This paper explores a question of superficial triviality: when sports use instant replay technology to review on-field calls, what standard of review should they employ? The conventional view is that on-field calls should be entrenched against reversal such that, if the reviewing official has any doubt about the correctness of the initial call, he must let it stand even if he thinks it very probably wrong. Indeed, in the wake of officiating debacles at last summer"s FIFA World Cup, commentators proposed not only that soccer employ instant replay, but also that it follow the NFL in directing officials to overturn on-field calls only when "indisputable visual evidence" (IVE) reveals that call to be mistaken. This essay argues that common wisdom in favor of IVE overlooks important considerations against entrenchment and likely rests upon mistaken premises, and it offers several concrete proposals for reform. A lengthy investigation into the optimal standard of review for instant replay in sports might seem frivolous. But it serves a deeper ambition. We are in the early years of sports" colonization by econometricians, as legal theorists remain watching from the sidelines. That is unfortunate. Formal organized sports are, in effect, legal systems, and legal theorists might find much both to teach and to learn by paying closer attention to competitive athletics. In short, legal theorists would benefit from a sustained engagement with what I have termed, in previous work, "the jurisprudence of sport." As a case study in this nascent field, this essay reveals that the problem of appellate review in sports is surprisingly rich and complex—implicating profound questions concerning the relationships among desert, entitlement and justice; the difference between mistake and error; and the contours of loss aversion and omission bias, among other things. But it shows even more than that. The jurisprudence of sport maintains that sporting practices and norms can teach lessons for ordinary legal systems as surely as the other way around. Illustrating that claim, this essay draws from football replay practices an argument to reform the criminal trial system to accommodate two verdicts of acquittal, not one.


The Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, or the "Principles," seek to "unify and clarify" the law of software transactions. The drafters, however, excluded "digital content" from the scope of their project. This Essay explains why the scope of the Principles should encompass digital content. The exclusion of digital content creates two different but related problems. The first problem is that it creates what I refer to as "classification confusion." Given the complexity and speed of technological innovation, the task of distinguishing digital content from software may be difficult for courts. The second problem is that it fails to resolve the conundrum of how to balance the proprietary rights and interests of licensor-owners and the rights and interests of licensee-consumers. This conundrum in turn has created problems of contractual form and user assent that arose out of software transactions but which have much more troubling applications in other contexts. With (and sometimes, even without) a click of a mouse, one can relinquish intellectual property, privacy, and expression rights. This Essay proposes that the Principles should generally apply to digital content. The Principles are an impressive accomplishment and go a long way toward unifying and clarifying the law of software transactions. This Essay urges that they go even further.


Over the last two decades, Pakistan has made significant progress in reducing all measures of poverty. The consumption-based poverty headcount decreased from 57.9% in 1998-99 to 29.5% in 2013-14, while the incidence of multidimensional poverty has declined from 55.2% in 2004-05 to 38.8% in 2014-15. However, as noted by the World Bank and the 2015-16 Economic Survey from the Ministry of Finance, much of the population remains in poverty or could fall into poverty if economic conditions worsened. Simultaneously, measures of inequality have risen. In comparison to 1987-88, the richest 20% now consume seven times more than the poorest 20%, and, while multidimensional poverty is less than 10% in major cities, it is more than 90% in some districts. Furthermore, Pakistan has experienced structural changes such that the share of services in total GDP has grown considerably. Agriculture's contribution to GDP declined from 22.9% to 18.9%2 over the period 2003-04 to 2017-18. Yet, the labor force is still employed in agriculture, as its share in total employment has only seen a marginal decline, from 43.1% in 2003-04 to 42.3%.


Police records of arrests of women in Wichita, Kansas for driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol for a 5-year period (1980-1984) were studied. The proportion of arrests of women increased from 10.6 to 14.5% of total arrested. Women in their 20s comprised the largest age group; single women were greatly overrepresented. More than one-half of the arrested women were employed outside the home; a substantial proportion (30.8%) were unemployed at the time of arrest. The average blood alcohol level of those tested was 183 mg/dl. Characteristics of arrestees are discussed in terms of changes in the social roles and expectations of women. Although time of arrest was similar to that of men (i.e., night), arrests of women were more evenly spread across the days of the week. Within the 5-year period, the rate of recidivism for DUI was 7.43%. The implications of arrest and recidivism patterns are discussed. A change in legal and arrest procedures was found to have the same effect on arrests of women as it had on those of men, suggesting that the changes did not produce differential treatment by police.


This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income and consumption sources affect overall inequality. The paper then provides a wide range of policy applications of the source decomposition of the extended Gini index, including techniques for analyzing the impact on inequality of the targeting of programs as opposed to the rules for the allocation of benefits among program participants.


Seismic depth soundings on Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier (NFG), NE Greenland, reveal an overdeepened trough under the floating glacier. The maximum depth of the trough reaches more than 900 m below sea level. Mass balance calculations indicate considerable ice loss due to strong subglacial melting with a mean melt rate of 8 m a−1. The geometry of the cavity and water mass characteristics from CTD measurements suggest the existence of a well defined regional circulation system. Warm, saline and rather dense water follows the inward inclining basal slope through the deep valley of Dijmphna Sund towards the grounding line. Shallow ridges at the eastern glacier front prevent this water mass entering from that direction. The comparatively cold, fresh and less dense melt water follows the subglacial ice topography leaving the cavity through the gaps towards the east. The abundance of subglacial melt water east of NFG is most probably one of the main reasons for the semi permanent sea ice cover in this region. Cold water masses upwelling in the Northeast Water Polynia and detected by satellite remote sensing are very likely influenced and modified by the subglacial melt water production.


The paper sheds some light on the education returns in Germany in the post war period. After describing higher education in Germany the current stand of higher education financing within the single states is presented. In six states tuition fees will be introduced in 2007/08 and discussions are going on in even some more. In the second part of the paper an empirical analysis is done using longitudinal data from the German social pension system. The analysis over the whole lifecycle renders results which proof that the higher education advantages are quite remarkable and might be a justification for more intensified financing by tuition fees. But all this has to be embedded into an encompassing strategy of tax and social policy, especially to prevent a strengthened process of social selection, which would be counterproductive for an increased and highly qualified human capital in Germany.


Background Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease characterized by progressive cartilage degeneration, subchondral bone changes, osteophyte formation, and synovitis. A major symptom is pain that is triggered by peripheral and central changes within the pain pathways. Some surgery-induced joint instability rat models of OA were described to mimic traumatic OA. Several behavioral tests were developed to access OA-induced pain. However, follow-up in most studies usually only occurred for about 4 weeks. Since traumatic OA is a chronic disease which gradually develops after trauma, the pattern of pain might differ between early and late stages after the trauma. Purpose To observe the time-dependent development of hypersensitivity after traumatic OA and to determine the best timing and methods to investigate traumatic OA-induced pain. Methods Anterior cruciate ligament transection plus medial meniscectomy was used to induce traumatic OA in Sprague-Dawley rats. Traumatic OA-induced pain was evaluated using four different behavioral tests for 15 weeks. Results A significant difference in mechanical hypersensitivity developed throughout the observational period. It was worst in the first 3 weeks after the operation, then became less significant after 5 weeks but persisted. There were no differences in thermal hyperalgesia or motor coordination. Conclusion Traumatic OA induced mechanical hyperalgesia but did not cause thermal hyperalgesia or influence motor coordination. Furthermore, to investigate chronic pain induced by OA, the observational period should be at least 5 weeks after the intervention. These findings may help in further research and improve our understanding of traumatic OA-induced pain mechanisms.


The understanding the implication of biotic component, especially freshwater phytoplankton in the man-made stormwater constructed wetland under tropical climate condition in Malaysia still rare and less documented. Thus, the aim of the this study is to investigate the effect of nitrogen and phosphorus removal (as an important element for freshwater phytoplankton) in the stormwater constructed wetland in Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), which designed based on Urban Stormwater Management Manual for Malaysia (MSMA) first edition, 2001, to the freshwater phytoplankton communities, as a primary food chain in aquatic life. This paper also will elaborate the detail design of stormwater constructed wetland during the first construction design was being made. Four (4) main nutrients was measured; nitrite, nitrate, ammoniacal nitrogen and orthophosphate, together with other supporting data such as water temperature, total suspended solid, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), pH, DO and conductivity. The phytoplankton sampling was conducted at the same time of water quality sampling. The results showed that the concentration of nutrient (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) continuously reduce when enter to throughout the constructed wetland for nitrite (80%), nitrate (61.56%), orthophosphate (60.98%) and NH4-N (51.49%) before it discharge to the outlet. Based on this nutrient concentration reduction pattern, species diversity (H') measured for phytoplankton showed decreasing in number as well as number of individual species and types of species. The dominance species represented by the dominance group Chlorophyta are Coelastrum microporum, Mougeotia sp and Westella botryoides. The freshwater phytoplankton distribution is strongly correlated with the reduction of nutrient concentration, however, for the other biotic component such as freshwater fish, inverse relationship found with the freshwater phytoplankton due to other factors such as the water depth design and water temperature in this constructed wetland.


