells in the same tissue. The progression of some cancers, including leukemia, appears to be driven by cancer stem cells—rare cancer cells that have a greater ability to proliferate than other cancer cells and which are therefore the most malignant. To have any hope of curing cancer it is necessary to develop therapies that kill these cancer stem cells. Yet these cells frequently have properties that are similar to normal stem cells in the same tissue, making it difficult to kill cancer stem cells without damaging the normal stem cells. "This study proves that it is possible to identify differences in the mechanisms that maintain normal stem cells and cancer stem cells, and to therapeutically exploit these differences to kill the cancer stem cells without harming normal stem cells in the same tissue," said Sean J. Morrison, Ph.D., lead author on the study and the director of U-M's Center for Stem Cell Biology. Morrison, a member of the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center, is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Three years ago, Morrison was part of a U-M team that made the breakthrough discovery that breast cancer has its own stem cells. These cells appear to be the primary drivers in tumor growth and possibly metastasis and the discovery pointed to a new direction in cancer therapy: Rather than trying to eliminate every last tumor cell, cancer therapies might be more specifically targeted at just the stem cells in cancer. But telling the bad guys from the good guys – normal adult stem cells that the body relies on to replace cells damaged by injury, disease and old age—is a big problem, because they have so many features in common, Morrison explained. In a new paper appearing in the April 6, 2006 edition of the journal Nature, Morrison's team has found a way to tell stem cell friends from foes, as well as a drug that can make them behave differently. "In many types of tumors, the gene Pten is missing or turned off," Morrison said. "Because Pten regulates cell proliferation and survival, we studied its role in the maintenance of normal blood-forming stem cells." Omer Yilmaz, a graduate student in the Morrison laboratory, deleted the Pten gene from adult blood-forming stem cells in mice and found that the loss of Pten led to leukemia, marked by the generation of leukemic stem cells. Transplantation of even a single leukemic stem cell from these Pten-deficient mice into a second mouse caused leukemia, demonstrating the powerful cancer-causing ability of these cells. In addition to pumping up leukemic stem cell numbers, Pten deletion also caused normal blood-forming stem cells to start dividing, but over time the normal stem cells became depleted in the absence of Pten. Additional experiments by the team established that every blood-forming stem cell needs Pten to maintain itself, in contrast to leukemic stem cells that thrive without Pten. This finding of a key difference between normal stem cells and cancer stem cells suggested that drugs that target the metabolic pathway in which Pten acts should have opposite effects on normal blood-forming stem cells and leukemic stem cells. To test this, the team treated the mice with rapamycin, a drug that reduces the activity of this metabolic pathway. The drug is used to prevent tissue rejection in transplant patients, and is currently being tested in clinical trials for activity against a variety of cancers. They found that rapamycin inhibited the creation and maintenance of leukemic stem cells. And even better, it "rescued" the function of normal blood-forming stem cells in these mice, that otherwise crashed without Pten. Mice that were put on rapamycin immediately after Pten deletion failed to develop leukemia. Mice that already had leukemia were kept alive longer by the drug. These results suggest that by better understanding the mechanisms that regulate the maintenance of normal stem cells it will be possible to develop new anti-cancer therapies that are more effective and less toxic. This is a particularly important issue for leukemia patients who often cannot be cured with current therapies, and for whom existing therapies sometimes have fatal sideeffects. "The ability to strategically target and kill leukemia-initiating stem cells will undoubtedly have a significant impact on our capacity to treat these often fatal diseases more effectively," said Riccardo Valdez, M.D., an assistant professor of pathology at U-M who participated in the study. "At the same time, it would minimize potentially life-threatening side effects caused byconventional drugs." Morrison is quick to point out that these findings are limited to mice so far, and cannot be immediately extrapolated to human patients. However, the study raises the possibility that rapamycin could be effective in depleting leukemic stem cells for at least certain patients. Clinical trials will be required to test this in human patients.


Pluralism about scientific method is more-or-less accepted, but the consequences have yet to be drawn out. Scientists adopt different methods in response to different epistemic situations: depending on the system they are interested in, the resources at their disposal, and so forth. If it is right that different methods are appropriate in different situations, then mismatches between methods and situations are possible. This is most likely to occur due to method bias: when we prefer a particular kind of method, despite that method clashing with evidential context or our aims. To explore these ideas, we sketch a kind of method pluralism which turns on two properties of evidence, before using agent-based models to examine the relationship between methods, epistemic situations, and bias. Based on our results, we suggest that although method bias can undermine the efficiency of a scientific community, it can also be productive through preserving a diversity of evidence. We consider circumstances where method bias could be particularly egregious, and those where it is a potential virtue, and argue that consideration of method bias reveals that community standards deserve a central place in the epistemology of science.


Stream and river systems are a critical component of the world's commons, providing a public good that is essential to all life. Almost half the stream and river systems in the USA are in poor condition because thousands of institutions and millions of people have historically made—and continue to make—poor decisions about watershed stewardship. The widespread adoption of best management practices (BMPs) in homes, offices, farms, and factories would do a great deal to mitigate existing impairments and prevent further degradation. Recent advances in technology, which allow precise and relatively inexpensive measurements of BMPs' effectiveness, can provide an unprecedented level of accountability and make possible the use of incentives not previously available. We propose that incentivization can and should supplement education and legislation in promoting the adoption of BMPs, and we focus on rural and agricultural watersheds to explore how to incentivize BMPs to improve conservation, restoration, and preservation practices.


Citizen plaintiffs play a vital role in the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act ("ESA"). In Strahan v. Roughead, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts opened the possibility for expansion of a citizen's ability to impose its own policy preference upon federal agencies working to comply with their statutory requirements under the ESA. Although the District Court properly denied the defendant's motion to dismiss on the basis of mootness, it erred in its rationale. A plaintiff's claim under the ESA may survive a mootness challenge, even after the violating agency has reinitiated consultation with its overseeing agency, if the potential for relief on alternative grounds remains. Valid alternate bases for relief include award of an injunction when a compliance plan does not encompass the full range of an agency's activities, or when an agency fails to demonstrate compliance with an existing plan. A citizen's mere suggestion that an agency's compliance plan adopt alternate protective measures, however, should not extend the life of an otherwise moot claim.


We observed the HH 211 jet in the submillimeter continuum and the CO (3-2) and SiO (8-7) transitions with the Submillimeter Array. The continuum source detected at the center of the outflow shows an elongated morphology, perpendicular to the direction of the outflow axis. The high-velocity emission of both molecules shows a knotty and highly collimated structure. The SiO (8-7) emission at the base of the outflow, close to the driving source, spans a wide range of velocities, from -20 up to 40 km s-1. This suggests that a wide-angle wind may be the driving mechanism of the HH 211 outflow. For distances ≥5'' (~1500 AU) from the driving source, emission from both transitions follows a Hubble-law behavior, with SiO (8-7) reaching higher velocities than CO (3-2) and being located upstream of the CO (3-2) knots. This indicates that the SiO (8-7) emission is likely tracing entrained gas very close to the primary jet, while the CO (3-2) is tracing less dense entrained gas. From the SiO (5-4) data of Hirano et al., we find that the SiO (8-7)/SiO (5-4) brightness temperature ratio along the jet decreases for knots far from the driving source. This is consistent with the density decreasing along the jet, from (3-10) × 106 cm-3 at 500 AU to (0.8-4) × 106 cm-3 at 5000 AU from the driving source.


