Rivers flowing into the Great Barrier Reef carry contaminants such as suspended sediments, dissolved inorganic nitrogen, total phosphorus and pesticides. To measure the extent and direction of the contaminants after they enter the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, a model was created using river volume, flooding variability, contaminant load, distance and direction as inputs. A GIS was used to calculate and visualise the exposure of the contaminants to the reefs for the current day, as well as modelling scenarios for pre-European arrival loads, and land management using realistic targets set by a regional Natural Resource Management board for water quality improvement planning purposes. The results show that a reduction in the dissolved inorganic nitrogen load exiting the Tully and Murray Rivers reduces the exposure of reefs close to the basin, but that reefs further east of the basin are significantly influenced by other rivers, highlighting that management for water quality improvement in neighbouring basins is also required.


With social media image analysis, one collects and interprets online images for the study of topical affairs. This analytical undertaking requires formats for displaying collections of images that enable their inspection. First, we discuss features of social media images to make a case for studying them in groups (rather than individually): multiplicity, circulation, modification, networkedness, and platform specificity. In all, these offer reasons and means for an approach to social media image research that privileges the collection of images as its analytical object. Second, taking the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires as a case study, we present four visual models for analyzing collections of social media images. Each visual model matches a distinctive spatial arrangement with a type of analysis: grouping images by theme with clusters, surfacing dominant images and their engagement with treemaps, following image trends with plots, and comparing image rankings across platforms with grids.


This study builds on the Bureau's earlier work and examines the relationship between geography and credit invisibility. The importance of geography in accessing credit has been long-standing concern for policymakers, going at least as far back as early efforts to combat redlining. In recent years, additional interest has been paid to the problems faced by people in "credit deserts," which generally are defined as areas with little access to traditional sources of credit. Because credit deserts have limited options for accessing credit, residing in those areas may inhibit the ability of consumers to establish an NCRA credit record. If so, the incidence of credit invisibility should be higher in credit deserts than in areas with better access to traditional credit.

This study examines geographic patterns in the incidence of credit invisibility to assess the extent to which where one resides is correlated with one's likelihood of remaining credit invisible. While determining the underlying factors that cause sustained credit invisibility is difficult and beyond the scope of this study, highlighting geographic variation in credit invisibility can aid policymakers and advance the conversation around potential causes and solutions.


In this thesis we consider parallel algorithms for solving band symmetric positive definite systems of linear equations where the number of equations is much larger than the band width. Such systems arise in many practical applications for the dynamic analysis of structures such as the design of dams, bridges, ships, supersonic jets etc. Sequential methods for solving these systems require intolerable turnaround times and hence the importance of fast parallel algorithms for solving them.
Our main contribution in this thesis is the presentation of a new practical parallel algorithm. Our algorithm runs in O(m $\*$ log n) time using nm/log n processors where n is the number of equations and m the band width. Hence, the algorithm is efficient. For tridiagonal systems the algorithm runs in O(log n) time using n/log n processors. We also develop a theoretical faster algorithm that runs in O(log m log n) time using nm$\sp2$/(log m log n) processors. This algorithm is efficient and runs as fast as the best currently known theoretical method.
In chapter one we introduce the basic principles of parallel computations. In chapter two we review the basic algebraic and numerical properties of matrix computations. Here, we present a new parallel efficient algorithm for adding n k-bits integers in O(log n + log k) time based on the Fibbonachi sequence. In chapter three we consider parallel methods for solving band triangular systems which arise from the L-U decomposition of A. We conclude that this method is not as efficient for parallel computers as for sequential ones. In chapter four, we give a new efficient parallel algorithm for inverting a s.p.d. matrix in O(log$\sp2$n) time. We then present our new parallel algorithm for solving band s.p.d. systems, analyse its complexity, and show its improvement over the odd-even reduction algorithm. We conclude by pointing to yet unresolved problems in this field.


PurposeWe previously described a group of patients of Chinese ancestry who presented with optic nerve appearance and visual field loss suggestive of glaucoma but did not show progression characteristic of this disease for up to 7 years. The purpose of this study was to assess whether axial length is a risk factor for visual field loss in patients presenting with this cluster of findings. Patients and MethodsTwenty patients of Chinese ancestry with characteristics of this previously described condition including myopia, tilted discs, and glaucomatous visual field abnormalities who also had asymmetric visual field loss were enrolled in this study. Patients underwent axial length measurement of both eyes and a fellow eye analysis was performed to determine the relationship between axial length and visual field loss. ResultsTilted discs were found in 30 out of 40 eyes, with cup/disc ratios ranging from 0.5 to 0.9. Myopia >6.00 diopters was also found in 30 out of 40 eyes. In these subjects with disease that was discordant between the 2 eyes, longer axial length was not found to be associated with greater visual field loss (P>0.99, Freeman-Halton extension of the Fisher exact test). No correlation was found between axial length and mean deviation on visual field testing (r=−0.06). ConclusionsWe did not find axial length to be a risk factor for visual field loss in eyes with asymmetric disease in this patient population. These findings suggest that factors other than progressive lengthening of the eye play an important role in the etiology of glaucomatous appearing optic nerve damage and visual field loss in this specific subset of patients.


Melilite-type crystals, including Ca2Ga2SiO7, Ca2MgSi2O7, and CaNdGa3O7, were successfully grown by the Czochralski technique. Thermal properties were investigated and full matrices of electromechanical constants of these melilite crystals were evaluated by impedance method, with d14 being on the order of 5.3–9.3 pC/N. The relationship between microstructure and electromechanical properties of the three kinds of crystals was established, in order to explore the piezoelectric origin and further optimize the piezoelectric properties. The distortion of eight-fold antiprisms and the distortion/rotation of tetrahedrons were thought to contribute to the piezoelectric d14 and d36, respectively. In addition, the layered structure leads to strong anisotropic behavior, accounts for the high resistivity along Z direction in Ca2MgSi2O7, while the disordered structure accounts for the degraded resistivity in CaNdGa3O7. The properties at elevated temperature were investigated, where the elastic constants show high ther...


The first judicial opinions interpreting the right to bear arms embraced vastly divergent views of the right, leading scholars to perceive these decisions as being in disarray. This article argues that these conflicts reflect exactly the sorts of disagreements that one would expect given that Americans viewed the right to bear arms as a natural right and as a positive right. Indeed, the first right-to-bear-arms decisions exemplified tensions that emerged when judges confronted claims about natural rights and positive rights in a changing social and legal landscape. As a natural right, the right to carry firearms could only be limited in promotion of the public good, which was quintessentially a question of legislative judgment. Yet emergent attitudes about judicial review counseled against absolute deference to legislatures. As a positive right, the right to bear arms offered more determinate legal protection. But its tradition-based content did not specify how to resolve novel problems, and entrenched norms posited that judges could only apply existing law — not make it up. Enforcing natural rights and positive rights in novel circumstances thus required judges to adopt rules that were over-inclusive, under-inclusive, or a combination of both. And that is precisely what one sees in the first right-to-bear-arms cases. The article concludes with a discussion of how this history bears on contemporary debates about the Second Amendment.


This paper proposes a systematic coexistence scheme for a new radio communication system (secondary system), which is additionally introduced to the service area being operated by an existing communication system (primary system). The same frequency band is allocated for both systems. Our proposal is to protect the primary system from interference, on the basis that the primary and secondary systems work cooperatively with each other. For this objective, we propose the deployment of signal detectors in the operating area of the primary system and also the gathering of information regarding the signal detection. Such information is used for estimating the area, where an additional radio system is allowed to operate. A signal detection scheme with high sensitivity is also proposed that has the ability to detect a weak interference signal under the condition of mixed primary and secondary signals, to confirm that the secondary system does not causes harmful interference to the primary system. By using the concept of non-detection probability of the secondary system, we address the systematic scheme to introduce an additional radio system in the operating area of an existing radio communication system.


Body dissatisfaction is associated with marked distress and often precipitates disordered eating symptomology. Literature on body dissatisfaction in athletes appears to be mixed, perhaps because athletes vary along several key characteristics related to how they experience their bodies. This study sought to investigate group differences in body dissatisfaction between sex (men vs. women), sport type (lean-promoting vs. non-lean-promoting), and division level (Division I vs. Division III). Collegiate athletes (N = 191) completed a self-report measure of body dissatisfaction, demographics, and sport characteristics. A factorial ANOVA revealed that women reported greater body dissatisfaction compared to men regardless of division level and sport type. There was an interaction between sex and sport type such that men in lean-promoting sports reported greater body dissatisfaction than men in non-lean-promoting sports. Findings suggest that some athletes participating in lean-promoting sports may be at risk of developing significant body dissatisfaction. Research on body dissatisfaction in collegiate athletes can be used to develop clinical interventions that aim to reduce body dissatisfaction and the potential of developing disordered eating and related psychopathology.


T. S. Eliot left Harvard during his third year of study in the department of philosophy and went to England. Forty-six years later he authorized the publication of his doctoral dissertation. Here we have a reprint of his sympathetic but not entirely uncritical study of the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley.


