The research topic is the one of public finance company whose core business is focused to support investment projects to overcome enterprises technological and structural gap. The research question is: If and how a public finance company is able to create and favor value creation processes sustainability for agro-food enterprises, highlighting the positive emerging externalities for different categories of stakeholders. They have results with particular evidences allow comparisons between the private investments and the support of institutional public investors. In such perspective, the mode of disbursement of soft loans and investment operations made by a public financing company will be examined. The methodological approach used, following a deductive-inductive perspective, is based on the case study. Such technique able to formulate theories about a little known phenomena in their context, allows the study of recent events on which the researcher has little control. To this, a qualitative analysis on both primary and secondary data adds. From data analysis, it resulted that the Institute of Agribusiness Development (ISA) initiatives facilitated, just for example, the technological innovation of production department and consequent production capacity, the acquisition of production assets for row material processing and optimization of internal logistics, through an innovative automated warehouse. As a result, the case study finds sustainability at multiple levels reached by the activities promoted by ISA and the subsequent co-creation of value for stakeholders involved, small agro-food businesses innovation, and/or internationalization processes. As long as practical implications are concerned, such highlight the importance and the need for public and private institutions in their effort to continue to invest in projects to support the economy of the country. The originality of the paper lies in the proposed interpretation of more integrative paradigms (viable system approach, sustainability, and, value creation), analyzing a financial institution for the development of the Italian food industry. At the same time, authors stress the research limit that is the analysis of the input of only one organization and consequent limited data in quantity and time span.


Meis genes are well known for their important roles in gene regulation and development, in combination with other transcription factors such as the Hox and Pbx families. The primary purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the genetic mechanisms that control the expression of meis genes during development. The Zerucha lab identified four highly conserved non-coding elements, named m2de1-m2de4 (for meis2 downstream element) that we hypothesize regulate expression of the meis2 gene. I have characterized the m2de3 element to determine if this element is able to direct spatial and temporal gene expression consistent with meis2 expression patterns over different stages of development. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) were used in combination with a Tol2 injection cassette to introduce gene expression constructs containing murine m2de3 through microinjection at single cell stage. In primary transgenic embryos, m2de3 directed expression was observed in a punctate expression pattern along the notochord, within motor neurons along the notochord, around the heart and in developing muscle fibers along the trunk of zebrafish embryos. In addition, a stable m2de3 transgenic zebrafish genetic line was generated through fin clip genome analysis. This transgenic line demonstrates the expression pattern in the heart and along the entire notochord.


This paper analyses the development and application of notions of climate justice by non-governmental groups (NGOs) within two Western developed nations. I argue that the development of the discourse of climate justice in each society is shaped by historical circumstances, existing discourses of environmental justice, and the political orientations of the society vis a vis, the international arena. In the case of the United Kingdom, a strong, existing, shared understanding amongst NGOs around social justice predisposed civil society towards accepting the notion of climate justice. The societal understandings of social and environmental justice within the United Kingdom around social and economic disadvantage has shaped their interpretation of climate justice. Additionally, the outward looking orientation of UK civil society has influenced their conception of climate justice as being a predominantly international, rather than domestic, issue. In contrast, the conception of climate justice in the United States of America has been interpreted quite differently. The understanding of environmental justice that underpins the discourse of climate justice in the USA is informed by the work of Bullard (Bullard 1983, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995), and others, on environmental racism. Thus, climate justice is shaped by previous understandings of environmental justice around the economic, social and health disadvantage suffered by peoples of colour in North America from environmental issues. Moreover, the inward looking orientation of US civil society has influenced their conception of climate justice as being a predominantly domestic, rather than international, issue.


The zeolites constitute a large family of inorganic compounds and have a remarkable molecular sieve effect thanks to the regular size of their pores, which thus excludes any molecule whose diameter is greater than that of the pores. 4Å zeolites are materials used in the gas industry in Algeria but this material becomes waste at the industry level. The latter generates an additional cost to the complexes of the gas industry, which must, by force of law, take in charge of their waste either by their own means or through the intermediary of qualified services. The zeolites used in the dehydration section for liquefied natural gas become waste as soon as they are saturated and after several regeneration. The purpose of this work is to recover these industrial wastes (zeolites 4A), which are subjected to various analyzes and experiments, with a view to recovering industrial waste in order to give it a second life, Adsorption of organic compounds (methanol and ethanol). The experiments are carried out in discontinuous system (batch). The influence of several parameters such as the contact time, the granulometry and the mass of the adsorbent on the adsorption rate will be presented.


Studies report that ECG measures newborns' heart rate (HR) more quickly1 ,2 and accurately3 than pulse oximetry (PO) in the delivery room (DR). In these studies, separate ECG and PO monitors were applied. The Philips IntelliVue X2 monitor (Philips, Eindhoven, Netherlands) incorporates ECG and Masimo PO technology (Masimo, Irvine, California, USA) and has a portable unit that may be used in the DR. This monitor displays HR faster when the ECG leads are connected to the machine before application to the infant.4 We wished to determine whether the order of application of ECG and PO affected how quickly …


How a government secures the implementation of its policies is one of the most interesting processes in public administration. The tendency of scholars is to ignore implementation and how it impacts on the form of policy, something which invariably changes once resources have been allocated to implementing agencies and the policy detail is addressed. Traditional 'top-down' (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, Mazmanian and Sabatier 1981) and 'bottom-up' (Elmore 1979, Hjern and Porter 1981, Hull and Hjern 1983) analytical frameworks give only a partial explanation of outcomes. In making the case for a network approach, a typology of implementation networks is presented. The utility of this typology is evaluated in the context of one of the most complex privatization programmes attempted by any government: the privatization of British Rail (BR) between 1992 and 1997. In the case of the sale of one BR subsidiary train operating company, ScotRail, a variety of agencies with competing interests and acting in a politically-charged climate exchanged essential resources to deliver the policy, though not without generating unintended outcomes in the form of significant change to the policy and the agencies charged with implementing it.


We develop two new non-ergodic alternating proximal augmented Lagrangian algorithms (NEAPAL) to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained convex optimization problems. Our approach relies on a novel combination of the augmented Lagrangian framework, alternating/linearization scheme, Nesterov's acceleration techniques, and adaptive strategy for parameters. Our algorithms have several new features compared to existing methods. Firstly, they have a Nesterov's acceleration step on the primal variables compared to the dual one in several methods in the literature. Secondly, they achieve non-ergodic optimal convergence rates under standard assumptions, i.e. an $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{k}\right)$ rate without any smoothness or strong convexity-type assumption, or an $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{k^2}\right)$ rate under only semi-strong convexity, where $k$ is the iteration counter. Thirdly, they preserve or have better per-iteration complexity compared to existing algorithms. Fourthly, they can be implemented in a parallel fashion. Finally, all the parameters are adaptively updated without heuristic tuning. We verify our algorithms on different numerical examples and compare them with some state-of-the-art methods.


Managing oxidative stress is an important physiological function for all aerobic organisms, particularly during periods of prolonged high metabolic activity, such as long-distance migration. However, no previous study has investigated the oxidative status of songbirds at different stages of migration, whether that oxidative status depends on the condition of the birds, how birds use their condition in concert with access to free water to make stopover decisions, or the effects of oxidative challenges like flight on subsequent reproduction. Additionally, scientists undertaking such research are commonly expected to disseminate their results as a Broader Impact of their studies––typically to secure research funding––and often struggle to do so, given that they are not usually trained in non-technical communication or public engagement. In this dissertation, I introduce the fundamentals of oxidative balance in flying songbirds (Chapter 1), discuss physiological factors affecting the condition and behavior of migratory songbirds on stopover (Chapters 2 and 3), describe the impact of dietary antioxidants and flight exercise on songbird reproduction (Chapter 4), and present a framework of guiding principles to help researchers communicate their science (Chapter 5). Development of this framework influenced the style and approach of the dissertation as a whole, with each chapter's organization and figure design benefiting from lessons transferrable from communication with non-scientist audiences to communication with professional peers. To investigate the relationship between energy stores and oxidative status of long-distance migratory birds on stopover, I drew blood samples from two species of Neotropical migrant (Blackpoll Warbler, Setophaga striata, and Red-eyed Vireo, Vireo olivaceus) with differing migration strategies during autumn migration on Block Island, USA, and a species of trans-Saharan migrant (Garden Warbler, Sylvia borin) during spring migration on the island of Ponza, Italy; I found fat stores to be positively correlated with circulating antioxidant capacity in Blackpoll Warblers and Red-eyed Vireos and positively correlated with circulating lipid oxidation levels in all three species. Among Garden Warblers, oxidative damage levels decreased with time on stopover (up to 8 nights). Thus, the physiological strategy of migrating songbirds appears to be to (1) build prophylactic antioxidant capacity in concert with fuel stores at stopover sites before a long-distance flight, and (2) repair oxidative damage while refueling at stopover sites after long-distance flight. To assess the contribution of free water to migratory birds' stopover decisions, I captured 61 free-living Garden Warblers in spring at a frequently used stopover site in the Mediterranean Sea, housed them with or without drinking water, and measured nocturnal restlessness (Zugunruhe) in relation to energy stores at capture; waterdeprived birds of high fat score showed the highest Zugunruhe activity, suggesting that individuals with higher fat scores might be expected, regardless of flight muscle size, to depart a dry stopover site more readily than a site with freely available water. To examine how songbirds use nutrition to manage trade-offs in antioxidant allocation between endurance flight and subsequent reproduction, I performed a controlled experiment with Zebra Finches (Taeniopygia guttata), using four treatment groups of birds that either were or were not provided a waterand lipid-soluble antioxidant-supplemented diet and were or were not trained to perform daily endurance flight for 6 weeks before breeding; I found that exercised birds had higher oxidative damage levels than non-exercised birds after flight training, supplementation with water-soluble antioxidants decreased the deposition of lipid-soluble antioxidants to eggs and yolk size, and flight exercise lowered deposition of lutein but not vitamin E to eggs. These results mechanistically demonstrate potential carry-over effects of nutrition and exertion on the capacity of songbirds to provision eggs with important nutrients after long-distance flights. To address how the potential for "impact" of varied Broader Impacts dissemination activities can be critically assessed during proposal writing and peer review, I combined the experiences of successful practitioners with communication theory to synthesize a five-point framework; this "Broader Impacts Impact Framework" summarizes best practices in communication and outreach, can be easily used by scientists during proposal writing and review, and focuses on five main factors: who, why, what, how, and with whom.


