For over a generation, academic jurisprudence and constitutional theory have attempted to reconcile, on the one hand, the rule of law and the Constitution's fundamentality with, on the other hand, the fact that legal and constitutional rules frequently do not produce determinate answers to concrete controversies. The approach of radical democrats who would abandon judicial review is unacceptable to all those who believe that some judicially enforceable limits on politics are needed to prevent majoritarian tyranny. At the same time, however, constitutional theories that attempt to justify judicial review have limited utility; at best they strike a compromise between the tyranny of the majority and the counter-majoritarian difficulty. Academic jurisprudence faces a parallel dilemma. Under close scrutiny, both positivism and its principal alternative turn out to adopt the same strategy for coping with legal indeterminacy: each claims that the law's areas of ambiguity are small; yet neither theory nor any of the leading approaches to constitutionalism proposes concrete measures to minimize the impact of legal indeterminacy. Drawing inspiration from the Legal Process approach of Hart and Sacks, this Article proposes that instead of devising justifications for judicial review or explanations of the task of judges, theorists would do better to design institutions that reduce the domain of legal indeterminacy. Where Hart and Sacks proposed deference to politically accountable actors, however, this Article advocates deep collaboration with the other institutions of government. Departing from the Legal Process assumption that courts must defer to one of a fixed menu of institutions, this Article develops a model of "experimentalist" courts and agencies that are always in transition. That model is based in part on the explosive emergence of "problem-solving courts", nominally judicial bodies that are more akin to decentralized administrative agencies than to conventional adjudicators. The model is also based on some hints in Supreme Court doctrine that suggest a role for appellate courts in using the opportunity of legal indeterminacy to create the pre-conditions for local deliberation about the content of legal norms.


The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) operates over UDP and TCP, among others. When used with UDP, responses to requests are returned to the source address the request came from, and to the port written into the topmost Via header field value of the request. This behavior is not desirable in many cases, most notably, when the client is behind a Network Address Translator (NAT). This extension defines a new parameter for the Via header field, called "rport", that allows a client to request that the server send the response back to the source IP address and port from which the request originated.


Making innovation stick has proven difficult to many large organizations. The challenge these organizations face is to turn innovation from a buzzword into a systemic and widely distributed competency. This study explored how to do this by asking the question "How might large organizations enable and nurture innovation over the long term?"

The study used a combination of research methods and adopted a design approach to answering the question. Research methods included literature review, case studies, surveys, semi-structured interviews, innovation canvassing and foresighting. The research identified that in order to embed innovation into an organization's DNA, that organization must have a strong innovation orientation, and must demonstrate aptitude in five critical areas: strategy, culture, process, portfolio and scalability. These findings were used to propose a roadmap to innovation for the City of Toronto's Chief Corporate Officer; one that embodies the characteristics of successful, long-term approaches to innovation that would allow the organization to transform itself into a more innovative organization.


Recent advances in non-invasive sampling techniques have led to an increase in the study of hormones and behaviour. Behaviour is complex but can be explained to a large degree by interactions between various psychological and physiological components, such as the interplay between hormonal and psychological systems. This new textbook from Nick Neave offers a detailed introduction to the fascinating science of behavioural endocrinology from a psychological perspective, examining the relationships between hormones and behaviour in both humans and animals. Neave explains the endocrine system and the ways in which hormones can influence brain structure and function, and presents a series of examples to demonstrate how hormones can influence specific behaviours, including sexual determination and differentiation, neurological differentiation, parental behaviours, aggressive behaviours and cognition. This introductory textbook will appeal to second and third year social science undergraduate students in psychology and biomedicine.


BACKGROUND
Obesity is a global health problem. Understanding how to utilise social media (SM) as a platform for intervention and engagement with young adults (YAs) will help the practitioners to harness this media more effectively for obesity prevention.

AIM
Communicating health (CH) aims to understand the use of SM by YAs, including Aboriginal YAs, and in doing so will improve the effectiveness of SM strategies to motivate, engage and retain YAs in interventions to reduce the risk of obesity, and identify and disseminate effective ways for health professionals to deliver obesity prevention interventions via SM.

METHODS
The present study describes the theoretical framework and methodologies for the CH study, which is organised into four interrelated phases, each building on the outcomes of preceding phases. Phase 1 is a mixed methods approach to understand how YAs use SM to navigate their health issues, including healthy eating. Phase 2 utilises co-creation workshops where YAs and public health practitioners collaboratively generate healthy eating messages and communication strategies. Phase 3 evaluates these messages in a real-world setting. Phase 4 is the translation phase where public health practitioners use outcomes from CH to inform future strategies and to develop tools for SM for use by stakeholders and the research community.

DISCUSSION
The outcomes will include a rich understanding of psychosocial drivers and behaviours associated with healthy eating and will provide insight into the use of SM to reach and influence the health and eating behaviours of YAs.


I. INTRODUCTION II. BACKGROUND A. Dangers of Prescription Drug Abuse 1. Opioids 2. Tranquilizers 3. Stimulants B. Costs of Prescription Abuse C. Reasons for Prescription Drug Abuse D. Sources of Prescription Drugs Used for Abuse 1. Pill Mills 2. Doctor Shopping 3. The Home E. Current State of Federal Law: Controlled Substances Act F. Current State of Ohio Law vis-a-vis Prescription Reporting III. ARGUMENT A Core Competencies of House Bill 93 and Medical Rule 4731-11-11 1. House Bill 93 Makes It Difficult to Operate Pill Mills in Ohio 2. The Recent changes Also Enable Easier Access to oARRS B. Shortcomings of H.B. 93 and Rule 4731-11-11 1. Technical Issues with Ohio's Current Law 2. Reactive C. Proposed Solution 1. Mandatory OARRS Monitoring 2. Interstate OARRS Connectivity 3. Unused Prescription Collections 4. Anti-Doctor Shopper Statute D Debunking the Criticism of OARRS by Practitioners and Patients IV. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Portsmouth, Ohio is a small steel town with a big city problem. (1) This city has been particularly hard hit by the prescription drug abuse epidemic. (2) Nationally, the prescription abuse epidemic has killed more people than the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980's and the heroin epidemic of the 1970's combined (3) In 2010, "9.7 million doses of prescription painkillers were dispensed in Scioto County[, Ohio, or] 123 doses for each of the 79,000 men, women and children in the county." (4) Portsmouth counts its dead by lining the front window of a vacant department store with pictures of those who died due to overdosing. (5) The city is essentially raising third and fourth generation prescription drug addicts. (6) In one particularly disheartening instance, a local family could name eleven houses on their street that sold drugs. (7) The majority of people who abuse these medications either get their drugs from dealers on the street or from someone who has access to these drugs. (8) The drug of choice--Oxycontin--is legal, and can be obtained from a local pharmacy with a prescription. (9) Drug abuse there is so pervasive that, despite the high unemployment rate, (10) some businesses have difficulty finding job candidates who can pass a drug test. (11) While some parts of Ohio are affected more so than others by this prescription abuse epidemic, (12) current legislation allows a situation, like that of Portsmouth, to happen anywhere in Ohio. This is in large part due to Ohio's statutory scheme that focuses more on punishment than prevention, despite recent encouraging changes that have been made. (13) Despite the changes already in place, the legislature should enact a consequential solution that prevents prescription abuse by removing these drugs from the streets. Ohio has a system in place with the capability to curb prescription drug abuse, but it is far underutilized. (14) The Ohio Automated Rx Reporting System ("OARRS") currently tracks all controlled prescription medications dispensed by an Ohio-licensed pharmacy. (15) OARRS is "designed to allow physicians and pharmacists to cross-check prescriptions with each other and identify individuals who may be doctor shopping." (16) When using OARRS, physicians can more effectively serve as the gatekeepers to dangerous prescription medications because they have access to more information to make the best decisions regarding prescription choices for patients. (17) But, currently, reporting from the system is not required in all situations, and before the recent changes of 2011, only a minority of practitioners were registered to use it. (18) In response to the growing prescription drug abuse epidemic, the Ohio legislature enacted House Bill 93 on May 20, 2011 (19) to eliminate "pill mills," (20) or a physician's office that sells prescriptions under the table to anyone with cash. (21) Regardless of the positive effects with the enactment of H. …


Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetic disorder that arises from protein truncating mutations in the dystrophin gene, is characterised by severe and progressive muscle wasting. Mutations causing DMD can occur in any of the 79 exons or introns of this massive gene (2.4 Mb), and antisense oligonucleotide (AO) induced exon skipping is emerging as a novel potential therapy, with two separate trials underway. Our rationale in AO design to address protein truncating dystrophin mutations by induced exon skipping is to prepare 2_-O-methyl modified bases on a phosphorothioate backbone that will anneal to potential splicemotifs and alter dystrophin pre-mRNA processing. These compounds can be prepared in-house and, when transfected as a cationic lipoplexes, are readily taken up in vitro. Overlapping 2OMeAOs are prepared to pre-mRNA motifs shown to influence splicing, in an attempt to optimise AO design. Titration studies then allow identification of the most effective AOs, those that induce pronounced exon excision at low transfection concentrations. Although the 2OMeAOs are being used in clinical trials in the Netherlands, we have found that phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PMOs) are better suited for in vivo applications. However, PMOs are not taken up efficiently in vitro, impeding design of optimal compounds. We present data showing that the hierarchy of exon skipping efficiency generated with overlapping 2OMeAOs was identical to that observed with the corresponding PMOs.