This article is motivated by a very simple question – 'what types of firms create the most jobs in the UK economy?' One popular answer to this question has been High-Growth Firms (HGFs). These firms represent only a small minority – the 'Vital 6%' – of the UK business population yet, but have a disproportionate impact on job creation and innovation. We re-visit the discussion launched by the 2009 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) reports, which identified the 6% figure and, using more recent data, confirm the headline conclusion for job creation: a small number of job-creating firms (mostly small firms) are responsible for a significant amount of net job creation in the United Kingdom. Adopting our alternative preferred analytical approach, which involves tracking the growth performance of cohorts of start-ups confirms this conclusion; however, we find an even smaller number of job-creating firms are responsible for a very significant proportion of job creation. We conclude by considering the question – 'what are the implications for policy choices?'


The ontogeny of erythrocytes, megakaryocytes, and blood platelets of different types of blood cells, the cells of the innate and the adaptive immune system, is very complex. Embryonic stem (ES) cells can be induced in vitro to differentiate to various cell lineages, notably also to hematopoietic cells and, more specifically, to cells of the innate and the adaptive immune system. Since B lymphocytes can be stimulated to develop into cells that no longer deposit their B-cell receptors (BcRs) (Ig) as antigen-specific receptors into the surface membrane but rather secrete this Ig as so-called plasma cells into the blood stream, antigen specificity of a B cell can be transferred to the innate immune system. By the time newly generated lymphocytes have been deposited in their peripheral, mature compartments of all the T cells and a large part of the B1 cells have been auto- antigen-ligand selected even before a foreign antigen can select "its" specific lymphocytes for a response.


BACKGROUND
We evaluated the completeness of reporting of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) systematic reviews using the recently developed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and MetaAnalyses (PRISMA)-DTA guidelines.

METHODS
MEDLINE® was searched for DTA systematic reviews published October 2017 to January 2018. The search time span was modulated to reach the desired sample size of 100 systematic reviews. Reporting on a per-item basis using PRISMA-DTA was evaluated.

RESULTS
One hundred reviews were included. Mean reported items were 18.6 of 26 (71%; SD = 1.9) for PRISMA-DTA and 5.5 of 11 (50%; SD = 1.2) for PRISMA-DTA for abstracts. Items in the results were frequently reported. Items related to protocol registration, characteristics of included studies, results synthesis, and definitions used in data extraction were infrequently reported. Infrequently reported items from PRISMA-DTA for abstracts included funding information, strengths and limitations, characteristics of included studies, and assessment of applicability. Reporting completeness was higher in higher impact factor journals (18.9 vs 18.1 items; P = 0.04), studies that cited PRISMA (18.9 vs 17.7 items; P = 0.003), or used supplementary material (19.1 vs 18.0 items; P = 0.004). Variability in reporting was associated with author country (P = 0.04) but not journal (P = 0.6), abstract word count limitations (P = 0.9), PRISMA adoption (P = 0.2), structured abstracts (P = 0.2), study design (P = 0.8), subspecialty area (P = 0.09), or index test (P = 0.5). Abstracts with a higher word count were more informative (R = 0.4; P < 0.001). No association with word counts was observed for full-text reports (R = -0.03; P = 0.06).

CONCLUSIONS
Recently published reports of DTA systematic reviews are not fully informative when evaluated against the PRISMA-DTA guidelines. These results should guide knowledge translation strategies, including journal level (e.g., PRISMA-DTA adoption, increased abstract word count, and use of supplementary material) and author level (PRISMA-DTA citation awareness) strategies.


We present a new reseeding-mixing method to extend the system period length and to enhance the statistical properties of a chaos-based logistic map pseudo random number generator (PRNG). The reseeding method removes the short periods of the digitized logistic map and the mixing method extends the system period length to 2253 by "xoring" with a DX generator. When implemented in the TSMC 0.18- μm 1P6M CMOS process, the new reseeding-mixing PRNG (RM-PRNG) attains the best throughput rate of 6.4 Gb/s compared with other nonlinear PRNGs. In addition, the generated random sequences pass the NIST SP 800-22 statistical tests including ratio test and U-value test.


The decision to select a subsample of eligible members of a sampled household is influenced by a number of factors including burden on the household, data quality, cost, and the sampling variance of survey estimates. Design effects quantify the influence of a complex sampling design on the variance of survey estimates. Selecting a subsample of eligible persons within a sampled household can have counteracting impacts on design effects. On one hand, subsampling increases the design effects attributable to unequal weighting. On the other hand, subsampling could reduce the design effects attributable to clustering because the potential intra-household correlation among respondents in the same household may be reduced or eliminated. If the reduction in correlation is greater than the increase caused by unequal weighting, subsampling can achieve the same sampling variance as selecting all eligible household members, with less cost and burden. We present the results of a simulation study that evaluates the design effects associated with subsampling household members on personal victimization rates based on the 2008 National Crime Victimization Survey, which selected all persons 12 and older in a sampled household.


Many seismic codes are modified to represent increased hazard or performance expectations of structures. According to the new code, many structures require retrofit to meet these increase performance expectations. Fluid viscous dampers can add energy dissipation without requiring major structural modification. However, their addition can lead to substantial increases in the maximum base shear and column axial forces in non-linear structures. In practice, these increases in demand would likely require strengthening of the columns and the foundations, thus increasing cost and reducing the ease and potential impact of this approach. In contrast, the 2-4 configuration of a passive Direction and Displacement Dependent (D3) damper provides damping in only quadrants 2 and 4 of the force-displacement response plot, thus substantially reducing peak base shear loads compared to a conventional viscous damper. The paper looks at the seismic performance of a 1/2 scale, two storey steel frame building that is retrofitted with the passive 2-4 D3 damper subjected to uni-directional shake table testing. Performance in mitigating structural response and foundation demand are assessed by evaluating base shear, maximum drift and acceleration. The overall results show that simultaneous reductions in displacement, base-shear and acceleration demand are only available with the 2–4 D3 viscous device. This device is entirely passive, and provides unique retrofit opportunity that does not require strengthening of the columns and the foundations.


The Bible helps to shape our understanding of Christian responsibility. However, different church bodies and individuals who claim scripture as an authority on ethics often reach different conclusions about moral life. In this book, C. Freeman Sleeper describes how the Bible can be used as a guide to moral life. He shows how various church bodies use the Bible to speak to specific contemporary ethical issues and deals directly with the question of the authority of the Bible by taking up the teaching of four basic styles of moral reflection--law, prophecy, apocalypse, and wisdom. Sleeper reviews the way that church bodies developed and used social policy and draws a distinction between the way churches speak to their own constituency and the way they speak to the world. He considers in detail the ethics of nuclear war and abortion. Practical exercises are also provided throughout the book.


Computer augmented reality (CAR) is a rapidly emerging field which enables users to mix real and virtual worlds. Our goal is to provide interactive tools to perform common illumination, i.e., light interactions between real and virtual objects, including shadows and relighting (real and virtual light source modification). In particular, we concentrate on virtually modifying real light source intensities and inserting virtual lights and objects into a real scene; such changes can be very useful for virtual lighting design and prototyping. To achieve this, we present a three-step method. We first reconstruct a simplified representation of real scene geometry using semiautomatic vision-based techniques. With the simplified geometry, and by adapting recent hierarchical radiosity algorithms, we construct an approximation of real scene light exchanges. We next perform a preprocessing step, based on the radiosity system, to create unoccluded illumination textures. These replace the original scene textures which contained real light effects such as shadows from real lights. This texture is then modulated by a ratio of the radiosity (which can be changed) over a display factor which corresponds to the radiosity for which occlusion has been ignored. Since our goal is to achieve a convincing relighting effect, rather than an accurate solution, we present a heuristic correction process which results in visually plausible renderings. Finally, we perform an interactive process to compute new illumination with modified real and virtual light intensities.


Peacock, Shane.  Becoming Holmes .  Toronto, ON:  Tundra Books, 2012.  Print. This is the final book in The Boy Sherlock Holmes series.  In the first five books, Shane Peacock developed the landscape of Holmes' early life, preparing the reader for his transition into the adult genius-detective that we all know and love.  Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not supply much information about Holmes' childhood, so authors have great scope to imagine how such an extraordinary person as Sherlock Holmes grew up to become what he is.  Shane Peacock is not the first to create a prequel series, nor is he likely to be the last. Prequels to much-loved stories are always a risk.  However, Peacock has done a remarkably good job of imagining Holmes' early years while staying true enough to Conan Doyle's character that readers will not be jarred when they progress from this series to the original series.  In this rendition of Holmes' childhood, much is explained by the fact that he is a half-Jew and that his parents have died leaving the boy in the care of the apothecary, Sigerson Bell.  Bell has taught Holmes much of his vast knowledge base as well as some disguise and martial arts techniques. In this series we also meet Holmes' brother, Mycroft, already ensconced in government, as well as youthful versions of Inspector Lestrade and the arch-enemy, here called Malefactor.   By the end of this book, Holmes has matured and thinks, "I am a man… It is just the beginning", giving readers a segue into the original series. While other series about Holmes' youth, for example Andrew Lane's  Sherlock Holmes, the Legend Begins Series address older teen readers,  Peacock has written these volumes for 10 to 14 year olds.   His use of language is age-appropriate and the final volume, like the earlier ones, is action-packed with lots of intrigue and just enough of the macabre to keep pre-teens and early teens engaged.   Becoming Holmes is a good read that is highly recommended for public libraries and both elementary and junior-high school libraries everywhere. Highly Recommended:  4 stars out of 4 Reviewer:  Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines.  Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.