This paper investigates the propagation of subnanosecond rise time (ultra wideband) voltage transients in low-voltage installation power cables. Experimental results are compared to simulations. It is concluded that the main mode of propagation of differentially injected transients in low-voltage installation power cables is transverse electromagnetic mode. Also, such transients would spread relatively unattenuated to any load or junction in the power system, received power primarily only limited by the impedance mismatches causing reflections. The effects of different types of bends in the cable have been studied. The study was conducted as a part of an assessment of the susceptibility of civilian facilities to intentional electromagnetic interference.


Special Issue Tsipi Heart Ben-Gurion University of the Negev firstname.lastname@example.com Yisrael Parmet Ben-Gurion University of the Negev email@example.com Nava Pliskin Ben-Gurion University of the Negev firstname.lastname@example.com The objective of this study was to investigate physicians' compliance with recommendations for drug substitutes embedded within an electronic medical record, to assess factors affecting compliance, and to evaluate associated cost savings. An exploratory study of all physicians in all clinics operated by a large health maintenance organization (HMO) was conducted using a transparent computerized agent that collected 1.21 million prescriptions prescribed by 647 physicians. Compliance with HMO recommendations for substitute drugs reached a 70 percent rate. Substitute type, whether generic or therapeutic, was found to be the most significant factor affecting compliance, with physician workload and age second and third in effect magnitude, respectively. Compliance was found to be non-automatic and selective, following a thoughtful cognitive process. The HMO realized at least a 4 percent reduction in costs for prescribed drugs as a result of compliance with substitute recommendations. The results can be interpreted via the lens of Organizational Justice Theory, assuming that the broad compliance with generic substitutes was driven by perception of just procedures, whereas there was no such perception in the case of therapeutic substitutes. While more research is warranted for investigating the motivations driving physicians' compliance, we strongly feel that the results can be generalized to other HMOs and healthcare settings.


Basal stem rot (BSR) caused by Ganoderma species is the most
serious disease of oil palm. Infection by the fungi causes significant loss
in yield, often resulting in the palm's death as the disease progressed.
Oil palm is a mycotrophic plant. Under natural conditions, the plant is
often colonized by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. The current study
carried out aimed to evaluate the role of AM in enhancing growth and
development of oil palm seedlings and to examine the possibility of using
this fungi as a biocontrol agent against basal stem rot (BSR) disease
caused by G. boninense. A greenhouse trial was carried out to determine the optimum AM
inoculum density for maximum plant growth and AM root colonization. The
palms were inocu lated with 6 levels of AM inoculum (m ixed species of AM
spores, extramatrical hyphae and infected root segments of Setaria
ancep) viz. 0, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 g inoculum/plant. Resu lts obtained
showed that 40 g inoculum/plant gave maximum growth and percent AM
root colonization at 3 months after inoculation. This inoculum level was
subsequently used in further experiments. A study was conducted to
evaluate the effect of AM on plant growth and development. AM
association significantly enhanced palm growth in terms of plant height,
total leaf area and dry matter production. Physiological processes such as
relative water content, photosynthetic rate and total root phenolic contents
were also significantly improved through AM symbiosis. In contrast,
stomatal resistance was significantly decreased. AM formation also alters
root morphological characteristics. The effect was more profound in the
tertiary roots . N umber and length of tertiary roots were respectively 63-105% and 26-113% higher in mycorrhizal than in control palms.


The development of new growth hormone (GH) agonists and growth hormone antagonists (GHAs) requires animal models for pre-clinical testing. Ideally, the effects of treatment are monitored using the same pharmacodynamic marker that is later used in clinical practice. However, intact rodents are of limited value for this purpose because serum IGF-I, the most sensitive pharmacodynamic marker for the action of GH in humans, shows no response to treatment with recombinant human GH and there is little evidence for the effects of GHAs, except when administered at very high doses or when overexpressed. As an alternative, more suitable model, we explored pharmacodynamic markers of GH action in intact rabbits. We performed the first validation of an IGF-I assay for the analysis of rabbit serum and tested precision, sensitivity, linearity and recovery using an automated human IGF-I assay (IDS-iSYS). Furthermore, IGF-I was measured in rabbits of different strains, age groups and sexes, and we monitored IGF-I response to treatment with recombinant human GH or the GHA Pegvisomant. For a subset of samples, we used LC-MS/MS to measure IGF-I, and quantitative western ligand blot to analyze IGF-binding proteins (IGFBPs). Although recovery of recombinant rabbit IGF-I was only 50% in the human IGF-I assay, our results show that the sensitivity, precision (1.7–3.3% coefficient of variation) and linearity (90.4–105.6%) were excellent in rabbit samples. As expected, sex, age and genetic background were major determinants of IGF-I concentration in rabbits. IGF-I and IGFBP-2 levels increased after single and multiple injections of recombinant human GH (IGF-I: 286±22 versus 434±26 ng/ml; P<0.01) and were highly correlated (P<0.0001). Treatment with the GHA lowered IGF-I levels from the fourth injection onwards (P<0.01). In summary, we demonstrated that the IDS-iSYS IGF-I immunoassay can be used in rabbits. Similar to rodents, rabbits display variations in IGF-I depending on sex, age and genetic background. Unlike in rodents, the IGF-I response to treatment with recombinant human GH or a GHA closely mimics the pharmacodynamics seen in humans, suggesting that rabbits are a suitable new model to test human GH agonists and antagonists.


Projects are per definition unique. However, there are several elements, such as solutions, methods, tools, etc. that are common to projects. In a time sensitive work environment, like project settings, it is highly beneficial to focus on making use of existing knowledge and solutions, and avoid ?reinventing the wheel?. This existing knowledge can be both explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit refers to written knowledge, and tacit refers to experience and unwritten knowledge. Experience like explicit knowledge can be transferred among people as well. Hence, experience transfer gains importance in project organizations. There are many ways to transfer experience in organizations. Development in information technology has led to several tools and systems that promote experience transfer. So, this master thesis will look at one such system that is used by an organization called Gassco. Gassco, as an operator, is responsible for safe and efficient gas transport from the Norwegian continental shelf and will be leading gas transporter in Europe. In this regards, this thesis aims to understand, find problems, suggest solutions for solving problems, and develop and improve the experience transfer systems in this company. Key words: knowledge management, knowledge transfer and sharing, experience transfer, individuals and organizational learning, information technology based system, PIMS R3 (project information management system), and Experience Transfer system


In 1990, epidemic diphtheria began to emerge in the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union; by 1996, approximately 125,000 cases of diphtheria and 4,000 deaths had been reported. Disease outbreaks are yet another stimulus to discovery. Certainly no one wishes for large numbers of people to become ill; however, outbreaks usually are investigated in considerable detail, whereas single cases are much less likely to receive such attention. Certainly this rule of thumb held true with the Legionnaires' disease outbreak in Philadelphia in 1976, the toxic shock syndrome outbreak several years later, and the outbreak of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in the Four Corners area of the United States in 1993. The response to anomalous laboratory results turned out to be a critical factor during the investigations of Legionnaires' disease and Pontiac fever. Epidemiologic investigations quickly established that the disease was airborne, but there was no evidence of person-to-person spread. The pulmonary manifestations of the Philadelphia patients were considered more typical of viral pneumonia than of bacterial.