The effects of erbium anisotropy in erbium-doped fiber lasers, sources, and amplifiers are examined. Starting from basic ion properties, inversion and gain equations are derived analytically to describe polarization dependencies. A novel matrix form of the Er/sup 3+/ rate equations is presented to propagate powers and polarization states. These equations are then numerically integrated and compared to experimentally observed polarization hole burning and polarization dependent gain. The theoretical predictions agree strongly with experiment in all cases.


This is the third volume of stories featuring the cunning clerical sleuth Father Brown. Ahead of a new series of the popular BBC adaptation starring Mark Williams, all five of Chesterton's original Father Brown books have been republished with charming and collectible Penguin covers. 'That sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can't get through a closed door in an American hotel.' Father Brown, the shrewd and modest clerical detective, encounters miracles, ghosts and prophets in this third volume of ingeniously plotted tales. From South America to New York, his keen observation and quiet wisdom are a match for any mystery - even when he finds himself missing, presumed dead, in his own coffin...G. K. Chesterton was born in 1874. He attended the Slade School of Art, where he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, before turning his hand to journalism. A prolific writer throughout his life, his best- known books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and the Father Brown stories. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 and died in 1938. "Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story". (Jorge Luis Borges).


We describe the establishment of a compound object model for object recognition purposes which provides the frame for the extraction of object structure from images degraded by noise. Our vision system is inspired by cognitive principles. From a set of sample views we automatically generate a sparse and view-based object representation, which contains enough information to represent the object for all poses. To verify this property we apply it in a pose estimation task with noisy and unfamiliar test views of the object. With an appropriate number of views in the object representation the proposed method shows a good selectivity and is able to distinguish views with a distance of only 3.6, even if they are degraded considerably by Gaussian noise.


Diabetes mellitus is a major late consequence of chronic pancreatitis. Diabetes
mellitus type 1 or insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) is characterized by the
failure of the pancreatic islets of Langerhans to synthesis or secrete insulin. The longterm
complications of IDDM are major health problems, and in these diabetics
exogenous insulin may not adequately regulate blood glucose homeostasis and thus fail
to avert the late complications. In this case, transplantation of pancreatic islets is
arguably the most logical approach to restoring metabolic homeostasis. The limited
availability of human donors makes the search for alternative source of islet cells
mandatory for future developments in pancreatic transplantation. The present study
investigates the potential of goats as an alternative source of pancreatic islets. The
objectives of the study were to optimize techniques for goat islet isolation and
purification for culture establishment, and to perform functional, morphological and viability assessment of goat islets. Goat pancreatic tissues were collected within 15 min
of slaughter, placed in Hanks balance salt solution (HBSS) and maintained at 4oC. Goat
islets were obtained successfully using a collagenase-based digestion and isolation
technique at an optimized pH of 7.2 to 7.4 and temperature of 37oC. Digested pancreatic
islets were purified by Euro-Ficoll density gradients. Islet cell purity and viability were
determined by dithizone and trypan blue staining, respectively. Islet clusters of different
sizes were positively identified by both staining methods and it was observed that 90%
of clusters were viable in the culture system. Following the static incubation, an in vitro
insulin secretion assay was carried out by ELISA to determine the islets viability. The
islets remained viable for 5 days in the culture system following regular media changes.
Pancreatic tissues were fixed in Bouin's solution stained with hematoxylin-eosin
(H&E) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) stains and examined microscopically to
estimate the islet mass and determine insulin secretion ability. Under the light
microscope, there were minimal connective tissue cells separating the islets from the
surrounding exocrine component. The nuclei of islets cellswere uniform in size and
surrounded by eosinophilic cytoplasm. Purified islets of Langerhans were fixed in a
mixture of paraformaldehyde and glutaraldehyde solution for transmission (TEM) and
scanning electron microscopic (SEM) examination. Under TEM, the caprine islet cell
exhibited their characteristic secretory granules, which were of various sizes and electron
opacity. The cells also showed characteristic abundance of rough endoplasmic reticulum
(RER) and mitochondria. In b-cells, the rough endoplasmic reticulum was
inconspicuous. The -cells are characterized by their peripheral location in the islet being larger and having electron-dense secretory granules. Based on morphological
criterion, intermediate cells are shown to be present in both the endocrine and exocrine
tissue of the normal pancreas of goats. Under SEM the size of the islet clusters was
shown to range from 50 to 250 μm. Cells with secretory sacs on the surface could
possibly be the isolated islet cells. The study had provided an optimized isolation and
purification techniques for goat pancreatic islets to be further developed and used for
xenotransplantation in diabetic animal models. The findings can lead to further research
in identification and sequencing of insulin indicator genes, pancreatic hormones
biomarkers and long-term cryopreservation of goat pancreatic islets.


Facial expression is the most natural means for human beings to communicate their emotions. Most facial expression analysis studies consider the case of acted expressions. Spontaneous facial expression recognition is significantly more challenging since each person has a different way to react to a given emotion. We consider the problem of recognizing spontaneous facial expression by learning discriminative dictionaries for sparse representation. Facial images are represented as a sparse linear combination of prototype atoms via Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm. Sparse codes are then used to train an SVM classifier dedicated to the recognition task. The dictionary that sparsifies the facial images (feature points with the same class labels should have similar sparse codes) is crucial for robust classification. Learning sparsifying dictionaries heavily relies on the initialization process of the dictionary. To improve the performance of dictionaries, a random face feature descriptor based on the Random Projection concept is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through several experiments on the spontaneous facial expressions DynEmo database. It is also estimated on the well-known acted facial expressions JAFFE database for a purpose of comparison with state-of-the-art methods.


Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common congenital anomaly in newborn babies. Cardiac malformations have been produced in multiple experimental animal models, by perturbing selected molecules that function in the developmental pathways involved in myocyte specification, differentiation, or cardiac morphogenesis. In contrast, the precise genetic, epigenetic, or environmental basis for these perturbations in humans remains poorly understood. Over the past few decades, researchers have tried to bridge this knowledge gap through conventional genome-wide analyses of rare Mendelian CHD families, and by sequencing candidate genes in CHD cohorts. Although yielding few, usually highly penetrant, disease gene mutations, these discoveries provided 3 notable insights. First, human CHD mutations impact a heterogeneous set of molecules that orchestrate cardiac development. Second, CHD mutations often alter gene/protein dosage. Third, identical pathogenic CHD mutations cause a variety of distinct malformations, implying that higher order interactions account for particular CHD phenotypes. The advent of contemporary genomic technologies including single nucleotide polymorphism arrays, next-generation sequencing, and copy number variant platforms are accelerating the discovery of genetic causes of CHD. Importantly, these approaches enable study of sporadic cases, the most common presentation of CHD. Emerging results from ongoing genomic efforts have validated earlier observations learned from the monogenic CHD families. In this review, we explore how continued use of these technologies and integration of systems biology is expected to expand our understanding of the genetic architecture of CHD.


Defence industries have become an essential component of nations' security. This dynamic sector has experienced constant transformations since the Second World War. In recent years large national and transnational defence firms have emerged through processes of mergers and acquisitions; dual-use technologies are becoming crucial in the development of modern weapons systems; and the phenomenon of globalisation is increasing the production interdependence among nations. These new trends, however, have not altered the hierarchical structure of the global defence industry, where a reduced group of nations have a dominant role in the production, innovation and transfer of weapons systems. The decline of their domestic markets has spurred exportation strategies resulting in an increasingly competitive global arms market. The latter may facilitate some nations to develop their defence industrial bases through the transfer of technology associated with weapons systems imports; however may also exacerbate the security dilemma and the proliferation of weapons, producing a detrimental impact on regional stability. Both problems may be ameliorated through cooperative security initiatives such as arms control, and confidence and security building measures.
The study of defence industries has generally been approached from an economic perspective, relating to nations? military spending and arms trade. The less commonly used security approach addresses the security threats that stimulate
the development of arms industries and the potential effects that these may have on the security dilemma. The present study examines the global defence industry and the relations between the major arms producers and importers, the implications of the global defence industry on the security dilemma; and the prospects of arms control policies in the prevention of arms proliferation. The Asia-Pacific region is used to centre the analysis through four case studies: Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and China, as the defence industries and military capabilities of these nations are currently experiencing substantial development, supported by the rapid growth of their economies. A comparative analysis demonstrates a lack of commitment to collective security strategies within the Asia-Pacific region which is resulting in the proliferation of arms and potentiating the effects of the security dilemma, with major implications for regional and global security.


Aims: The aims were to study various patterns of pseudoexfoliation (PXF) deposits over anterior lens capsule and its relation with intraocular pressure (IOP) and peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) defects. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the outpatient department of a tertiary care center. Subjects and Methods: Newly detected cases of PXF not on any antiglaucoma medications were selected. Central corneal thickness-corrected IOP was recorded with applanation tonometry. The four patterns that were made out are– three ring pattern (3R), two ring with no central disc (2R), radial pigmentary (RP) with multiple radial lines and combined (CR) pattern. RNFL thickness with optical coherence tomography was recorded. Statistical Analysis Used: Frequency calculation and analysis were done using t-test and Chi-square test as applicable using SPSS software. Sensitivity, specificity, and diagnostic accuracy of ring pattern in detecting high IOP and RNFL defects were calculated. Results: Out of 40 eyes with PXF, 17 and 15 eyes had 3R and 2R patterns, respectively. When out of 32 eyes with ring pattern, 8 recorded IOP >20 mmHg and 18 had RNFL defect. Sensitivity, specificity, and diagnostic accuracy of ring pattern in detecting RNFL thinning were 56.25%, 100%, and 65%, respectively. Conclusions: PXF is a severe form of glaucoma, with about 45% having severe disc damage even at presentation. Detection of ring pattern mandates early treatment and follow-up even with borderline IOP. RP pattern also requires regular follow-up as progression to severe damage may occur with age.