Although KRASG12C inhibitors show clinical activity in patients with KRAS G12C mutated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other solid tumor malignancies, response is limited by multiple mechanisms of resistance. The KRASG12C inhibitor JDQ443 shows enhanced preclinical antitumor activity combined with the SHP2 inhibitor TNO155, and the combination is currently under clinical evaluation. To identify rational combination strategies that could help overcome or prevent some types of resistance, we evaluated the duration of tumor responses to JDQ443 ± TNO155, alone or combined with the PI3Kα inhibitor alpelisib and/or the CDK4/6 inhibitor ribociclib, in xenograft models derived from a KRASG12C-mutant NSCLC line and investigated the genetic mechanisms associated with loss of response to combined KRASG12C/SHP2 inhibition. Tumor regression by single-agent JDQ443 at clinically relevant doses lasted on average 2 weeks and was increasingly extended by the double, triple or quadruple combinations. Growth resumption was accompanied by progressively increased KRAS G12C amplification. Functional genome-wide CRISPR screening in KRASG12C-dependent NSCLC lines with distinct mutational profiles to identify adaptive mechanisms of resistance revealed sensitizing and rescuing genetic interactions with KRASG12C/SHP2 co-inhibition; FGFR1 loss was the strongest sensitizer, and PTEN loss the strongest rescuer. Consistently, the antiproliferative activity of KRASG12C/SHP2 inhibition was strongly enhanced by PI3K inhibitors. Overall, KRAS G12C amplification and alterations of the MAPK/PI3K pathway were predominant mechanisms of resistance to combined KRASG12C/SHP2 inhibitors in preclinical settings. The biological nodes identified by CRISPR screening might provide additional starting points for effective combination treatments.


Motivational characteristics of students learning Japanese as a foreign language at universities in Australia were investigated to find out what affecting factors are closely related to their intentions for continuing/discontinuing their study. The results showed that students' cultural/linguistic backgrounds have a significant impact on their performance in learning the language, and sustaining motivation, which is closely related to their interest in aspects of Japanese culture, is an important determinant for persistence in their study. Developing intrinsic cultural interest is an important factor for sustaining motivation, which is more likely to occur when learners have distant cultural/linguistic backgrounds from Japanese. Closer cultural/linguistic backgrounds, on the other hand, may become hazardous for having accurate self-efficacy.


We investigate the emergence of spatial and temporal coherence for the fields in the noncritical nondegenerate parametric second-order down-conversion process pumped with low spatial and temporal coherence beams. It is shown that in this scenario, which is of considerable practical importance, the parametric gain in the near field breaks down into an ensemble of mutually incoherent beamlets containing parametric waves. The field generated in a single beamlet is fully spatially coherent. The size of such coherent parametric gain regions is governed by the near-field spatial coherence radius of the pump, which also acts as a parameter, restraining the linear diffraction of the parametric waves generated in the nonlinear interaction. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate how the spatial and temporal coherence can be substantially enhanced by manipulating the spatial field correlation of the multilongitudinal and multi-transversal mode pump.


This article provides a formalisation of Dirichlet characters and Dirichlet L-functions including proofs of their basic properties – most notably their analyticity, their areas of convergence, and their nonvanishing for R(s) ≥ 1. All of this is built in a very high-level style using Dirichlet series. The proof of the non-vanishing follows a very short and elegant proof by Newman [4], which we attempt to reproduce faithfully in a similar level of abstraction in Isabelle. This also leads to a relatively short proof of Dirichlet's Theorem, which states that, if h and n are coprime, there are infinitely many primes p with p ≡ h (mod n).


Volcanic constructions, not associated with seamount (or volcano) chains, are abundant on the flanks of the East Pacific Rise (EPR) but are rare along the axial high. The distribution of isolated volcanoes, based on multibeam bathymetric maps, is approximately symmetric about the EPR axis. This symmetry contrasts with the asymmetries in the distribution of volcano chains (more abundant on the west flank), the seafloor subsidence rates (slower on the west flank), and the distribution of plate-motion-parallel gravity lineaments (more prominent on the west flank). Most of the isolated volcanoes complete their growth within ∼14 km of the axis on crust younger than 0.2 Ma, while seamount chain volcanoes continue to be active on older crust. Volcanic edifices within 6 km of the ridge axis are primarily found adjacent to axial discontinuities, suggesting a more sporadic magma supply and stronger lithosphere able to support volcanic constructions near axial discontinuities. The volume of isolated near-axis volcanoes correlates with ridge axis cross-sectional area, suggesting a link between the magma budget of the ridge and the eruption of near-axis volcanoes. Within the study area, off-axis volcanic edifices cover at least 6% of the seafloor and contribute more than 0.2% to the volume of the crust. The inferred width of the zone where isolated volcanoes initially form increases with spreading rate for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (<4 km), northern EPR (<20 km), and southern EPR (<28 km), so that isolated volcanoes form primarily on lithosphere younger than 0.2 Ma (< 4-6 km brittle thickness), independent of spreading rate. This suggests some form of lithospheric control on the eruption of isolated off-axis volcanoes due to brittle thickness, increased normal stresses across cracks impeding dike injection, or thermal stresses within the newly forming lithosphere.


We examine the impact of the global recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic on women's versus men's employment. Whereas recent recessions in advanced economies usually had a disproportionate impact on men's employment, giving rise to the moniker "mancessions," we show that the pandemic recession of 2020 was a "shecession" in most countries with larger employment declines among women. We examine the causes behind this pattern using micro data from several national labor force surveys, and show that both the composition of women's employment across industries and occupations as well as increased childcare needs during closures of schools and daycare centers made important contributions. While many countries exhibit similar patterns, we also emphasize how policy choices such as furloughing policies and the extent of school closures shape the pandemic's impact on the labor market. Another notable finding is the central role of telecommuting: gender gaps in the employment impact of the pandemic arise almost entirely among workers who are unable to work from home. Nevertheless, among telecommuters a different kind of gender gap arises: women working from home during the pandemic spent more work time also doing childcare and experienced greater productivity reductions than men. We discuss what our findings imply for gender equality in a post-pandemic labor market that will likely continue to be characterized by pervasive telecommuting.


The surface chemistry of cycloalkanes and cycloalkyl intermediates on Pt-Sn alloys is important to the function of selective hydrocarbon conversion catalysts, yet very little is known about this chemistry because cycloalkane decomposition is strongly suppressed under UHV conditions on Pt-Sn alloys and there are few other clean sources of these intermediates. Low-energy, electron-induced dissociation (EID) in multilayers of saturated hydrocarbons produces rather cleanly reactive intermediates formed by the selective cleavage of one C-H bond. This method was used to activate C 5 -C 8 cycloalkane multilayers and prepare monolayer coverages of cycloalkyl species on Pt(111) and two well-defined Pt-Sn alloy surfaces-the p(2 x 2)-Sn/Pt(111) and (√3x √3)R30°Sn/Pt(111) surface alloys formed by vapor deposition of Sn on a Pt(111) substrate. EID of the multilayers and subsequent thermal reactions of the intermediates on these surfaces were investigated by temperature-programmed desorption (TPD), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), and low-energy electron diffraction (LEED). Adsorbed cycloalkyl species dehydrogenate facilely on both alloy surfaces, but alloying with Sn weakens the bonding to the surface of the cycloalkenes formed and strongly suppresses cycloalkene dehydrogenation. This chemistry leads to a much higher selectivity for the evolution of gas-phase cycloalkenes from the dehydrogenation of cycloalkyl intermediates compared to that on Pt(111).