I. INTRODUCTIONThe employer-employee relationship is at the epicenter of commerce. This relationship is complex and rife with difficulties, as the two sides often have competing objectives and aspirations. From the smallest sole proprietorship to the largest corporation, where there are employers and employees, there is a tension. The struggle is simple and constant: employees want to work less for more pay, while employers want their employees to work more for less pay. Prior to modern legislation, the Golden Rule governed this relationship in the United States: "he who has the gold makes the rules."1 Fortunately, for American workers, labor laws have helped level the playing field.Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the NLRA or the Act)2 to help workers gain equality at the bargaining table. The Act guarantees workers certain rights, such as the right to form unions, to bargain collectively through their representatives, and to strike.3 The Act created the National Labor Relations Board (the NLRB or the Board) to assist workers in asserting these rights.4 From time to time, the Board issues rules that it finds necessary to help workers achieve the equality of bargaining power contemplated in the NLRA.On August 30, 2011, the Board issued a rule requiring employers to post 11-by-17-inch notices in their places of business informing employees of their NLRA rights.5 The Board found that workers were largely unaware of these rights and thus were unable to benefit from the Act.6 The Board found the posting rule necessary for effectuating the purpose of the NLRA and helping workers at the bargaining table.7While the Board and other supporters see the new rule as a way to apprise workers of their rights and to help them assert those rights, opponents see it as an effort by Democrats to heavily encourage the unionization of the workplace. Part II of this Note details the history, purpose, and function of the NLRA, and the NLRB's role in administering the Act.8 Part II also explains the NLRB's new notice requirement. Part III outlines the debate over the new rule and the major legal and political issues involved.9 Part IV provides a recommendation for how courts should evaluate the NLRB's authority to promulgate such a rule.10 While political ideologies undergird this debate, the purpose of the NLRA, the NLRB's statutory authority, and analogous rules of other agencies show that the NLRB has not exceeded its legal authority by issuing the notice rule.11II. BACKGROUNDCongress enacted the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 amidst the background of the Great Depression and New Deal reform. Prior to the Act, workers enjoyed little protection from miserly or abusive employers and had little recourse against unfair labor practices.12 The history and development of the Act and the Board help illuminate the current tensions between businesses and the new NLRB posting rule.A. The National Labor Relations ActThe National Labor Relations Act of 1935 created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce the provisions of the Act and enact rules to uphold the Act's policies.13 Since its inception, opponents have challenged the Act and the Board's rulemaking power to enforce it.14 Businesses continue to resist Board rules with the same fervor as they did in the early days of the Act.15 As discussed,16 the basic nature of the employer-employee relationship explains this struggle.1. The Precursor to the NLRA: The Norris-LaGuardia ActIn 1932, Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act.17 Prior to the Act's passage, workers had few remedies against unfair labor practices, as courts would simply enjoin striking workers and force them back to work.18 With the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act, Congress declared that the public policy of the United States concerning labor would be to help ordinarily helpless workers protect their freedom of labor rights and to give workers full freedom of association with fellow workers. …


In residential tenancies, it is usual for the landlord to be responsible for the fabric of the building and the main appliances, and for the tenant to be responsible for paying for electricity, gas and other fuel. It is also the tenant who is affected by the building's heating and ventilation performance – whether it can be kept warm and dry without undue expense. A landlord has no financial incentive to invest in extra insulation or better appliances, because the benefits will be reaped by the tenant in lower energy bills and higher levels of comfort, and because the improvements do not have a direct influence on the rent that the landlord can charge. The result is that energy efficiency investments tend not to get made. In policy terms, the interests of the landlord and tenant are not aligned; the incentives are split. It is a classic example of a principal-agent gap, and as the "landlord-tenant problem" is one of the market failures that affects efficiency in markets for energy and energy products. The energy use affected by the principal-agent problem in the United States residential sector for refrigerators, space heating, water heating and lighting has been estimated as 31.4 per cent of the total sectoral energy use; so the issue is a substantial one. The problem of energy efficiency in rental accommodation is therefore the subject of this article.


Imprinted genes in placental mammals play a critical role in regulating prenatal growth and setting the metabolic rate of development. Highly expressed in embryos and early postnatal life, imprinted genes are down regulated when the organism reaches adulthood, remaining expressed in individual cells where they control activation and plasticity. Maternally imprinted gene Pw1, also known as Peg3, recently was described as a potential adult stem cell marker in various tissues such as bone marrow, central nervous system and intestines. In skeletal muscle it marks myogenic stem cells, which are located in interstitia and can efficiently contribute to muscle regeneration after focal freeze-crush injury. Using a transgenic Pw1:nLacZ reporter mouse, I described a subpopulation of proepicardial/epicardial derived mesenchymal cells involved in maintaining homeostasis of adult mouse heart through secretion of various growth factors. Immunohistochemistry and cytometric analysis revealed that myocardial Pw1 cells express the cardiac stem cell membrane receptors Sca1, Pdgfra, Cd34 and Cd29, making them a potentially interesting component of regenerative medicine for further investigation. Based on mRNA expression profiles and patterns during embryonic development I surmise an epicardial origin of Pw1 cells and their involvement in cardiac growth, as adult Pw1 cells are highly pro-angiogenic in vitro and can induce tube formation when they are co-cultured with an endothelial cell line. To investigate the role of Pw1 cells during postnatal cardiac growth I have linked their action to heart hypertrophy during pregnancy. Using pharmacological tools I locally depleted Pw1 cells which resulted in local cardiomyocyte atrophy and fibrosis. To explore the remodelling potential of Pw1 cells in pathological conditions we are planning to investigate their involvement in disease models of myocardial infarction.


The article analyses the process of designing the incident management structure, which is useful for practicing the coordination of disaster-responsive measures, developed during the response phase of disaster management. While delving into the given response phase of the disaster management cycle on the basis of the theoretical and methodological construct the authors of the article state that the "Command-and-Control" (which is close to the traditional hierarchical public administration model) and "Problem-Solving" (close to the new public management model) models offered by the researchers of disaster management processes for the response phase of disaster management can be merged into a single unit on the basis of implementation of Neo-Weberian principles. The application of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model enables the combination of both the centralised hierarchical management and public administration principles which are based on the new public management. The general hierarchical incident management structure (IMS) presented in the article can be applied for the management of disasters. Nevertheless, as regards the areas of responsibility or competence of the incident management departments analysed by disaster management researchers, the authors of the article draw attention to the failure to assess the importance of (and thus propose to introduce) the involvement of citizens and their groups in incident liquidation and to find the concord (synergy) between the hierarchical IMS and the participation of citizen groups (communities) in disaster management.


We quantified the spatio-temporal patterns of land cover/land use (LCLU) change to document and evaluate the daytime surface urban heat island (SUHI) for five hot subtropical desert cities (Beer Sheva, Israel; Hotan, China; Jodhpur, India; Kharga, Egypt; and Las Vegas, NV, USA). Sequential Landsat images were acquired and classified into the USGS 24-category Land Use Categories using object-based image analysis with an overall accuracy of 80% to 95.5%. We estimated the land surface temperature (LST) of all available Landsat data from June to August for years 1990, 2000, and 2010 and computed the urban-rural difference in the average LST and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for each city. Leveraging non-parametric statistical analysis, we also investigated the impacts of city size and population on the urban-rural difference in the summer daytime LST and NDVI. Urban expansion is observed for all five cities, but the urbanization pattern varies widely from city to city. A negative SUHI effect or an oasis effect exists for all the cities across all three years, and the amplitude of the oasis effect tends to increase as the urban-rural NDVI difference increases. A strong oasis effect is observed for Hotan and Kharga with evidently larger NDVI difference than the other cities. Larger cities tend to have a weaker cooling effect while a negative association is identified between NDVI difference and population. Understanding the daytime oasis effect of desert cities is vital for sustainable urban planning and the design of adaptive management, providing valuable guidelines to foster smart desert cities in an era of climate variability, uncertainty, and change.


Climate change coupled with an intensifying wildfire regime is becoming an important driver of permafrost loss and ecosystem change in the northern boreal forest. There is a growing need to understand the effects of fire on the spatial distribution of permafrost and its associated ecological consequences. We focus on the effects of fire a decade after disturbance in a rocky upland landscape in the interior Alaskan boreal forest. Our main objectives were to (1) map near-surface permafrost distribution and drainage classes and (2) analyze the controls over landscape-scale patterns of post-fire permafrost degradation. Relationships among remote sensing variables and field-based data on soil properties (temperature, moisture, organic layer thickness) and vegetation (plant community composition) were analyzed using correlation, regression, and ordination analyses. The remote sensing data we considered included spectral indices from optical datasets (Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI)), the principal components of a time series of radar backscatter (Advanced Land Observing Satellite—Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS-PALSAR)), and topographic variables from a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-derived digital elevation model (DEM). We found strong empirical relationships between the normalized difference infrared index (NDII) and post-fire vegetation, soil moisture, and soil temperature, enabling us to indirectly map permafrost status and drainage class using regression-based models. The thickness of the insulating surface organic layer after fire, a measure of burn severity, was an important control over the extent of permafrost degradation. According to our classifications, 90% of the area considered to have experienced high severity burn (using the difference normalized burn ratio (dNBR)) lacked permafrost after fire. Permafrost thaw, in turn, likely increased drainage and resulted in drier surface soils. Burn severity also influenced plant community composition, which was tightly linked to soil temperature and moisture. Overall, interactions between burn severity, topography, and vegetation appear to control the distribution of near-surface permafrost and associated drainage conditions after disturbance.