This study examines the relative efficacy of citizen science recruitment messages appealing to four motivations that were derived from previous research on motives for participation in citizen-science projects. We report on an experiment (N=36,513) that compared the response to email messages designed to appeal to these four motives for participation. We found that the messages appealing to the possibility of contributing to science and learning about science attracted more attention than did one about helping scientists but that one about helping scientists generated more initial contributions. Overall, the message about contributing to science resulted in the largest volume of contributions and joining a community, the lowest. The results should be informative to those managing citizen-science projects. Abstract Citizen science


Purpose – Although the crucial role of business, and of business-based approaches, in development is increasingly emphasised by academics and practitioners, we lack insight into the 'whether and how' of viable business models, in environmental, social and economical terms. This article analyses private-sector involvement in development, including a business perspective of firm-level factors, taking the case of sustainable energy in developing countries.Design/methodology/approach – In the framework of the international business and development debate, we examine the 'state of the art' on sustainable energy and business involvement, and present our own research on illustrative cases from local companies involved in renewable, off-grid rural electrification. Implications are discussed, viewed from the broader perspective of business models.Findings – Existing studies on sustainable energy take macro-economic and/or policy-oriented approaches, containing specific case studies of rural electrification and/or recommended financing/delivery models. We categorize them on two dimensions (levels of subsidies and public/private involvement) and conclude that market-based models operating without subsidies do hardly exist in theory – and also not in practice, as our study shows that companies can at best have part of their portfolio non-subsidized based on customer segmentation or require socially-oriented investors/funders.Research limitations/applications – This exploratory study can be a starting point for further in-depth analyses.Practical implications – The article outlines challenges faced by companies/entrepreneurs when aiming for viable business models, and provides insights to policy-makers who want to further the role of business in sustainable (energy) development.Societal implications – Sustainable energy and development are crucial and interlinked issues highly relevant to global society, as exemplified by the UN year of Sustainable Energy for All and Rio 20.Originality/value – The article contributes new dimensions and perspectives that have been left unexplored, and that are crucial for reducing poverty and stimulating sustainable (energy) development.


Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in average decision lags. Furthermore, and also surprisingly, there is no significant difference in the decision lag when groups decisions are made by majority rule versus when they are made under a unanimity requirement. In addition, group decisions are on average superior to individual decisions. The results are strikingly similar across the two experiments.


With welfare reform soundly launched and its effects already praised, it is time to examine its impact on former welfare recipients. A typology of adaptation to welfare—comprising dependency, supplementation, self-reliance, and autonomy—was developed based on former welfare recipients' financial status and employment status. An examination was also made of ways in which welfare recipients changed from more independent modes of adaptation (autonomy and self-reliance) to less independent modes (supplementation and dependency). Using longitudinal data extracted from a U. S. Department of Labor survey, event history analysis was applied to investigate changes in adaptation mode and factors contributing to these changes, among former welfare recipients across a period of 1 8 years. The investigation found that return to welfare was uncommon. Furthermore, the results show that nonpoor former recipients most often joined the ranks of the working poor because of welfare reform, ethnicity, education level, occupational skills, family income, housing subsidy, child care, and prior experience in welfare use. Some nonpoor former recipients who spent long spells in welfare returned to welfare because they suffered income reductions and needed food stamps. Working poor former recipients were likely to become nonpoor if they were married and had no need for child care or food stamps. Working poor White, single mothers with little work experience and little child support were likely to return to welfare and become further dependent on it.


Introduction: There are significant gender differences in the epidemiology and presentation of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), physiological aspects of CVDs, response to diagnostic tests or interventions, and prevalence or incidence of the associated risk factors. Considering the independent influence of gender on early dire consequences of such diseases, this study was conducted to investigate gender differences in patients' beliefs about biological, environmental, behavioral, and psychological risk factors in a cardiac rehabilitation program.
Materials and Methods: This study has cross sectional design. The sample was composed of 775 patients referred to cardiac rehabilitation unit in Imam Ali Hospital in Kermanshah, Iran. The data were collected using clinical interview and patients' medical records. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, and chi-square test. To do the statistical analysis, SPSS version 20 was utilized.
Results: As the results indicated, there was a significant difference between the beliefs of men and women about risk factors of heart disease (X2= 48.36; P<0.01). Men considered behavioral (55.1%) and psychological (33.7%) risk factors as the main causes of their disease, respectively. On the other hand, women regarded psychological (38.2%) and behavioral factors (26.6%) as the most common causes of cardiac conditions, respectively. Both men and women considered stress as the most important heart disease risk factor (21% and 22.3%, respectively). Also, women were less aware of the risk factors, compared to men.
Conclusion: From the patients' perspective, psychological and behavioral risk factors were the most important causes of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs); moreover, stress was the most influential risk factor for developing cardiac diseases. Thus, learning to control and manage these risk factors can help to prevent the development of CVDs and reduce the occurrence of subsequent cardiac events.


CASE DESCRIPTION The primary subject matter of this case is the impact of recent United States Supreme Court decisions regarding the application of the Due Process Clause in determining punitive damages awards. Specifically, this case looks at the most recent decision in Philip Morris USA v. Williams (2007) of three significant Supreme Court decisions regarding punitive damages awards. The case looks at the two previous Court decisions regarding the criteria used in determining punitive damages awards and the effect of those decisions on the final decision in this trilogy. Given new appointments to the U. S. Supreme Court, the case provides an opportunity to examine the impact of those changes on this recent decision. All three decisions raise questions about the commitment of firms to ethical and socially responsible behavior given the restrictions to the size of punishments that may be levied against them when their behavior is found to fall below the recognized standards of "acceptable." This case would be appropriate for use in business law/legal environment of business, business marketing, or business ethics with a difficulty level of two or three depending on the course. CASE SYNOPSIS In Philip Morris USA v. Williams (2007), the United States Supreme Court decided that the Due Process Clause prohibits a state from using punitive damages awards to punish a defendant for injuries it inflicts upon non-parties, i.e. strangers to the litigation because such awards amount to a taking of property without due process, there being no fair notice of the severity of the penalty the state may impose (Philip Morris USA v. Williams, 2007). This decision is the third in the United States Supreme Court's recent forays into the constitutionality of punitive damages awards, but the first punitive damages case decided by the Court since the retirement of Justice O'Connor and the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist, and the addition of Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts to the Court (Murray, 2007). The purpose of this paper is to examine how Philip Morris USA v. Williams fits into the trilogy of punitive damages decisions issued by the United States Supreme Court, to assess the impact of the Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito's joining the majority decision, and to determine the reach of the Due Process Clause in restricting punitive damages awards (Hamdini, 2006). Careful discussion of the case should enable the students to better understand (1) the use of punitive damages in legal decisions; (2) the concept of Due Process; (3) the possible implications of these decisions of corporate behavior; (4) the significance of the composition and creation of majorities on the United Supreme Court. INSTRUCTORS' NOTES Supplemental Documentation and Information Some quotes and information provided in the court records and decisions that further describe and clarify the arguments made are found below. Regarding Ms. Williams' personal claims of negligence and fraud: Under 15 U.S.C. [section] 1334, the federally-imposed warning that appears on cigarette packages preempts all state regulation of the advertising and promotion of cigarettes that carry the warning. Further, in Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 505 U.S. 504, 524 (1992), the United States Supreme Court ruled that preemption extends to state common law claims, precluding plaintiff from pursuing a claim based on fraudulent concealment of information concerning smoking and health. Hence plaintiff pursued alternative claims for negligence and fraud. The trial court's reduction of the non-economic damages to $500,000.00 is based on Oregon statute: ORS 18.560 provides in part: "(1) Except for claims subject to ORS 30.260 to 30.300 [the Oregon Tort Claims Act] and ORS chapter 656 [the Oregon Workers' Compensation Act], in any civil action seeking damages arising out of bodily injury, including emotional injury or distress, death or property damage of any one person including claims for loss of care, comfort, companionship and society and loss of consortium, the amount awarded for non-economic damages shall not exceed $500,000" (Williams v. …


Introduction: Here we propose a tactic to fill the upper poles of breasts that are emptied by ptosis in primary and secondary cases to obtain anatomically beautiful breasts with sufficient breast volume. Objective: To describe breast tissue flaps used to fill the upper breast pole when there is adequate or surplus volume. Methods: In primary or secondary cases, if the measurement from point A to the submammary fold is long and that to the upper glandular ridge is short, one obtains from the difference between them a flap with an upper pedicle, termed a "book leaf," and sutured at the upper mammary pole. Glandular detachment preserves the skin's thickness with subcutaneous tissue in all maneuvers similar to the adjacent thorax according to the mammary gland's vascular anatomy, which is irrigated and innervated from the subcutaneous tissue to the gland. Results: The six patients presented no complications related to flap irrigation. Adequate mammary shape and volume were achieved by inverting measurements between the lower and upper poles. Discussion: Here we proposed an innovative manner to fill the upper pole of the breast with a breast upper pedicle flap. A larger number of cases should be analyzed in the long term. Conclusion: The flap is used to fill the upper pole of the breast when the largest volume is in the lower pole. ■ ABSTRACT


We describe the use of machine learning and data mining to detect and classify malicious executables as they appear in the wild. We gathered 1,971 benign and 1,651 malicious executables and encoded each as a training example using n-grams of byte codes as features. Such processing resulted in more than 255 million distinct n-grams. After selecting the most relevant n-grams for prediction, we evaluated a variety of inductive methods, including naive Bayes, decision trees, support vector machines, and boosting. Ultimately, boosted decision trees outperformed other methods with an area under the ROC curve of 0.996. Results suggest that our methodology will scale to larger collections of executables. We also evaluated how well the methods classified executables based on the function of their payload, such as opening a backdoor and mass-mailing. Areas under the ROC curve for detecting payload function were in the neighborhood of 0.9, which were smaller than those for the detection task. However, we attribute this drop in performance to fewer training examples and to the challenge of obtaining properly labeled examples, rather than to a failing of the methodology or to some inherent difficulty of the classification task. Finally, we applied detectors to 291 malicious executables discovered after we gathered our original collection, and boosted decision trees achieved a true-positive rate of 0.98 for a desired false-positive rate of 0.05. This result is particularly important, for it suggests that our methodology could be used as the basis for an operational system for detecting previously undiscovered malicious executables.