Abstract The term elevation (also referred to as moral elevation), described by Thomas Jefferson and later coined by Jonathan Haidt, refers to the suite of feelings people may experience when witnessing an instance of moral beauty. The construct of elevation signifies the emotion felt when a person is a witness to, but not a recipient of, the moral behavior of others. Scholarship examining elevation has burgeoned since Haidt first introduced the construct. Researchers have explored the antecedents of, and outcomes associated with, witnessing instances of moral beauty. The current review will outline the existing scholarship on elevation, highlight conflicting findings, point out critical gaps in the current state of elevation research, and delineate fertile future directions for basic and applied research. Continued investigation of the affective, motivational, and behavioral responses associated with witnessing virtuous actions of others is warranted.


In many applications, the system needs to selectively present a small subset of answers to users. The set of all possible answers can be seen as an elevation surface over a domain, where the elevation measures the quality of each answer, and the dimensions of the domain correspond to attributes of the answers with which similarity between answers can be measured. This paper considers the problem of finding a diverse set of k high-quality representatives for such a surface. We show that existing methods for diversified top-k and weighted clustering problems are inadequate for this problem. We propose k-DHR as a better formulation for the problem. We show that k-DHR has a submodular and monotone objective function, and we develop efficient algorithms for solving k-DHR with provable guarantees. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of the results produced by k-DHR for applications in computational lead-finding and fact-checking, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms.


In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the period, men identified as "warm brothers" wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed a particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion. There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around "a queer proto-identity." Today, we might consider a canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul a homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others. Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers a much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.


We use data from California to document and offer possible explanations for the sharp increase in hospital prices charged to private payers after 1999. We find a downward trend in price for private pay patients in the 1990s and a rapid upward trend beginning in 1999, amounting to an annual average increase of 10.6% per year over 1999-2005. Prices in 2006 were almost double prices in 1999. By contrast, there was little discernable trend in prices for Medicare and Medicaid patients, although these prices varied from year-to-year. Surprisingly, the increase in prices is not correlated, geographically, with the change in hospital market concentration. For example, the greatest price rises came from hospitals in monopoly and highly concentrated counties which experienced little or no change over our sample period. Two recent California state hospital regulations, the seismic retrofit mandate and the mandatory nurse staffing ratio affected hospital costs. However, the cost increases due to the nursing staffing regulations are not large enough to account for the price increase, and the price increase is not substantially correlated with the costs of compliance with the seismic retrofit mandate. Therefore, the source of the near-doubling of California hospital prices remains something of a mystery.


The FDA employs an average-patient standard when reviewing drugs: it approves a drug only if is safe and effective for the average patient in a clinical trial. It is common, however, for patients to respond differently to a drug. Therefore, the average-patient standard can reject a drug that benefits certain patient subgroups (false negatives) and even approve a drug that harms other patient subgroups (false positives). These errors increase the cost of drug development - and thus health care - by wasting research on unproductive or unapproved drugs. The reason why the FDA sticks with an average patient standard is concern about opportunism by drug companies. With enough data dredging, a drug company can always find some subgroup of patients that appears to benefit from its drug, even if the subgroup truly does not. In this paper we offer alternatives to the average patient standard that reduce the risk of false negatives without increasing false positives from drug company opportunism. These proposals combine changes to institutional design - evaluation of trial data by an independent auditor - with statistical tools to reinforce the new institutional design - specifically, to ensure the auditor is truly independent of drug companies. We illustrate our proposals by applying them to the results of a recent clinical trial of a cancer drug (motexafin gadolinium). Our analysis suggests that the FDA may have made a mistake in rejecting that drug.


This is a fictive dialogue between a liberal and an ultra-Orthodox on the exclusion of women from Torah study. The dialogue begins with a lengthy discussion of the highly intricate preliminary problems of understanding and normatively evaluating the practices of another culture. The Liberal argues that the exclusion of women from Torah study precludes them from fully realizing the intellectual potential that lies within them, i.e., it denies them reaching the height of their human flourishing. It also implies that ultra-Orthodox women are regarded as having lesser moral worth than men. The ultra-Orthodox argues that whereas modernity is premised on the denial of any status bestowed by tradition in the life of a person, for the ultra-Orthodox tradition has a binding force: it embodies God's imperatives as to the good life, together with the ways these imperatives have been interpreted throughout the generations by Halakhic sages. Torah study is a religious imperative (mitzvah) that under the accepted tradition is incumbent upon men, but not upon women. The ultra-Orthodox also argues that when men study Torah, women study as well, though by proxy, in creating the conditions that enable their husbands to study. This draws on an ancient notion that exists in Judaism – the 'Issachar and Zebulun Agreement'. Finally, in the ultra-Orthodox community there are two central values: Torah study and raising children. The community upholds these two values by maintaining a division of labor: men are in charge of Torah study and women are in charge of raising children. The upshot of these arguments, according to the ultra-Orthodox, is that it cannot be claimed that the ultra-Orthodox community violates women's sense of worth, self-respect and human dignity. One understanding that emerges from this dialogue is the need to base normative evaluations on a close examination of the facts relevant to the evaluations.


Whether or not one uses humor to cope with a setback may depend on the idiosyncratic relation of the setback to feeling of self-worth. All people pursue the higher order goal of self-validation, but people differ in what domains of life their self-worth is contingent upon and to what extent. In this article based on an incongruity theory of humor we argue that the use of humor in coping with a highly self-worth-contingent setback may be impeded by two cognitive-motivational processes: goal-driven activation and goal shielding. From the outlined theory we derived the hypothesis that the more a domain is contingent upon self-worth, the less likely a person will be to use humor to deal with a setback in that domain. We tested this hypothesis in two studies employing two forms of self-report, i.e., ratings of reaction likelihood to setbacks described at an abstract domain level (Study 1), and ranking of reaction likelihood to concrete setbacks from different domains (Study 2). The hypothesis was affirmed in different domains of self-worth contingency controlling for the influence of habitual coping with humor, coping by disengagement, and global self-esteem.


This essay addresses the democratic deficit in women's representation in Canadian politics that hinders the access of all citizens in Canada to free, equal, and meaningful opportunities to engage in all levels of political affairs. In doing so, a number of socio-cultural and structural barriers to women's participation in federal politics are identified. In turn, strategies to overcome these barriers are presented while making effort to tackle the conditions underlying women's misrepresentation, as opposed to promoting explicitly compulsory solutions such as affirmative action legislation. The purpose of my research is to guide Canadian policy structures and social standards toward a new paradigm in Canadian politics where women are liberated from having to face the tension between the implications of their status as the 'other' and their desire to meaningfully contribute to the political affairs of the Canadian state.


Pseudo-Boolean problems lie on the border between satisfiability problems, constraint programming, and integer programming. In particular, nonlinear constraints in pseudo-Boolean optimization can be handled by methods arising in these different fields: One can either linearize them and work on a linear programming relaxation or one can treat them directly by propagation. In this paper, we investigate the individual strengths of these approaches and compare their computational performance. Furthermore, we integrate these techniques into a branch-and-cut-and-propagate framework, resulting in an efficient nonlinear pseudo-Boolean solver.


The Christian Religious Internalization Scale (CRIS; Ryan, Rigby, & King, 1993) measures two different types of internalization of religious values and behaviors: an introjected internalization, mainly based on seeking self and others' approval, and an identified internalization, that represents the adoption of religious behaviors as personally chosen and valued. In the present study, we tested the CRIS factor structure in an Italian sample, estimated its reliability and internal consistency, and explored its intercorrelation with other measures of religiosity and with two measures of personal wellbeing. Results showed that a 10-item version of the CRIS is a valid measure as it captures the different degrees of religious internalization in Italian youths; identification subscale (and not introjection) showed positive correlations with attending church and religious groups, with perceived subjective importance of religion and with satisfaction with life and religious wellbeing.


In this thesis we aim to provide empirical evidence of the effect of spot and futures prices on municipal land transition in Brazil. We take advantage of newly developed, detailed, municipality-level data on land transition, for the whole of Brazil. Additionally, we exploit data on potential yield for soy and maize in our analysis, and we present two simple models for two different kinds of land transition to guide our empirical work. We mainly utilize a First Difference approach to study the effects of both spot and future prices for soy and maize. We also estimate the effects of our commodity prices for different levels of potential yield, and investigate the long-term effects of our prices. Our main findings are that the spot-future spread has a seemingly larger effect on deforestation than the spot price alone for soy. This contributes to the extensive research on deforestation in Brazil by suggesting that the price expectations for the future should be included in further research on Brazilian deforestation. Maize on the other hand, show more ambiguous effects. Finally, municipalities with higher levels of potential yield seems to have a more price sensitivity towards land transition. Further, the long-term effects are larger for deforestation than regrowth of forests.