Although recent scholarship has advanced our understanding of status, little attention has been paid to the factors that shape states' status-seeking behaviour. Consequently, existing theories are unable to explain why Russia has been more aggressive and confrontational in its status-seeking than China. What is missing is a detailed examination of the ways in which status-seekers' power trajectories affect their status-seeking behaviour. Whether a status-seeker is rising or in decline shapes its propensity to take risks in pursuit of status, its calculations regarding the utility of attaining more status, and its ability to use non-confrontational and non-aggressive status-seeking strategies to induce other states to accord it higher status. Declining powers, such as Russia, engage in aggressive status-seeking to avoid imminent status losses. Decliners need to initiate confrontations with other states to compel them to recognise their status. Risers, such as China, are more cautious and restrained. Recognising that aggressive status-seeking can jeopardise imminent gains, they are conscious of the costs that accompany elevated status. Their admirable successes and growing power, moreover, make other states all the more willing to accord them higher status. Risers, therefore, can enhance their status without resorting to aggressive or confrontational methods.


Opportunistic Network is form of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) and regarded as extension to Mobile Ad Hoc Network. OPPNETS are designed to operate especially in those environments which are surrounded by various issues like- High Error Rate, Intermittent Connectivity, High Delay and no defined route between source to destination node. OPPNETS works on the principle of "Store-and-Forward" mechanism as intermediate nodes perform the task of routing from node to node. The intermediate nodes store the messages in their memory until the suitable node is not located in communication range to transfer the message to the destination. OPPNETs suffer from various issues like High Delay, Energy Efficiency of Nodes, Security, High Error Rate and High Latency. The aim of this research paper is to overview various routing protocols available till date for OPPNETs and classify the protocols in terms of their performance. The paper also gives quick review of various Mobility Models and Simulation tools available for OPPNETs simulation.


Knowledge bases (KBs) are often greatly incomplete, necessitating a demand for KB completion. A promising approach is to embed KBs into latent spaces and make inferences by learning and operating on latent representations. Such embedding models, however, do not make use of any rules during inference and hence have limited accuracy. This paper proposes a novel approach which incorporates rules seamlessly into embedding models for KB completion. It formulates inference as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem, with the objective function generated from embedding models and the constraints translated from rules. Solving the ILP problem results in a number of facts which 1) are the most preferred by the embedding models, and 2) comply with all the rules. By incorporating rules, our approach can greatly reduce the solution space and significantly improve the inference accuracy of embedding models. We further provide a slacking technique to handle noise in KBs, by explicitly modeling the noise with slack variables. Experimental results on two publicly available data sets show that our approach significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models in KB completion. Moreover, the slacking technique is effective in identifying erroneous facts and ambiguous entities, with a precision higher than 90%.


Purpose To determine the sensitivity of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and standard automated perimetry (SAP) for detecting glaucomatous progression in the superior and inferior hemiretina. Methods We calculated contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs) for OCT retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness of hemiretinas and for SAP mean total deviation (MTD) of the corresponding hemifields from longitudinal data (205 eyes, 125 participants). The glaucoma stage for each hemiretina was based on the corresponding hemifield's MTD. Contrast was defined as the difference of the parameter between two consecutive glaucoma stages, whereas noise was the measurement variability of the parameter in those stages. The higher the CNR of a parameter, the more sensitive it is to detecting progression in the transition between successive stages. Results There were no statistically significant differences for the RNFL CNR and MTD CNR between superior and inferior hemiretinas. As the glaucoma stage of the opposite hemiretina worsened, the MTD CNR in the transition from moderate to advanced glaucoma significantly increased. The RNFL CNR in the transition from mild to moderate glaucoma significantly decreased in case of advanced glaucoma in the opposite hemiretina. Conclusions Similar to full retinas, detecting conversion to glaucoma in hemiretinas is more sensitive with OCT than SAP, whereas with more advanced disease, SAP is more sensitive for detecting progression. More importantly, the sensitivity for detecting progression in one hemiretina with either technique depends on the glaucoma severity in the opposite hemiretina. Translational Relevance Monitoring glaucomatous progression with either OCT or SAP partly depends on the glaucoma severity in the opposite hemiretina.


In coastal research tidal flats are often classified and investigated in the context of estuarine dynamics due to the widely accepted view that tidal forces are the main responsible for their geomorphological evolution and that biological variables need to play a major role in its evolution. On the other hand coastal morphodyanmics deals mostly with geomorphological evolution of beaches taking a purely geological view on sediment dynamics. In this paper, a discussion is presented in relation to the adequate treatment of tidal flat research by illustrating various numerical and empirical methods used to address morphodynamics on the sandy tidal flats of Newtownards. Common to other sandy tidal flats, the intertidal shores of Newtownards in Strangford Lough (Northern Ireland) are affected by tidal flows (c 0.1 ms(-1)) given the average tidal range of 3.5 m and the action of wind generated waves over the fine grained siliciclastic sediments which frequently shows rippled Surfaces. The results from a wide range of investigations (previously published) that utilized mainly numerical modeling indicated that the flats of Newtownards characterized by a RTR (relative tidal range) factor of 2.3 to 7, are very sensitive to sediment redistribution due to combined water level / wave height effects which implies that wave energy dissipation due to bottom friction the primarily shoaling process during relative high energy events. Using empirical methods designed for beach morphodynamics research, it was found that (i) waves exceeded predicted values given short fetch under westerly winds, (ii) wave penetration was a parameter that proved extremely sensitive for sediment entrainment and was not sufficient to generate bedload sediment transport and (iii) further numerical simulations need to be conducted to achieve further understanding on the role of shoaling and spatial distribution of wave energy dissipation on the translating surf and nearshore zones to achieve a complete morphodynamic classification of these ultra-mega dissipative wave dominated environments.


ABSTRACT
 Captive breeding is key to management of severely endangered species, but maximizing captive production can be challenging because of poor knowledge of species breeding biology and the complexity of evaluating different management options. In the face of uncertainty and complexity, decision-analytic approaches can be used to identify optimal management options for maximizing captive production. Building decision-analytic models requires iterations of model conception, data analysis, model building and evaluation, identification of remaining uncertainty, further research and monitoring to reduce uncertainty, and integration of new data into the model. We initiated such a process to maximize captive production of the whooping crane (Grus americana), the world's most endangered crane, which is managed through captive breeding and reintroduction. We collected 15 years of captive breeding data from 3 institutions and used Bayesian analysis and model selection to identify predictors of whooping crane hatching success. The strongest predictor, and that with clear management relevance, was incubation environment. The incubation period of whooping crane eggs is split across two environments: crane nests and artificial incubators. Although artificial incubators are useful for allowing breeding pairs to produce multiple clutches, our results indicate that crane incubation is most effective at promoting hatching success. Hatching probability increased the longer an egg spent in a crane nest, from 40% hatching probability for eggs receiving 1 day of crane incubation to 95% for those receiving 30 days (time incubated in each environment varied independently of total incubation period). Because birds will lay fewer eggs when they are incubating longer, a tradeoff exists between the number of clutches produced and egg hatching probability. We developed a decision-analytic model that estimated 16 to be the optimal number of days of crane incubation needed to maximize the number of offspring produced. These results show that using decision-analytic tools to account for uncertainty in captive breeding can improve the rate at which such programs contribute to wildlife reintroductions.


This contribution focuses on the representation of history in four texts by Pierre Bergounioux. La Mort de Brune (1996), an evocation of the writer´s sleepy native town Brive in the 1950´s and 1960´s, tells the story of Brune, one of Brive´s very few famous figures. Having served in the Revolutionary Armies, Brune became Marshall of the Empire, and was brutally killed by the Royalists in 1815. In B 17 G (2001) and Le recit absent/ Le baiser de sorciere (2010), Bergounioux writes about the violent deaths of an American bombarder (Smith) and a Russian tank commander (Ivan) during the war against Nazi-Germany. The stories of Brune, Smith and Ivan symbolize decisive episodes in history. They each gave their lifes for the ideals of freedom and a more just society. Back in the sixties (2003) draws on a visit of the writer in 2002 to Cuba, where time has frozen and a dreamlike reality takes him back to his youth and the left-wing ideals he then cherished. Whereas La mort de Brune finishes with the great expectations that the 1968 Revolution aroused in the narrator, the young Bergounioux alter ego, the other texts reflect the increasing pessimism of a writer who feels doubly disinherited: by the disappearance of the values of an age-old rural society as well as the loss of the ideals of his youth in the neo-liberal turmoil of the last three decades.