In the last ten to fifteen years, a number of articles have been written on the differences between a normative income tax system and a normative consumption tax system, with much of the discussion focusing on the taxation of the risk-free rate of return and the risk premium from an investment. As is generally accepted, under certain assumptions an accrual income tax system taxes the risk-free rate of return on capital but does not tax the risk premium, while a cash-flow consumption tax system (or a wage tax system) taxes neither the risk-free rate of return nor the risk premium. As a result, the only difference between the two tax systems is the tax treatment of the risk-free rate of return on capital. Brief forays into supernormal returns have seemed to indicate that these returns are taxed under an accrual income tax or a cash-flow consumption tax, but not under a wage tax.In this Article, we begin with a brief discussion on the taxation of capital income. We then discuss the taxation of supernormal returns on investments. The literature has treated supernormal returns as one of the three elements of the return on capital (along with the risk-free rate of return and the risk premium). Our thesis is that a supernormal return is not a return on capital but rather a return on skill or labor or, in some cases, simply a windfall. The implications of treating supernormal returns as due to skill or as a windfall can be quite enlightening and startling. For example, if Congress were to adopt a wage tax system, supernormal returns would need to be taxed under such a system. To compare the various tax bases, the following discussion assumes flat tax rates, full loss offsets, and no inflation.


Once seen as something avoided in making important life decisions, recent research and theories of emotional intelligence point to the interdependence of emotion and cognition in the decision-making process. Emotional intelligence as conceptualized by Mayer and Salovey consists of four interrelated abilities: (a) perceiving emotions, (b) using emotions to facilitate thoughts, (c) understanding emotions, and (d) managing emotions to enhance personal growth. It is hypothesized that such abilities facilitate the career decision-making process and lead to decisions that more fully satisfy career-related interests, values, and aspirations. Emotions experienced during this process have implications for the perception of risk related to specific career options, amount and kind of self-exploration individuals will engage in, and how information related to career choice will be processed. Also reviewed are issues of reliability and validity of the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale and the implications of emotional intelligence for the career counseling process.


Nasa Yuwe is the language of the Nasa indigenous community in Colombia. It is currently threatened with extinction. In this regard, a range of computer science solutions have been developed to the teaching and revitalization of the language. One of the most suitable approaches is the construction of a Part-Of-Speech Tagging (POST), which encourages the analysis and advanced processing of the language. Nevertheless, for Nasa Yuwe no tagged corpus exists, neither is there a POS Tagger and no related works have been reported. This paper therefore concentrates on building a linguistic corpus tagged for the Nasa Yuwe language and generating the first tagging application for Nasa Yuwe. The main results and findings are 1) the process of building the Nasa Yuwe corpus, 2) the tagsets and tagged sentences, as well as the statistics associated with the corpus, 3) results of two experiments to evaluate several POS Taggers (a Random tagger, three versions of HSTAGger, a tagger based on the harmony search metaheuristic, and three versions of a memetic algorithm GBHS Tagger, based on Global-Best Harmony Search (GBHS), Hill Climbing and an explicit Tabu memory, which obtained the best results in contrast with the other methods considered over the Nasa Yuwe language corpus.


In their efforts to change organizations, managers and change consultants are time and again confronted with the limited controllability of organizations, the complexity and indeterminacy of change processes and the uncertain and ambiguous effects of their actions. In short, they are confronted with chaos. Some managers and consultants try to enhance their (illusion of) control over organizations by attempting to reduce chaos, while others accept and embrace chaos and base their change practice on it. This article focuses on the second group. Based on a study of literature and a series of interviews with experienced change consultants, a typology is developed, in which an enlightened modern, an ironic, and a postmodern way of coping with chaos in change processes is elaborated. The typology may help change consultants and managers with the development of their way of working and the articulation of their professional identity.


Wireless nanosensor networks (WNSNs) consist of nanosized communicating devices, which can detect and measure new types of events at the nanoscale. WNSNs are the enabling technology for unique applications such as intrabody drug delivery systems or surveillance networks for chemical attack prevention. One of the major bottlenecks in WNSNs is posed by the very limited energy that can be stored in a nanosensor mote in contrast to the energy that is required by the device to communicate. Recently, novel energy harvesting mechanisms have been proposed to replenish the energy stored in nanodevices. With these mechanisms, WNSNs can overcome their energy bottleneck and even have infinite lifetime (perpetual WNSNs), provided that the energy harvesting and consumption processes are jointly designed. In this paper, an energy model for self-powered nanosensor motes is developed, which successfully captures the correlation between the energy harvesting and the energy consumption processes. The energy harvesting process is realized by means of a piezoelectric nanogenerator, for which a new circuital model is developed that can accurately reproduce existing experimental data. The energy consumption process is due to the communication among nanosensor motes in the terahertz band (0.1-10 THz). The proposed energy model captures the dynamic network behavior by means of a probabilistic analysis of the total network traffic and the multiuser interference. A mathematical framework is developed to obtain the probability distribution of the nanosensor mote energy and to investigate the end-to-end successful packet delivery probability, the end-to-end packet delay, and the achievable throughput of WNSNs. Nanosensor motes have not been built yet and, thus, the development of an analytical energy model is a fundamental step toward the design of WNSNs architectures and protocols.


Traditional correspondence system has now been replaced by internet, which has now become indispensable in everyone's life. With the advent of the internet, majority of people correspond through emails several times in a day. However, as internet has evolved, email is being exploited by spammers so as to disturb the recipients'. The entire internet community pays the price, every time there pops a spam mail. Online privacy of the users is compromised when spam disturbs a network by crashing mail servers and filling up hard disks. Servers classified as spam sites are forfeited from sending mails to the recipients'. This paper gives the broader view of spam, issues challenges and statistical losses occurred on account of spams.


Introduction: Despite the effective pre- and post-exposure treatments, at least 60,000 deaths from rabies occur worldwide every year. Post-exposure treatment is considered as one of the most significant measures for preventing human deaths in exposed individuals. The 2-1-1 rabies post-exposure treatment schedule known as Zagreb regimen is an abbreviated immunization plan in which a tissue culture rabies vaccine is administered intramuscularly at two sites on day 0 and at one site on days 7 and 21. Objectives: In this study the efficacy of rabies vaccine administration under Zagreb regimen in an Iranian group of patients attending Pasteur Institute of Iran was evaluated. Methods: Rabies neutralizing antibody titer was measured in 75 serum samples collected from 25 volunteers receiving post exposure treatment by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT), and ELISA. Results: All patients were negative for rabies antibody in both ELISA and FRRIT tests on day 0. A satisfactory rabies virus antibody response with the titer of ≥0.5 IU/ml was detected in all patients on day 21 and two weeks after the completion of vaccination (day 35). Conclusions: Rabies immunization with rabies Vero-cell vaccine (PVRV) under the 2-1-1 schedule (Zagreb regimen) could result in an adequate immune response without any adverse effect. However a more comprehensive comparative study is underway to confirm these findings. Vac Res, 2014, 1 (1): 25 - 27


The rapid and selective accumulation of neutrophils into the lungs is thought to underlie the pulmonary failure that leads to sepsis-related death. In this study we investigated whether neutrophil TLR4 is important in LPS-induced pulmonary neutrophil recruitment by creating chimeric mice (transferring bone marrow between TLR4 +/+ and TLR4 ‐/‐ mice). In TLR4 +/+ mice receiving TLR4 ‐/‐ bone marrow, 6 weeks after transplant TLR4 was absent in all circulating leukocytes as well as in resident macrophages (these mice were termed LeukocyteTLR4 ‐/‐ ), and these cells were completely nonresponsive to LPS. In TLR4‐/‐ mice receiving TLR4+/+ bone marrow, endothelial cells but not leukocytes were deficient in TLR4 (EndotheliumTLR4 ‐/‐ ). Surprisingly, systemic LPS (0.5 mg/kg) induced a dramatic increase in neutrophil sequestration into the lungs of LeukocyteTLR4‐/‐ mice over the first 4 hours. Concomitantly, numbers of circulating leukocytes decreased by 90%. By contrast, EndotheliumTLR4 ‐/‐ mice showed very little increase in neutrophil sequestration in the lungs, suggesting that endothelium rather than leukocyte TLR4 was important. Intravital microscopy of peripheral microcirculation in the cremaster muscle revealed about 30-fold more leukocyte‐endothelial cell interactions in LPStreated EndotheliumTLR4 ‐/‐ mice than in LPS-treated LeukocyteTLR4 ‐/‐ mice. This is consistent with less sequestration of leukocytes into the lungs of EndotheliumTLR4‐/‐ mice. In conclusion, our data challenge the view that LPS directly activates neutrophils to trap in lungs and suggest a far more important role than previously appreciated for the endothelial cells.