Neural Baldwinism concerns the Baldwin Effect in the evolution of brains and intelligence. The first phase of the Baldwin Effect (B.E.), wherein plasticity provides a selective advantage, is intuitive and commonplace in simulations of adaptive systems. However, the second (assimilation) phase often poses problems for Baldwinism in general, and this is particularly acute for biological neural networks, where a complex developmental process greatly confounds the mapping from genotype to functional phenotype: a brain whose synapses are tuned to perform particular tasks. Since a strong genotype-phenotype correlation is often viewed as a prerequisite to this second phase, the body's most plastic organ would appear to defy Baldwinism. However, a detailed examination of 3 key processes of neural adaptation blurs the distinction between classic developmental and learning stages of brain maturation, thus supporting a re-interpretation of Neural Baldwinism's phase II as a heterochronous shift of the bulk of these three adaptive processes from postnatal to prenatal stages. This article illustrates Heterochronous Neural Baldwinism (HNB) with artificial neural networks that evolve, develop and learn, and in which some degree of synaptic tuning shifts to the prenatal stage.


How far are Australia's most important ecosystems (our range of habitats for plants and animals) represented by scientifically adequate samples protected as national parks and reserves? This question was asked by the Terrestrial Conservation Section of the International Biological Programme as part of its world wide investigation. The Australian Academy of Science is concerned with Australia's international relations in science and has accepted responsibility for Australian participation in the International Biological Programme. The Academy also has a continuing interest in the scientific knowledge and research which would lead to conservation of our unique flora and fauna. Consequently, when the Academy established a National Committee for the International Biological Programme, under the Chairmanship of Sir Otto Frankel, F.R.S., F.A.A., it also established a Subcommittee for Section CT, Conservation of Terrestrial Communities. We were fortunate that Professor R. L. Specht, Professor of Botany in the University of Queensland, accepted the position of Chairman of the Subcommittee. Professor Specht, in association with one of Australia's great scientific conservationists, the late Sir John Cleland, published papers on flora conservation in South Australia which surveyed the conservation status of both the major plant communities and the endemic plants in the national parks and nature reserves in which they occurred. Their survey provided a basis for suggesting areas which should be incorporated into new reserves, to prOVide, where necessary, for complete conservation coverage of the plant communities and hence for other biota in the state. Subsequently, Professor Specht, as President of the Victorian National Parks Association, initiated a comparable survey in Victoria, which has since been published (Frankenberg 1971), and later he organized similar activity in Queensland. When the Convener of the CT Section (Mr. E. M. Nicholson) of the International Biological Programme (IBP) visited Australia in 1964, he considered that these projects could form an excellent basis for Australia's contribution to the IBP/CT programme. Since the listing of individual plant species would be impossible on a world or on a national scale, it was agreed that plant "communities" rather than species would form the basis of the IBP compilations, though, whenever possible, animals were to be considered as well. Data from the surveys in different countries were to be collated at an international level at the Monks Wood Experimental Station in England. Professor Specht and his Committee worked on the Australian project with great enthusiasm. The Committee consisted of members from all States, from Papua New Guinea, and members of Commonwealth instrumentalities. All of the work has been done in an honorary capacity by people with other responsibilities. No special funds were available. Such a survey is an immense task in a country of roughly 3 million square miles (7.7 X 106 km2 ), much of which is floristically relatively unexplored. Further, since all States continue to form new parks and reserves, the task of listing the protected flora and fauna needs constant revision. The work on listing the national parks has been carried out largely by Dr. J. G. Mosley of the Australian Conservation Foundation who has been most active in keeping the information up-to-date and in stimulating interest in the important question of tenure and management of existing parks and reserves. This report, which is the culmination of seven years' work, set out to examine the extent to which scientifically adequate samples of all the main types of ecosystems and their variants are protected in national parks and reserves in Australia. The work of the Subcommittee has been extensive and productive and the Academy of Science is grateful to those who took part. It is hoped that this type of work will continue as the result of the Academy's proposals for a biological survey in Australia. Rutherford Robertson (President, Australian Academy of Science)


Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani and the "New York Times Book Review" Blinder is a master storyteller . . . one of the best books yet about the financial crisis. "The Wall Street Journal" Alan S. Blinder esteemed Princeton professor, "Wall Street Journal" columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Alan Greenspan is one of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers. In "After the Music Stopped," he delivers a masterful narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we must do to recover from it. With bracing clarity, Blinder chronicles the perfect storm of events beginning in 2007, from the bursting of the housing bubble to the implosion of the bond bubble, and how events in the U.S. spread throughout the interconnected global economy. Truly comprehensive and eminently readable, "After the Music Stopped" is the essential book about the financial crisis."


This research examines the "protest paradigm" in the digital news environment of a politically polarized media system by considering relations between news and online readers' comments about the Serbian protest Against Dictatorship, which was held in 2017. Applying content analysis to news and comments from two news websites, our study indicates the need to account for opposing framing of the protest (violence/peacefulness, de/legitimizing and un/democratic) in a polarized environment. The results show that the distribution of opposing frames is guided by the media relations with the government. Online readers' comments generally enhance this polarized pattern of frame distribution, with the exception of the performance frame, which remains prolific in the media, but absent from readers' comments.


With genetically modified crops we have entered uncharted territory - where visions of the triumph of biotechnology in agriculture vie with dire views of medical and environmental disaster. For two years Mark L. Winston travelled this fraught territory at home and abroad, listening to farmers, industry spokespeople, regulators, and researchers, canvassing high-security laboratories, environmentalist enclaves, and cyberspace, making a thorough survey of the facts, opinions, and practices deployed by opponents and proponents of transgenic crops. Through his sympathetic portrayal of the passions on all sides, Winston brings a clear, unbiased perspective to this bewildering landscape. Travelling with Winston, we see the excitement and curiosity that pervade laboratories developing genetically modified crops, as well as the panic and outrage among dedicated opponents of agricultural biotechnology; the desperation of conventional farmers as they look to science for solutions to the problems driving them from their farms, as well as the deeply held values of organic farmers who dread the incursion of genetically modified crops into their expanding enterprise. And, Winston shows us, these contrasting attitudes transcend national borders, with troubling counterparts and consequences in the developing world. As he seeks a middle ground where concerns about genetic engineering can be rationally discussed and resolved, Winston gives the reader a full and balanced view of the forces at play in the chaotic debate over agricultural biotechnology.


In this paper we propose failure probabilities as a semantically and mechanically meaningful measure of object fragility. We present a stochastic finite element method which exploits fast rigid body simulation and reduced-space approaches to compute spatially varying failure probabilities. We use an explicit rigid body simulation to emulate the real-world loading conditions an object might experience, including persistent and transient frictional contact, while allowing us to combine several such scenarios together. Thus, our estimates better reflect real-world failure modes than previous methods. We validate our results using a series of real-world tests. Finally, we show how to embed failure probabilities into a stress constrained topology optimization which we use to design objects such as weight bearing brackets and robust 3D printable objects.