Research shows that healthy police-community relationships are important for an effective police department. However, although many studies have investigated the relationship between racial minorities and police, only a small portion focus on the Islamic community. This is problematic because hostility towards the Islamic community has been on the rise in the United States (US) since the attacks of 9/11 (Jackson, 2010), and current Middle Eastern conflicts have led to an influx of Muslim refugees into the US. This has further diversified neighborhoods and is the reason that it is just as imperative to explore police-Muslim interactions as it is to explore police interactions with other minority groups. This study asks—how do Muslim community members perceive the police, and how do their interactions with police affect their perceptions of law enforcement? This study hypothesizes that, like racial minorities, Muslim community members perceive the police more negatively than average, and that their interactions with police negatively affect their perceptions. A survey was be distributed to a sample of Muslim community members to measure their perceptions of police. A snowball sampling method was used, facilitated by a prominent member of the Muslim community. The sample was drawn from a mid-size city in the Northwest.


As concepts, communication and information are very closely related, but they also designate more than their usual conceptual meaning when they are called upon in social theories as well as in philosophical theories about the reality and the truth of social life; information and communication are then designating physical events or event like objects of the observable reality, which will be hereafter described as a procedural ontologization of information. Why do they have this role and how do they play it in contemporary social sciences and philosophy of social sciences? This article questions the scientificity of these concepts in these theoretical contexts. It wants to propose a framework for an epistemology of communication and information that is critical about the cybernetician paradigm in the social sciences. It presents this paradigm's main features: informational ontology and probabilistic sociality. It offers a critique of this paradigm's epistemological and methodological pretensions. It finally exposes the basis of an alternative philosophical theory of communication that wants to support the thesis that the cybernetician paradigmatic communication theory is not scientifically productive; and that it cannot be used in social scientific theoretical contexts without being dramatically redesigned and reoriented towards new goals.


Abstract. Changes in the mean sea ice thickness and concentration in the Arctic are well known. However, quantitative information about changes in the ice thickness distribution and the composition of the pack ice is lacking. In this paper we determine the ice draft distributions, mean and modal thicknesses, and their regional and seasonal variability in the Arctic for the time period 1975–2000. We compare characteristics of the Arctic pack ice for the years 1975–1987 and 1988–2000. These periods represent different large-scale atmospheric circulation modes and sea ice circulation patterns, most evident in clearly weaker Beaufort Gyre and stronger as well as westward shifted Transpolar Drift during the later period. The comparison of these two periods reveals that the peak of sea ice draft distributions has narrowed and shifted toward thinner ice, with reductions in both mean and modal ice draft. These noticeable changes are attributed to the loss of thick, mostly deformed ice. Springtime, loss of ice volume with draft greater than 5 m exceeds 35 % in all regions except the Nansen Basin, with as much as 45 % or more at the North Pole and in the Eastern Arctic. Autumn volume reduction, mostly of deformed ice, exceeds 40 % in the Canada Basin only, but is above 30 % also in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. During the later period, the volume of ice category consisting thin, mostly level first-year ice, is clearly larger than during the former period, especially in the spring. In the Beaufort Sea region, changes in the composition of ice cover have resulted in a shift of modal draft from level multiyear ice draft range to values of level first-year ice. The regional and seasonal variability of sea ice draft has decreased, since the thinning has been most pronounced in regions with the thickest pack ice (the Western Arctic), and during the spring (0.6–0.8 m per decade).


This edition has been reviewed and updated, including the relevant general provisions of the civil code, and also incorporates the 1985 revisions to the law regarding Stiftungen (foundations). There is an overall emphasis on US legal terminology, although in a few instances references to English (UK) parlance is maintained for comparative purposes. The updating of the text was prompted by the revision of the Aktienrecht (share law), which became effective in 1992. The relevant sections of the Code (Arts. 620 to 763) have been fully re-translated, incorporating the revisions, together with selected relevant new provisions from other related laws. There is also an in-depth translation addressing current issues, including, besides the substance of the revision code, comparative aspects of both the laws of the European Union and the United States, including accounting rules. The charts and tables are also revised for this edition, including the 'synoptic tables'.


Many communication-efficient variants of SGD use gradient quantization schemes. These schemes are often heuristic and fixed over the course of training. We empirically observe that the statistics of gradients of deep models change during the training. Motivated by this observation, we introduce two adaptive quantization schemes, ALQ and AMQ. In both schemes, processors update their compression schemes in parallel by efficiently computing sufficient statistics of a parametric distribution. We improve the validation accuracy by almost 2% on CIFAR-10 and 1% on ImageNet in challenging low-cost communication setups. Our adaptive methods are also significantly more robust to the choice of hyperparameters.


The gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) and its analogues become control reproductive function in farm animals. The GnRH agonist (GnRHa), which is used in veterinary practice, has a longer half-life and higher affinity to GnRH receptors than the native decapeptide. GnRH or GnRHa effects depend on the species, dose, route, and the moment of administration. As Nellore is the main bovine breed in Brazil, corresponding to 70% of Brazilian herds, more studies on its reproductive physiology are needed. The objective was to study luteinizing hormone (LH) secretion in intact (I, n = 4) and ovariectomized (Ov, n = 4) prepubertal Nellore heifers (18 months) after gonadorelin acetate administration (25 μg, iv; Lecirelina, Gestran Plus, ARSA S.R.L., Buenos Aires, Argentina) from samples collected every 15 min for 10 h. LH was quantified by RIA, with sensitivity of 0.03 ng mL-1 and CV of 11%. Maximum LH amplitude was considered as the peak for each period. Peaks were identified as an increase 2 times higher than intraassay CV and involving at least 3 samples. The time for the highest peak occurrence was determined by GraphPad Prism program (Prism 3.00 for Windows, GraphPad Software, San Diego CA, USA). Results were compared by the ANOVA followed by t-test either paired or not using GraphPad InStat (3.06 version). After GnRH treatment, maximum LH peak amplitude was higher in Ov (12.48 ± 1.41 ng mL-1) (P ≤ 0.05) than in intact heifers (6.42 ± 1.30 ng mL-1), but there was no significant difference (P ≥ 0.05) on LH pulse frequency, with only one peak in both groups during the 10-h period. Although there was a small delay in peak occurrence in I (63.75 ± 21.48 min) compared with Ov heifers (45 ± 16.43 min), there was no difference (P ≥ 0.05) between groups. The results suggested a higher hypothalamus sensitivity to GnRH in absence of gonadal steroids or a higher LH storage during the hypergonatropism period. Support by FAPESP (Sao Paulo, Brazil); fellowship from CAPES.


Auditors play a major role in corporate governance and capital markets. Ex ante, auditors facilitate firms' access to finance by fostering trust among public investors. Ex post, auditors can prevent misbehavior and financial fraud by corporate insiders. In order to fulfill these goals, however, in addition to having the adequate knowledge and expertise, auditors must perform their functions in an independent manner. However, auditors are often subject to conflicts of interest, for example, resulting from the provision non-audit services, but also because of the mere fact of being hired and paid by the audited company. Therefore, even if auditors act independently, investors may have reason to think otherwise. Policymakers and scholars around the world have attempted to solve the auditor independence puzzle through a variety of mechanisms, including prohibitions and rotation requirements. More recent proposals have also included breaking up audit firms and the empowerment of shareholders. This paper argues that none of these solutions is entirely convincing. Drawing from the corporate governance, law and economics, and accounting literatures, we propose a new model to solve the auditor independence puzzle. Our proposal is based on four pillars. First, we argue that, in the context of controlled firms, auditors should be elected with a majority-of-the-minority vote. Second, while auditors in many jurisdictions are subject to certain temporal prohibitions to be hired by previous clients, we propose that the length of these temporal prohibitions should be extended. Moreover, regulators should also restrict the type of services potentially provided to the audit client. Third, policymakers must pay closer attention to the internal governance and compensation systems of audit firms. We argue that increased transparency of audit firms is essential to enhance the independence of auditors. Finally, studies have shown that audit committees often fail to perform their monitoring functions, a major reason being the influence of corporate insiders on the committee. For this reason, we propose to increase the power and presence of public investors in the audit committee.


Introduction Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and hyperactivity symptoms exhibit an incidence that is male-biased. Thus androgen activity can be considered a plausible biological risk factor for these disorders. However, there is insufficient information about the association between increased androgen activity and hyperactivity symptoms in children with ASD. Methods In the present study, the relationship between parameters of androgenicity (plasmatic testosterone levels and androgen receptor sensitivity) and hyperactivity in 60 boys (age 3–15) with ASD is investigated. Given well documented differences in parent and trained examiners ratings of symptom severity, we employed a standardized parent`s questionnaire (Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form) as well as a direct examiner`s rating (Autism diagnostic observation schedule) for assessment of hyperactivity symptoms. Results Although it was found there was no significant association between actual plasmatic testosterone levels and hyperactivity symptoms, the number of CAG triplets was significantly negatively correlated with hyperactivity symptoms (R2 = 0.118, p = 0.007) in the sample, indicating increased androgen receptor sensitivity in association with hyperactivity symptoms. Direct trained examiner´s assessment appeared to be a relevant method for evaluating of behavioral problems in the investigation of biological underpinnings of these problems in our study. Conclusions A potential ASD subtype characterized by increased rates of hyperactivity symptoms might have distinct etiopathogenesis and require a specific behavioral and pharmacological approach. We propose an increase of androgen receptor sensitivity as a biomarker for a specific ASD subtype accompanied with hyperactivity symptoms. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for practice and future research.


Innovation has become omnipresent especially in today's technologically driven world. For developed economies, it is termed as cognitive enhancement 'technology' for improving humanity innovative abilities, and the 'engine of growth' or 'creative destruction'. Recently, the concept of human capital started to feature strongly as an essential part to production and worthy of examination and economic consideration. There are many dimensional facets of innovation including the factors that foster its development, ideas and the processes that drives innovation. This study will explore and analyze the role of the human factor and evolution of human-centric innovation ecosystems.