ABSTRACT Fresh debris-flow deposits consolidate under their own weight. How quickly they consolidate (dissipate excess pore-fluid pressure and compact) affects their resistance to remobilization as well as their sedimentologic and stratigraphic characteristics. Here, analysis of small-volume (0.05 m3) noncohesive debris-flow slurries and larger (10 m3) experimental debris-flow deposits reveals the nature, rate, and magnitude of consolidation of typical debris-flow deposits. A simple, linear, one-dimensional model describing the diffusion of excess pore-fluid pressure satisfactorily approximates the overall timing and magnitude of consolidation of noncohesive debris-flow deposits. The model and measurements of pore-fluid pressure demonstrate that changes in fluid pressure and effective stress evolve upward from the base of a deposit, and show that hydraulic diffusivities of muddy slurries containing about 5 to 50 wt% mud are remarkably similar, about 10-6-10-7 m2/s. By comparison, sandy-gravel debris-flow deposits containing <2 wt% mud have higher hydraulic diffusivities, 10-4 m2/s. Pore-fluid seepage across a permeable basal boundary accelerates consolidation response time in the lower stratum compared to that over a no-flow boundary. However, changes in sediment fabric resulting from porosity changes alter hydraulic properties of basal debris and retard expected decay of fluid pressure immediately above the bed. This result suggests that fluid infiltration to the substrate does not contribute significantly toward debris-flow deposition. Low hydraulic diffusivities promote high and persistent pore-fluid pressure in debris flows, key factors enhancing mobilization. Elsewhere, pore-fluid pressures nearly sufficient to liquefy debris have been shown to persist through transit and deposition. Here, I show that significant dissipation of such fluid pressure is restricted to postdepositional consolidation. Therefore, neither uniform decay of excess pore-fluid pressure nor intrinsic viscoplastic yield strength explain debris-flow deposition. Instead, debris-flow deposition results from friction concentrated along flow margins where high pore-fluid pressures are absent. Sustained high pore-fluid pressure following deposition fosters deposit remobilization, which can mute or obliterate stratigraphic evidence for multiple events. A thick deposit of homogeneous, poorly sorted debris can result from mingling of soft deposits and recurrent surges rather than from a single flow wave if deposit consolidation time greatly exceeds typical sediment emplacement times.


A common assumption in economics is that money is fungible. In other words, spending patterns do not depend on the source of income, only on the total amount. The mental accounting theory, however, rejects this assumption by arguing that people compartmentalise their income into different mental accounts and decide on their consumption within each of these accounts. In this paper I hypothesise that households differently associate a private transfer coming from a migrant than a public transfer received from the government, and that this impacts the way transfers are spent. By analysing the first nationally representative longitudinal survey in South Africa, covering the years 2008, 2010 and 2012, I find evidence that public and private transfers are not spent in the same way.


The use of evidence to resolve uncertainties is key to many endeavours, most conspicuously science and law. Despite this, the logic of uncertainty is seldom taught explicitly, and often seems misunderstood. Traditional educational practice even fails to encourage students to identify uncertainty when they express knowledge, though mark schemes that reward the identification of reliable and uncertain responses have long been shown to encourage more insightful understanding. In our information-rich society the ability to identify uncertainty is often more important than the possession of knowledge itself. In both science and law there are fundamentally different kinds of uncertainty at issue. There is uncertainty whether a particular hypothesis is correct, and there is uncertainty about observable data that may be generated if a particular hypothesis is correct. Both are expressed in terms of probabilities. Each has its own domain of application and its own logic, but the inter-relationship is complex and sometimes misunderstood. Hypothesis probabilities are always open to error through possible failure to take account of realistic alternatives, while the proper inferences that can be drawn from data probabilities (often in the context of significance testing) are quite limited and easily over-interpreted. When considering these two kinds of probability in a court of law it is possible to interpret the phrase 'reasonable doubt' in different ways. It can be seen as addressing data uncertainty: whether such incriminating evidence might with reasonable probability arise to confront an innocent person. Or (the more conventional view) it can be seen as some sort of threshold level on the probability that the defendant is guilty (a hypothesis probability). Each typically involves elements of subjective judgement, but fewer issues and uncertainties arise when considering the data probability and it is argued that this is often the more critical and proper issue for a jury to address. This has particular repercussions for cases involving identification of a suspect through trawl of a DNA or other database.


The article emphasizes the fact that the problem of providing effective pedagogical support for personal development of children with mental and physical disabilities occupies an important place in the educationa theory and practice of modern Ukraine. Among scientists there are different approaches to determining its content, purpose and objectives. Most researchers consider pedagogical support of children with special educational needs (SEN) assystematic actions and measuresaime datensuring positive results in the educational process. The main tasks of pedagogical support of children with psychophysical developmental disorders are to ensure their social adaptation and over come difficulties in communicating with peers; prevention of problems of personal development and upbringing of the child; providing assistance in solving current educational problems and socialization; implementation of psychological and pedagogical counseling for parents. The authorsempha size that art therapy is rightly considered to be an effective means of pedagogical influenceon children with SEN in an inclusive educational space. Art therapy as a method of diagnosis, change and resource development of an individual, group or team through the use of different art sand their own creative activities has a wide field of  application in various areas of  teaching. To achieve a positive result in the pedagogical support of children with SEN the following arttherapy means are used: drawing therapy, fairy-tale therapy, sand therapy, music therapy, photo therapy, color therapy, which can be integrated, completing each other. It is scientifically proven that theuse of different types of arts contributes to the development of a child's emotional and communicative sphere, the establishment of interpersonal communication, taking into account emotional state of peers. During art therapy classes peculiarities of interpersonal communication are revealed, obstacles in its establishment are found and over come, and as a result the development of social-communicatives kills of children with SEN.


This paper describes a new approach to control traffic signals at isolated intersections by capturing vehicles' delay times and utilize them to adjust the green times. Similar to a traditional vehicle actuated control a queue clearing policy is applied: Within the bounds of a minimum and a maximum green time, a running green phase is terminated as soon as the accumulated delay on an approach is dissolved. The strength of this new approach is that it can be used for new data sources like probe vehicles, video cameras, or vehicle infrastructure integration (VII). To assess the quality of the new method, a simulation study is performed which demonstrates that it outperforms the traditional approaches, with the additional benefit of robustness against a particular kind of measurement error.


We study whether prompts to form and recall a plan can increase individuals' responsiveness to reminders to make and attend beneficial appointments. At four companies, all employees due for a colonoscopy were randomly assigned to receive either a control mailing or a treatment mailing. The mailings were identical except that the control mailing included a blank sticky note while the treatment mailing included a sticky note that prompted the recipient to write down the appointment date for a colonoscopy and the name of the doctor who would conduct the procedure. During the seven-month follow-up period, 7.2% of treatment employees received a colonoscopy compared to 6.2% of control employees, a statistically significant difference that is roughly equal to the variation in compliance associated with a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the procedure's cost covered by insurance. The treatment effect was largest for demographic groups judged to be at the highest risk of failing to receive a colonoscopy due to forgetfulness.


This thesis is composed of three essays related to empirical asset pricing. In the first essay of the thesis, we investigate recent rational explanations of the value premium using a regime-switching approach. Using data from the US stock market, we investigate the risk of value and growth in different market states and using alternative risk measures such as downside beta and higher moments. Our results provide little or no evidence that value is riskier than growth, and that evidence is specific to pre-1963 period (including the Great Depression). Within the post-1963 sample, there are periods when the value premium can be explained by the CAPM, whilst during other periods the premium is explained by the fact that the returns on value firms increase more than the returns on growth stocks in periods of strong market performance, whilst in downturns growth stocks suffer more than value, and these features are captured by different upside/downside betas or higher moments. These results are not consistent with a risk-based explanation of the value premium. The second essay of the thesis contributes to the debate about the momentum premium. We investigate the robustness of the momentum premium in the US over the period from 1927 to 2006 using a model that allows multiple structural breaks. We find that the risk-adjusted momentum premium is significantly positive only during certain periods, notably from the 1940s to the mid-1960s and from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, and we find evidence that momentum has disappeared since the late 1990s. Our results suggest that the momentum premium has been slowly eroded away since the early 1990s, in a process which was delayed by the occurrence of the high-technology stock bubble of the 1990s. In particular, we estimate that the bubble accounts for at least 60% of momentum profits during the period from 1995 to 1999. In the final essay of this thesis, we study the question of which asset pricing factors should be included in linear factor asset pricing model. We develop a simple multivariate extension of a Bayesian variable selection procedure from the statistics literature to estimate posterior probabilities of asset pricing factors using many assets at once. Using a dataset of thousands of individual stocks in the US market, we calculate posterior probabilities of 12 factors which have been suggested in the literature. Our results indicate strong and robust evidence that a linear factor model should include the excess market return, the size and the liquidity factors, and only weak evidence that the idiosyncratic volatility and downside risk factors matter. We also apply our methodology to portfolios of stocks commonly used in the literature, and find that the famous Fama and French (1993, 1996) HML factor has high posterior probability only if portfolios formed on book-to-market ratio are used.