The amount of magmatism that accompanies the extension and rupture of the continental lithosphere varies dramatically at rifts and margins around the world. Based on widely spaced geophysical transects, some margins are known to preserve a transition from magmatically robust to magmatically starved rifting along strike, but the nature of the transition is unknown. Wide-angle seismic data from the Black Sea provide the first direct observations of such a transition and show that it is abrupt, occurring over only ~20–30 km, and coincides with a transform fault. This abrupt transition cannot be explained solely by gradual along-margin variations in mantle properties, since these would be expected to result in a smooth transition from magma-poor to magma-rich rifting over hundreds of kilometers. We suggest that the abruptness of the transition results from the development of three-dimensional (3-D) melt migration due to along-strike variations in extension and thus the thickness of the lithosphere at the time of rifting. Localized magmatic addition attributed to melt focusing has been observed in modern mid-ocean ridges and active rift environments, but here we show that such processes can also produce abrupt along-strike changes from magma-poor to magma-rich rifting.


Purpose: To determine the potential of crenolanib, a potent inhibitor of PDGFRA, to treat malignancies driven by mutant PDGFRA. Experimental Design: The biochemical activity of crenolanib was compared with imatinib using a panel of PDGFRA-mutant kinases expressed in several different cell line models, including primary gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) cells. The antiproliferative activity of crenolanib was also studied in several cell lines with PDGFRA-dependent growth. Results: Crenolanib was significantly more potent than imatinib in inhibiting the kinase activity of imatinib-resistant PDGFRA kinases (D842I, D842V, D842Y, DI842-843IM, and deletion I843). For example, crenolanib was 135-fold more potent than imatinib against D842V in our isogenic model system, with an IC50 of approximately 10 nmol/L. The relative potency of crenolanib was further confirmed in BaF3 and primary GIST cells expressing PDGFRA D842V. In contrast, imatinib was at least 10-fold more potent than crenolanib in inhibiting the V561D mutation. For all other tested PDGFRA mutations, crenolanib and imatinib had comparable potency. Conclusions: Crenolanib is a potent inhibitor of imatinib-resistant PDGFRA kinases associated with GIST, including the PDGFRA D842V mutation found in approximately 5% of GISTs. The spectrum of activity of crenolanib suggests that this drug is a type I inhibitor (inhibitor of activated conformation of kinase). Based in part on these results, a phase II clinical study of this agent to treat GIST with the PDGFRA D842V mutation has been initiated. Clin Cancer Res; 18(16); 4375–84. ©2012 AACR.


Background : Balance is one of the critical factors that affects athletes' performances, and is recognized to have a central role in sport injury prevention, while the effect of functional fatigue on static and dynamic balance has not been properly investigated.
Research question : To understand the effect of functional fatigue on static and dynamic balance in female athletes.
Methods : Fifteen female basketball players (age: 16.1 ± 1.1 years; weight: 53.1 ± 6.7 kg; height: 164.1 ± 4.6 cm) with no orthopaedic problems volunteered to participate in the study. They performed subsequently pre-One-Foot Balance Test (OFBT), pre-Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT), fatigue protocol, post-SEBT, and post-OFBT. The SEBT and OFBT protocol were used to measure the amount of dynamic and static balance, respectively. A functional fatigue protocol that lasted 20 minutes was performed to tire the subjects. The amount of perceived fatigue was measured with rating of perceived excursion (RPE) values.
Results : Although the effect of functional fatigue was not significant on the dynamic balance of the subjects, the dynamic balance performance between directions was found to be significant (P <0.001). In addition, the result showed that fatigue had a significant effect on the subjects' static balance (P = 0.019).
Conclusion : As static balance is one of the factors that affects athletic performance and is also used during the rehabilitation tasks; the finding may help to prevent fatigue-related problems, such as balance perturbation of athletes during conditioning and rehabilitation, and consequently in preventing injuries.


Interest in photonic crystal nanocavities is fueled by advances in device performance, particularly in the development of low-threshold laser sources. Effective electrical control of high-performance photonic crystal lasers has thus far remained elusive due to the complexities associated with current injection into cavities. A fabrication procedure for electrically pumping photonic crystal membrane devices using a lateral p-i-n junction has been developed and is described in this study. We have demonstrated electrically pumped lasing in our junctions with a threshold of 181 nA at 50 K-the lowest threshold ever demonstrated in an electrically pumped laser. At room temperature, we find that our devices behave as single-mode light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which when directly modulated, have an ultrafast electrical response up to 10 GHz corresponding to less than 1 fJ/bit energy operation-the lowest for any optical transmitter. In addition, we have demonstrated electrical pumping of photonic crystal nanobeam LEDs, and have built fiber taper coupled electro-optic modulators. Fiber-coupled photodetectors based on two-photon absorption are also demonstrated as well as multiply integrated components that can be independently electrically controlled. The presented electrical injection platform is a major step forward in providing practical low power and integrable devices for on-chip photonics.


This paper develops a theoretical model of material flow analysis (MFA) within the framework of the Waste Input-Output model (WIO) (Nakamura and Kondo). The model is developed based on two fundamental ingredients: yield ratios and the degree of fabrication. In manufacturing process, multiplication of physical inputs by the yield ratios gives the portion that enters physical outputs, with the rest being discarded as process waste without entering outputs. In input-output analysis, the degree of fabrication can be visualized as triangularity of the input coefficients matrix (goods of lower degree of fabrication can enter those of higher fabrication, but the reverse does not hold), which is known to emerge through an appropriate reordering of sectors. Application to the Japanese IO data indicates that the model can provide accurate estimates of the weight as well as the composition of metals (Fe, Cu, Pb, Zn, and Al) used in a passenger car. The model is also used to estimate the major final use categories (household consumption, public consumption, capital investment, inventory investment, and export) of metals.


DURING the past few months one has endeavoured to compare the results obtained by using the acetic anhydride test on cerebro-spinal fluids with those obtained by the colloidal gold and globulin methods, in order to form a tentative opinion as to the reliability of this very simple test. Its advantage is the ease with which it can be carried out, and, moreover, it gives a definite result very quickly, the reading being obtained within a very few moments. The technique is quite straightforward: to i c.c. of cerebro-spinal fluid in a sterile test tube o03 c.c. of acetic anhydride is added, and the tube shaken thoroughly; o*8 c.c. of concentrated sulphuric acid is added slowly, drop by drop. If the cerebro-spinal fluid is from a case of general paralysis of the insane a deep purple colour soon appears, but if the case is negative a brownish-red reaction is found. To take the reading correctly, a white background is necessary. There is said to be an error of some 8 per cent. with this test, this being accounted for by the number of neurosyphilitics giving a positive result, although not true general paralytics. For this reason it would appear inadvisable to lay complete reliance on the acetic anhydride test without considerable confirmatory evidence in other directions. All the results which we are about to quote have been confirmed by Lange's colloidal gold method, the globulin reaction (ammon. sulphate and also Pandy), the sigma reaction and cell count. In any still doubtful case the permanganate test is used.


In this paper, the non-boiling evaporation (30 -70?) of the fixed droplets on the Aluminum plate surface was investigated by the experiment. The effect of the plate temperature and initial volume on the contact angle, contact diameter and evaporation time were considered. The results showed that the temperature and initial volume were important for the droplets evaporation. As the heating plate temperature increased, the evaporation rate increased and the initial contact angle decreased. At the same heating plate temperature, the evaporation rate and the initial contact angle decreased with the increase of the droplets initial volume. At the constant temperature hydrophilic surface, the droplet evaporation is performed in two modes: Constant contact radius mode (CCR mode) and mix mode. The CCR mode were about 90% of the time at the droplets evaporation process and the droplet contact diameters kept constant with the increase of the evaporation time. For the mix mode, the contact angle and contact diameter decreased with the increase of the evaporation time.