Existing frameworks (such as used by the New Zealand Commerce Commission in its recent evaluation of the proposed merger between Sky Television and Vodafone) require, as a first step, the definition of the relevant markets affected by the merger or vertical integration activity. Historic precedents in the telecommunications sector have tended towards finding that vertical agglomeration effects when network operators integrate downstream into the provision of applications and services to end-consumers are harmful to competition. Such Structure-Conduct-Performance methods of evaluating mergers and other aspects of market performance are problematic when the firm(s) concerned supply many different products, both together in various different bundle forms and separately as individual components. Defining the markets for (merger) analysis on the basis of only one of the components in a possible bundle that the (merged) firm may supply risks overlooking the complex interactions that occur on the demand side when consumers make their purchase decisions. This is especially likely to be an issue in the supply of internet applications and content bundled with broadband internet access. Consumers have heterogeneous preferences for different applications and content (hereafter 'content'), and will purchase (or access) many different content types. Even though ownership of rights to distribute one content may confer a degree of market power in for the owner-provider over those consumers with very strong preferences for this content over all others, it is not axiomatic that the firm will be able to exert this power over consumers whose preferences are more evenly distributed. The more variety there is in the content bundles available, and the more heterogeneous are consumers' preferences across the various content types, the greater is the number of possible markets in which interaction is likely to occur and the more problematic it becomes to identify the relevant markets for analysis of mergers and antitrust cases. We propose that classic merger and antitrust analysis based on econometric cost-benefit analysis can be augmented by using simulation and numerical analysis of a range of bundle offers expected to be relevant in decision-making. We develop a simple model and use it to demonstrate how this approach could have informed the recent New Zealand Commerce Commission decision about the proposed Sky-Vodafone merger by offering some quantitative estimates of total and consumer welfare and provider profits under the proposed factual (with bundling) and counterfactual (individual component sales) cases. The approach may also inform other analyses, such as the assessment of the effects of two-sided markets and firm pricing decisions.


HKT1;5 loci/alleles are important determinants of crop salinity tolerance. HKT1;5s encode plasmalemma-localized Na+-transporters, retrieving xylem Na+ into xylem parenchyma cells, reducing shoot Na+ accumulation. Allelic variation in rice OsHKT1;5 sequence in specific landraces (Nona Bokra OsHKT1;5-NB/Nipponbare OsHKT1;5-Ni) correlates with variation in salt tolerance. Oryza coarctata, a halophytic wild rice, grows in fluctuating salinity at the seawater-estuarine interface in Indian and Bangladeshi coastal regions. The distinct transport characteristics of the shoots and roots expressing O. coarctata OcHKT1;5 transporter, are reported vis-à-vis OsHKT1;5-Ni. Yeast sodium extrusion-deficient cells expressing OcHKT1;5 are sensitive to increasing Na+ (10-100 mM). Electrophysiological measurements in Xenopus oocytes expressing O. coarctata or rice HKT1;5 transporters indicates that OcHKT1;5, like OsHKT1;5-Ni is a Na+-selective transporter, but displays 16-fold lower affinity for Na+ and 3.5-fold higher maximal conductance than OsHKT1;5-Ni. For Na+ concentrations greater than 10 mM, OcHKT1;5 conductance is higher than that of OsHKT1;5-Ni, indicating potential of OcHKT1;5 for increasing domesticated rice salt tolerance. Homology modeling/ simulation suggests that four key amino acid changes in OcHKT1;5 (in loops on the extracellular side; E239K, G207R, G214R, L363V), account for its lower affinity and higher Na+ conductance vis-à-vis OsHKT1;5-Ni. Of these, E239K in OcHKT1;5, confers lower affinity for Na+ transport, as evidenced by Na+ transport assays of reciprocal site directed mutants for both transporters (OcHKT1;5- K239E, OsHKT1;5-Ni- E270K) in Xenopus oocytes. Both transporters have analogous roles in xylem sap desalinization and differences in Na+ transport affinity/ conductance between the transporters is attributable to differences in xylem sap Na+ concentrations in both species.


With the increasing number of available digital images, there is an urgent need of image content description to facilitate content based image retrieval (CBIR). Besides colour and texture, shape is an important low level feature in describing image content. An object can be photographed from different distances and angles. However, we often want to classify the images of the same object into one class, despite the change of perspective. So, it is desired to extract shape features that are invariant to the change of perspective. The shape of an object from one viewpoint to another can be linked through an affine transformation, if it is viewed from a much larger distance than its size along the line of sight. Those invariant shape features are known as affine invariant shape representations. Because of the change of perspective, it is more difficult to develop affine invariant shape representations than normal ones. The goal of this work is to develop affine invariant shape descriptors.

Through shape retrieval experiments, we find that the performance of the existing affine invariant shape representations are not satisfactory. Especially, when the shape boundary is corrupted by noise, their performance degrades quickly. In this work, two new affine invariant contour-based shape descriptors, the ICA Fourier shape descriptor (ICAFSD) and the whitening Fourier shape descriptor (WFSD) have been developed. They perform better than most of the existing affine invariant shape representations, while having compact feature size and low computational time requirement. Four region-based affine-invariant shape descriptors, the ICA Zernike moment shape descriptor (ICAZMSD), the whitening Zernike moment shape descriptor (WZMSD), the ICA orthogonal Fourier Mellin moment shape descriptor (ICAOFMMSD), and the whitening orthogonal Fourier Mellin moment shape descriptor (WOFMMSD), are also proposed, in this work. They can be applied to both simple and complex shapes, and have close to perfect performance in retrieval experiments. The advantage of those newly proposed shape descriptors is even more apparent in experiments on shapes with added boundary noise: Their performance does not deteriorate as much as the existing ones.


This book describes a colorful period in French social and cultural history, during which music and science combined to provide the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the Age of Enlightenment with an enormous vitality. Investigating the place assigned to music in France's preeminent scientific institution, the Paris Academy, the author shows the role played by the scientific movement in the evolution of musical thought prior to the Revolution.Originally published in 1982.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Hydrocarbon reservoirs often contain thin and irregularly shaped low-permeability heterogeneities at the interface between sedimentary bodies that can act as barriers or baffles where they are aligned perpendicular to the flow. These heterogeneities are often not explicitly captured in simulation models because they occur over lengthscales smaller than a single simulation grid block and, as such, are ubiquitously captured in flow simulations using transmissibility multipliers. This parameterization implies that the properties of the fine-scale heterogeneities are a direct function of the properties in the adjacent grid cells. A new methodology is proposed where fine-scale heterogeneities are modelled using properties attached to surfaces and updated independently from other uncertain reservoir properties present during assisted history matching. This method is validated via a synthetic reservoir simulation model, using the ensemble Kalman filter to assimilate production history. The update of geometrical and petrophysical parameters related to fine-scale heterogeneity improves the history match and production forecast in comparison to traditional implicit techniques that do not honour the characteristics of the heterogeneity. The results indicate that, for history matching, it can be important to capture fine-scale heterogeneities independently from other uncertain reservoir properties even if the fine-scale heterogeneities do not exert a large control on reservoir response.


The Kingdom of God is like an intergalactic starship in constant orbit around the earth. No on can see it, but its tremendous power is available at all times to anyone who is dedicated to its transcendent message. With this splendid metaphor, Maloney launches into an engaging study of the Gospel of Mark.He argues forcefully that the key theme of the book is eschatology (death and resurrection) and his argument goes against the grain of the majority of Markan scholars who contend that the themes of the Gospel are discipleship and the Messianic secret. Maloney asserts that Markan scholars have so often missed this point because of their location in the First World. They lack the cultural orientation to understand the force of Mark's message about the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, traditional interpretations of Mark have emphasized a privatization of morality among Christians and a lack of concern for the well-being of the worldwide human community. The remedy for such a reading of Mark is to read it through the eyes of the people whose experience is most like that of Mark's original audience. Maloney uses the insights of Latin American biblical interpreters and the results of social science research into the first-century Mediterranean world to provide a fresh and provocative reading of Mark's gospel. Elliott C. Maloney, O.S.B. is Professor of New Testament Studies and Biblical Languages at Saint Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a member of the Religious Studies Faculty at Saint Vincent College, and the author of Semitic Interference in Marcan Syntax.