Effective leaders who have the capacity to solve complex, strategic business problems are a key differentiator in the new world of work. As external environmental changes converge with internal organisational shifts, the need for a strong bench of leaders becomes critical in driving profitable growth. This study explores the relationship between personality and the capacity to think strategically, an important component of managing the complexity of the emerging environment. Based on the California Psychological Inventory and Career Path Appreciation assessments of 256 managers and executives, the existence of relationships between a number of personality factors and the respondents' future potential capability (FPC) were tested to identify which personality factors are predictors of the potential to think strategically. Anchored in Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT), this research builds on the leadership functions of CLT to provide new insight into the role of individual characteristics in the ability to think strategically. The consolidated findings identified Dominance, Flexibility, Achievement via Independence, Psychological Mindedness and Self-Acceptance as key constructs in the ability to think strategically. These outcomes sharpen the new leadership profile and enable the development of tools that can directly improve the organisation's ability to identify, attract, select and develop leaders who are proficient in the emergent, complex context.


One of the most inclusive policies to come out of Scottish Legislation is 'Getting it Right for Every Child' (Scottish Government, 2012). This is a set of recommendations which seeks to ensure that the educational and welfare progress of all children and young people is prioritised. The proposals seek to identify ways in which a variety of agencies can work together to reduce exclusion and increase educational success. This paper addresses some of the features of GIRFEC. Using an innovative framework for analysis, Policy as Positioning (Adams, 2015), the paper considers the way in which educational imperatives are 'framed' by wider socio-political Discourses, 'explained' by texts which seek to present such matters, and 'formed' by the very discursive acts that relate to the ways in which individuals and groups come together to understand and form the very policies of which they speak. To do this, the paper deploys Positioning Theory: a way of considering the interplay between the storylines that come together to form Discourses and discourses, the speech acts used to define and explain certain interactional features, and the positions offered and taken up or resisted by participants. Positioning Theory concerns itself with whom and what has the right to speak and how this gives rise to position calls for those involved. These position calls seek to orient individuals and groups through the rights, duties and obligations they convey. In turn such position calls can be taken up, modified or resisted. The paper analyses the political frames and textual representations for GIRFEC and uses data gathered through interviews with teachers in one school that has yet to engage with GIRFEC training. The paper demonstrates the ways in which interaction at all three levels helps one to understand the formation of policy at the local level. Specifically, the paper addresses the ways in which policy is formed by the individuals concerned within the frames of Scottishness so prevalent within political Discourse and texts oriented towards integrated children's services. Accordingly, the paper identifies three position calls for ICS and GIRFEC in Scotland: the ways in which a discourse of Scottishness leads to distinct understandings of ICS; the post-bureaucratic reconceptualization of professionalism; and, the drive for inclusion and a respect for difference. The paper has relevance for other countries through the way in which the new methodological framework is applied and the fact that the integration of children's services is something that exists out with Scotland. Internationally, such approaches are evident and seek, amongst other things, to rationalise the various services that support the individual child and young person.


Whenever librarians use Semantic Web services and standards for representing data, they also generate graphs, whether they intend to or not. Graphs are a new data model for libraries and librarians, and they present new opportunities for library services. In this paper we introduce graph theory and explore its real and potential applications in the context of digital libraries. Part 1 describes basic concepts in graph theory and how graph theory has been applied by information retrieval systems such as Google. Part 2 discusses practical applications of graph theory in digital library environments. Some of the applications have been prototyped at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, others have been described in peer-reviewed journals, and still others are speculative in nature. The paper is intended to serve as a high-level tutorial to graphs in libraries.


The University of Toledo University Transportation Center (UT-UTC) has identified hybrid vehicles as one of the three areas of the research. The activities proposed in this research proposal are directed towards the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) solutions for hybrid vehicles. The soaring fuel prices require imperious steps in developing alternate propulsion technologies. The design and development of hybrid vehicles is a critical issue for an economy dependent on an efficient, fast, and secure transportation system. To date, better fuel economy has been mainly achieved by combining two propulsion sources (hybridization) and/or by developing better managing algorithms for the internal combustion engines. Examples for the hybridization are the plug-in hybrid electric and the hydraulic-hybrid vehicles. An example of managing internal combustion engines is the cylinder on demand as a solution that Honda has recently introduced. One common problem with these solutions is excessive noise and vibration that is caused by switching between the propulsion sources and propulsion modes. To mitigate this problem there is a need to develop vibration isolation devices that can provide isolation over a wide range of frequencies. This proposal seeks to study the NVH problem of the hybrid vehicles and to introduce isolation mounts to overcome these issues. Hydraulic and elastomeric mounts are generally used to dynamically isolate engines and power trains from the chassis, while statically holding these elements together. Hydraulic mounts overcome some of the drawbacks of the elastomeric mounts. The stiffness and damping of the hydraulic mounts varys with frequency and amplitude of vibration. It is possible to design a hydraulic mount that has a significantly larger static stiffness, compared to an elastomeric mount, and has a much smaller dynamic stiffness at a specific frequency. To achieve low vibration transmissibility, the mount can be tuned to the primary frequency of the vibration source. On the other hand, to isolate the high frequency vibration of the engine, the mount should have low stiffness and low damping, which is not possible to achieve. This project proposes to develop a semi-active mount, which will be realized by improving the existing hydraulic mounts through adding a magnetorheological (MR) fluid element. In response to magnetic fields, MR fluids change their viscosity, which can be harnessed in a variable stiffness and damping mount. The resulting mount will provide shock and vibration isolation over a wide range of frequencies. This extended isolation frequency range will be achieved through the variable dynamic stiffness of the MR portion of the mount. This solution will make it possible to improve the noise and vibration characteristic of hybrid vehicles with alternative propulsion systems. Technical Approach or Methodology It is proposed to develop an MR fluid based semi-active mount by modifying the existing hydraulic mounts. In this design, the existing mount will be modified to adapt the MR fluid technology in the hydraulic part of the mount Specifically, the hydraulic fluid will


When the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising, as well as in the memories of its devoted viewers. Buffy stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. Yet it has also been central to changing trends in television production and reception. As a flagship show for two U.S. "netlets"—the WB and UPN— Buffy helped usher in the "post-network" era, and as the inspiration for an active fan base, it helped drive the proliferation of Web-based fan engagement.

In Undead TV , media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. Contributors engage with critical issues such as stardom, gender identity, spectatorship, fandom, and intertextuality. Collectively, they reveal how a vampire television series set in a sunny California suburb managed to provide some of the most biting social commentaries on the air while exposing the darker side of American life. By offering detailed engagements with Sarah Michelle Gellar's celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and "youth" audiences, Buffy tie-in books, and Angel's body, Undead TV shows how this prime-time drama became a prominent marker of industrial, social, and cultural change.

Contributors . Ian Calcutt, Cynthia Fuchs, Amelie Hastie, Annette Hill, Mary Celeste Kearney, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Jason Middleton, Susan Murray, Lisa Parks


Several solutions had been introduced to authenticate streamed data delivered in real-time over insecure networks, where there is no guarantee that every packet will be delivered. Some solutions resist any type of packet loss, others resist burst loss. Amortization schemes reduce the overhead caused by other schemes, but suffer from several weak points, such as where to place the signature packet, that is, after how many packets to send the signature. How many hashes to append to each packet, in addition to no clear chain structure analysis had been introduced, so as to show the effect on the efficiency in terms of the authentication probability, loss resistance and overhead. In this paper we introduce a new chain construction for multicast stream authentication delivered in real-time using signature amortization, giving solutions for the shortcomings. We also introduce a theoretical analysis of the chain construction to show its effect on the authentication efficiency. The proposed scheme consists of several odd-even chains, where the odd chains link some of the odd numbered packets, and the even chains link some of the even numbered ones. The scheme achieves better performance in terms of loss resistance and low overhead by changing the number of chains. That is when increasing the number of chains, low overhead and longer packet loss resistance are achieved. The sender's buffer capacity is taken into consideration when choosing the number of chains. We also introduce equations to quantify the requirements such as the buffer size and delay on the receiver.


We deployed a mesonet of year‐round eddy covariance towers in boreal forest stands that last burned in ∼1850, ∼1930, 1964, 1981, 1989, 1998, and 2003 to understand how CO2 exchange and evapotranspiration change during secondary succession. We used MODIS imagery to establish that the tower sites were representative of the patterns of secondary succession in the region, and Landsat images to show that the individual stands have changed over the last 22 years in ways that match the spatially derived trends. The eddy covariance towers were well matched, with similar equipment and programs, which maximized site‐to‐site precision and allowed us to operate the network in an efficient manner. The six oldest sites were fully operational for ∼90% of the growing season and ∼70% of the dormant season from 2001 or 2002 to 2004, with most of the missing data caused by low battery charge or bad signals from the sonic anemometers. The rates of midday growing‐season CO2 uptake recovered to preburn levels within 4 years of fire. The seasonality of land–atmosphere exchange and growing‐season length changed markedly with stand age. The foliage in the younger stands (1989, 1998, and 2003 burns) was almost entirely deciduous, which resulted in comparatively short growing seasons that lasted ∼65 days. In contrast, the older stands (1850, 1930, 1964, and 1981) were mostly evergreen, which resulted in comparatively long growing seasons that lasted ∼130 days. The eddy covariance mesonet approach we describe could be used within the context of other ecological experimental designs such as controlled manipulations and gradient comparisons.