3 Faculty of Education, Cukurova University, Adana Turkey. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Abstract This study aimed to examine which values predicted depressive symptoms and hopelessness in Turkey. While it was hypothesized that values emphasizing universalism, benevolence, conformity, security, tradition, spirituality, self-direction, and achievement would predict lower levels of depressive symptoms and hopelessness, those values emphasizing power, stimulation, and hedonism would predict higher levels of depressive symptoms and hopelessness. Participants were 712 university students in Turkey. The Schwartz Values Survey Revised Turkish Version, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the Beck Hopelessness Scale were administered. Spirituality was observed as a distinct value category in Turkish culture. Higher levels of universalism predicted lower levels of depressive symptoms. While higher levels of self-direction and benevolence predicted lower levels of hopelessness, higher levels of achievement predicted higher levels of hopelessness. The findings partially fit Sagiv and Schwartz's value theory regarding the relationship between mental health and the growth and deficiency aspects of values. The findings suggested having congruent values with the environment (i.e. achievement) were not uniformly associated with positive affective states.


We collected and analyzed Br− breakthrough curve (BTC) data to identify the parameters controlling transport from a series of soil cores and a field‐scale tracer test at the Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory (SH‐CZO) in central Pennsylvania. The soil cores were retrieved from a continuous hole that extended through the soil profile to quantify also how solute transport behavior changes with depth and weathering. Additionally, we performed a field‐scale doublet tracer test to determine transport behavior in the weathered shale bedrock. Hydraulic conductivity and porosity were as low as 10−15 m s−1 and 0.035, respectively, in the shale bedrock and upward of 10−5 m s−1 and 0.45, respectively, in the shallow soils. Bromide BTCs demonstrated significant tailing in soil cores and field tracer experiments, which does not fit classical advection–dispersion processes. To quantify the behavior, numerical simulation of solute transport was performed with both a mobile–immobile (MIM) model and a continuous‐time random walk (CTRW) approach. One‐dimensional MIM modeling results yielded low mass transfer rates (<1 d−1) coupled with large immobile domains (immobile/mobile porosity ratio of 1.5–2). The MIM modeling results also suggested that immobile porosity was a combination of soil texture, fractures, and porosity development on shale fragments. One‐dimensional CTRW results yielded a parameter set indicative of a transport regime that is consistently non‐Fickian within the soil profile and bedrock. These modeling results confirm the important role of preferential flow paths, fractures, and mass transfer between more‐ and less‐mobile fluid domains and advance the need to incorporate a continuum of mass transfer rates to more accurately quantify transport behavior within the SH‐CZO.


The small solar thermal power plant is being developed with funding from EU Horizon 2020 Program. The plant is configured around a 2-kWel Organic Rankine Cycle turbine and solar field, made of Fresnel mirrors. The solar field is used to heat thermal oil to the temperature of about 240 °C. This thermal energy is used to run the Organic Rankine Cycle turbine and the heat rejected in its condenser (about 18-kWth) is utilized for hot water production and living space heating.
 The plant is equipped with a latent heat thermal storage to extend its operation by about 4 hours during the evening building occupancy period. The phase change material used is Solar salt with the melting/solidification point at about 220 °C. The total mass of the PCM is about 3,800 kg and the thermal storage capacity is about 100 kWh. The operation of the plant is monitored by a central controller unit. The main components of the plant are being manufactured and laboratory tested with the aim to assemble the plant at the demonstration site, located in Catalonia, Spain. At the first stage of investigations the ORC turbine will be directly integrated with the solar filed to evaluate their joint performance. During the second stage of tests, the Latent Heat Thermal Storage will be incorporated into the plant and its performance during the charging and discharging processes will be investigated. It is planned that the continuous filed tests of the whole plant will be performed during the 2018–2019 period.


Sub-Doppler signals of the hyperfine Cs[62P3/2(Fe)-->62S1/2(Fg)] transition lines in a diode laser-induced retro-fluorescence spectrum at the interface between glass and Cs vapor are, for the first time to our knowledge, experimentally identified and phenomenologically investigated. We propose a qualitative explanation of the origin of the sub-Doppler hyperfine line, based on kinematic effects of the population of the excited 62P3/2(Fe) atoms of the laser-pumped velocity classes confined in the near-field region of the interface. The role played by different relaxation processes contributing to the retrofluorescent atomic linewidth has been characterized. The effective decay rate of the atomic hyperfine level 62P3/2(Fe=5) near a metallic thin film has been measured by using both sub-Doppler retrofluorescence and frequency-modulated selective reflection spectroscopies. For a saturated Cs vapor in a glass cell at a temperature of 130°C, the effective nonradiative relaxation rate of the 62P3/2(F_e=5) energy hyperfine level due to the coupling with a metallic film is estimated to be AFe=5-->Fg=4nf approximately 3.10^8 s^−1.


Pb2CoWO6 in its incommensurate phase (230 less than or equal to T less than or equal to 300 K) invariably exhibits orientational domains. Such a polydomain state has been investigated by means of X-ray diffraction at 283 K. Assuming the modulation to be one-dimensional, we have identified the orientations of four domains. In view of the pseudosymmetry of this phase, many refinements of a purely displacive modulation had to be performed in order to establish the best suited unit cell and superspace group. Two major categories of candidates have arisen from this approach. (i) In a centered monoclinic or triclinic cell, there were clear indications of disorder in the structure, but owing to numerical instabilities, it was very difficult to decide whether this phenomenon was due to an occupational modulation or to a more complex domain structure (overlapping satellites, presence of antiphase domain boundaries etc.). (ii) In a primitive monoclinic cell model, a purely displacive modulation was conclusive. In each category, the major feature is an antiparallel shift of the Pb atoms. The main component of this shift involves a rotation and/or deformation of the oxygen octahedra. The structure of Pb2CoWO6 may be described to a good approximation as displacively modulated, but occupational modulation and coherent domains will also have to be added to the model in order to reach an even more satisfactory picture of this elusive phase. [References: 19]


In molecular structure analysis and visualization, the molecule's atoms are often modeled as hard spheres parametrized by their positions and radii. While the atom positions result from experiments or molecular simulations, for the radii typically values are taken from literature. Most often, van der Waals (vdW) radii are used, for which diverse values exist. As a consequence, different visualization and analysis tools use different atomic radii, and the analyses are less objective than often believed. Furthermore, for the geometric accessibility analysis of molecular structures, vdW radii are not well suited. The reason is that during the molecular dynamics simulation, depending on the force field and the kinetic energy in the system, non-bonded atoms can come so close to each other that their vdW spheres intersect. In this paper, we introduce a new kind of atomic radius, called atomic accessibility radius', that better characterizes the accessibility of an atom in a given molecular trajectory. The new radii reflect the movement possibilities of atoms in the simulated physical system. They are computed by solving a linear program that maximizes the radii of the atoms under the constraint that non-bonded spheres do not intersect in the considered molecular trajectory. Using this data-driven approach, the actual accessibility of atoms can be visualized more precisely.


OBJECTIVE
The goal was to review systematically the comparative effectiveness of yoga, compared with other exercise interventions, for older adults as shown on measures of health and physical functioning.

DESIGN
This was a systematic review with both narrative synthesis and meta-analysis.

DATA SOURCES
Searches were conducted in MEDLINE®/PUBMED, PSYCINFO, CINAHL, Web of Science, and SCOPUS; bibliographies of selected articles; and one systematic review on the effects of yoga on cardiovascular disease.

METHODS
Original studies from 1950 to November 2010 were sought, evaluating the effects of yoga on older adults. The search was restricted to randomized controlled trials of yoga in subjects ≥age 60, and published in English. Data were extracted and evaluated regarding setting, population size and characteristics, intervention type and duration, comparison group, outcome assessment, data analysis, follow-up, key results, and the quality of each study according to specific predetermined criteria.