Hilsa shad (Tenualosa ilisha), is a biologically, nutritionally, economically, socially and culturally important species in the Bay of Bengal and Persian Gulf regions, but Bangladesh enjoys the major share wherein it contributes about 517,000 tons/year. However, this important fishery declined in the late 1990's that led the Government to formulate the Hilsa Fishery Management Action Plan (HFMAP) and started its implementation from 2005. Since then, hilsa production increased @5%/year till 2015. To improve the annual incremental production further, Department of Fisheries (DoF) and WorldFish have jointly been implementing "Enhanced Coastal Fisheries in Bangladesh (ECOFISH-Bangladesh)", a USAID supported project (2014-2019). The project supports the DoF and local communities to establish a science-based "adaptive co-management" that focuses on the brood hilsa protection, juvenile conservation, illegal gears control, and overall ecosystem resilience involving all stakeholders. As a synergistic impact of all the initiatives taken and the proactive supports of the law enforcing agencies, the declined hilsa fishery from both inland and marine habitats revived @ 11% annual incremental total hilsa catch. The increased hilsa production and average size (from 510 g to 915 g) resulted in increased household income of fishers by 52%. The interventions additionally improved catfish abundance and other fish biodiversity.


As older workers move closer to retirement, they are more likely to take on caring roles. This may affect their health, retirement plans, and income security. Retired men and women experience the caring role differently, with men less likely to be adversely affected and more likely to accept services and to derive satisfaction from caring. Carers make an important contribution to the lives of the people they care for and to the community. Caring is a productive role that can be sustained into older age, as long as the carer's health and well-being are maintained. More research is needed on the relationship between retirement and caring, to explore the extent of caring and its impact on retirement plans, income, and the physical and mental health of retired carers. This information could then be built into retirement planning to better prepare older workers for this important role. Caring roles and retirement intersect in several ways. About 6 million Americans, 2.6 million Australians, and 6 million people in the United Kingdom are informal carers. People (especially men) are more likely to take on caring roles as they get older and leave the paid workforce. The need to care for a spouse or older relative can be an unanticipated outcome or a precipitator of retirement. Retirement may coincide with illness or disability of a parent or spouse, or may be forced by the demands of caring. Caring may bring about major changes to retirement plans. The financial impact of having been a carer during one's working life may also be felt most keenly on retirement, through the lack of opportunities for savings and retirement fund co-contributions.


Copyright, caught in a digital maelstrom of perpetual reform and shifting commercial practices, exacerbates tensions between cultural stakeholders. On the one hand, copyright seems to be drowned in Canada and the USA by the role reserved to exceptions by the legislature and the courts granted to certain institutions. On the other, these institutions, such as libraries, are keen to navigate digital environments by allocating their acquisitions budgets to digital works.

Beyond the paradigm shifts brought by digital technologies, one must recognize the conceptual paradox surrounding digital copyrighted works. In economic terms, they behave naturally as public goods, while copyright attempts to restore their rivalrousness and excludability. Within this paradox lies tension, between the aggregate social wealth spread by a work and its commoditized value, between network effects and reserved rights. How can markets emerge if we are not able to resolve this tension?

After discussing some theoretical aspects described above, this paper will attempt to cast new light on user rights (as posited by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004) and other emerging concepts in copyright. In particular, the making available right will be analysed from the perspective of the library community. The goal is to express how libraries can fit in a distribution chain of cultural products through the two copyright tools at their disposal: licences/limitations and exceptions.


OBJECTIVE
Determine the impact of fracture, coronary disease, and diabetes on changes in rates of discontinuation and initiation of estrogen therapy with (EPT) and without (ET) progestin, before (September 1, 1999 to June 30, 2002, baseline) versus 5 months after (follow-up) release of the Women's Health Initiative EPT trial results (WHI).

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
Observational cohort; 169,586 women 40 to 80 years old from 5 U.S. HMOs.

METHODS
We used pharmacy data to identify ET and EPT users. A woman was a user any month she filled > or =1 estrogen prescription and in subsequent months based upon the number of pills/patches dispensed. We used inpatient and outpatient claims to identify fracture January 1, 1999 to June 30, 2002 and pharmacy data to identify disease-based groups of medications for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

MEASURES
EPT/ET prevalence, initiation, and discontinuation rates.

RESULTS
Baseline to follow-up EPT and ET prevalence declined 45% and 22%, respectively, with no difference by comorbidity. Follow-up EPT initiation was half the baseline rate irrespective of comorbidity. Compared to baseline, follow-up EPT discontinuation rates increased among women with diabetes (relative risk [RR], 6.9; 95% confidence interval [CI], 5.6 to 8.4), cardiovascular disease (RR, 5.5; 95% CI, 4.9 to 6.2), fracture (RR, 3.8; 95% CI, 2.4 to 5.7), and no comorbidity (RR, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.9 to 4.9). The RRs for follow-up versus baseline EPT discontinuation were higher among women with diabetes (P<.01) and cardiovascular disease (P<.01) versus women without these comorbidities. ET discontinuation rates among these same groups were elevated 2- to 2.8-fold.

CONCLUSIONS
Diabetes and cardiovascular disease were associated with higher EPT discontinuation rates post-WHI compared to women without comorbidity; comorbidity had little impact on changes in prevalence or initiation of ET/EPT after release of the WHI.


Hodrick-Prescott filter has been the favourite empirical technique among researchers studying "cycles". Software facilities and the optimality criterion, from which the filter can be derived, can explain its wide use. However, different shortcomings and drawbacks have been pointed out in the literature, as alteration of variability and persistence and detecting spurious cycles and correlations. This paper discusses these criticisms from an empirical point of view trying to clarify what the filter can and cannot do. In particular, a less mechanical use for descriptive analysis is proposed: testing how the estimated cyclical component behaves and using autocorrelation adjusted standard errors to evaluate cross correlations to differentiate the "genuine" from "spurious" case. Simulation results to test these bivariate correlations when there is a "genuine" relationship are presented. Some examples of descriptive analysis for macro aggregates (real activity, trade flows and money) of Argentina and USA are reported to show that not always the filter is appropriate. Simple tools are used to appreciate how the filtered series result and to evaluate cross correlations.


Russia and China on the Eve of a New Millennium assesses the collapse of totalitarian power and its consequences in Russia and surrounding nations. The situation in China is different, with economic openness struggling against political repression. The book focuses on the economic issues of systematic transition because, if not properly handled, they risk diverting or altogether derailing the impulse toward democracy. The authors consider hotly disputed issues of ideology, cultural values, beliefs, doctrine, and ethics; the threat to national unity and the promise of material prosperity offered by regionalism; and projections of future trends. Central to their work is the conviction that at the end of collectivist serfdom lies not absolute perfection, but vast increases in individual freedom, initiative, and responsibility; democratic governance; and spontaneous market coordination of economic choices. In Russia the failure of Marxian totalitarianism led to the political revolution of 1989-1991 that swept away its power structures. The attempt at "revolution from above" to save Soviet communism unleashed the "revolution from below" that destroyed it. The core issue now is whether the surge of nationalism coming after the great collapse will flow into democratic or return to despotic channels. In China the totalitarian systemic failure was most apparent in the economic bankruptcy of the system of command of economics and central planning. Deng Xiaoping carried out a strategic retreat to save the regime by launching into economic reformation; he freed the peasantry from state control and opened the command economy to the influx of market forces. The authors claim that the new forces arising out of burgeoning markets sap the foundations of communist power and are likely in time to turn Deng's retreat into a rout under his successors. Linden and Prybyla assert that, despite the apparent economic success of politically despotic China and economic tribulations of the politically more pluralistic countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Russians and East Europeans have the sounder approach. How Russia works through its crisis of identity and how China works through the contradiction between free market economics and communist dictatorship will deeply affect the shape of our world in the new millennium. The book includes contributions from Lawrence D. Orton, Marie-Luise Nath, Franz Michael, Jiirgen Domes, and Yuan-li Wu. It is a must read for political scientists, economists, policymakers, and Russian and Asian studies specialists.


Recent studies have shown that changes in visual processing in perihand space are limited to the area around the right hand, at least in right-handers. One explanation for these findings is that perception is altered at locations where action is more likely to occur. To test this notion, we asked both right- and left-handers to perform an unspeeded visual discrimination task under four hand-position configurations: Left hand, right hand, both hands, or no hands near the display. Compared to the no-hands (control) condition, visual sensitivity (d') was higher in the dominant-hand condition for right-handers and higher in the dominant- as well as the non-dominant hand condition for left-handers. When both hands were near the display, sensitivity was similar to that in the dominant-hand condition for right-handers and to that in the non-dominant hand condition for left-handers. This shows that performance differed between the two handedness groups when their non-dominant hand was near the display (both alone and accompanied by their dominant hand). Thus, the pattern for left-handers did not correspond to a mirror image of the pattern for right-handers. In line with studies on bimanual action control, visual processing in perihand space seems to be determined by the different ways in which left- and right-handers use their hands.