Abstract. A new and consistent time series of glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro over the last century has been established by re-interpreting two historical maps and processing nine satellite images, which removes uncertainty about the location and extent of past and present ice bodies. Three-dimensional visualization techniques were used in conjunction with aerial and ground-based photography to facilitate the interpretation of ice boundaries over eight epochs between 1912 and 2011. The glaciers have retreated from their former extent of 11.40 km2 in 1912 to 1.76 km2 in 2011, which represents a total loss of about 85% of the ice cover over the last 100 yr. The total loss of ice cover is in broad agreement with previous estimates, but to further characterize the spatial and temporal variability of glacier retreat a cluster analysis using topographical information (elevation, slope and aspect) was performed to segment the ice cover as observed in 1912, which resulted in three glacier zones being identified. Linear extrapolation of the retreat in each of the three identified glacier assemblages implies the ice cover on the western slopes of Kilimanjaro will be gone before 2020, while the remaining ice bodies on the plateau and southern slopes will most likely disappear by 2040. It is highly unlikely that any body of ice will be present on Kilimanjaro after 2060 if present-day climatological conditions are maintained. Importantly, the geo-statistical approach developed in this study provides us with an additional tool to characterize the physical processes governing glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro. It remains clear that, to use glacier response to unravel past climatic conditions on Kilimanjaro, the transition from growth to decay of the plateau glaciers must be further resolved, in particular the mechanisms responsible for vertical cliff development.


Multi-modal neuroimaging projects are advancing our understanding of human brain architecture, function, connectivity using high-quality non-invasive data from many subjects. However, ground truth validation of connectivity using invasive tracers is not feasible in humans. Our NonHuman Primate Neuroimaging & Neuroanatomy Project (NHP_NNP) is an international effort (6 laboratories in 5 countries) to: (i) acquire and analyze high-quality multi-modal brain imaging data of macaque and marmoset monkeys using protocols and methods adapted from the HCP; (ii) acquire quantitative invasive tract-tracing data for cortical and subcortical projections to cortical areas; and (iii) map the distributions of different brain cell types with immunocytochemical stains to better define brain areal boundaries. We are acquiring high-resolution structural, functional, and diffusion MRI data together with behavioral measures from over 100 individual macaques and marmosets in order to generate non-invasive measures of brain architecture such as myelin and cortical thickness maps, as well as functional and diffusion tractography-based connectomes. We are using classical and next-generation anatomical tracers to generate quantitative connectivity maps based on brain-wide counting of labeled cortical and subcortical neurons, providing ground truth measures of connectivity. Advanced statistical modeling techniques address the consistency of both kinds of data across individuals, allowing comparison of tracer-based and non-invasive MRI-based connectivity measures. We aim to develop improved cortical and subcortical areal atlases by combining histological and imaging methods. Finally, we are collecting genetic and sociality-associated behavioral data in all animals in an effort to understand how genetic variation shapes the connectome and behavior.


More than we ever anticipated, alliances among firms are changing the way business is conducted, particularly in the global, high-technology sector. The reasons are clear: companies must increasingly pool their capabilities to succeed in ever more complex and rapidly changing businesses. But the consequences for managers and for the economy have so far been underestimated. In this book, Benjamin Gomes-Casseres presents an in-depth account of the new world of business alliances and shows how collaboration has become part of the very fabric of modern competition. Alliances, he argues, create new units of competition that do battle with one another and with traditional single firms. The flexible capabilities of these multifirm constellations give them advantages over single firms in certain contexts, offsetting the advantage of a single firm's unified control. When managed effectively, alliances can strengthen a firm's competitive advantage and narrow the gap between leading firms and second-tier players. This often results in intensified rivalry, and the competition within an industry is transformed. Alliances often spread swiftly through an industry as firms jockey for advantage. Yet the very spread of alliances increases their costs and poses new limits on their use. Gomes-Casseres concludes that firms need to manage their constellations to enchance collaboration within their groups, while raising what he calls "barriers to collaboration" for rivals. These ideas are developed and illustrated through case studies of alliances among US, Japanese and European firms in electronics and computers, including Xerox, IBM and Fujitsu as well as other small and large companies. The book should be of interest to business academics, managers and general readers concerned with contemporary capitalism.


In a departure from Fred Schepisi's film The Devil's Playground, the television sequel Devil's Playground focuses on the cultural impact of priest child abuse. It will be argued that the prolific mainstream media coverage of these crimes before the series was made, and anticipated during its screening, lent a form of permission to green light the production. In focusing on Case 28 of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, this article will draw attention to the problematic nature of dramatising priest abuse in mainstream Australian television. While victims have willingly voiced graphic details of the sexual violence they experienced as children, after decades of silence, it is as if networks and producers are only now awkwardly grappling with these uncomfortable realities. In the process of sanitising such abusive behaviour, they reduce the degree of cruelty that survivors are intent on communicating.


Coordinate-transformation approaches to invisibility cloaking rely on the design of an anisotropic, spatially inhomogeneous "transformation medium" capable of suitably re-routing the energy flux around the region to conceal without causing any scattering in the exterior region. It is well known that the inherently magnetic properties of such medium limit the high-frequency scaling of practical "metamaterial" implementations based on subwavelength inclusions (e.g., split-ring resonators). Thus, for the optical range, non-magnetic implementations, based on approximate reductions of the constitutive parameters, have been proposed.
In this paper, we present an alternative approach to non-magnetic coordinate-transformation cloaking, based on the mapping from a nearly-transparent, anisotropic and spatially inhomogeneous virtual domain. We show that, unlike its counterparts in the literature, our approach is amenable to exact analytic treatment, and that its overall performance is comparable to that of a non-ideal (lossy, dispersive, parameter-truncated) implementation of standard (magnetic) cloaking.


Conceptions of modernity have tended towards the identification of urban spatial practice as
the primary signifier of meaning in this discourse. While much of this work has been crucial
in identifying just what is at stake in a reading of modernity as a spatial and political project,
this has lead to an oversight of the importance of the increasingly global character of social
relations in this narrative. This thesis attempts to engage with this question from the
perspective of the steamship, writing a cultural history of the introduction of steam power
into colonial shipping during the mid-nineteenth century. Taking as a case study the
steamships of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, widely known as
P&O, this thesis sets out to highlight the importance of globalised networks of mobility in
our conception of the experience of modernity. The introduction of steam is explored
through the experiences of the passengers on board these ships. Utilising diaries, letters,
contemporary press reports and published accounts of voyages, the impact of technological
change is charted through associated cultural attitudes and altered conceptions of global
travel. While the transitions which accompanied steam power's entry into global shipping
present a radical historical disjuncture, empirical research points rather to a complex
srrucrure ofco-constitution between technology, global capital and the newly mobile human
subjects aboard these vessels. The consequences of a departure from sail power gave rise not
simply to a transitional society at sea on a difi'erent scale and at a greater velocity, but made
possible structural change which allowed for a new kind of specifically modern,
idiosyncratically imperial environment, in which global actors reinforced and receded aspects
of control through performative instances of imperialism. Calling for an innovative
interdisciplinary engagement with the maritime humanities, the thesis utilises a critical
approach to historical material, seeing developing attitudes toward sea travel in relation to
wider discourses governing conceptions of empire, colonialism and global space in the
modern era.


I. INTRODUCTION There are many ways to evaluate the quality of a jurisdiction's business law rules. From a practical point of view, however, there is no better method of evaluating the efficacy of a particular system of rules than by measuring how conflicts of interest are handled. Conflicts of interest are ubiquitous and inevitable. From decisions about executive compensation to decisions about corporate control transactions, corporate governance systems regulate conflict within the firm. In fact, viewed broadly, a strong argument can be made that corporate law does very little of much value other than regulating conflicts within the firm. Indeed, moving beyond the confines of corporate law to the issue of conflicts of interest more broadly, traditional ethical theory presumes that conflicts of interest are fundamental to the human condition and that the study of ethics contains the solutions to these dilemmas. Put simply, ethical norms are what inform the decisions about whose interests should be sacrificed in order to resolve the conflicts. Conflicts of interest are a perennial problem precisely because they cannot be prohibited.1 They must be regulated, simply because often it is simply not possible, much less desirable, to avoid conflicts within the firm. Executives have to be paid. Firms need capital, and sometimes, particularly when the firm is in distress, that capital can come only from insiders. More generally, firms must make decisions in the ordinary course of business, and these decisions inevitably generate conflict. While these conflicts may or may not rise to the level of legally cognizable conflicts, they are conflicts nonetheless. Decisions to raise prices, raise workers' wages, change suppliers, relocate, or pay dividends instead of reinvesting the free cash flow, all make some of the corporation's constituents better off while making other constituents worse off. In this and many other ways, they create conflicts within the firm. Thus, ethical theory only guides us to the extent that we can avoid conflicts, which is to say, hardly ever as a practical matter. Some way of managing conflicts is necessary in the real world, and that is through the contracting process. For this reason, theories that suggest that the way to deal with conflicts of interest is simply to avoid them are not of much practical value, since in the real world it simply is not possible to avoid conflicts entirely. An additional practical problem associated with the standard ethical perspective on conflicts is that it fails to distinguish between what economists would characterize as ex ante conflicts and what they would describe as ex post conflicts. An ex ante conflict is one that emerges, or can be reasonably foreseen, before a party has made any sort of investment or commitment in a particular endeavor. An ex post conflict is one that emerges after investments or commitments have been made, and could not reasonably have been foreseen by the parties prior to making their investments. Conflicts that were anticipated ex ante, or that should have been anticipated ex ante, should be treated differently than conflicts that are unforeseeable. Putting together these two categories, there is one large set of conflicts that are unavoidable but foreseeable, and a smaller set of conflicts that are both unavoidable and unforeseeable. It is the latter, smaller set of conflicts that we need worry about, because this is the set of conflicts that cannot be solved adequately through either explicit or default contractual arrangements. A puzzle emerges from the above analysis. Many of the conflicts that appear to undermine modern corporate governance are quite foreseeable. In particular, conflicts such as executive compensation and the proper role of management in dealing with mergers and acquisitions are ubiquitous, widely discussed in the literature, and easily dealt with, at least in theory if not not in practice. …