RESULTS
The search yielded 18 eligible studies (N=649). The studies reported on older adults across a range of settings, intervention intensity, and outcome measures. The majority of the studies had<35 participants (range 9-77). Quantitative and qualitative synthesis of the studies suggested that the benefits of yoga may exceed those of conventional exercise interventions for self-rated health status, aerobic fitness, and strength. However, the effect sizes were modest, and the evidence was mixed for yoga's effect on depression, sleep, and bone-mineral density. Studies did not find an effect on cognition.

CONCLUSIONS
Small studies with mixed methodological quality suggested that yoga may be superior to conventional physical-activity interventions in elderly people. The precision of the estimates remains low. Larger studies are necessary to define better the intersection of populations, settings, and interventions in which yoga is most beneficial.


This paper presents some of the key findings and recommendations of the report The Tasmanian Children's Project (TCP): The Needs of Children with a Parent/Carer with a Mental Illness, October, 1999. The TCP, a collaborative venture between the University of Tasmania's School of Nursing and the Mental Health Services - South, Tasmania (Department of Health and Human Services), is the first study in Tasmania to formally examine the needs of children where the parent/carer has a mental illness. The study is a modified replication and extension of the 1993/94 Victorian Children's Project. Extension aspects of the TCP included interviews with children (in addition to parents and service providers), the inclusion of data on both maternal and paternal mental illness and a broad definition of mental illness (beyond psychotic illness and major affective disorder). The report highlights the need to provide a range of programs that encourage the development of personal competency among children, parents, and other family members and those that emphasize interagency collaboration. Implications of this research for mental health nursing education and practice are also addressed.


In 579 COVID patient samples collected between March and July of 2020, we examined the effects of non-synonymous mutations harbored by the circulating B.1.1.7 strain on linear antibody epitope signal for spike glycoprotein and nucleoprotein. At the antigen level, the mutations only substantially reduced signal in 0.5% of the population. Although some epitope mutations reduce measured signal in up to 6% of the population, these are not the dominant epitopes for their antigens. Given dominant epitope patterns observed, our data suggest that the mutations would not result in immune evasion of linear epitopes for a large majority of these COVID patients.


When the mechanisms that cause fading in communication channels were first modeled in the 1950s and 1960s, the principles developed were primarily applied to over-the-horizon communications covering a wide range of frequency bands. The 3-30 MHz high-frequency (HF) band used for ionospheric propagation, as well as the 300 MHz-3 GHz ultra-high-frequency (UHF) and the 3-30 GHz superhigh-frequency (SHF) bands used for tropospheric scatter, are examples of channels that are affected by fading phenomena. Although the fading effects in mobile radio channels are somewhat different from those encountered in ionospheric and tropospheric channels, the early models are still quite useful in helping to characterize the fading effects in mobile digital communication systems. This article emphasizes so-called Rayleigh fading, primarily in the UHF band, which affects mobile systems such as cellular and personal communication systems (PCS). The primary goal is to characterize the fading channel and in so doing to describe the fundamental fading manifestations and types of degradation.


We describe in this dissertation, planning strategies which enhance the accuracy with which visual surveillance can be conducted and which expand the capabilities of visual surveillance systems. Several classes of planning strategies are considered: sensor planning, motion planning and temporal planning.
Sensor planning is the study of the control of cameras to optimize information gathering for performing vision algorithms. The study of camera control spans camera placement strategies, active camera (specifically, Pan-Tilt-Zoom or PTZ cameras) control, and, in some cases, camera selection from a collection of static cameras.
Camera placement strategies have been employed previously for enhancing vision algorithms such as 3D reconstruction, area coverage in surveillance, occlusion and visibility analysis, etc. We will introduce a two-camera placement strategy that is utilized by a background subtraction algorithm, allowing it to achieve video rate performance and invariance to several illumination artifacts, such as lighting changes and shadows. While camera placement strategies can improve the performance of vision algorithms significantly, their utilities are limited in situations where it is more cost-effective to utilize existing camera networks instead. In these situations, we can employ camera selection strategies that choose, from the camera network, cameras that yield the best performance when utilized for performing surveillance tasks. We illustrate this with an algorithm that detects and tracks people under severe occlusions by selecting the best stereo pairs for counting people in a scene.
The study of sensor planning is also closely related to motion and temporal planning. Motion and temporal planning involves predicting trajectories of objects into the future based on previously observed tracks, and is very useful for modeling interactions between moving objects in the scene. This is utilized by an active camera system that we have developed for reasoning about periods of occlusions. Doing so allows the system to select cameras and PTZ settings that with high probability can be used to capture unobstructed video segments.
Finally, we will introduce a left-package system. This system first detects abandoned package in the scene and goes back in time to determine the time window when the package was first left. Steps can then be taken to retrieve images or video segments collected during the time window for identifying the person who left the package. We present the left-package detection sub-system and will show that it can detect abandoned packages even under severe occlusions without any hard thresholding steps.


Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have become integral to modern prototyping and manufacturing. Therefore, guidelines for using AM are necessary to help users new to the technology. Many others have proposed useful guidelines, but these are rarely written in a way that is accessible to novice users. Most guidelines (1) assume the user has extensive prior knowledge of the process, (2) apply to only a few AM technologies or a very specific application, or (3) describe benefits of the technology that novices already know. In this paper, we present a one-page, visual design for additive manufacturing worksheet for novice and intermittent users which addresses common mistakes as identified by various expert machinists and additive manufacturing facilities who have worked extensively with novices. The worksheet helps designers assess the potential quality of a part made using most AM processes and indirectly suggests ways to redesign it. The immediate benefit of the worksheet is to filter out bad designs before they are printed, thus saving time on manufacturing and redesign. We implemented this as a go-no-go test for a high-volume AM facility where users are predominantly novices, and we observed an 81% decrease in the rate of poorly designed parts. We also tested the worksheet in a classroom, but found no difference between the control and the experimental groups. This result highlights the importance of motivation since the cost of using AM in this context was dramatically lower than real-world costs. This second result highlights the limitations of the worksheet. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4037251]


BACKGROUND
The results of previous studies suggest that de novo lipogenesis may play an important role in the etiology of obesity, particularly during overconsumption of different carbohydrates.

OBJECTIVE
We hypothesized that de novo lipogenesis would increase during overfeeding, would vary depending on the type of carbohydrate consumed, and would be greater in obese than in lean women.

DESIGN
De novo lipogenesis was measured during 96 h of overfeeding by 50% with either sucrose or glucose and during an energy balance treatment (control) in 8 lean and 5 obese women. De novo lipogenesis was determined by measuring the amount of deuterium incorporation into plasma triacylglycerols. Fat and carbohydrate balance were measured simultaneously by continuous whole-body calorimetry.

RESULTS
De novo lipogenesis did not differ significantly between lean and obese subjects, except with the control treatment, for which de novo lipogenesis was greater in the obese subjects. De novo lipogenesis was 2- to 3-fold higher after overfeeding by 50% than after the control treatment in all subjects. The type of carbohydrate overfeeding (sucrose or glucose) had no significant effect on de novo lipogenesis in either subject group. Estimated amounts of absolute VLDL production ranged from a minimum of 2 g/d (control) to a maximum of 10 g/d after overfeeding. This compares with a mean fat balance of approximately 275 g after 96 h of overfeeding. Individual subjects showed characteristic amounts of de novo lipogenesis, suggesting constitutive (possibly genetic) differences.