The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of chronic cholecalciferol administration (1.0, 2.5 or 5.0 mg/kg/day, s.c., once daily, for 14 days) on the anxiety-like and depression-like behaviors following long-term ovariectomy (12 weeks) in female rats. Cholecalciferol was administered to the ovariectomized (OVX) rats and OVX rats treated with 17β-estradiol after long-term absence of estrogen (17β-E2, 0.5 μg/rat, s.c., once daily, for 14 days). Anxiety-like behavior was assessed in the elevated plus maze (EPM), depression-like behavior was assessed in the forced swimming test (FST), locomotor and grooming activities were assessed in the open field test (OFT). The treatment with cholecalciferol (1.0 mg/kg/day, s.c.) in the OVX rats after long-term absence of estrogens induced antidepressant-like effect (p<0.05). Moreover, cholecalciferol in this dose plus 17β-E2 more markedly exhibited antidepressant-like effect in the OVX rats after long-term ovariectomy (p<0.05). The OVX rats treated with cholecalciferol at doses of 1.0 mg/kg and 2.5 mg/kg demonstrated a decrease of anxiety-like behavior in the EPM. The combination of cholecalciferol at doses of 1.0 and 2.5 mg/kg with a low dose of 17β-E2 more effectively decreases anxiety-like behavior in the OVX rats after longterm estrogen deficiency than17β-E2 alone. This work promotes more effective creation of novel therapeutic targets and strategies for affective-related disorders treatment in female subjects with long-term estrogen deficiency.


A global coalition of civil society and academics recently launched the Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health (JALI), which is developing a post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework for global health. The Framework Convention proposes establishing fair terms of international co-operation, with agreed-upon mutually binding obligations to create enduring health system capacities, meet basic survival needs, and reduce unconscionable inequalities in global health. States that bear a disproportionate burden of disease have the least capacity to do anything about it. The richer states are deeply resistant to expending the political capital and economic resources. When they do act, it is often more out of narrow self-interest or humanitarian instinct than a full sense of ethical or legal obligation. The result is a spiralling deterioration of health in the poorest regions, with manifest global consequences and systemic effects on trade, international relations, and security.


The relevance of drought and salinity stress under Mediterranean conditions is
reviewed and prospects for crop improvement against these constraints are discussed.

Field trials under severe drought in Syria highlighted the importance of
earliness to ensure satisfactory yields. Peduncle length and frost tolerance were
also important attributes. Under more favourable conditions in Sicily, the yield
components per se (number of spikes, number of kernels and kernel weight) had
greater influence on genotype performance. At both locations of evaluation high
yields were attained through different architectures of traits.
Durum wheat genetic resources proved very variable. Genotypes were
identified which could be used as donors of adaptive characters in breeding programmes.

The CERES-Wheat growth model was used for the two locations, using
historical weather data and two genotypes of known adaptation to the region.
Early heading was a positive attribute, particularly in Syria. At both sites, lengthening
of the grain filling period resulted in higher yields. Three sowing dates were
simulated. "Early" sowing (1 November) had the highest simulated yield in both
environments, suggesting a possible agronomic means to improve yields under
stress. Simulated yields were in most cases within 15% of measured values when
a comparison was possible.
The ability to adjust osmotically was sought in seedlings artificially exposed
to drought stress during early development. One entry appeared to possess this
feature. However, another genotype, of known tolerance under real conditions, did
not show this ability. Therefore, osmotic adjustment during early stages of ontogeny
does not seem unequivocally able to identify the best genotypes under
drought.
Salt tolerance of durum wheat genetic resources was assessed measuring
early growth under controlled environment. The data indicated that the results may
be somewhat experiment-specific when using different growing techniques such
as hydroponics and sand-culture. Finding tolerant tetraploid entries in terms of
plant survival and ion uptake seemed difficult. However, variability existed and
some entries, less susceptible than others, were noted. They could be used for
breeding. For instance, they could be valuable recipient for the introgression of
identified resistance mechanisms from other taxa.


Motivation Plasmids are stably maintained extra-chromosomal genetic elements that replicate independently from the host cell's chromosomes. Although plasmids harbor biomedically important genes, (such as genes involved in virulence and antibiotics resistance), there is a shortage of specialized software tools for extracting and assembling plasmid data from whole genome sequencing projects. Results We present the plasmidSPAdes algorithm and software tool for assembling plasmids from whole genome sequencing data and benchmark its performance on a diverse set of bacterial genomes. Availability and implementation PLASMIDSPADES is publicly available at http://spades.bioinf.spbau.ru/plasmidSPAdes/ Contact firstname.lastname@example.com


The Congo Peafowl Afropavo congensis is a little-known species endemic to the Democratic Republic of Congo. A central question in assessing its conservation status is the degree to which it uses secondary forest. Here, we measure relative use of two contiguous forest blocks in Salonga National Park, one patch of primary forest and another of secondary forest that has been regenerating for over 30 years. We searched for Congo Peafowl using systematic surveys along a transect grid, and exhaustive searching of smaller subsections of habitat for secondary signs of peafowl presence (feathers and droppings). Detections of secondary signs of peafowl presence were significantly more frequent in secondary than in primary forest, and 19 of the 31 sightings of birds were in secondary forest. Microhabitats used by the birds differed between forest types, with those in secondary forest being closer to the nearest watercourse, having fewer large trees, and lower plant species richness. In addition, fewer taxonomic groups were found in peafowl droppings collected in secondary forest. Overall, our results demonstrate that old regenerating forest is heavily used by Congo Peafowl at least in this area. Secondary habitats must therefore be considered when planning for the conservation of this species, particularly where regenerating forest fragments might connect larger blocks of habitat.


Compared with serial robots, parallel robots have the advantages of high stiffness and good dynamics. By replacing the rigid limbs with cables, the cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) is greatly simplified in structure and lightweight. We designed a high-speed CDPR tensioned by the passive rod and spring, named TBot. The robot can realize the SCARA movement as the classical Delta parallel robot. Comparison analysis of TBot and Delta is carried out to reveal the natures of the CDPRs and rigid parallel robots, identify the key issues, and promote industrial applications. Performance of both robots is analyzed with simulation under a typical Adept Motion trajectory. Results illustrate that TBot has advantages of low cost, low inertia, low energy consumption, and adjustable workspace and has great application potential. Energy consumption of TBot is discussed, and the trajectory planning is studied with the genetic algorithm to further reduce the energy consumption, considering the influence of the passive spring. Finally, on the basis of 30% less energy consumption for the Adept Motion than Delta, extra 14.3% energy is saved through the trajectory planning of TBot.


The relevance of this study is due to the problem of providing and increasing the competitiveness of enterprises operating in the regional market of medical services, which is possible only with a constant study of the characteristics of the market and factors of the external environment and is an indispensable criterion for survival in a competitive environment. The purpose of this article is to study the practical application of instrumental approaches to assessing the external environment of organizations in the market of medical services to the population of Magnitogorsk. The leading methods to study this problem are the methods of strategic analysis of the external environment, special methods of sociological expert study, tabular and graphical methods of visualizing the results of the study. The study covered medical centers operating in the territory of Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk region. The article substantiates that the use of strategic analysis methods to assess external environmental factors allows the organization to timely extract information about the business environment at the regional level and to develop programs for the development of the organization in the short and long term. Adapted, considering the specifics of medical organizations, methods form a unified system that facilitates a comprehensive assessment of the external environment and ensuring competitiveness. The study proved that the applied methods of strategic analysis can be used to conduct comparative competitive analysis and develop strategic development plans aimed at increasing the competitiveness of regional medical centers. The materials of the article can be useful for the leaders of medical organizations to ensure sustainable development and increase the efficiency of economic activity in a changing external environment.


This paper introduces a wayfaring process, previously deployed at early stage product development projects, in the exploration, design and piloting of experiments. The case example being an interaction experiment in a ship bridge context, targeting stress and affective response. It included a simulation task as primary and a cognitive load task as secondary element as well as various physiology sensors. Rather than being based on long-term planning or conducting meticulous analysis before decision points, the team focused onto: Probing ideas, Merging multidisciplinary, Agility, and Speed.


Objective. The objective was to review psychiatric involvement in seven prosecutorial workshops on criminal capacity between 2004 and 2009. The aim was to evaluate the changing role of the psychiatrists in the workshops in order to identify areas in forensic psychiatry where prosecutors have a specific need for training, and to identify more suitable methods of training. Method. The workshop programmes, copies of presentations, the number of attending prosecutors at each workshop, informal personal notes from the presenters, suggestions from meetings in preparation for workshops and formatted feedback reports were reviewed. Information from a total of seven workshops was reviewed and interpreted by 2 psychiatrists from Weskoppies Hospital Forensic Psychiatry Unit (WHFPU). Results. The psychiatrists' involvement increased over the years. Problematic topics that were identified include nonpathological criminal incapacity, child psychiatry and the different roles of the psychiatrist and the psychologist in court. Exposure to practical aspects, interactive workshops with case presentations, discussion groups and audience participation seemed to be the preferred method of training. Attitudes of prosecutors towards psychiatry improved with increased knowledge and understanding of the field, and overall the training was rated as relevant and enriching. Conclusion. Psychiatrists can offer valuable training opportunities to legal professionals about the major mental illnesses and how they can affect criminal capacity, but evaluation of the training should be an ongoing process to address changing needs. Training sessions provide an opportunity for reciprocal sensitisation between the different fields. The ultimate goal is to work towards improved association between the criminal justice and mental health systems.