Dreams have fascinated human cultures and societies for thousands of years. What dreams are, what they look like, and what they mean have been the centre of discussions in a variety of contexts, across disciplines, and languages. The very notion of 'dream' entails, on the one hand, something unattainable, whimsical, and even fantastic. Dreams reside, perhaps by definition, in the realm of the imaginary. This does not mean, however, that they do not have cultural and historical relevance. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa argue that "while we by no means assume that we can make contact with the dream itself", there is no doubt that all subsequent decodings and interpretations of the dream "are expressive of culturally specific themes, patterns, tensions, and meanings" (3).Equally, dreams are inspirational; they can be representational of our innermost desires and wishes for the future. The very notion of 'dream' has been used metaphorically across the board of media and narrative, and has included a  conspicuous presence in poems, literature, film, art, advertising, and even political speeches. The representation of dreams as metaphor is entangled with our projections of feeling, identities and the everyday. As such, any mention of dream must pay close attention to the common usage of socio-cultural and socio-historical perceptions over "emotions, temporal references, successes and failures, fortunes and misfortunes" (Domhoff 2). Transformed into their specific counterparts as nightmares, dreams give voice to our innermost fears. They give voice to both the intangible and the tangible, and act as a conduit for the exploration of both the illusionary and the physical.  As agents of both dread and desire, dreams are metaphors for both our everyday and our innermost fantasies. They never exist ex nihilo, and channel – both tacitly and explicitly – parts of our human experience instead. Dreams are, in this context, a profoundly "cultural act" (Shulman and Stroumsa 3).Drawing on the multi-faceted nature of the very concept of 'dream', this issue of M/C Journal seeks to expand the definition of the term, by investigating its meanings and representations across the media and cultural spectrum. 'Dream' is taken to be a matter of both metaphor and agency, bringing together perspectives on matters of desire, wistfulness, and meaning. This issue aims to explore emerging research on the textual, methodological, and practical aspects of 'dream'. What we are interested in is the exploration of the broader and multi-faceted aspects of "dream culture" (Shulman and Stroumsa 3) and its ability to showcase issues of both a private and a public nature. The article in this issue provide wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary approaches to the versatile and mutating notion of 'dream'.This issue begins with Donna Lee Brien's "Dreaming of Creativity" which looks at how the self is imagined and envisioned in memoirs written by both first time authors and creative writers. Brien presents a survey of how writers-as-memorists capture (and create) a reflection of their lived experiences-real or otherwise.Angelique Nairn's "Chasing Dreams, Finding Nightmares" builds on this discussion of dreams in reality as documented in the music industry by bands and musicians themselves. Nairn focuses on artists such as Thirty Seconds to Mars and the Jonas Brothers as they witness their creative aspirations go from dream to nightmare.Blair Speakman takes us from real world dreams and nightmares to the uncanny world of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in "Poor Creature, Trapped in Existential Solitude Forever". Speakman interrogates how the medium of the dream can be used to show not only wishes but also repressed and unconscious desires.From the liminal of the television screen to liminal spaces created by wearers of alternative fashion in Lisa J. Hackett's "Dreaming of Yesterday". Hackett's interviews with people who dress in retro 1950s style show how these activities are tempered by both gender and temporal distance. These alternative fashion practitioners show that you can live the dream and still be aware of the fantasy at play.In a similar vein, Nancy Johnson-Hunt's "Dreams for Sale" looks at how in the world of cosmetics, "beauty is in the eyes of the advertiser". For Johnson-Hunt the dream is an idealised version of our desires; it is both packageable for consumption but also endlessly unobtainable.Patrick Leslie West's "Thom Gunn's 'The Annihilation of Nothing' and the Negative Capability of Dream Poetry" positions Gunn's work as a dream poem in which dream relates not to a specific dream, but rather the poetic creative process.In "Dream Machines" Paul Ryder asks us to buckle up in the iconic cars of The Great Gatsby. The machines have captured the imagination of the motoring public since their inception and continue to do so. Ryder contrasts motoring history with Fitzgerald's fictional world and the spirits that inhabit both.Through interviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre, Carmen Jacques, Kelly Jaunzems, Layla Al-Hameed, and Lelia Green show how nightmare pasts have the potential to become dreamed of futures in "Refugees' Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future".Finally, in Glenda Ballantyne and Aneta Podkalicka's "Dreaming Diversity" these dreams are investigated from the perspective of second generation Australians. For these Australians, who are trapped between refugee/migrants and "old/white Australia", the dream is not one of belonging but of identity.ReferencesDomhoff, G. William. Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach. New York: Springer, 1996.Shulman, David, and Guy G. Stroumsa. Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.


Rapid development of El Sistema-inspired music programs around the world has left many music educators seeking the tools to emulate El Sistema effectively. This paper offers information to these people by evaluating one successful program in the United States and how it reflects the intent and mission of El Sistema. Preliminary research on El Sistema draws from articles and from information provided by Mark Churchill, Dean Emeritus of New England Conservatory's Department of Preparatory and Continuing Education and director of El Sistema USA. Travel to Baltimore, Maryland and to four cities in Venezuela allowed for observation and interviews with people from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's OrchKids program and four nucleos in El Sistema, respectively. OrchKids and El Sistema aim to improve the lives of their students and their communities, but El Sistema takes action only through music while OrchKids has a broader spectrum of activities. OrchKids also uses a wider variety of musical genres than El Sistema does. Both programs impact their students by giving them a strong sense of personal identity and of belonging to community. The children learn responsibility to the communities around them such as their neighborhood and their orchestra, and also develop a sense of belonging to a larger international music community.


abstract Most work, to date, on analysis of effects of earthquakes on dams treats dam and reservoir as two uncoupled systems. The importance of interaction between the two systems in determining the water pressure on dams during earthquakes is investigated herein. The analysis presented is approximate in nature and is aimed at exploring the problem. The earthquake acceleration is first modeled as a stationary gaussian white noise process. For this excitation, certain qualitative conclusions concerning importance of interaction effects are derived. Hydrodynamic responses of typical systems subjected to El Centro (1940) earthquake are then determined to confirm these conclusions. On basis of these results, it appears that the interaction between reservoir and dam has significant influence on the hydrodynamic responses during earthquake excitations.


With 14C‐labeled phytoplankton as tracer, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) produced by sloppy feeding was measured for three species of marine copepods (Acartia tonsa, Centropages typicus, and Temora longicornis) grazing on the differently sized phytoplankton (Rhodomonas salina, Heterocapsa rotundata, and Ditylum brightwelli). DOC production per prey cleared was not dependent on prey concentration, whereas the relative size of the prey was important. When the prey was more than 39 times smaller than the copepod (measured as equivalent spherical diameter) no DOC production by sloppy feeding was measured. When the prey was larger, the fraction of carbon cleared that was lost as DOC by sloppy feeding was a function of the copepod‐prey size ratio. The DOC production by the three species could be predicted from a common regression.


Abstract. Aerosols and clouds affect atmospheric radiative processes and climate in many complex ways and still pose the largest uncertainty in current estimates of the Earth's changing energy budget. Airborne in-situ sensors such as the Cloud, Aerosol, and Precipitation Spectrometer (CAPS) or other optical spectrometers and optical array probes provide detailed information about the horizontal and vertical distribution of aerosol and cloud properties. However, flow distortions occurring at the location where these instruments are mounted on the outside of an aircraft may directly produce artifacts in detected particle number concentration and also cause droplet deformation and/or break-up during the measurement process. Several studies have investigated flow-induced errors assuming that air is incompressible. However, for fast-flying aircraft, the impact of air compressibility is no longer negligible. In this study, we combine airborne data with numerical simulations to investigate the flow around wing-mounted instruments and the induced errors for different realistic flight conditions. A correction scheme for deriving particle number concentrations from in-situ aerosol and cloud probes is proposed, and a new formula is provided for deriving the droplet volume from images taken by optical array probes, reducing errors by up to one order of magnitude. Shape distortions of liquid droplets can either be caused by errors in the speed with which the images are recorded or by aerodynamic forces acting at the droplet surface caused by changes in the airflow around the instrument. These forces can lead to the dynamic breakup of droplets causing artifacts in particle number concentration and size. Furthermore, an estimation of the critical breakup diameter, as a function of flight conditions is provided. Experimental data show that flow speed at the instrument location is smaller than the ambient flow speed. Our simulations confirm the observed difference and reveal a size-dependent impact on particle speed and concentration. This leads, on average, to a 25 % overestimation of the number concentration of particles larger than ~10 μm} diameter and causes distorted images of droplets and ice crystals if the flow values recorded at the instrument are used. With the proposed correction scheme both errors are significantly reduced by a factor 10. Although the presented correction scheme is derived for the DLR Falcon research aircraft (SALTRACE campaign) and validated for the DLR Falcon (A-LIFE campaign) and the NASA DC-8 (ATom campaign), the general conclusions hold for any fast-flying research airplane.


Information Systems Engineering (ISE) is an interdisciplinary approach to enable the realisation of successful information systems in a broad sense. ISE comprises a number of areas of expertise that must be integrated and managed in order to build information systems. Since ISE is becoming progressively more complex there is an increasing need to codify and manage knowledge within and about the ISE process. From a knowledge perspective the different model types created in an ISE project are examples of codified knowledge about the future system. The descriptions of how work should proceed are examples of codified knowledge of the process of creating the system. In summary, one of the main concerns in the ISE process is to manage the substantial amount of knowledge associated with the process as such as well as with the target domain of the actual development project and the developed software. In the thesis I recognise three areas of knowledge in ISE: development process knowledge, target domain knowledge, and software knowledge. Furthermore, I use a set of knowledge perspectives in order to describe and analyse ISE from a knowledge perspective. Finally, I introduce three aspects: organisation, artefact, and individual in order to be able to discuss and analyse how methods are actually used in organisations and how they affect the work situation. The results are presented in the form of a framework for knowledge transfer in ISE that comprises the knowledge perspective, the knowledge area, and the aspect of knowledge transfer. The framework is thus used to analyse the results from the six papers enclosed in the thesis. The results also comprise an empirical characterisation of a method in use which is based on data collected during an ethnographical study. Finally the results are made concrete in the form of a pattern collection for method introduction and method use.


Justice Harlan Fiske Stone's majority opinion in United States v. Carolene Products Co. is well-known for its statement of two principles. The first is that regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions is to be afforded a strong presumption of constitutionality. The second principle, articulated in the famous Footnote Four, qualifies the first: such a strong presumption of constitutionality is not warranted when legislation appears on its face to violate a provision of the Bill of Rights, or restricts ordinary political processes, or is directed at discrete and insular minorities. At the time the decision was announced, however, the decision in Carolene Products was recognized as marking an important step in the development of Commerce Clause jurisprudence. This article seeks to recover that understanding, which rested on a conception of the relationship between individual rights and constitutional federalism that has faded from memory. The key to this effort at recovery is a reinterpretation of the puzzling and seemingly inconsistent line of Supreme Court decisions involving the constitutionality of federal statutes prohibiting the interstate shipment of such disfavored items as lottery tickets, adulterated or mislabeled food and drugs, alcoholic beverages, stolen automobiles, and child-made goods. The article reconciles this line of cases by arguing that they are best understood as incorporating and resting upon principles of vested rights and substantive due process rather than upon principles internal to the Commerce Clause. This lays the groundwork for the development of an enhanced appreciation of the important role that the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause played in the allocation of state and federal regulatory authority in the Progressive Era, and of the signal role that Carolene Products played in the passing of that regime of constitutional law.