CONCLUSION
De novo lipogenesis increases after overfeeding with glucose and sucrose to the same extent in lean and obese women but does not contribute greatly to total fat balance.


Comparative civil procedure has had little influence in American jurisprudence and commentary, in part because of American procedure's deep and widespread exceptionalism. But this may be changing, at least in certain areas. The American notice pleading standard, for example, which has long been considered exceptional, shows signs of trending toward the fact pleading models of foreign countries. Congressional experimentation with heightened pleading in statutes such as the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and the Supreme Court's recent pronouncements in Iqbal v. Ashcroft and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly suggest that American pleading jurisprudence is moving away from its traditionally exceptionalist corner and towards a regime focused on facts that is more akin to the global norm. If so, then this trend may allow for more meaningful transnational dialogue between the U.S. and foreign systems, more valuable comparative analyses in the U.S., and the potential to harmonize civil procedure across national boundaries.


Bayesian hierarchical models with latent Gaussian layers have proven very flexible in capturing complex stochastic behavior and hierarchical structures in high-dimensional spatial and spatio-temporal data. Whereas simulation-based Bayesian inference through Markov Chain Monte Carlo may be hampered by slow convergence and numerical instabilities, the inferential framework of Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is capable to provide accurate and relatively fast analytical approximations to posterior quantities of interest. It heavily relies on the use of Gauss-Markov dependence structures to avoid the numerical bottleneck of high-dimensional nonsparse matrix computations. With a view towards space-time applications, we here review the principal theoretical concepts, model classes and inference tools within the INLA framework. Important elements to construct space-time models are certain spatial Matern-like Gauss-Markov random fields, obtained as approximate solutions to a stochastic partial differential equation. Efficient implementation of statistical inference tools for a large variety of models is available through the INLA package of the R software. To showcase the practical use of R-INLA and to illustrate its principal commands and syntax, a comprehensive simulation experiment is presented using simulated non Gaussian space-time count data with a first-order autoregressive dependence structure in time.


This paper analyzes different criterion that shippers employ in their port selection process. It uses results from a survey conducted on regional shippers from the chemical and life sciences industries that ship full container and LCL cargo of hazardous and non-hazardous chemicals westbound (from U.S. east coast to Asia). Using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework and participants' comparative scores, factors affecting a shipper's port choice are prioritized. Findings suggest that port congestion and delays on the west coast ports in the U.S. and its effect on shippers' supply chains have changed their priorities; price and port characteristics are no longer their primary decision factors.


"America First" is "America Alone"

Foreign policy is like physics: vacuums quickly fill. As the United States retreats from the international order it helped put in place and maintain since the end of World War II, Russia is rapidly filling the vacuum. Federiga Bindi's new book assesses the consequences of this retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, showing how the current path of US foreign policy is leading to isolation and a sharp decrease of US influence in international relations.

Transatlantic relations reached a peak under President Barack Obama. But under the Trump administration, withdrawal from the global stage has caused irreparable damage to the transatlantic partnership and has propelled Europeans to act more independently. Europe and America explores this tumultuous path by examining the foreign policy of the United States, Russia, and the major European Union member states. The book highlights the consequences of US retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, demonstrating that "America first" is becoming "America alone," perhaps marking the end of transatlantic relations as we know it, with Europe no longer beholden to the US national interest.


A New Psychology of Men. Ronald F. Levant & William S. Pollack (Eds.). New York: Basic Books. 1995. 402 pp. Hardcover ISBN 0-46508656-X. $40.00. There was a time when male psychology was seen as the model of health, and female psychology was seen as pathological. Assertive, active masculinity was contrasted with passive, dependent femininity. But those days are gone. As Pollack (1995) states, "The monuments built of men, by men, and for men are tumbling.... Even their virtues are suspected as vices." Although the pace of change is slow, men's roles at home and at work are being redefined, and the psychology of men-how they develop and how they function psychologically as adults-is also changing. Perhaps the rate of change in men's roles crossed a threshold in the 1990s, triggering a surge of new interest in men's needs, their responsibilities, and the roles they have entered in post-industrial, post-feminist, post-modern America. For example, the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, brought attention to African American men, along with a public debate about their roles in families, the economy, and the community. Several national conferences have made fatherhood the central focus for the year. National debates have centered on the responsibilities of single and divorced fathers, as well as the rights of gay men. Robert Bly's Men's Movement continues to attract new warriors, despite the attacks by critics. On many fronts, men and women are actively redefining what it means to be male. To understand the changes in men and to become current with some of the most solid research programs aimed at both the old style masculinity and the emerging new psychology of men, Levant and Pollack's edited volume is essential reading. It is a readable collection of theoretical papers on male development and psychological functioning, reviews of research on men, clinical approaches to men's changing roles, as well as analyses of the diverse developmental experiences of minority males. The papers present a refreshing social-scientific approach to men's roles, without the ideological cliches of either radical feminists or neo-masculinists. The chapters document a 15-year program of theory development, research, and applications spawned by Joseph Pleck's (1981) gender rolestrain paradigm. Pleck's theory was one of the earliest attempts to integrate the emerging critical views of traditional male roles, and it laid the groundwork for the social constructionist perspectives on gender roles that emerged in the 1980s. He argued that the traditional ideals of masculinity-which include the demands for achievement, aggressiveness, toughness, sexual prowess, and psychological autonomy-were bad for men's health. First, the standards were inconsistent with human needs and were so unachievable that many men felt they never lived up to them. Second, in trying to live up to the self-destructive standards, many boys and young men went through traumatizing experiences that damaged them psychologically. …


Adoption by partners in a same-sex life partnership - Du Toit and Another v Minister of Welfare and Population Development 2001 (12) BCLR 1225 (T)
The applicants in this case were partners in a same-sex (lesbian) life partnership. Both applicants had been approved as suitable prospective adoptive parents and the adoption of two siblings had been finalised, but since the Child Care Act 74 of 1983 does not make provision for the joint adoption of a child by the members of a same-sex life partnership, the second applicant was the sole adoptive parent.


The world of academic study and university education privileges a so-called "global" process of thinking as universal, but this process actually relies on practices with a European centrality. This thinking process gets taught to individuals and "programs" the manner of thinking for the majority of the world's population, serving a neocolonial purpose in global conversations. After first revealing that Western civilization's institutions of learning propagate a disorienting perspective for other ethno-cultural viewpoints, Ishmael Reed utilizes a discursive process called Jes Grew that parasitically rewrites the institutionalized hegemony of the Western academy and its influence on the arts, thoughts, and actions of other ethno-cultural groups. In his novel Mumbo Jumbo , Ishmael Reed uses Jes Grew, a type of infovirus, to recode both the reader of the text and the academy itself through de-centering and deconstructing academic practices and texts of Western civilization, and then reconstructing and rewriting these into a more fluid, unbound academic system not circumscribed within the confines of Eurocentric hegemony. Reed accomplishes this task with the construction and implementation of Jes Grew that he first seeds in the imaginary and then extends out into physical, lived reality. Through a deconstruction of the physical and fictional text and an analysis of Reed's structural approach in Mumbo Jumbo , it becomes clear that his target hosts for Jes Grew infection are academic readers. Reed begins his process by shifting a European paradigm to an African one, and through this process he de-centers the "universal" centrality of Western culture. Reed's Jes Grew rewrites thinking into a system of thought that equally privileges multiple ethno-cultural viewpoints by de-centering and deconstructing the infected reader and re-centering the academic manner of processing information. This process de-privileges a Western manner of thinking and creates, instead, a fluid, unbound method of processing knowledge. Jes Grew reconfigures thinking itself in a manner that decolonizes the global psyche.