Omphacite (Jd46.1_52.0Aeo_8.4Aug48.0_51.2) and diopside (Jd4.3_6.3Ae0_0.4Aug93.6_95.6) coexist in a vein cutting an omphacitite block in a serpentinite melange of the Oeyama ophiolite, central Chugoku Mountains. The compositional gap between omphacite and diopside is significantly wider than for other omphacitediopside pairs reported in the literature. The intergrowth texture of the omphacite-diopside vein suggests that the clinopyroxene pair was contemporaneously crystallized in the fracture from a Ca-bearing, alkali-rich fluid in a sub-solvus condition. Such a fluid may have been introduced from the surrounding serpentinized clinopyroxene-bearing harzburgite. The stability of omphacite and Al-rich pumpellyite in the matrix and the omphacite-diopside vein indicate that the earlier matrix reerystallization and later fracture filling may have both taken place under high-P-T condition during the melange-forming stage.


No More Hate! All Are Welcome!

 "Stigma" is a simple two-syllable word, yet it carries the weight of negative and often unfair beliefs that we hold about those who are different from us. Stigmas lock people into stereotyped boxes and deny us all the right to be our authentic and whole selves. Dr. Pernessa Seele, a longtime public health activist who started one of the first AIDS education programs in the 1980s, has crafted a proven method to address stigma. This powerful book confronts stereotype development, shows how to undo the processes and effects of stigma, and explains how we can radically change cultural thinking on the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels to put an end to stigmatization once and for all.


This paper analyzes daily patterns in the settlement of payments in the European TARGET2 settlement system using a unique transaction-level data set. For the first time, we provide insights into the intraday patterns of bank-to-bank payments (a subset of all TARGET2 transactions) and identify intraday periods of highest activity. Next, we focus on the time dimension, looking in particular at settlement delay and its evolution over time. We show the effects of emergency monetary policy measures on payment timing and document the very high resilience of the system despite the financial and sovereign debt crises. Finally, our analysis hints at a link between trading activity on financial markets and interbank payments, showing the potential of large-value payment data for observing patterns and participants' behavior in financial markets.


Denture stomatitis is a debilitating disease associated with the presence of adherent Candida albicans. This study compared the attachment capacity of C. albicans to three different acrylic resin materials (self-curing [SC], conventional pressure-packed [CPP], and injection-molded [IM]) to determine whether the physical properties of the materials influenced candidal attachment. No significant differences in attachment between the isolates were observed for each acrylic resin. However, a comparison of the mean of all isolates showed significantly less attachment to SC than to CPP (P < .05). These data indicate that choice of denture acrylic resin material may influence the capacity for developing denture stomatitis.


Bandit algorithms have various application in safety-critical systems, where it is important to respect the system constraints that rely on the bandit's unknown parameters at every round. In this paper, we formulate a linear stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with safety constraints that depend (linearly) on an unknown parameter vector. As such, the learner is unable to identify all safe actions and must act conservatively in ensuring that her actions satisfy the safety constraint at all rounds (at least with high probability). For these bandits, we propose a new UCB-based algorithm called Safe-LUCB, which includes necessary modifications to respect safety constraints. The algorithm has two phases. During the pure exploration phase the learner chooses her actions at random from a restricted set of safe actions with the goal of learning a good approximation of the entire unknown safe set. Once this goal is achieved, the algorithm begins a safe exploration-exploitation phase where the learner gradually expands their estimate of the set of safe actions while controlling the growth of regret. We provide a general regret bound for the algorithm, as well as a problem dependent bound that is connected to the location of the optimal action within the safe set. We then propose a modified heuristic that exploits our problem dependent analysis to improve the regret.


Using data from Taiwan where engagement partner names are disclosed and misstatements of clients' annual financial statements to proxy for audit quality, we examine whether audit quality at the engagement partner level persists, and whether an engagement partner's reputation for prior audit quality is informative about current audit quality. We find that at the engagement partner level, year t-1 misstatements made by other audit clients predict year t misstatements for clients without a history of misstatements in the preceding three years, but this effect is mitigated by engagement partner experience. In addition, we find a positive association between the incidence of restatements made by an engagement partner's clients in the previous two or three years and the likelihood that a different client misstates in the current year, suggesting that partner-level restatements provide information about future audit quality. Finally, we find that an engagement partner's reputation for past client misstatements (as disclosed in restatements) is associated with a higher likelihood of that partner losing existing clients and a lower likelihood of that partner attracting new audit clients. Collectively, our results suggest that engagement partner identification can reveal information that is informative about audit quality and affects stakeholder perceptions of audit quality, providing some support for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's proposal to disclose the names of engagement partners in the U.S.


One of the factors hindering the use of classification models in decision making is that their predictions may contradict expectations. In domains such as finance and medicine, the ability to include knowledge of monotone (nondecreasing) relationships is sought after to increase accuracy and user satisfaction. As one of the most successful classifiers, attempts have been made to do so for Random Forest. Ideally a solution would (a) maximise accuracy; (b) have low complexity and scale well; (c) guarantee global monotonicity; and (d) cater for multi-class. This paper first reviews the state-of-theart from both the literature and statistical libraries, and identifies opportunities for improvement. A new rule-based method is then proposed, with a maximal accuracy variant and a faster approximate variant. Simulated and real datasets are then used to perform the most comprehensive ordinal classification benchmarking in the monotone forest literature. The proposed approaches are shown to reduce the bias induced by monotonisation and thereby improve accuracy.


Several methods are used to estimate the spatial pattern of seed dispersal. However, each method has specific shortcomings that limit the accuracy and reliability of the resulting dispersal models. In this study we compared seed shadows of the anemochoric species Abies alba Mill. obtained from (1) phenomenological models derived from seed trapping data and inverse modelling, (2) ballistic models based on wind speed at canopy height and an exponential wind profile and (3) empirical models parameterised from seed-tracking data. In addition, we checked whether the empirical model coupled with multiannual wind characteristics provides a dispersal pattern concordant with the gene shadow obtained from parentage assignment between seedlings and overstorey trees. The seed trap and seed-tracking experiments were conducted in 2013 and 2015 with contrasting wind conditions in five study plots located in the Krynica Forest Experimental Station in southern Poland. Genetic data originated from 16 mature stands with dominant A. alba . The study revealed that the distances reached by single seeds strongly vary at the same wind speed at canopy height. The ballistic model overestimated the flight distances of A. alba seeds. Similarly, the empirical model calibrated on data that disregarded seeds trapped in the crowns of neighbouring conifer trees predicted longer flight distances than those derived from the seed trap experiments. The gene shadow obtained from the parentage analysis suggests dispersal patterns concordant with those anticipated by the empirical model based on the seed-tracking experiments, with a possible shift towards an increased proportion of seeds landing close to the source. It was concluded that in dense canopies collisions with canopy elements during seed flight and secondary dispersion of seeds trapped in the canopy zone may considerably shorten the travel distances of A. alba seeds .


WS-BPEL defines a standard for executable processes. Executable processes are business processes which can be automated through an IT infrastructure. The WS-BPEL specification also introduces the concept of abstract processes: In contrast to their executable siblings, abstract processes are not executable and can have parts where business logic is disguised. Nevertheless, the WS-BPEL specification introduces a notion of compatibility between such an under-specified abstract process and a fully specified executable one. Basically, this compatibility notion defines a set of syntactical rules that can be augmented or restricted by profiles. So far, there exist two of such profiles: the Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior and the Abstract Process Profile for Templates. None of these profiles defines a concept of behavioral equivalence. Therefore, both profiles are too strict with respect to the rules they impose when deciding whether an executable process is compatible to an abstract one. In this paper, we propose a novel profile that extends the existing Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior by defining a behavioral relationship. We also show that our novel profile allows for more flexibility when deciding whether an executable and an abstract process are compatible.


This paper is concerned with the block monotone iterative schemes of numerical
solutions of nonlinear parabolic systems with initial and boundary condition in two
dimensional space. By using the finite difference method, the system is discretized
into algebraic systems of equations, which can be represented as block matrices.
Two iterative schemes, called the block Jacobi scheme and the block Gauss-Seidel
scheme, are introduced to solve the system block by block. The Thomas algorithm
is used to solve tridiagonal matrices system efficiently. For each scheme, two convergent
sequences starting from the initial upper and lower solutions are constructed.
Under a sufficient condition the monotonicity of the sequences, the existence and
the uniqueness of solution are proven. To demonstrate how these method work, the
numerical results of several examples with different types of nonlinear functions and
different types of boundary conditions are also presented.


This paper reports the discovery and characterization of the transiting hot giant exoplanet Kepler-17b. The planet has an orbital period of 1.486 days, and radial velocity measurements from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope show a Doppler signal of 419.5+13.3−15.6 m s−1. From a transit-based estimate of the host star's mean density, combined with an estimate of the stellar effective temperature Teff = 5630 ± 100 from high-resolution spectra, we infer a stellar host mass of 1.06 ± 0.07 M☉ and a stellar radius of 1.02 ± 0.03 R☉. We estimate the planet mass and radius to be MP = 2.45 ± 0.11 MJ and RP = 1.31 ± 0.02 RJ. The host star is active, with dark spots that are frequently occulted by the planet. The continuous monitoring of the star reveals a stellar rotation period of 11.89 days, eight times the planet's orbital period; this period ratio produces stroboscopic effects on the occulted starspots. The temporal pattern of these spot-crossing events shows that the planet's orbit is prograde and the star's obliquity is smaller than 15°. We detected planetary occultations of Kepler-17b with both the Kepler and Spitzer Space Telescopes. We use these observations to constrain the eccentricity, e, and find that it is consistent with a circular orbit (e < 0.011). The brightness temperatures of the planet's infrared bandpasses are = 1880  ±  100 K and = 1770 ± 150 K. We measure the optical geometric albedo Ag in the Kepler bandpass and find Ag = 0.10 ± 0.02. The observations are best described by atmospheric models for which most of the incident energy is re-radiated away from the day side.