Abstract The economic integration of North America has deepened with the creation of NAFTA. Border interdependence has created mechanisms that are cementing the mutual interaction that border cities have with each other. Yet, the emerging new policies of U.S. homeland security will require important adjustments in border areas and in the interaction with Mexico and Canada. This essay examines the challenges of border towns in coping with demands related to security and how these issues are presented by their news media. Security policies represent a paradigm shift of border interaction that illustrates that the relationship between the U.S. with Mexico and Canada is entering a new stage of complex interdependence. To ensure proper implementation, Mexico will need to make significant structural adjustments and lessons from the Canada‐U.S. relation that may serve as templates are explored.


It is well known that the main functional components of the skull in the Whalebone Whales (Mystacoceti) attain an ultimate size, which is out of normal proportion to the rest of the skeleton as compared to the proportions existing in land-mammals. As generally supposed the aquatic mode of life has greatly influenced the shape of the skull. Therefore, it is to be expected that the various species, which all have the same mode of life, show a certain amount of convergence. However, not all bones have become enlarged to the same degree; e.g., the alisphenoid and the orbitosphenoid have remained relatively small. Apparently these bones of the orbit have not been influenced by the aquatic mode of life to the same extent as is the case with other elements of the skull. In the present paper some features of the orbit of the Mystacoceti are described; the variability and the systematic importance of these peculiarities have been examined.
In order to indicate the degree of modification undergone by the Whale skull, it is necessary to have a clear idea of the typical arrangement of the elements bordering the orbit in the skull of a primitive mammal (fig. 1a).
This figure shows that the orbit is lined by several elements; of these the alisphenoid and the orbitosphenoid lie in the lateral wall of the skull and they immediately surround the foramen opticum. It also shows that these two bones are contiguous with the frontal, the parietal, and the squamosal. In these respects the skull of juvenile Cetacea shows more resemblance to the primitive mammalian skull than do those of the adults.
Comparison of the skulls of juvenile Tursiops tursio (Fabr.) (fig. 1b) and Balaenoptera borealis Lesson (fig. 1C) with those of adult specimens shows that in the adult the shape of some of the orbital bones has under-


New types of dual microring resonators coupled via 3x3 couplers are proposed. By employing the transfer matrix method, a model for these four types is developed and analytical expressions for characterizing their transmissions are derived. The first two types show a coupled-resonator-induced-transparency-like transmission spectrum at the through port. The third type holds the same transmission spectrum, while the last type simultaneously realizes a first-order and a second-order filters at two drop ports. The effects of coupling coefficients on their transmission spectra are investigated in more detail. Moreover, the effects of loss are also discussed. These proposed types can be found applications in fields such as sensors and filters.


Depending on the perspective and even language, the concept of didactics is defined in different ways. The debate about conceptualization, particularly concerning the equivalence in English of what in other languages, specifically Germanic and Latin languages, is termed 'didactics', is well documented in the research literature. There is a claim in this article concerning the need to transcend the language discussion; it is indeed necessary, especially for Vocational Education & training (VET), to developa close linkage between what some authors consider "an empirically based" side of didactics associated with empirical findings and the "non-empirical" side that is associated with theoretical constructs for understanding the teaching-learning process.The main aim of this article is to revisit research in didactics in German, Nordic and French contexts looking for diversity in the various approaches. This is intended to contribute to the discussion about prospects and shortcomings in the development of a didactics for the intricate subject of vocational education and training. Rather than alternative didactical paths, the article intends to suggest lines of development, encourage discussions and the further research needed concerning relationshipdidactics and vocational education and training.


Besides well-known benefits, commodity cloud storage also raises concerns that include security, reliability, and consistency. We present Hybris key-value store, the first robust hybrid cloud storage system, aiming at addressing these concerns leveraging both private and public cloud resources. Hybris robustly replicates metadata on trusted private premises (private cloud), separately from data which is dispersed (using replication or erasure coding) across multiple untrusted public clouds. Hybris maintains metadata stored on private premises at the order of few dozens of bytes per key, avoiding the scalability bottleneck at the private cloud. In turn, the hybrid design allows Hybris to efficiently and robustly tolerate cloud outages, but also potential malice in clouds without overhead. Namely, to tolerate up to f malicious clouds, in the common case of the Hybris variant with data replication, writes replicate data across f + 1 clouds, whereas reads involve a single cloud. In the worst case, only up to f additional clouds are used. This is considerably better than earlier multi-cloud storage systems that required costly 3f + 1 clouds to mask f potentially malicious clouds. Finally, Hybris leverages strong metadata consistency to guarantee to Hybris applications strong data consistency without any modifications to the eventually consistent public clouds. We implemented Hybris in Java and evaluated it using a series of micro and macrobenchmarks. Our results show that Hybris significantly outperforms comparable multi-cloud storage systems and approaches the performance of bare-bone commodity public cloud storage.


This paper analyses the introduction and expansion of health insurance schemes in Tanzania. Health insurances were introduced around year 2000 as part of a more general health reform process aimed at improving access to health services. The paper argues that the health insurances were driven by a policy coalition of bureaucrats and transnational actors, who, inspired by international trends, framed reforms as a way for the ruling party to live up to one of its core priorities since independence, namely, improved and, eventually, universal access to health services. The introduction of insurances was expected to help mobilise funds and improve the working of the health care system for this purpose. However, judged by their modest design and slow implementation, the ruling political elite remained ambiguous about health insurances. Politically, a fast rollout was perceived to be risky. Similar political considerations may explain the reluctance to expand health insurance coverage through a mandatory scheme that bureaucrats and development partners have propagated recently. The rejection of the initial design for such a scheme came as a surprise to the policy coalition, which did not enjoy the same access to key decisionmakers as in the past. Concurrently, and driven by increased electoral competition, the ruling party has increasingly focused on improving access through the expansion of physical health infrastructure. This has the additional advantage of being highly visible among the rural majority of the population, who overwhelmingly vote Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). This is our second paper on social protection in Tanzania.


Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, Art and Materials Conservation Commons, Classical Archaeology and Art History Commons, Classical Literature and Philology Commons, Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts Commons, Indo-European Linguistics and Philology Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Museum Studies Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, and the Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons


In mouse skin, immune cells migrate toward lymphatic vessels along an immobilized chemokine gradient. Although chemokines have long been thought to direct immune cell movements within tissues, a formal in vivo demonstration and detailed understanding are lacking. By tracking dendritic cell movements in the ears of mice, Weber et al. were able to provide both. Endogenous gradients of the chemokine CCL21 were observed in ear tissue and, at distances of up 90μm, dendritic cells were able to use these gradients to migrate directionally toward lymphatic vessels. The CCL21 gradient was immobilized on heparan sulfates and disruption of the gradient inhibited dendritic cell migration. M. Weber, R. Hauschild, J. Schwarz, C. Moussion, I. de Vries, D. F. Legler, S. A. Luther, T. Bollenbach, M. Sixt, Interstitial dendritic cell guidance by haptotactic chemochine gradients. Science 339, 328–331 (2013). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Research has linked Psychological Capital (PsyCap) to employees' positive attitudes, behaviors, and performance in organizations and is characterized by hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism. Despite the demonstrated effects of PsyCap on employee outcomes, PsyCap has not been researched in family firms (except for Memili, Welsh, & Luthans, forthcoming). Previous research has highlighted the potential effects of family influence on family firms' human resources policies and procedures, as well as the subsequent effects on employees' value-creating attitudes and behaviors. Here, we extend this line of research by drawing primarily upon theory of PsyCap and the extant family business and franchising literature to explore whether family-owned franchise firms exhibit more organizational PsyCap than non-family franchise firms and the impact of family involvement and organizational PsyCap on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in family-owned franchise firms.


Middle Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous intermediate to silicic plutonic and volcanic rocks of Hong Kong record a transition from calc-alkaline, through high-K calc-alkaline, to transitional shoshonitic compositions with time. Close spatial and temporal associations among comagmatic volcanic-plutonic pairs indicate that magmatism occurred in discrete episodes, mostly of less than one million years duration. Synchronous high-K calc-alkaline and transitional shoshonitic magmatic activity during at least one pulse suggests a relatively rapid transition from a subduction-related to an extension-related tectonic setting. Geochemical signatures indicate that the magmatic suites have a mantle origin with a decreasing crustal contribution from two distinct sources. The earliest mantle-derived magmas interacted strongly with a dominantly Archaean crustal protolith. Younger magmas show evidence for interaction with a dominantly Proterozoic crustal protolith. The strongest mantle influence is shown by magmas which were intruded along the boundary between the two dominant crustal sources. This interface marks a deep crustal discontinuity which promoted the passage of magmas to the surface.


Jeffrey Beall's blog listing of potential predatory journals and publishers, as well as his Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access (OA) Publishers are often looked at as tools to help researchers avoid publishing in predatory journals. While these Criteria has brought a greater awareness of OA predatory journals, these tools alone should not be used as the only source in determining the quality of a scholarly journal. Employing a three-person independent judgment making panel, this study demonstrates the subjective nature of Beall's Criteria by applying his Criteria to both OA and non-OA Library and Information Science journals (LIS), to demonstrate that traditional peer-reviewed journals could be considered predatory. Many of these LIS journals are considered as top-tier publications in the field and used when evaluating researcher's publication history for promotion and tenure.