Sodium superoxide (NaO2) has attracted considerable attention as the main discharge product in Na–air batteries due to its specific energy, which exceeds that of the Li-ion battery. Pressure has become an irreplaceable tool to improve or alter the physical properties of a given material. By utilizing first-principles swarm structure-searching predictions, herein, we for the first time investigate the structures and electronic properties of NaO2 in the pressure range of 0–20 GPa. It is found that the orthorhombic Pnnm structure at ambient pressure transforms to another orthorhombic Immm structure at approximately 4.6 GPa, and subsequently to the tetragonal P4/mbm structure at 6.7 GPa. The pressure-induced structural transitions are mainly derived from the denser polyhedral packing and higher coordination number. It is interesting to find that the superoxide group (O2−) is maintained over the entire pressure range considered. Analysis of the electronic band structure and density of states shows that the structures found exhibit intriguing half-metallic magnetism. This study enables an opportunity to understand the structures and electronic properties of NaO2 at high pressures.


The People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) can help organizations successfully address their critical human capital issues. The People CMM employs a process maturity framework as a foundation for best practices for managing and developing an organization's workforce. Based on the best current practices in fields such as human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the People CMM guides organizations in improving their processes for managing and developing their workforce. The People CMM helps organizations characterize the maturity of their human capital practices, establish a program of continuous workforce development, set priorities for improvement actions, integrate workforce development with process improvement, and establish a culture of excellence. Since the release of the Version 2 of the People CMM in 2001, use of the People CMM around the world has increased substantially by small and large organizations in many industries and market sectors. Based on continuing feedback and experience, this update of the People CMM has been prepared. This report documents an update to the People CMM, Version 2, which updates informative material within the People CMM and its subpractices and provides new information learned from the continuing global use of the People CMM.


In this paper, we explore the problem of identifying substitute relationship between food pairs from real-world food consumption data as the first step towards the healthier food recommendation. Our method is inspired by the distributional hypothesis in linguistics. Specifically, we assume that foods that are consumed in similar contexts are more likely to be similar dietarily. For example, a turkey sandwich can be considered a suitable substitute for a chicken sandwich if both tend to be consumed with french fries and salad. To evaluate our method, we constructed a real-world food consumption dataset from MyFitnessPal's public food diary entries and obtained ground-truth human judgements of food substitutes from a crowdsourcing service. The experiment results suggest the effectiveness of the method in identifying suitable substitutes.


Thompson sampling (TS) is an effective approach to trade off exploration and exploration in reinforcement learning. Despite its empirical success and recent advances, its theoretical analysis is often limited to the Bayesian setting, finite stateaction spaces, or finite-horizon problems. In this paper, we study an instance of TS in the challenging setting of the infinite-horizon linear quadratic (LQ) control, which models problems with continuous state-action variables, linear dynamics, and quadratic cost. In particular, we analyze the regret in the frequentist sense (i.e., for a fixed unknown environment) in one-dimensional systems. We derive the first O( √ T ) frequentist regret bound for this problem, thus significantly improving the O(T ) bound of Abeille & Lazaric (2017) and matching the frequentist performance derived by Abbasi-Yadkori & Szepesvári (2011) for an optimistic approach and the Bayesian result of Ouyang et al. (2017). We obtain this result by developing a novel bound on the regret due to policy switches, which holds for LQ systems of any dimensionality and it allows updating the parameters and the policy at each step, thus overcoming previous limitations due to lazy updates. Finally, we report numerical simulations supporting the conjecture that our result extends to multi-dimensional systems.


New sandstone petrology and petrostratigraphy provide insights on Palaeogene (Middle Eocene to Oligocene) clastics of the Thrace Basin in Greece, which developed synchronously with post‐Cretaceous collision and subsequent Tertiary extension. Sandstone petrofacies are used as a tool to unravel complex geodynamic changes that occurred at the southern continental margin of the European plate, identifying detrital signals of the accretionary processes of the Rhodope orogen, as well as subsequent partitioning related to extension of the Rhodope area, followed by Oligocene to present Aegean extension and wide magmatic activity starting during the Early Oligocene. Sandstone detrital modes include three distinctive petrofacies: quartzolithic, quartzofeldspathic and feldspatholithic. Major contributions are from metamorphic basement units, represented mostly by low to medium‐grade lithic fragments for the quartzolithic petrofacies and high‐grade metamorphic rock fragments for the quartzofeldspathic petrofacies. Volcaniclastic sandstones were derived from different volcanic areas, with a composition varying from dominantly silicic to subordinate intermediate products (mainly rhyolitic glass, spherulites and felsitic lithics). Evolution of detrital modes documents contributions from three key source areas corresponding to the two main crystalline tectonic units: (i) the Variegated Complex (ultramafic complex), in the initial stage of accretion (quartzolithic petrofacies); (ii) the Gneiss–Migmatite Complex (quartzofeldspathic petrofacies); and (iii) the Circum‐Rhodope Belt. The volcaniclastic petrofacies is interbedded with quartzofeldspathic petrofacies, reflecting superposition of active volcanic activity on regional erosion. The three key petrofacies reflect complex provenance from different tectonic settings, from collisional orogenic terranes to local basement uplift and volcanic activity. The composition and stratigraphic relations of sandstones derived from erosion of the Rhodope orogenic belt and superposed magmatism after the extensional phase in northern Greece provide constraints for palaeogeographic and palaeotectonic models of the Eocene to Oligocene western portions of the Thrace Basin. Clastic detritus in the following sedimentary assemblages was derived mainly from provenance terranes of the Palaeozoic section within the strongly deformed Rhodope Massif of northern Greece and south‐east Bulgaria, from the epimetamorphic units of the Circum‐Rhodope Belt and from superposed Late Eocene to Early Oligocene magmatism related to orogenic collapse of the Rhodope orogen. The sedimentary provenance of the Rhodope Palaeogene sandstones documents the changing nature of this orogenic belt through time, and may contribute to a general understanding of similar geodynamic settings.


We present a deep learning method for the interactive video object segmentation. Our method is built upon two core operations, interaction and propagation, and each operation is conducted by Convolutional Neural Networks. The two networks are connected both internally and externally so that the networks are trained jointly and interact with each other to solve the complex video object segmentation problem. We propose a new multi-round training scheme for the interactive video object segmentation so that the networks can learn how to understand the user's intention and update incorrect estimations during the training. At the testing time, our method produces high-quality results and also runs fast enough to work with users interactively. We evaluated the proposed method quantitatively on the interactive track benchmark at the DAVIS Challenge 2018. We outperformed other competing methods by a significant margin in both the speed and the accuracy. We also demonstrated that our method works well with real user interactions.


Information about the motor performance, i.e. how well an activity is performed, is valuable information for a variety of novel applications in Activity Recognition (AR). Its assessment represents a significant challenge, as requirements depend on the specific application. We develop an approach to quantify one aspect that many domains share – the efficiency of motion – that has implications for signals from body-worn or pervasive sensors, as it influences the inherent complexity of the recorded multi-variate time-series. Based on the energy distribution in PCA we infer a single, normalised metric that is intimately linked to signal complexity and allows comparison of (subject-specific) time-series. We evaluate the approach on artificially distorted signals and apply it to a simple kitchen task to show its applicability to real-life data streams.


Research demonstrates that a Fresnel hologram can be generated and simultaneously encrypted numerically based on a secret symmetric key formed by the maximal length sequence (M-sequence). The method can be directly extended to encrypt a video holographic clip in a frame-by-frame manner. However, given the limited combination of signals in the family of M-sequence, hacking the secret key through trial and error can be time consuming but not difficult. In this letter, we propose a method that is difficult to crack with brute force for encrypting a holographic video sequence. An M-sequence is first randomly assigned to encrypt each frame of the holographic video signal. Subsequently, the index of the selected M-sequence, which is necessary to decrypt the hologram, is encrypted with the RSA algorithm before transmitting to the receiving end. At the receiving end, the decoder is provided with a private key to recover the index for each frame, and the corresponding M-sequence is used to decrypt the encoded hologram.


Species are the units used to measure ecological diversity and alleles are the units of genetic diversity. Genetic variation within and among species has been documented most extensively using allozyme electrophoresis. This reveals wide differences in genetic variability within, and genetic distances among, species, demonstrating that species are not equivalent units of diversity. The extent to which the pattern observed for allozymes can be used to infer patterns of genetic variation in quantitative traits depends on the forces generating and maintaining variability. Allozyme variation is probably not strictly neutral but, nevertheless, heterozygosity is expected to be influenced by population size and genetic distance will be affected by time since divergence. The same is true for quantitative traits influenced by many genes and under weak stabilizing selection. However, the limited data available suggest that allozyme variability is a poor predictor of genetic variation in quantitative traits within populations. It is a better predictor of general phenotypic divergence and of postzygotic isolation between populations or species, but is only weakly correlated with prezygotic isolation. Studies of grasshopper and planthopper mating signal variation and assortative mating illustrate how these characters evolve independently of general genetic and morphological variation. The role of such traits in prezygotic isolation, and hence speciation, means that they will contribute significantly to the diversity of levels of genetic variation within and among species.