This study explores results of the 2012 Survey on Adjustments of Establishments to Globalization (SAEG) to analyze the economic and social upgrading experience of Philippine manufacturers within global value chains (GVCs). Three broad patterns emerge from the data. First, firms with stronger GVC linkages tend to have better labor indicators than purely domestic producers. Second, the majority of manufacturers either experienced or missed economic and social upgrading simultaneously. Lastly, almost all social upgrading is accompanied by economic upgrading but economic upgrading may take place without a social component. Against this background, this study uses bivariate probit regression to model the joint determination of the two separate but interconnected upgrading outcomes. The results indicate that the covariates in the model can be categorized based on their statistical significance: purely economic (i.e., employment size, unit labor cost, high skill intensity, and the Kaitz dummy), purely social (i.e., training, female intensity, and foreign equity), and both (i.e., contractualization, and process and product innovations). These results have several important implications. First, GVC firms' notion of social upgrading is closer to the softer components of working conditions than to traditional measurable indicators such as employment, wages, and efficiency. Second, the results suggest direct and indirect channels through which technological upgrading may generate desirable social outcomes: the direct channel highlights that innovation should be accompanied by skills development to sustain higher value creation while the indirect channel underlines the potential of innovation to create upward spirals in output, productivity, and, ultimately, labor conditions. Lastly, there are some indications that the social benefits of economic upgrading may not be evenly distributed among different types of employment. Overall, the results emphasize the need for a holistic upgrading experience that shifts the country's comparative advantage from cheap labor to innovative local industries and highly skilled workers.


Injection locking is a way of sinchronizing one free-running oscillator to a stabilized master oscillator. When considering applications utilizing this technique in semiconductor lasers, the noise properties of the locked lasers are of vital importance. In this paper we present and analyze some clarifying simulation results about determinate aspects related to the effect of noise on injection-locking. In this aim, a new semiconductor injection-locked laser modelling technique that includes this important effect of noise, both from the injected laser and from the external source, has been implemented. This modelling technique is based on a description of the coherent rate equations in terms of a funcional blocks diagram that can be analized by means of a suitable computer simulation program


Tax-benefit microsimulation models are typically used to assess the impact of policy changes on the income distribution based on micro data representative of the population. Such analysis assesses the effects of tax-benefit policies by considering their interaction effects and the population structure, which are both important elements for an overall assessment of complex realities. However, it can be helpful to abstract from this complexity and to explain the effects of tax-benefit policies using concrete examples. Using hypothetical households visualises how single policies are linked with each other while leaving the additional complexity of the population structure aside. This paper uses the Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT) to generate hypothetical household data that can be used in EUROMOD, the tax and benefit microsimulation model of the European Union, to analyse current tax and benefit policies as well as the effects of policy changes in a comparative manner. The paper provides a brief introduction of the use of hypothetical data in general and presents concrete examples of its application. The main part proposes a set of basic indicators that can be used to learn about European tax-benefit systems in a comparative perspective.


Interoception, the sensing of information about the internal physiological state of the body, is proposed to be fundamental to normal and abnormal affective feelings. We undertook a cross-sectional characterisation of cardiac interoception in patients accessing secondary mental health services to understand how interoceptive abnormalities relate to psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses.Patients attending adult mental health services (205 female, 101 male) and controls (42 female, 21 male) participated. Clinical diagnoses spanned affective disorders, personality disorders and psychoses. Physiological, bio-behavioural and subjective interoceptive measures included: 1) Basal heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV); 2) cardiac afferent effects on emotional processing (cardiac cycle modulation of ratings of fear vs. neutral faces); 3) perceptual accuracy, confidence, and metacognitive insight in heartbeat detection, and; 4) self-reported sensitivity to internal bodily sensations. We tested for transdiagnostic differences between patients and controls, then for correlations between interoceptive measures and affective symptoms, and for group differences across clinical diagnostic categories.Patients differed from controls in HRV, cardiac afferent effects on emotional processing, heartbeat discrimination accuracy, and heartbeat detection confidence. Anxiety and depression symptom severity correlated particularly with self-reported sensitivity to interoceptive experiences. Significant differences between diagnostic categories were observed for HRV, cardiac afferent effects on emotional processing, and subjective interoception. Patients with schizophrenia relative to other diagnoses intriguingly showed opposite cardiac afferent effects on emotion processing.This multilevel characterisation identified interoceptive differences associated with psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses. Interoceptive mechanisms have potential value for the clinical stratification and therapeutic targeting of psychiatric disorders.


Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) cause china epidemics with high morbidity and mortality, the infection has been transmitted to other countries. About three neonates and more than 230 children cases are reported. The disease condition of the main children was mild. There is currently no evidence that SARS‐CoV‐2 can be transmitted transplacentally from mother to the newborn. The treatment strategy for children with Coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) is based on adult experience. Thus far, no deaths have been reported in the pediatric age group. This review describes the current understanding of COVID‐19 infection in newborns and children.


We consider a multi-sided assignment game with the following characteristics: (a) the agents are organized in m sectors that are connected by a graph that induces a weighted m-partite graph on the set of agents, (b) a basic coalition is formed by agents from different connected sectors, and (c) the worth of a basic coalition is the addition of the weights of all its pairs that belong to connected sectors. We provide a sufficient condition on the weights to guarantee balancedness of the related multi-sided assignment game. Moreover, when the graph on the sectors is cycle-free, we prove the game is strongly balanced and the core is fully described by means of the cores of the underlying two-sided assignment games associated with the edges of this graph. As a consequence, the complexity of the computation of an optimal matching is reduced and existence of optimal core allocations for each sector of the market is guaranteed.


Under EPA's Workers Protection Standard Act of 1992, persons applying pesticide in a greenhouse are usually required to wear protective clothing and a face mask and to breath filtered air. The impervious clothing is usually uncomfortable and may be a health risk via overheating and potential for dehydration. The objective of this research was to devise an automated greenhouse spray system to eliminate hand application. Using off-the-shelf components, pesticides are applied at a predetermined time through mist nozzles suspended in greenhouse bays. The automated spray system reduces pesticide exposure to the applicator and others and thus reduces potential liability for the employer, facilitates better control on application rates, is more repeatable than hand application, reduces costs of hazardous waste disposal, and reduces disruption of other greenhouse operations.


Abbey presents a close study of Nietzche's works Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Although these middle period works tend to be neglected in commentaries on Nietzsche, they repay close attention. Abbey's study of Nietzsche's middle period paints a vastly different portrait of the philosopher: a careful, sensitive analyst of moral life. This work fills a serious gap in the literature on Nietzsche.


Possibilistic logic is a well-known logic for reasoning under uncertainty, which is based on the idea that the epistemic state of an agent can be modeled by assigning to each possible world a degree of possibility, taken from a totally ordered, but essentially qualitative scale. Recently, a generalization has been proposed that extends possibilistic logic to a meta-epistemic logic, endowing it with the capability of reasoning about epistemic states, rather than merely constraining them. In this paper, we further develop this generalized possibilistic logic (GPL). We introduce an axiomatization showing that GPL is a fragment of a graded version of the modal logic KD, and we prove soundness and completeness w.r.t. a semantics in terms of possibility distributions. Next, we reveal a close link between the well-known stable model semantics for logic programming and the notion of minimally specific models in GPL. More generally, we analyze the relationship between the equilibrium logic of Pearce and GPL, showing that GPL can essentially be seen as a generalization of equilibrium logic, although its notion of minimal specificity is slightly more demanding than the notion of minimality underlying equilibrium logic.