Despite the development of numerous adaptive optimizers, tuning the learning rate of stochastic gradient methods remains a major roadblock to obtaining good practical performance in machine learning. Rather than changing the learning rate at each iteration, we propose an approach that automates the most common hand-tuning heuristic: use a constant learning rate until "progress stops," then drop. We design an explicit statistical test that determines when the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent reach a stationary distribution. This test can be performed easily during training, and when it fires, we decrease the learning rate by a constant multiplicative factor. Our experiments on several deep learning tasks demonstrate that this statistical adaptive stochastic approximation (SASA) method can automatically find good learning rate schedules and match the performance of hand-tuned methods using default settings of its parameters. The statistical testing helps to control the variance of this procedure and improves its robustness.


In the United States, 40% of all food intended for human consumption is lost or wasted. This has economic, environmental, and social consequences and equity concerns that justify the involvement of local governments. In addition, local governments are well positioned to support the systems-level innovations and systems- and equity-oriented approaches necessary for bringing together various sectors to tackle food waste issues. However, little is known about how food-generating businesses and anti-hunger agencies think local governments and public agencies could work with them to address food waste through source reduction (i.e., prevention) and feeding hungry people. These are the top two methods for waste reduction as outlined in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s Food Recovery Hierarchy. Using qualitative interviews, this study presents the key challenges and facilitators of multiple Seattle-based anti-hunger agencies (n=8) and food-generating businesses (n=12) to addressing food waste prevention, recovery, and composting. This study also addresses how anti-hunger agencies and food-generating businesses interrelate within and between the two sectors. Interviewees also provided sector views on the potential roles of local government in this space. Strategies recommended for local governments included: (1) committing resources that enable a systems approach. This can be accomplished by dedicating a staff or office to food waste issues, designating funding that is specific to food waste, incorporating equity and inclusivity, and serving as a convener of stakeholders; (2) helping to standardize metrics and normalize waste audits. These practices are essential for understanding and scaling work within and between sectors, for measuring progress toward goals or fluctuations in the system, and for identifying priorities; and (3) supporting the optimal operation of the emergency food system by helping improve infrastructure and efficiency.


A rich and sensitive portrait of a changing peasantry, this study is also a general inquiry into the nature of status, class, and community in the developing world. Robert Hefner presents an analysis designed to bridge the gap between village studies and social history. He describes the forces that have shaped upland politics and society from pre-colonial times to the Green Revolution today.


Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which the first-moving actor has a unique, unilateral, procedural right to enforce the status quo, i.e., to exercise gatekeeping. Normative analysis using Pareto-dominance criteria reveals that the institution of gatekeeping is inferior to another institutional arrangement within this framework—namely, one in which the same actor is given a traditional veto instead of a gatekeeping right. The analytical results raise an empirical puzzle: when and why would self-organizing collective choice bodies adopt gatekeeping institutions? A qualitative survey of governmental institutions suggests that—contrary to an entrenched modeling norm within political science—empirical instances of codified gatekeeping rights are rare or nonexistent.


Summary The restoration of physical habitat has emerged as a key activity for managers charged with reversing the damage done by humans to streams and rivers, and there has been a great expenditure of time, money and other resources on habitat restoration projects. Most restoration projects appear to assume that the creation of habitat is the key to restoring the biota ('the field of dreams hypothesis'). However, in many streams where new habitat is clearly required if populations and communities are to be restored, there may be numerous other factors that cause the expected link between habitat and biotic restoration to break down. We discuss five issues that are likely to have a direct bearing on the success, or perceived success of local habitat restoration projects in streams: (i) barriers to colonization, (ii) temporal shifts in habitat use, (iii) introduced species, (iv) long-term and large-scale processes, and (v) inappropriate scales of restoration. The purpose of the study was primarily to alert ecologists and managers involved in stream habitat restoration to the potential impacts of these issues on restoration success. Furthermore, the study highlights the opportunities provided by habitat restoration for learning how the factors we discuss affect populations, communities and ecosystems.


Abstract. This paper proposes a model for assessing the risk posed by natural hazards to infrastructures, with a focus on the indirect losses and loss of stability for the population relying on the infrastructure. The model prescribes a three-level analysis with increasing level of detail, moving from qualitative to quantitative analysis. The focus is on a methodology for semi-quantitative analyses to be performed at the second level. The purpose of this type of analysis is to perform a screening of the scenarios of natural hazards threatening the infrastructures, identifying the most critical scenarios and investigating the need for further analyses (third level). The proposed semi-quantitative methodology considers the frequency of the natural hazard, different aspects of vulnerability, including the physical vulnerability of the infrastructure itself, and the societal dependency on the infrastructure. An indicator-based approach is applied, ranking the indicators on a relative scale according to pre-defined ranking criteria. The proposed indicators, which characterise conditions that influence the probability of an infrastructure malfunctioning caused by a natural event, are defined as (1) robustness and buffer capacity, (2) level of protection, (3) quality/level of maintenance and renewal, (4) adaptability and quality of operational procedures and (5) transparency/complexity/degree of coupling. Further indicators describe conditions influencing the socio-economic consequences of the infrastructure malfunctioning, such as (1) redundancy and/or substitution, (2) cascading effects and dependencies, (3) preparedness and (4) early warning, emergency response and measures. The aggregated risk estimate is a combination of the semi-quantitative vulnerability indicators, as well as quantitative estimates of the frequency of the natural hazard, the potential duration of the infrastructure malfunctioning (e.g. depending on the required restoration effort) and the number of users of the infrastructure. Case studies for two Norwegian municipalities are presented for demonstration purposes, where risk posed by adverse weather and natural hazards to primary road, water supply and power networks is assessed. The application examples show that the proposed model provides a useful tool for screening of potential undesirable events, contributing to a targeted reduction of the risk.


We describe Bayesian Layers, a module designed for fast experimentation with neural network uncertainty. It extends neural network libraries with drop-in replacements for common layers. This enables composition via a unified abstraction over deterministic and stochastic functions and allows for scalability via the underlying system. These layers capture uncertainty over weights (Bayesian neural nets), pre-activation units (dropout), activations ("stochastic output layers"), or the function itself (Gaussian processes). They can also be reversible to propagate uncertainty from input to output. We include code examples for common architectures such as Bayesian LSTMs, deep GPs, and flow-based models. As demonstration, we fit a 5-billion parameter "Bayesian Transformer" on 512 TPUv2 cores for uncertainty in machine translation and a Bayesian dynamics model for model-based planning. Finally, we show how Bayesian Layers can be used within the Edward2 probabilistic programming language for probabilistic programs with stochastic processes.


Mobile networking technology has been in existence for more than twenty
years, but only in the past decade has it become commercially popular. With
computers however increasingly portable and networks more accessible, users are
coming demanding to the same network services from mobile network as they
have been accustomed to obtaining from stationary wireline networks. Mobile
communication can be defined as any communications network in which at least
one of the constituent entities (users, switches, or a combination of both) change
location, relative one to another.
One of the most important problems in the design of a cellular system is
deciding on the optimal configuration of it. The designers must evaluate the
possible con figurations of the system components and their characteristics in order
to develop a system with greater efficiency. The parameters useful to measure different parts performance of the system are: voice quality, frequency spectrum
efficiency and grade of service (GOS).
The grade of service (GOS) gives a form to measure a system's
performance, and with it the proportion of non-served calls can be known. GOS in
cellular systems is effected not only by the systems traffic but also by cochannel
interference (outage).
In this thesis, the analytical study of the grade of service (GOS)
degradation in presence of outage for the mobile communication with queueing
system is wanted.
Two analytical models are proposed, the first model is with fixed outage
rate, while the second model is the traffic dependent outage, where the outage is
often dependent on the number of channels in use. Thus, the number of channels in
outage can be considered as an indicator of the traffic load variations in the
system.
The performance parameters considered for the study from the above
models are queue length, waiting time and probability of delay. The analytical
results can show the benefit for considering the queueing in the cellular network,
and can be used by designers in choosing appropriate design parameters to meet
requirements.


This paper, which is based on the author's undergraduate thesis on translation as a means of cultural appropriation, is a critique of the Taiwanese soap opera Meteor Garden (MG). It presents the various gender(ed) archetypes for both male and female characters employed in the serialized drama. Although the chinovela seems to be an innovation from its forerunners in Philippine media, the Hispanic American soaps, the traditional representations of gender found in said soaps are also evident in the text of MG. The paper also discusses audience interpretations of gender representations in MG These interpretations are the result of a translation exercise that required the adolescent viewers to provide their own Filipino translations of selected MG scenes in their original Chinese version with English subtitles. Although MG has a tendency to romanticize gender(ed) relations, its audiences remain enthusiastic viewers possibly because the soap enacts their dreams in ways that are understandable and uncomplicated.


AbstractPassive confinement provided by fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) jackets increases the compressive strength and axial deformation capacity of concrete. This study explains a normalized confinement stiffness approach to quantify the strength and strain increase of FRP-confined concrete using a previously proposed and most widely-used model for both active and passive confinement of concrete, and claims that these equations can still be used for FRP-confined concrete with very simple modifications. A comparison of the proposed model's accuracy to American Concrete Institute guidelines was made using experimental results reported in the literature. The proposed modified model was shown to be quite effective in predicting the increased strength and strain values of FRP-confined concrete, and was also modified for FRP-confined hollow concrete cylinders.