The concept of a medical parallel robot applicable to chest compression in the process of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is proposed in this paper. According to the requirement of CPR action, a three-prismatic-universal-universal (3-PUU) translational parallel manipulator (TPM) is designed and developed for such applications, and a detailed analysis has been performed for the 3-PUU TPM involving the issues of kinematics, dynamics, and control. In view of the physical constraints imposed by mechanical joints, both the robot-reachable workspace and the maximum inscribed cylinder-usable workspace are determined. Moreover, the singularity analysis is carried out via the screw theory, and the robot architecture is optimized to obtain a large well-conditioning usable workspace. Based on the principle of virtual work with a simplifying hypothesis adopted, the dynamic model is established, and dynamic control utilizing computed torque method is implemented. At last, the experimental results made for the prototype illustrate the performance of the control algorithm well. This research will lay a good foundation for the development of a medical robot to assist in CPR operation.


Atmospheric cold plasma (ACP) is a non-thermal technology, effective against a wide range of pathogenic microorganisms. Inactivation efficacy results from plasma generated reactive species. These may interact with any organic components in a test matrix including the target microorganism, thus food components may exert a protective effect against the antimicrobial mode of action. The effect of an in-package high voltage ACP process applied in conjunction with common meat processing MAP gas compositions as well as bacteria type and meat model media composition have been investigated to determine the applicability of this technology for decontamination of safety challenges associated with meat products. E. coli, L. monocytogenes, and S. aureus in PBS were undetectable after 60 s of treatment at 80 kVRMS in air, while ACP treatment of the contaminated meat model required post-treatment refrigeration to retain antimicrobial effect. The nutritive components in the meat model exerted a protective effect during treatment, where 300 s ACP exposure yielded a maximum reduction of 1.5 log using a high oxygen atmosphere, whilst using air and high nitrogen atmospheres yielded lower antimicrobial efficacy. Furthermore, an ROS assay was performed to understand the protective effects observed using the meat model. This revealed that nutritive components inhibited penetration of ROS into bacterial cells. This knowledge can assist the optimization of meat decontamination using ACP technology where interactions with all components of the food matrix require evaluation.


This essay explores virtue ethical concepts in the context of animal law theory and practice. For reasons discussed in the essay, virtue ethics may not, on its own, serve as an adequate foundation for general anticruelty statutes, but it may have application in those contexts in which sufficient sharing of values enables participants in legal re form to work through differences in moral commitments to generate at least temporarily acceptable laws. The article considers a detailed example of that type of application, based on the actual and realistic situation of legislator-requested feral cat colony caretakers' participation in the development of ordinances that regulate the management of such colonies.


A privacy policy is a statement informing users how their information will be collected, used, and disclosed. Failing to provide a correct privacy policy may result in a fine. However, writing privacy policy is tedious and error-prone, because the author may not understand the source code well as it could have been written by others (e.g., outsourcing), or the author does not know the internal working of third-party libraries used. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel system named AutoPPG to automatically construct correct and readable descriptions to facilitate the generation of privacy policy for Android applications (i.e., apps). Given an app, AutoPPG first conducts static code analysis to characterize its behaviors related to users' personal information, and then applies natural language processing techniques to generating correct and accessible sentences for describing these behaviors. The experimental results using real apps and crowdsourcing indicate that: 1) AutoPPG creates correct and easy-to-understand descriptions for privacy policies; 2) the privacy policies constructed by AutoPPG usually reveal more operations related to users' personal information than existing privacy policies; and 3) most developers, who reply us, would like to use AutoPPG to facilitate them.


Making a good script great is more than just a matter of putting a good idea on paper. It requires the working and reworking of that idea. This book takes you through the whole screenwriting process-from initial concept through final rewrite-providing specific methods that will help you craft tighter, stronger, and more saleable scripts. While retaining the invaluable insights that placed its first two editions among the all-time most popular screenwriting books, this expanded, revised, and updated third edition adds rich and important new material on dialogue, cinematic images, and point of view, as well as an interview with screenwriter Paul Haggis. If you are writing your first script, this book will help develop your skills for telling a compelling and dramatic story. If you are a veteran screenwriter, it will help you articulate the skills you know intuitively. And if you are currently stuck on a rewrite, this book will help you analyse and solve your script's problems and get it back on track.


An experimental design has been developed for the purpose of testing the response of larval fish feeding to turbulence. The main purpose of the design is to reproduce natural turbulence within the range of scales relevant to the feeding processes. The design is based on grid-generated turbulence in a circular tank with a diameter of 1.5 m and a water depth of 0.90 m. The spatial distribution of the turbulence was measured. The data analysis of our experiment indicate that we successfully simulated natural turbulence covering six orders of magnitude for the energy dissipation rate (4*10-11 - 2*10-4 W/kg) and over three orders of spatial scales from the Kolmogorov microscale (0.3 mm -13 mm) to the size of the tank. It is concluded that the tank is well designed for studies of zooplankton - larval fish interactions, as the turbulence is generated on a range of scales similar to the separation distance between the zooplankton particles found in nature. The short and relatively slow movement of the grid in addition to the relatively large volume of water should make it possible for the larvae to avoid extreme shears, and minimises mechanical impact on larvae behaviour compared to other known turbulence generating systems. A method is developed to calculate the turbulent energy dissipation rate in a zero mean velocity field, assuming the turbulent cascade follows a -5/3 law in the inertial subrange. This method is also expanded for use on noisy time series. Comparisons with five other methods have been conducted. The comparisons show that Taylors frozen turbulence hypothesis can be used even when the ratio between the turbulent and the mean velocity is approximately 1.


Abstract Linear free energy relationships, in particular relationships between rate and equilibrium constants, are the basis for our rationalization of organic reactivity. Whereas relationships between the kinetic terms nucleophilicity and nucleofugality and the thermodynamic term basicity have been in the focus of interest for many decades, much less attention has been paid to the relationships between electrophilicity, electrofugality, and Lewis acidity. By using p- and m-substituted benzhydrylium ions (Aryl2CH+) as reference electrophiles, reference electrofuges, and reference Lewis acids of widely varying electron demand and constant steric surroundings of the reaction center, we have developed comprehensive reactivity scales which can be employed for classifying polar organic reactivity and for rationally designing synthetic transformations. It is a general rule that structural variations in electron-surplus species, which increase basicities, also increase nucleophilicities and decrease nucleofugalities, and that structural variations in electron-deficient species, which increase Lewis acidities also increase electrophilicities and decrease electrofugalities. Deviations from this behavior are analyzed, and it is shown that variations in intrinsic barriers are responsible for the counterintuitive observations that structural variation in one of the reactants alters the rates of forward and backward reactions in the same direction. A spectacular example of this phenomenon is found in vinyl cation chemistry: Vinyl cations are not only generated several orders of magnitude more slowly in SN1 reactions than benzhydrylium ions of the same Lewis acidity, but also react much more slowly with nucleophiles.


This paper describes how fuzzy goal programming can be efficiently used to solve bilevel programming problems with fuzzy parameters. In the model formulation of the problem, the tolerance membership functions for the fuzzily described objective functions of decision makers are defined by determining individual optimal solution of each of the level decision makers. Since the objectives are potentially conflicting in nature, a possible relaxation of the upper level and lower level decision are considered by providing preference bounds on the decision variables for avoiding decision deadlock. Then fuzzy goal programming approach is used for achieving highest degree of each of the membership goals by minimizing negative deviational variables. Three fuzzy goal programming models are presented. Distance function is used to identify which fuzzy goal programming models offers better optimal solution. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the potential use of the proposed approach.