We have measured the optical absorption and scattering coefficient spectra of a multiple-scattering medium (i.e., a biological tissue-simulating phantom comprising a lipid colloid) containing methemoglobin by using frequency-domain techniques. The methemoglobin absorption spectrum determined in the multiple-scattering medium is in excellent agreement with a corrected methemoglobin absorption spectrum obtained from a steady-state spectrophotometer measurement of the optical density of a minimally scattering medium. The determination of the corrected methemoglobin absorption spectrum takes into account the scattering from impurities in the methemoglobin solution containing no lipid colloid. Frequency-domain techniques allow for the separation of the absorbing from the scattering properties of multiple-scattering media, and these techniques thus provide an absolute measurement of the optical absorption spectra of the methemoglobin/lipid colloid suspension. One accurately determines the absolute methemoglob in absorption spectrum in the frequency domain by extracting the scattering and absorption coefficients from the phase shift Φ and average light intensity DC (or Φ and the amplitude of the light-intensity oscillations AC) data with relationships provided by diffusion theory, but one determines it less accurately by using the Φ and modulation M (M ≡ AC/DC) data and the diffusion theory relationships. In addition to the greater uncertainty in the absorption and scattering coefficients extracted from the Φ and M data, the optical parameters extracted from the Φ and M data exhibit systematically inaccurate behavior that cannot be explained by random noise in the system. Possible reasons for the systematically lower accuracy of the methemoglobin absorption spectrum obtained from Φ and M data are discussed.


Studies on the use of palm fats and mixtures of fats and oils in poultry nutrition. The main f actors that affect the digestibility and metabolizable energy content of fats for poultry are their contents  of saturated fatty acids and the unsaturated to saturated ratio (U FA: SFA), the carbon chain length of the SFA, the level of free fatty acids (FFA), and the age of the birds. Also, it is important to consider quality aspects of the fat being fed, such as the level of moisture, impurities and insaponifiable matter and toxic products developed in fats excesively heated, such as polymers resent in restaurant greases of  poor quality. The results of the present studies show that up to 45% FFA in a crude palm oil - palm destilled fatty acids blend are permisable without detrimental effect on broiler performance when that blend was included at a 6% rate in starler diets. Besides, better results are obtained when a fat of high FFA content and /or low IJFA: SFA is fed after the first week of age and not in day-old broilers. The use of fats of high FFA content is feasible but a previous determination of its ME content is necessary before formulation of the feed. Due to the difficulties involved in the determination of ME by conventional methods, an alternative procedure is to calculate such values through the use of prediction equations. These equations use FFA and UFA:SFA levels in the fat and are developed for young and older broilers.


To ensure the safety of navigating vessels on the Netherlands Continental Shelf (NCS), the Hydrographic
Service surveys the Shelf with Multi Beam Echo sounders. The deployment of the survey
vessels is done according to a survey policy, which contains resurvey frequencies for each specific
area. The survey policy is based on four factors: Minimum depth, draught, shipping intensity
and seabed dynamics. Based on the survey policy, yearly survey instructions are issued. These
instructions are resulting from a comparison of the age of the contents of the source databases
and the maximum age allowed by the survey policy. The current problem is now the result of
reliability problems of the survey vessels and the relatively high frequencies of the survey policy.
When compared to neighboring countries, these frequencies are rather ambitious, and the question
is now if it is possible to reduce these frequencies with the aim to optimize the survey policy.
In this study, we focus on optimization of the survey policy by means of the interpretation of
seabed dynamics. In the southern NCS, several bed forms are present, which have a strong influence
on the navigation safety in the shallow sections. Over the last years, a project has been
initiated that analyses selected areas in the southern NCS with a statistical method called deformation
analysis. This method approximates the seabed with a spatial representation, which is
then analysed with a temporal testing procedure to discuss the dynamic character. However, to
include the results of this statistical analysis in the reconsideration of the resurvey frequencies of
the survey policy, a proper interpretation of the detected dynamics is mandatory. In this study we
introduce an approach to zoom in on the most critical areas (areas with the highest risk), based
on the factors minimum depth, draught, shipping intensity and influence of human interventions.
This last factor is included due to the increased spatial use of the NCS, and recent area planning.
We call this selection of the critical areas, the initial prioritization. To quantify the factors for
this prioritization, interviews have been executed at the Hydrographic Service. Furthermore, we
use a background chapter on the technologies and methods of surveying to become more familiar
with the different error sources.


Multi-agent behavior modeling and trajectory forecasting are crucial for the safe navigation of autonomous agents in interactive scenarios. Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has been widely applied in multi-agent interaction modeling to generate diverse behavior and learn a low-dimensional representation for interacting systems. However, existing literature did not formally discuss if a VAE-based model can properly encode interaction into its latent space. In this work, we argue that one of the typical formulations of VAEs in multi-agent modeling suffers from an issue we refer to as social posterior collapse, i.e., the model is prone to ignoring historical social context when predicting the future trajectory of an agent. It could cause significant prediction errors and poor generalization performance. We analyze the reason behind this under-explored phenomenon and propose several measures to tackle it. Afterward, we implement the proposed framework and experiment on real-world datasets for multi-agent trajectory prediction. In particular, we propose a novel sparse graph attention message-passing (sparse-GAMP) layer, which helps us detect social posterior collapse in our experiments. In the experiments, we verify that social posterior collapse indeed occurs. Also, the proposed measures are effective in alleviating the issue. As a result, the model attains better generalization performance when historical social context is informative for prediction.


Abstract In this qualitative study, the authors merge two bodies of previously separated scholarship: (1) a socio-cultural understanding of adolescent girls in light of the shifting meaning of ideal girlhood, and (2) the participation and success of adolescent girls in school-based literacy activities. They apply these fields of inquiry to explore the following questions: (1) What does it mean to be a young woman/girl in middle school? (2) What does it mean to be a young woman/girl reader in middle school? (3) What does it mean to be a young woman/girl in literacy circles and discussion groups? To answer these questions, the authors collected observational and interview data in two classrooms (one grade 6 and one grade 8) from January to June. From the analysis of the data, the authors identify profiles that typify the girls with whom they interacted, capture the girls' roles during literature discussion groups and other classroom events, and frame the influence of teachers' actions on the girls.


The dynamic IR spectra of electrically modulated liquid crystalline 5CB (4-pentyl-4'-cyanobiphenyl) are determined to be due to the director reorientation. In the absence of dc fields, the IR response is mainly at two times the modulation frequency. IR signals at the modulation frequency may be induced by application of additional dc fields. These signals at the modulation frequency are caused by the creation of polar orientation due to the static field. No difference in dynamic response has been found between the rigid aromatic core and the pentyl chain of 5CB. Expressions are given for the in-phase and in-quadrature signals at the modulation frequency and at twice its value. It is shown that the frequency-domain dynamic IR experiment mainly probes the transition range between the uniform planar to the homeotropic regions in the sample. The different probing of the sample by time-domain experiments is briefly discussed.


We study the stellar populations of the brightest group galaxies (BGGs) in groups with different dynamical states, using Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey data. We use two independent, luminosity-dependent indicators to probe the relaxedness of their groups: the magnitude gap between the two most luminous galaxies (ΔM12), and the offset between BGGs and the luminosity center (Doffset) of the group. Combined, these two indicators were previously found useful for identifying relaxed and unrelaxed groups. We find that the BGGs of unrelaxed groups have significantly bluer near-ultraviolet-r colors than in relaxed groups. This is also true at the fixed sersic index. We find the bluer colors cannot be explained away by differing dust fraction, suggesting there are real differences in their stellar populations. Star formation rates derived from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting tend to be higher in unrelaxed systems. This is in part because of a greater fraction of BGGs with non-elliptical morphology, but also because unrelaxed systems have larger numbers of mergers, some of which may bring fuel for star formation. The SED-fitted stellar metallicities of BGGs in unrelaxed systems also tend to be higher by around 0.05 dex, perhaps because their building blocks were more massive. We find that the ΔM12 parameter is the most important parameter behind the observed differences in the relaxed/unrelaxed groups, in contrast with the previous study of Trevisan et al. We also find that groups selected to be unrelaxed using our criteria tend to have higher velocity offsets between the BGG and their group.


This paper reviews managers' decisions to voluntarily disclose information. The unraveling result is described, which suggests that managers would disclose all information under certain conditions. In particular, the paper focuses on managers' choice of non-verifiable voluntary disclosure in the light of cheap-talk models. Newman and Sansing (1993), Gigler (1994) and Stocken (2000), among others, have attempted to apply Crawford and Sobel's (1982) concept of cheap-talk models in disclosure settings. Assuming conditions when there are no apparent costs of misreporting, these studies examined the extent to which managers disclose truthfully and precisely, their incentives for doing so, and the resulting affects on disclosure quality, credibility and managerial reputation.