The U.S. Geological Survey initiated a research effort in 2014 to define the geologic framework of the Delmarva Peninsula inner continental shelf, which included new data collection and assembly of relevant extant datasets. Between 2006 and 2011, Science Applications International Corporation, under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Ocean Service, carried out 23 hydrographic surveys covering more than 4,100 square kilometers of the continental shelf using Reson multibeam echosounders and Klein towed sidescan sonars to update nautical charts along the Delmarva Peninsula. Acoustic backscatter data from these instruments are valuable for characterizing aspects of shallow geologic framework, including seafloor geology, sediment transport pathways, and marine resources. The data cover an area that extends from the entrance of Delaware Bay, Delaware, south to Parramore Island, Virginia, in water depths of about 3 to 35 meters below mean lower low water. Data were collected along lines spaced 40 meters apart, resulting in 40 to 100 percent seafloor coverage for multibeam bathymetry. Processed bathymetric data within the Delmarva Peninsula study area are available through a National Ocean Service interactive map interface, but towed sidescan data products are limited, and multibeam backscatter data products have not been available in the past. The U.S. Geological Survey obtained raw Reson multibeam data files from Science Applications International Corporation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 20 hydrographic surveys and extracted backscatter data using the Fledermaus Geocoder Toolbox from Quality Positioning Service. The backscatter mosaics produced by the U.S. Geological Survey for the inner continental shelf of the Delmarva Peninsula using National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data increased regional geophysical surveying efficiency, collaboration among government agencies, and the area over which geologic data can be interpreted by the U.S. Geological Survey. This report describes the methods by which the backscatter data were extracted and processed and includes backscatter mosaics and interpolated bathymetric surfaces. U.S. Geological Survey National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration


Importance
The use of sacubitril/valsartan is not endorsed by practice guidelines for use in patients with New York Heart Association class IV heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction because of limited clinical experience in this population.

Objective
To compare treatment with sacubitril/valsartan treatment with valsartan in patients with advanced heart failure and a reduced ejection fraction and recent New York Heart Association class IV symptoms.

Design, Setting, and Participants
A double-blind randomized clinical trial was conducted; a total of 335 patients with advanced heart failure were included. The trial began on March 2, 2017, and was stopped early on March 23, 2020, owing to COVID-19 risk.

Intervention
Patients were randomized to receive sacubitril/valsartan (target dose, 200 mg twice daily) or valsartan (target dose, 160 mg twice daily) in addition to recommended therapy.

Main Outcomes and Measures
The area under the curve (AUC) for the ratio of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) compared with baseline measured through 24 weeks of therapy.

Results
Of the 335 patients included in the analysis, 245 were men (73%); mean (SD) age was 59.4 (13.5) years. Seventy-two eligible patients (18%) were not able to tolerate sacubitril/valsartan, 100 mg/d, during the short run-in period, and 49 patients (29%) discontinued sacubitril/valsartan during the 24 weeks of the trial. The median NT-proBNP AUC for the valsartan treatment arm (n = 168) was 1.19 (IQR, 0.91-1.64), whereas the AUC for the sacubitril/valsartan treatment arm (n = 167) was 1.08 (IQR, 0.75-1.60). The estimated ratio of change in the NT-proBNP AUC was 0.95 (95% CI 0.84-1.08; P = .45). Compared with valsartan, treatment with sacubitril/valsartan did not improve the clinical composite of number of days alive, out of hospital, and free from heart failure events. Aside from a statistically significant increase in non-life-threatening hyperkalemia in the sacubitril/valsartan arm (28 [17%] vs 15 [9%]; P = .04), there were no observed safety concerns.

Conclusions and Relevance
The findings of this trial showed that, in patients with chronic advanced heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction, there was no statistically significant difference between sacubitril/valsartan and valsartan with respect to reducing NT-proBNP levels.

Trial Registration
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02816736.


Energy use in the building stock represents a major share of the total energy use in developed countries. Ventilation and cooling of buildings constitute a constantly increasing part of the total energy use in buildings. One of the reasons for the increase of the energy use is increasing user demands. In combination with increasing ambient air temperatures, cooling of buildings will become a necessity. To minimise costs and energy demand, available cooling solutions must be optimised and innovative approaches encouraged. The growing awareness of climate change in combination with rising prices on fossil fuels have boosted the demand for energy efficient and even plus-energy buildings. By minimising the losses of energy used for conditioning the indoor environment, heating and cooling systems with a low temperature difference to the room can be used. Floor heating or cooling are common examples. Using distribution of heating and cooling at temperatures close to the room temperature opens the possibility to utilise low quality energy sources, for instance cooling with ambient heat sinks or heating with waste energy. Exergy analysis is a powerful tool for allocating the most relevant energy losses and suggesting technical solutions for improving cooling and heating systems. Aim of this paper is to illustrate the methodological issues with exergy analysis and to show what potential exists for improving the cooling systems by means of the exergy analysis. A program for exergy performance assessment has been developed for analyzing cooling systems. Different cooling systems have been analyzed from the generation to the heat emission system to the room environment. The analyzed systems comprise a chiller with high temperature lift, a hybrid cooling tower and floor cooling, a chiller with low temperature lift, hybrid cooling tower and floor cooling and a chiller with high temperature lift, hybrid cooling and air cooling. The results from simulations illustrate that the overall exergy efficiency of such systems is low and can be further improved by a more rational energy management.


The objective of this paper is to introduce an artificial intelligence based optimization approach, which is inspired from Piaget's theory on cognitive development. The approach has been designed according to essential processes that an individual may experience while learning something new or improving his / her knowledge. These processes are associated with the Piaget's ideas on an individual's cognitive development. The approach expressed in this paper is a simple algorithm employing swarm intelligence oriented tasks in order to overcome single-objective optimization problems. For evaluating effectiveness of this early version of the algorithm, test operations have been done via some benchmark functions. The obtained results show that the approach / algorithm can be an alternative to the literature in terms of single-objective optimization. The authors have suggested the name: Cognitive Development Optimization Algorithm (CoDOA) for the related intelligent optimization approach.


Spatially integrated measurements of the surface energy balance (SEB) are needed in urban areas to evaluate urban climate models and satellite observations. Scintillometers allow observations of sensible heat flux (QH) over much larger areas than techniques such as eddy covariance (EC), however methods are needed to partition between remaining unmeasured SEB terms. This is the first study to use observed spatial and temporal patterns of QH from a scintillometer network to constrain estimates of remaining SEB terms in a dense, heterogeneous urban environment. Results show that QH dominates the surface energy balance in central London throughout the year, with expected diurnal courses and seasonal trends in QH magnitude related to solar radiation input. Measurements also reveal a clear anthropogenic component of QH with winter (summer) weekday QH values 11.7% (5.1%) higher than weekends. Spatially, QH magnitude is correlated with vegetation and building landcover fraction in the measurement source areas. Spatial analysis provides additional evidence of anthropogenic influence with highest weekday/weekend ratios (1.55) from the City of London. Spatial differences are used to estimate horizontal advection and a novel method to estimate monthly latent heat flux is developed based on observed landcover and wet–dry surface variations in normalized QH. Annual anthropogenic heat emissions are estimated to be 46.3 W m−2 using an energy balance residual approach. The methods presented here have potential to significantly enhance understanding of urban areas, particularly in areas with tall buildings where there are few observational data.


Improved Single Molecule Detection Platform Using a Buried ARROW Design Thomas Allen Wall Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BYU Doctor of Philosophy As the microelectronics industry pushes microfabrication processes further, the lab-on-achip field has continued to piggy-back off the industry's fabrication capabilities with the goal of producing total chemical and biological systems on small chip-size platforms. One important function of such systems is the ability to perform single molecule detection. There are currently many methods being researched for performing single molecule detection, both macro and micro in scale. This dissertation focuses on an optofluidic, lab-on-a-chip platform called the ARROW biosensor, which possesses several advantages over macro-scale single molecule detection platforms. These advantages include an amplification-free detection scheme, cheap parallel fabrication techniques, rapid single molecule detection results, and extremely low volume sample probing, which leads to ultra-sensitive detection. The ARROW biosensor was conceived in the early 2000s; however, since then it has undergone many design changes to improve and add new functionality to the lab-on-a-chip; however, water absorption in the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposited silicon dioxide has been a problem that has plagued the biosensor platform for some time. Moisture uptake in the oxide layer of the ARROWs leads to loss of waveguiding confinement and drastically decreases the overall sensitivity of the ARROW biosensors. New ARROW designs were investigated to alleviate the negative water absorption effects in the ARROWs. The new waveguide designs were tested for resiliency to water absorption and the buried ARROW (bARROW) design was determined to be the most successful at preventing negative water absorption effects from occurring in the PECVD oxide waveguides. The bARROWs were integrated into the full biosensor platforms and used to demonstrate high sensitivity single molecule detection without any signs of water absorption affecting the bARROWs' waveguiding capabilities. The bARROW biosensors are not only water resistant, they also proved to be the most sensitive biosensors yet fabricated with average signal-to-noise ratios around 80% higher than any previously fabricated ARROW biosensors.