Police sexual misconduct is often considered a hidden crime that routinely goes unreported. The current study provides empirical data on cases of sex-related police crime at law enforcement agencies across the United States. The study identifies and describes incidents where sworn law enforcement officers were arrested for one or more sex-related crimes through a quantitative content analysis of published newspaper articles and court records. The primary news information source was the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts. Data are analyzed on 548 arrest cases in the years 2005-2007 of 398 officers employed by 328 nonfederal law enforcement agencies located in 265 counties and independent cities in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Findings indicate that police sexual misconduct includes serious forms of sex-related crime and that victims of sex-related police crime are typically younger than 18 years of age.


Over the last decade alone, the overall crime rate among adolescents has increased substantially. To understand this trend, this article examines characteristics of adolescent males who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. The study focuses on drug and alcohol involvement, the relevance of education, sexual practices, and sensitivity to violence. For this study, 82 males, aged 12-18, who were randomly selected from a correctional institution located in a large southeastern state, completed instruments and provided demographic information. Results indicate that juvenile offenders share a number of characteristics, which lead to the following profile: single-parent households headed by the mother; siblings or parents who have been involved in the legal system; the use of cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana at an early age; weekly $1,000 earnings selling crack; a friend who sells drugs; achievement in mathematics; high rates of suspension and expulsion; no aspiration for higher education; early sexual activity; and weapons ownership. A number of intervention strategies, particularly community-based programs, are recommended Juvenile delinquency was first recognized as a social problem in the United States at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Eddy & Gribskov, 1998). Unfortunately, the number of juvenile delinquents arrested for crimes has increased steadily since. Moreover, there has been a marked increase in the prevalence and severity of criminal activity in the past decade. In particular, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( 1995), since 1985, the overall crime rate among adolescents has increased by 75%, including a 97% increase in aggravated assaults and a 150% increase in murders. Unfortunately, despite a plethora of research in the area of violence and aggression, we still do not understand why our youth continue to become involved in and victimized by criminal acts. The purpose of this study was to examine characteristics of adolescent males who come into contact with the juvenile justice system and to assess their attitudes and perceptions on a number of relevant dimensions. These dimensions include: drug and alcohol involvement, relevance of education, sexual practices, and sensitivity to violence. It was believed that an understanding of the attitudes and perceptions of aggressive, undersocialized youth would have implications for confronting the rising concerns about violence among today's youth. Also, it was hoped that this study would contribute to the knowledge base relating to juvenile delinquents by determining factors which place them at risk, thus helping to identify effective treatment programs and ultimately reducing the overall rate of incarceration. Method Participants Eighty-two adolescent males, aged 12-18, participated in the study. This sample was drawn randomly from the population of juveniles incarcerated at correctional facilities located in a large southeastern state. The sample size represented approximately 15% of the total number of juveniles incarcerated at these correctional institutions. INSTRUMENT AND PROCEDURE Participants were administered the Lifestyles, Attitudes, and Perceptions Survey (LAPS), which was devised by the researchers specifically for the present study. The LAPS is an 86-item questionnaire consisting of a series of open- and closed-ended questions designed to examine juveniles' attitudes and perceptions regarding a variety of life issues. This instrument examines several domains, including drug use, sexual behavior, life expectancies, and attitudes towards women. The LAPS was reviewed by secondary school teachers and analyzed using Grammatik 5 (Reference Software International, 1992) for readability. All scales were found to be suitable for readers at a fifth-grade level. Although participants were provided with the actual instrument, each question was read aloud by one of the researchers in order to control for variation in reading skills. …


Nonlinear control laws often need to be implemented with digital hardware. Use of digital control systems leads to communication/processing delays which are widely neglected in control of mechanical systems. This paper proposes a discrete approach to feedback linearization that considers these commonly overlooked delays in design. The proposed approach is shown to both improve the performance and remove the need for continuous derivative terms. In feedback linearization control systems, designed in the continuous domain, derivative terms are required to speed up the control response of mechanical systems, but disadvantageously cause high sensitivity to noise. The proposed approach was used to design a feedback linearization control system for a common turning maneuver of an unmanned helicopter in yaw. At this maneuver, the helicopter centroid motion and pitch rotational speed are almost zero. Governing differential equations of the helicopter at this maneuver are nonlinear and coupled. A feedback linearization law was proposed to curb nonlinearity and, a discrete control system, considering the inevitable delay due to the use of digital control systems, was adopted to complete the control law. This innovative approach resulted in less sensitivity to noises and performance boost. Practical limits in terms of control input, rotor speed, sampling frequency and noises of the gyroscope, the tachometer and the acceleration sensor were taken into account in this research. The results show that the proposed control system leads to fast and smooth yaw turns even at a high pitch angle (close to vertical) or in the case of being hit by external objects.


In many analyses of international family law attention is exclusively given to "cultural" aspects; the analysis of rules of international family law is often embedded in the debate on the collision of cultures. But in analyses of international family law a so-called socio-economic component can be distinguished, certainly if international family law is studied in interaction with migration law: in regulating mobility, residence, nationality and social security issues at present sensitive areas – one is inevitably confronted with the intricacies of PIL – for example, the recognition of a foreign marriage or of a foreign judgment containing a change of age of a foreigner (both typical issues of PIL) could be decisive in evaluating a residence claim or a retirement claim. Awareness of this impact of international family law apparently functions as a catalyst on various levels: in parallel with current "two-track policies" in migration law, a double-track policy is also emerging in the process of dealing with international family law. On the one hand, the European Union has "brought in" international family law as an instrument to stimulate the freedom of movement of European citizens: the awareness that mobility of European citizens within the European Union can be influenced by the way people weigh the pros and cons of its impact on the regulation of their family life, spurs the elaboration of a liberal international family law. On the other hand, when international family law issues involve non-European foreigners, national authorities sometimes tend to use international family law rules in such a way as to prevent non-European migrants from claiming residence, social security and nationality. Thus, if one examines the "economic" component of international family law, both the so-called European context (mobility of European citizens and their family members within Europe, whereby principles as free movement of persons, non-discrimination of EU citizens and European citizenship are crucial) and the so-called non-European context (migration from non-European countries) should be examined – with attention for the shaky dividing line which seems to exist between the two, as well as the double-track policy which, when comparing dynamics, seems to develop (trends to liberalisation in a European context versus opposite trends in a non-European context). An analysis of the "instrumentalisation" of PIL requires a) research into the foundations of PIL b) as well as research into PIL's "hinge-function." There is a need to lay down the scientific foundations for future developments in this area through the identification of a series of mechanisms, the critical analysis of the legitimacy and side-effects of current practices and the exploration of future scenarios. The paper includes references to the themes of Transnational Corporate Social Responsibility and International Labour Law, as related to Private International Law.


With the increasing service quality standards in financial organisations, customer retention tools gain more significance. The banking sector is not an exception in this context as loyalty programmes have become an important tool to retain small and medium enterprises (hereinafter – SMEs) as customers which generate a considerable portion of the bank's income. It is assumed that the world's safest banks also have their loyalty programmes in place to retain the SMEs segment, however the unclear extent and characteristics of these programmes presupposes the need for empirical research. First of all, the article elaborates on the concept of loyalty programmes and its typologies, furthermore, it proves the need and importance of bank loyalty programmes to SMEs and after the survey methodology is formed, the magnitude and specificity of the world's safest banks' loyalty programmes designed to SMEs are empirically analysed. The accomplished analysis of the national context, types, characteristics and reward parameters of loyalty programmes shows consistent empirical and statistical patterns, which are significant for the marketing science and practice. JEL classification: M 21, M 31. Keywords: bank, loyalty, loyalty programme, marketing, relationship, SMEs.