This study explores the reasons for children's varying levels of engagement with mathematics. Although new approaches to the learning of and engagement in mathematics continue to be developed, it has been argued by Boaler (2009) that levels of engagement continue to drop. Therefore, this study seeks to identify what factors children consider engage them, as opposed to teachers and researchers. The study consists of semi-structured, non-participant observations of four children (two boys and two girls) in a mixed year 3 and 4 class. These observations were followed by individual semi-structured interviews and other relevant data collection. The findings indicate that behavioural engagement is not always consistent with cognitive and emotional engagement, yet cognitive engagement may have a resulting impact upon behavioural engagement. Overall, the children considered several factors that engage them in the mathematics classroom with the application of mathematics to 'real-life' situations being one of the most prevalent. The implications of the study for teachers are the identification of different indicators of engagement in children and suggestions as to how to enhance cognitive (and other forms of) engagement.


Gaussian process (GP) regressors are used in a wide variety of regression tasks, and many recent applications feature domains that are non-Euclidean manifolds or other metric spaces. In this paper, we examine formal consistency of GP regression on general metric spaces. Specifically, we consider a GP prior on an unknown real-valued function with a metric domain space and examine consistency of the resulting posterior distribution. If the kernel is continuous and the sequence of sampling points lies sufficiently dense, then the variance of the posterior GP is shown to converge to zero almost surely monotonically and in L for all p > 1, uniformly on compact sets. Moreover, we prove that if the difference between the observed function and the mean function of the prior lies in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space of the prior's kernel, then the posterior mean converges pointwise in L to the unknown function, and, under an additional assumption on the kernel, uniformly on compacts in L. This paper provides an important step towards the theoretical legitimization of GP regression on manifolds and other non-Euclidean metric spaces.


"The paper will describe a knowledge-based system developed to capture, process and analyse records of past performance in ordered to help contractors to initiate future strategies and actions.

 A detailed study of the of a major contractor's Management Information Systems showed, inter alia, that the "Cost Value Reconciliation" forms (CVR's), produced on a monthly basis by the contractor's Surveyor, held a large amount of data unused by the contractors except for the purpose of performance control. Examination of the data revealed that if processed and stored in a central database, it could provide invaluable source of information to contractors for analysing performance and initiating strategies both on the project level and the company level. A subsequent survey of fifteen other contractors revealed that substantially identical CVR procedures were in universal use. It was therefore decided, in order to facilitate the adoption of the proposed system by contractors, to use a CVR format as a data capture facility for the system.

 Actual CVR sheets used by different contractors were studied, The type of records used in these sheets were examined in terms of their usefulness to management in terms of measuring progress and initiating future actions other than cost control. Further variables that are not currently in use in CVR sheets were introduced. A mathematical model was developed to process these monthly records into useful information subsequently called performance variables (i.e. variables used to measure the contractor's performance with respect to the project).

 Finally, further variables were introduces to the system in order to facilitate the sharing of information between different projects. These variables were called Contract Classification Variables (i.e. variables used to describe the project) and contract performance variables) and included nine criteria by which a contract is defined or grouped (e.g. method of tendering, method of procurement etc.). These criteria were identified by contractors as the most important factors influencing contracts' characteristics and performance. The Contract Performance Variables are the information that can be extracted from the CVR sheets and used to form new strategies (e.g. rate of mark-up on different projects, payment delays etc.).

 The model was developed in such a way that when a contract is started, the contractor enters the classification and the performance variables in the Individual Project Module. As the contract progresses and actual data become available, the contractor starts to fill the CVR sheets on a monthly basis. When the contract is completed, a the model process the CVR sheets and as a result summarise the performance of the project in terms of the performance variables and the data (including contract classification variables) are sent to the central Database.

 When a new contract is considered, the contractor defines the project in terms of its classification variables. The model queries the Database for the characteristics of past projects that match the same classification. Once the data is retrieved and processed a set of contract performance variables is predicted for that particular contract.

 The above method will work as long as adequate similar past projects are found and retrieved from the Database. However, finding adequate data is not always possible, particularly in the early years of applying the proposed model. Also, certain classification variables are not finite in terms of the options available (such as the client for the contract). An Intelligent Data Retrieval system has therefore been developed to overcome this problem. This paper will also explain this system and how the knowledge behind it was elicited."


Since 2005, Russia and Syria enjoyed a close relationship. The Syrian uprisings put this alliance to the test, and yet Russia continues supporting Bashar al-Asad's regime. For this, there are several 'old' reasons. Economically, Russian companies benefited from the breakthrough in the Russian-Syrian relations in 2005 and invested heavily in Syria's energy sector. Syria is also Russia's fifth biggest weapons-buyer. Militarily, the Kremlin is interested in the Tartus naval station, seen by some as the Russian fleet's foothold in the Mediterranean. The Arab Spring, and specifically the situation in Syria and the international community's interest in it, also offered Russia new political motives to support al-Asad. Firstly, Russia's resistance to Western pressure and marginalisation of the Syrian opposition are aimed at the domestic audience. Secondly, the Syrian uprising is Russia's chance to protest international military interventions as an acceptable way of regime changes. Thirdly, Russia's stance on Syria promotes Russia's image of a 'benevolent' Eurasian power, which upholds international law and favours multilateral and regional solutions to crises. Finally, Moscow's 'different' stand on the issue elevates Russia's importance in international diplomacy.


The bulk of global inequality is accounted for by income differences across countries rather than within countries. Expanding trade with China has aggravated inequality in some advanced economies, while ameliorating global inequality. But the 'China shock'i?½ is receding and other low-income countries are unlikely to replicate China's export-oriented industrialization experience. Relaxing restrictions on cross-border labor mobility might have an even stronger positive effect on global inequality. However it also raises a similar tension. While there would likely be adverse effects on low-skill workers in the advanced economies, international labor mobility has some advantages compared to further liberalizing international trade in goods. I argue that none of the contending perspectives -- national-egalitarian, cosmopolitan, utilitarian -- provides on its own an adequate frame for evaluating the consequences.


In recent years there has been considerable interest in electrode processes at metal surfaces with alkanethiol monolayers attached to them. One effect of the monolayer is that the electron transfer rate from the redox reagent in solution to the metal (gold or platinum are commonly used) becomes clearly nonadiabatic and the effect of the density of states of the metal on such a rate can be investigated.

We develop a way of writing the wave function of a semi-infinite metal using tight-binding matrix elements and the 'Z-transform', a discrete Laplace transform. Using these k-dependent metal wave functions we calculate the coupling matrix element between the metal and the redox reagent and thus the electron transfer rate constant. We then study the effect of changing the density of electronic states at the Fermi level (DOS) of a metal on the rate of nonadiabatic electron transfer by changing the metal.

The DOS of platinum is about 7.5 times that of gold, the difference being mainly due to the d-band of Pt. Inspite of this difference, the calculated electron transfer rate constant increases only by a factor of about 1.8. Bands which are weakly coupled (e.g., the d-band of Pt in the present case) contribute much less to the rate constant than is suggested by their density of states. Thereby, the rate constant is approximately independent of the density of states in two cases: adiabatic electron transfer and nonadiabatic electron transfer when the extra density of states is due to weakly coupled bands. Our results are in agreement with experiments performed with systems similar to those used in our calculations.

We next employ our method to calculate the temperature dependence of the electronic contribution to the nonadiabatic electron transfer rate constant at metal and semiconductor electrodes. We find that the electronic contribution in metals is proportional to T, and under conditions for the maximum rate constant, that at semiconductor electrodes is also proportional to T, but for different reasons than in the case of metals (Boltzmann statistics and transfer at the conduction band edge for the semiconductor vs. Fermi-Dirac statistics and transfer at the Fermi level, which is far from the band edge, of the metal).

On a different topic, we study the inverse photoemission spectra at metal electrode-liquid interfaces. In such experiments, an electron transfer redox agent was used to inject electrons or holes into a metal and create excited electronic states of the metal. Emission thus occurs in competition with energy loss and radiationless transitions. Some of the excited states decay radiatively and gave a frequency-dependent spectrum. The spectrum may be analysed to probe the electronic structure of the metal above and below its Fermi level. The experimental technique, known in the literature as charge transfer inverse photoemission spectroscopy (CTRIPS), is treated theoretically here.

We give a possible explanation of the data using a model, experimental band structures (from vacuum inverse photemission) and surface states from solution electroreflectance (ER) experiments and propose experiments that could be performed to further clarify the mechanism of electron transfer.


This paper presents both a generalised model of induction and a prototype induction model specifically designed for the teaching profession in Botswana. During the two year probationary period, which is required of every teacher at all levels in Botswana, no structured procedures are laid down regarding their induction. Research has documented that teachers face many problems during these early years of teaching and that it is during this period that the Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs), need support and guidance so as to gain confidence in the decision making processes and general professional matters. The proposed induction model is therefore intended to provide the necessary guidelines regarding the induction of NQTs in Botswana. The induction model was developed largely from a literature search on the induction of NQTs. Some piloting of the induction model items has been conducted and a validation study (pre-testing) of the model is in progress.