The measurement of stress hormones (i.e., glucocorticoids) has greatly advanced animal conservation. Fecal glucocorticoid metabolite assays are valuable because they are noninvasive, but their ability to detect responses to short-term (<30 min) stressors in a way similar to blood serum assays is comparatively less well understood. We evaluated whether fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (FGMs) increased in captive wild mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) exposed to either a brief (<2 min) capture, handling and release (CHR) or capture stress protocol (CSP; i.e., capture, hold for 30 min, release) treatment. Previous studies have shown that mourning doves exhibit elevated FGMs within 2-3 hrs of experimental challenges. Therefore, we attempted to collect feces every hour for 24 h pre-treatment and 36 h post-treatment. We did not detect a consistent increase in FGMs in response to CHR or CSP treatments. Though additional research is needed, FGM levels were lower the longer birds were held in captivity and we did not observe sex-based or seasonal differences in FGM responses. For mourning doves, and likely other species, plasma corticosterone analysis is better suited to assess responses to short-term stressors. Alternatively, FGMs are ideal for research focused on longer-term patterns in physiological state because they are not sensitive to exposure to temporary, acute stressors.


Yuri Druzhnikov. Prisoner of Russia: Alexander Pushkin and the Political Issues of Nationalism. Translated by Thomas Moore and Ilya Druzhnikov. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. 454 pp., $61.95, cloth. The eminent Russian historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii once observed that "one always wants to say too much about Pushkin, and one always ends up saying many extraneous things, leaving out the important ones" (p. xii). The image of Pushkin, a dominant figure in Russian culture, a genius whose works expressed Russia's whole destiny, weighs heavily upon scholars and biographers. In the foreword to Prisoner of Russia, the author, a fiction writer and scholar, remarks that a century-and-a-half of research has yielded more about Pushkin than the poet ever knew about himself. Scholars have "exhaustingly explored" his views on literature, philosophy, religion, and economics; they have calculated "the range of every pistol shot he ever fired" and discovered "how long his fingernails were" (p. vii). However, Druzhnikov maintains, the voluminous research has not revealed certain mysteries about Pushkin. Though filled with biographical and documentary detail, this book is neither a comprehensive biography, nor a critical survey of Pushkin's works. In the author's words, it represents a search for "a new approach towards Pushkin" (p. ix) and a skeptical inquiry into the life and works of Russia's foremost poet and writer. Druzhnikov finds that, since the nineteenth century and throughout the Soviet period, Pushkin has been turned into "an icon of worship insulated from the doubts and inquiries of skeptics" (p. xi). As Druzhnikov acknowledges, his goal is not to undermine Pushkin's significance but rather to purge the past of deception (p. xii). Applying Soviet cliches to the reign of Nicholas I, Druzhnikov calls Pushkin, who had been banned from experiencing the world beyond his country's borders, "the first recognized 'refusenik' in Russia" (p. 354). A non-exiter, Pushkin was also an internal exile; he could not travel in his own country without government authorization. This theme is only too familiar to Druzhnikov, a dissident writer under the Soviet regime, who views Pushkin's exile through the prism of his own experiences. The book focuses on twelve years in Pushkin's life, from 1817, the year when the poet graduated from the Western-oriented Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, until "one of the most mysterious episodes" (p. 417) in his life, the journey to Arzrum, on the Turkish border, where Pushkin escaped in 1829. Druzhnikov finds that Pushkin's life and works "can neither be understood, nor interpreted irrespective his desire to see the West" (p. xi). Sixty-four years ago Ernest Simmons discussed the manner in which Tsar Nicholas I had formulated Pushkin's status for the rest of his life in a letter written to the exiled poet on September 1826: "Mr. Pushkin may travel in his own equipage at freedom, not in the position of a prisoner, and under the escort of the courier only..." (Simmons, Pushkin [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937] p. 248). The American scholar succinctly summarized the tragedy of the poet who lived not under arrest, but neither as a free person, and revealed the poet's efforts to escape from Russia (Simmons, pp. 236-48).l Subsequently, other biographers also dealt with Pushkin's attempts to go abroad.2 For this reason, Druzhnikov's remark that-apart from an article published by Mstislav Tsiavlovskii in 1916 (p. xii)-the poet's exit file "has not been studied at all" (p. xi) comes as a surprise. Druzhnikov goes beyond the idea that Pushkin was Russia's prisoner and suggests that the poet collaborated with the secret police in return for his freedom to travel abroad: "He was openly being prepared for a career of informing" (p. 379). The writer views the high society of Moscow and Petersburg as "one extended family-dissidents and informers" (p. 320), and suggests that the hopelessness of Russian existence made Pushkin into a fugitive. …


We investigate the mapping from individual to aggregate labor supply using a general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent model with an incomplete market. The nature of heterogeneity among workers is calibrated using wage data from the PSID. The gross worker flows between employment and nonemployment and the cross-sectional earnings and wealth distributions in our model are comparable to those in the micro data. We find that the aggregate labor supply elasticity of such an economy is around 1, bigger than micro estimates but smaller than those often assumed in aggregate models.


In a majority Catholic country like the Philippines, it can be difficult to appreciate the true impact of Catholicism, beyond the obvious presence of Catholics. For the 'unchristianised' indigenous minorities in its peripheral upland regions, the role of the Catholic thought-world in shaping who they are today is masked substantially by their cultural distinctiveness. Missionary-dominated narratives in colonial historiography configure our understanding of the present, structuring our approach to anthropology in these peripheral spaces. This article argues that the diachronic component is necessary to make sense of how Catholicism has not only shaped the diversity of modern Philippine cultures, but also how it has configured cultural and political spaces so completely that, as anthropologists, we at times reproduce this thought-world uncritically through our own ethnographies. A focus on the so-called unchristianised Lumad ethnic minorities of Mindanao argues that it is essential to look beyond Catholics as obvious subjects when undertaking an anthropology of Catholicism.


We have witnessed rapid evolution of deep neural network architecture design in the past years. These latest progresses greatly facilitate the developments in various areas such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, along with the extraordinary performance, these state-of-the-art models also bring in expensive computational cost. Directly deploying these models into applications with real-time requirement is still infeasible. Recently, Hinton et al. have shown that the dark knowledge within a powerful teacher model can significantly help the training of a smaller and faster student network. These knowledge are vastly beneficial to improve the generalization ability of the student model. Inspired by their work, we introduce a new type of knowledge---cross sample similarities for model compression and acceleration. This knowledge can be naturally derived from deep metric learning model. To transfer them, we bring the "learning to rank" technique into deep metric learning formulation. We test our proposed DarkRank method on various metric learning tasks including pedestrian re-identification, image retrieval and image clustering. The results are quite encouraging. Our method can improve over the baseline method by a large margin. Moreover, it is fully compatible with other existing methods. When combined, the performance can be further boosted.


Abstract Drawing on a framework of deinstitutionalisation, this study explores the abandonment of budgeting through a multiple-case study of four companies. The findings illustrate how a number of antecedents to deinstitutionalisation acted in each setting and show that abandonment was only achieved through skilful agency by dominant insiders to construct the need and manage for change. In addition, a finding of the study is that two of the four companies reversed the deinstitutionalisation and reintroduced traditional budgeting. This is explained by highlighting the role of remnants of formerly institutionalised practices and by demonstrating the importance of administrative and cultural controls which can support the abandonment of a central accounting control practice in the first place. Overall, this research extends previous studies of deinstitutionalisation by analysing a taken-for-granted practice at the micro-level and by giving a more agentic account of its processes.


The respiration rate of activated sludge has generated much interest, because it is an essential variable in the activated sludge process and provides information on biomass activity and concentration of waste components. Recognising the need for an extensive evaluation of respirometry in control of the activated sludge process, IWA published Scientific and Technical Report (STR7): Respirometry in Control of the Activated Sludge Process: Principles, which included the biological background, measuring principles, measured and deduced variables, an introduction to control system principles and an overview of proposed and applied control strategies.

To complete the work, a second STR: Respirometry in Control of the Activated Sludge Process: Benchmarking Control Strategies was commissioned and, through the generous support of 14 corporate sponsors, a well-defined project was set up with the aim to accomplish an ambitious mission: the development of a simulation protocol (known as the 'IWA Simulation Benchmark') and the unbiased evaluation of many respirometry-based control strategies.

This Report includes a complete description of the simulation protocol including model plants, simulation procedures and evaluation criteria. Also included in this STR is an overview of the strategy evaluations and a look into the future of respirometry as the basis for control. Finally, to ease the transition from paper to computer, and increase the application of the IWA Simulation Benchmark, a CD is included with many benchmark files and control strategy layouts generated using a variety of simulation platforms including GPS-X, STOAT and WEST®.

This Report will be an invaluable source of information for practitioners and consultants dealing with the operation and control of activated sludge processes, developers of control systems, control software and simulation software, and manufacturers of respirometers and other environmental instruments in all industries dealing with toxic wastes.