The Role of Facebook in the Exhibition of Subclinical Narcissistic Traits by Megan L. Gramm MS, Walden University, 2014 MA, American Military University, 2012 BA, American Military University, 2010 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Psychology Walden University February 2017 Abstract Several psychological processes motivate the use of Facebook. The correlation between subclinical narcissistic traits and Facebook use has been examined, but the results have been inconsistent. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between Facebook use and the exhibition of subclinical narcissistic traits. The method for this study was meant to improve upon previous studies that used self-reported data by providing researchers with a technique to collect Facebook data from the personal pages of participants, with informed consent. Social learning theory provided the theoretical foundation for this study. This theory posits that new patterns of behavior can be acquired through direct experience or by observing the behavior of others. This theory could explain why a billion people choose to post pictures, share news articles, add friends, and engage in other Facebook activities. Using a quantitative approach, approximately 3 months of Facebook activity from 93 participants were analyzed and correlated with Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores. A multiple regression analysis was then used to examine the data in relation to the research questions and hypotheses. There were no statistically significant findings for Facebook activity and NPI scores. These findingsSeveral psychological processes motivate the use of Facebook. The correlation between subclinical narcissistic traits and Facebook use has been examined, but the results have been inconsistent. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between Facebook use and the exhibition of subclinical narcissistic traits. The method for this study was meant to improve upon previous studies that used self-reported data by providing researchers with a technique to collect Facebook data from the personal pages of participants, with informed consent. Social learning theory provided the theoretical foundation for this study. This theory posits that new patterns of behavior can be acquired through direct experience or by observing the behavior of others. This theory could explain why a billion people choose to post pictures, share news articles, add friends, and engage in other Facebook activities. Using a quantitative approach, approximately 3 months of Facebook activity from 93 participants were analyzed and correlated with Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores. A multiple regression analysis was then used to examine the data in relation to the research questions and hypotheses. There were no statistically significant findings for Facebook activity and NPI scores. These findings may challenge the popular notion that Facebook and other social media represent a platform for narcissistic self-promotion. This study has potential to promote social change, in that the negative connotation may be removed from social media use, allowing more people to communicate openly without the fear of being perceived as narcissistic. The Role of Facebook in the Exhibition of Subclinical Narcissistic Traits by Megan L. Gramm MS, Walden University, 2014 MA, American Military University, 2012 BA, American Military University, 2010 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Psychology


The progression of research on school-based agricultural education (SBAE) has been limited, in part, due to a lack of nationwide, student data detailing the effectiveness of SBAE. Using an ecological systems perspective, the relationships between SBAE enrollment; graduation rates; postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) achievement; and income were explored using data from a nation-wide, longitudinal study conducted from 2002 to 2012. Results indicate SBAE students were more likely to be male, white, and have a lower socioeconomic status than students not enrolled in SBAE. With regard to graduation rates, SBAE enrollment was a statistically significant, positive predictor of high school graduation. In fact, students enrolled in SBAE were 1.16 times more likely to graduate high school than students not enrolled in SBAE. In the analysis of STEM achievement, SBAE enrollment was a statistically significant, negative predictor of postsecondary science, math, and overall STEM GPA. With regard to income, each additional Carnegie unit of SBAE was related to $1,850.67 more annual income for high school graduates and $457.40 more annual income for postsecondary graduates. Findings are discussed in relation to the ecological systems theory, with an emphasis on recommendations for research and practice.


It has been well known that Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O system has three
superconducting phases represented by general formula, Bi2Sr2Can-1CUnOy ,
referred to as 2201(n= 1,Tc~ 10K), 2212 (n=2, Tc~ 80K), and 2223 (n = 3, Tc~
11 OK) The role of calcium and copper seem to influence the formation of those
phases This research work was focussed at the role played by calcium in the
formation of 2223 phase by doping this site with different elements having different
valences and ionic radius Sample of Bi2-xbpxSr2Ca2Cu3O3(x=01 to 06)and Bi2Pb06Sr2Ca2-"MxCu3Oy (M = Ba, Y, V, Zn, Sn with x =0 02 to 0 10) were prepared using the
conventional solid state reaction technique The samples were sintered at 855°C for
150 hours and annealed at 830°C for 30 hours The transport properties of the
samples were measured using four-point probe resistance measurement, magnetic
properties by using ac susceptibility, microstructure by scanning electron


The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the nonlinear distortions introduced by the high-power amplifier in the downlink of direct-sequence code-division multiple-access systems. By modeling the nonlinear distortion effects as a signal power loss and a superimposed colored Gaussian noise, we derive the symbol-error rate (SER) of the minimum mean-squared error (mmse) detector in additive white Gaussian noise channels. Successively, we make use of a semianalytical approach to obtain the SER performance of linear multiuser detectors, such as the RAKE, decorrelator, and mmse receiver, in frequency-selective fading channels. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the theoretical approach.


Abstract Background: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was reported in 1995 that the routine coverage for BCG was as low as 47%, and that it was 27% for DPT3, 28% for OPV3 and 39% for measles vaccine. The trend also was declining unevenly. This study aimed to determine the reasons for such low coverage, examining the socio-demographic characteristics of mothers and health system factors such as health services barriers. It further sought to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices of mothers associated with routine immunisation. Methods: In 1999, a cross-sectional household survey applied a systematic sampling technique in a sample of eight out of the 22 health zones that then served the population of Kinshasa. These were dichotomised into low- and high-coverage health zones, based on BCG immunisation coverage. Mothers of children aged from zero to four years were the respondents to a standardised questionnaire. Results: A total of 1 613 children aged zero to four years participated in the study. Awareness of immunisation and its importance in protecting a child against diseases was universal, although most mothers could not tell exactly against which diseases. Mothers had positive attitudes towards immunisation (98%). Coverage based on the immunisation card, however, was as low as 37%, indicating a discrepancy between the high level of knowledge and positive attitudes, with the observed low immunisation coverage. The father's education and the mother's experience of an EPI-targeted disease in the family emerged as significant predictors of complete immunisation of the child. The father's involvement and the mother's ability to cite signs of severity of EPI diseases were associated with the child's vaccination status in the high-coverage health zone. The mother's vaccine-related knowledge was a predictor of immunisation status only in the low-coverage zone. Conclusion: Different factors determine the complete vaccination status, depending on whether the child lives in a zone with low or high routine EPI coverage. For example, the father's involvement is associated with the child's vaccination status in the high-coverage zone, but not in the low-coverage zone. Programmes and policy makers should take these factors into account when designing strategies to increase immunisation coverage.


Identifying with a group can bring benefits to physical and psychological health. These benefits can be found with both small-scale and large-scale social groups. However, groups can also be associated with health risks: a distinct branch of medicine ('Mass Gathering Medicine') has evolved to address the health risks posed by participating in events characterized by large crowds. We argue that emphasizing either the positive or the negative health consequences of group life is one-sided: both positive and negative effects on health can occur (simultaneously). Moreover, both such effects can have their roots in the same social psychological transformations associated with a group-based social identification. Reviewing evidence from across a range of mass gatherings, we offer a conceptual analysis of such mixed effects. Our account shows i., how social identity analyses can enrich mass gatherings medicine, and ii., how social identity analyses of health can be enriched by examining mass gatherings.


The majority of Galactic high-energy gamma-ray sources continue to elude identification. Currently, we have a handful of firm pulsar identifications, one of which is radio quiet, and a few marginal detections, including one millisecond pulsar. Recently, both blind searches of EGRET error boxes and targeted searches of X-ray counterpart candidates have had some success in finding new pulsars. I review these results, and discuss our current program of searching mid-Galactic latitude EGRET error boxes using the Parkes multi-beam system.


Java Fundamentals I and II will show you everything you need to know to start building robust, powerful software with Java SE. This collection provides $2,000 (USD) worth of expert Java training! Your instructor, Paul Deitel, has personally taught Java at organizations ranging from IBM to Sun Microsystems to NASA. With the powerful videos included in this LiveLesson, you'll learn at your own pace as Deitel guides you through Java's fundamentals, object-oriented programming, and event-driven programming. Deitel's signature "live-code" approach shows you the correct ways to use Java, right from the start. And you'll learn in the best possible way: through complete, working programs containing thousands of lines of fully tested Java program code. After mastering the basics--classes, objects, methods, and much more--you'll move on to master professional-quality techniques, from inheritance and polymorphism to exception handling and user interface development. Check out the extensive Java and Java-related Deitel® Resource Centers at www.deitel.com/resourcecenters.html. Each week Deitel® announces its latest Resource Centers in its newsletter, the DEITEL® BUZZ ONLINE (www.deitel.com/newsletter/subscribe.html). Looking for a better way to master today's rapidly changing programming technologies? Want expert help, but don't have the time or energy to read a book? Can't find classroom training worth the money? Discover LiveLessons: self-paced, personal video instruction from the world's leading experts. LiveLessons are video courses, on DVD with a book supplement, that are organized into bite-sized, self-contained sessions-you'll learn key skills in as little as fifteen minutes! Track your progress as you follow clearly defined learning objectives. Follow along as your instructor shows exactly how to get great results in your real-world environment. For the latest information on Deitel publications and to be notified when Deitel content is updated or added, please follow Deitel on: Twitter: @deitel Facebook: http://www.deitel.com/deitelfan


Data mining, or knowledge discovery, has become an indispensable technology for businesses and researchers in many fields. Drawing on work in such areas as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high performance computing, data mining extracts useful information from the large data sets now available to industry and science. This collection surveys the most recent advances in the field and charts directions for future research.The first part looks at pervasive, distributed, and stream data mining, discussing topics that include distributed data mining algorithms for new application areas, several aspects of next-generation data mining systems and applications, and detection of recurrent patterns in digital media. The second part considers data mining, counter-terrorism, and privacy concerns, examining such topics as biosurveillance, marshalling evidence through data mining, and link discovery. The third part looks at scientific data mining; topics include mining temporally-varying phenomena, data sets using graphs, and spatial data mining. The last part considers web, semantics, and data mining, examining advances in text mining algorithms and software, semantic webs, and other subjects.