This title belongs to Scientific and Technical Report Series

ISBN: 9781900222044 (Print)

ISBN: 9781780402611 (eBook)


I analyze ln this paper a financial program found commonly ln developing countries that are engaged in improving structural imbalances. Similar programs have also been adopted in industrialized countries, in the U.K. since 1980 and in the U.S. since 1984. A typical financial program consists of a target budget deficit, an independent monetary (domestic credit) policy, and the government budget constraint. For such a program, I ShOH that the endogeneity of the issuance of nominal bonds is not sufficient to satisfy both the government budget constraint and the deficit target. Such a program is feasible provided bonds are issued endogenously to satisfy the deficit target and either lump sum t~~es and/or discretionary spending are adjusted endogenously to satisfy the budget constraint. Lump sum taxes are not dissimilar from U.K. government receipts from North Sea oil and gas production or proceeds from selling government assets. In the absence of ready access to such receipts, if taxes are not raised and/or spending is not cut, the policy package Hill be infeasible as the government budget constraint cannot be satisfied. Recent policy packages and the resulting fiscal performances ln the U.K. and in the U.S. economies provide empirical support to the analytical result of this paper. In particular, bonds and discretionary government expenditure have been used as tHO endogenous policies satisfying the constraint on the budget deficit and the budget balance. In the ca~e of the U.K., increased receipts from the production of North Sea oil and gas in the early 1980s provided a temporary alternative to reducing government spending. Policy Implications of Budget Deficit Targets


Africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital. In many respects it has been the most capital-hostile region. We review and interpret the aggregate-level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance. There is a reasonable correspondence of the two sets of evidence, pointing to four factors as being important. These are a lack of openness to international trade; a high-risk environment; a low level of social capital; and poor infrastructure. These problems are to a substantial extent attributable to government behaviour and the paper includes a review of the political economy literature which addresses that behaviour.


This volume contains humorous accounts of two journeys, one taken across America, the other a trek across Europe. "The Lost Continent" is an account of one man's rediscovery of America and his search for the perfect small town. Instead he finds a continent that is doubly lost: lost to itself because it is blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; and lost to him because he has become a foreigner in his own country. In "Neither Here Nor There", the author journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the European continent, to Istanbul. In doing so he retraces his steps as a student 20 years before, visiting countries including Norway, France and Italy.


We propose a suitable number of different services to coexist in the same cable bundle with VDSL2 service (Very high bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line 2). The situation for quad cables and twisted pairs is considered for real-case and bad-case assumptions. NEXT (Near-End Crosstalk), FEXT (Far-End Crosstalk), and background AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) were taken into consideration. The real-case assumption was proven to be a good choice for limiting the noise that may affect VDSL2 service, by determining the services and their numbers to be used in the same cable bundle.


Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance. Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge. Flandreau argues that finance and science were at the heart of a new brand of imperialism born during Benjamin Disraeli's first term as Britain's prime minister in the 1860s. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican rebellion, they were in fact catering to the impulses of the stock exchange—for their own benefit. In this way the very development of the field of anthropology was deeply tied to issues relevant to the financial market—from trust to corruption. Moreover, this book shows how the interplay between anthropology and finance formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth-century British imperialism and helped produce essential technologies of globalization as we know it today.


Many studies have investigated the water relations of indigenous plants in the fynbos shrublands of the Cape, South Africa. These have mainly focused on understanding the mechanisms by which individual plant species respond to droughts, the frequency and severity of which is expected to increase due to climate change. However, comparatively little information exists on the dynamics of water use by indigenous plants in the region, and, in particular, how water use varies seasonally and between sites. In this study we determined water use by 3 fynbos vegetation types growing at 4 different sites, namely: (i) lowland Atlantis Sand Plain fynbos growing on deep sandy soils, (ii) Kogelberg Sandstone fynbos growing in a riparian zone on deep alluvial soils, (iii) dryland Kogelberg Sandstone fynbos growing on shallow sandy soils at a montane site, and (iv) alluvial Swartland fynbos growing in clayey soils. Evapotranspiration (ET) was quantified at each site during specific periods using a boundary layer scintillometer and energy balance system. A simple dual source model in which the stand ET was calculated as the algebraic sum of outputs from soil evaporation and transpiration sub-models was used to scale up the ET measurements to annual values. The data showed large differences in ET depending on site characteristics and on plant attributes. Dense stands of riparian Sandstone Fynbos had an annual ET of 1 460 mm which exceeded the reference ET of 1 346 mm. Dryland Sandstone Fynbos used only 551 mm of water per year while the Sand Plain Fynbos' annual ET was 1 031 mm, which was similar to the reference ET of 1 059 mm. We conclude that some indigenous plant species use large volumes of water which should be accounted for in, e.g., groundwater recharge estimates, and calculations of incremental water gains after clearing alien invasive plants, among other applications. Keywords : Evapotranspiration, fynbos, scintillometer, Western Cape


Bacterial infections are a serious problem for patients with burns and other wounds. Such burn wound infection accounts for the pathogenic bacteria by colonising onto burned areas. Therefore, the need for detection and inhibition of such bacterial colonisation requires a methodology for sensing/killing pathogenic bacteria. This research project aims to design a ‗smart' wound dressing system which can respond to the microbiological environment of the wound via a simple colour change and will release antimicrobials only when required. Two strains of pathogenic bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA 476) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PAO1) were used in the study. The non-pathogenic bacterium E.coli (DH5α) was used as a control organism as it does not secrete virulence factors and therefore does not lyse membranes of vesicles. The key contributions of this thesis are outlined below. Firstly, an initial responsive nanocapsule system was studied. The fundamental work with giant unilamellar vesicles proved such a responsive system can provide antimicrobial properties when antimicrobial agents were encapsulated within the vesicles. Secondly, partially polymerised vesicles—polydiacetylene/phospholipid vesicles were then developed to improve vesicle stability. The vesicle system was optimised by varying molar concentration of diacetylene monomers (TCDA) in order to obtain relatively stable vesicles as well as sensitivity to the toxins secreted by the pathogenic strains. Measurements proved that the polydiacetylene/phospholipid vesicles can respond to pathogenic bacteria when fluorescent dye/antimcirobials were encapsulated in the vesicles. Finally, a simple prototype dressing was constructed. Plasma polymerised maleic anhydride (pp-MA) deposited onto non-woven polypropylene was shown to be a good method to stabilise vesicles via covalent bonding. Vesicle adhered to pp-MA non-woven polypropylene showed the ability to inhibit/kill the pathogenic strains, quantified by the Japanese Industry Standard assay and also gave a fluorimetric colour response in the presence of pathogenic bacteria when a fluorescent dye is encapsulated within vesicles. Other simple prototypes were also attempted by using hydrogels (gelatine and collagen) to maintain vesicle stability as well as promote tissue healing.


This study aims to develop a low cost energy storage system for hourly dispatching solar photovoltaic (PV) power for 1MW grid connected PV array. To fulfill this objective, the optimum (most economical) scaling of a battery and supercapacitor (SC) hybrid storage is developed based on the time constant of a low pass filter (LPF) that is used to allocate the power between a battery and SC. Based on the battery state of charge (SOC), rule based algorithms are developed to estimate the perfect grid reference power for each one-hour dispatching period. Another rule-based algorithm is implemented to keep the battery SOC within a certain limit that helps to increase the battery lifetime. An economic comparison of different kinds of battery and SC combination in hybrid energy storage system (HESS) is presented in this research. This study also considers the relationship between the actual PV cell temperature and the ambient temperature and presents their effects on energy storage price calculations. This study uses actual solar data of four different days recorded at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in MATLAB/Simulink environment simulations to get the better picture about annual energy storage cost for hourly dispatching solar power. According to the results, the HESS combination of li-ion battery and SC, outperforms a battery only or lead acid and SC combination in HESS operation regardless of temperature framework.


Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) evaluate the practical skills of students training in the health professions. OSCEs have several limitations, including a large administrative burden, potential inaccuracies when transferring student scores from paper to electronic mediums, and difficulties providing individualised student feedback. The "eOSCE," an electronic version of the traditional paper-based OSCE, potentially addresses these issues. In the eOSCE, examiners use electronic means (e.g. computer, personal digital assistant) to record student scores and comments about their performance, and the system provides students with individualised feedback. The literature from 12 databases was searched to identify articles discussing the use of electronic methods for practical skills assessment, focussing on health professions. Thirteen articles described the evaluation of health students' practical skills using electronic means. This review discusses the types of electronic methods used for practical skills assessments and the advantages and disadvantages of the types of eOSCEs compared to traditional paper-based formats.


The most common method to attenuate noise in ventilation systems today is passive silencers. For these to efficiently attenuate frequencies below 400 Hz such silencers need to be large and a more neat solution to attenuate low frequencies is to use active noise control (ANC). The usage of ANC in ventilation systems is well known and there are several commercial products available. ANC is not, however, used on a wide basis due to its often high price and poor performance. Since the price is an important factor in ANC systems the expensive laboratory filters and the amplifier that is currently used in the experimental setup at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) need to be replaced with cheaper ones, but without too much performance loss. For easier implementation in ventilation systems the placement of the reference microphone is important, the shorter distance from the anti-noise loud speaker the easier the ANC system is to implement. But if the distance is so small that the ANC system is no longer causal the performance will be decreased and if the reference microphone is close enough to pick up acoustic feedback from the anti-noise loud speaker the performance will also be decreased. In this thesis the expensive laboratory filters will be exchanged to cheaper alternatives, power and total harmonic distortion (THD) measurements will be done on the amplifier that is driving the loud speaker and the reference microphones position will be investigated with measurements on the group delay of the system and the acoustic feedback between the loud speaker and the reference microphone.