In recent years, in the wake of disasters and frauds there has been a growing awareness of the potential importance of reacting to employee whistle blowers. In this article a brief overview of existing cases of corruption where the potential value of employees raising concern over malpractices, is largely evident, is given. Whistle blowing has been defined often and in differing ways in the literature. An attempt is made to clarify the meaning of whistle blowing and to argue for a narrow interpretation of a whistle blower which contains three necessary social actors, each of whom takes actions in response to the others. This article explores the controversial stages of whistle blowing with an emphasis on the options and dilemmas in blowing the whistle. It argues that given its important functions and implications, whistle blowing should be encouraged and protected in institutions. The issues that have come up suggest what steps in institutions are necessary to maintain a positive culture of whistle blowing. Since external disclosures are clearly undesirable, the challenge for employers is to devise a policy and procedures which positively encourage the internal reporting of concerns.


The purposes of this study were to identify and describe the factors that influenced the choices made by mainland Chinese students and scholars to come to the United States, to identify and describe the factors that influenced their settlement in the United States, and to identify and describe the role that higher education played in this process. An explanatory multiple case study design was used as the basic strategy for the study. In-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted to describe, from the participant's perspective, the factors that influenced their successful immigration to the United States. The participants were a convenience sample of 10 Chinese immigrants from mainland China selected from several Chinese professional and social organizations in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. The participants were of different genders, professions, and ages. Key words: Higher Education, Chinese Immigration, Chinese Students and Scholars Consistent with earlier findings, the participants in this study were highly qualified students and scholars from the top educational institutions in China. Factors influencing their decisions to immigrate to the United States included lack of professional opportunities, recurrent intrusion of the state into individuals' lives, the residual mistrust of intellectuals, and related political instability. For most of the participants the immigration process was long, difficult, and stressful. The participants faced many difficulties and hardships, including financial, emotional, social, and academic. Many changed their majors or took multiple degrees to enhance their prospects of finding a job that would enable them to stay in the United States. Immigration has been a vital element in the development of the history of the United States. The fact that the United States continues to receive substantial inflows of immigrants remains a feature that distinguishes this nation from all other countries of the world. In the 1970's and early 1980's, the United States legally admitted twice as many immigrants in absolute numbers as did all of the remaining nations of the world combined (Briggs, 1984). During the last decade, the Chinese-American community increased by almost 800,000 nationwide due to a continuous stream of immigration. Many of these immigrants were professionals, students, and scholars. Since the late 1970's, sending students and scholars abroad to earn degrees and conduct research has been an integral part of China's policy of upgrading its educational systems and obtaining the professional manpower necessary to meet the goals of modernization. More than ever before, large numbers of students and scholars were sent to Western Europe, Japan, and the United States for advanced studies and training (Guangming Daily, Sept. 22, 1989). In the early years, candidates tended to be middle-aged or older, And were drawn mainly from national-echelon higher education institutions, the best quality institutions in China. Later, more and younger graduates, as well as undergraduate students were sent. The United States has consistently been the country of choice in China's practice of studying abroad, and three quarters of the total Chinese students overseas were believed to be in the United States (Reed, 1985). Many tens of thousands of students and scholars poured into the United States in a period of less than a decade. Many students sought to stay in the United States, and many of these were the top of the line scholars, selected for foreign study by China's most prestigious scientific, academic, and government institutions (Orleans, 1988). For those, who studied or were still studying in the United States and other foreign countries, various means were sought to extend their stays or to seek permanent residency in the host countries. Factors that influenced Chinese students to remain in the United States included low incomes, poor living standards, and lack of professional opportunities in China. …


The Dutch Atlantic is often ignored because for much of its history it was quite small and seemingly insignificant compared to other European colonies in the Americas. However, it began with extraordinarily ambitious conquests and colonizing schemes. The present-day Dutch Caribbean—St. Martin, Saba, Eustatius, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire—is but the remnants of what was, in the first half of the 17th century, an empire that claimed large portions of Brazil, the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. Forged during the decades-long Dutch Revolt against Spain, this budding empire collapsed soon after the Dutch gained Independence in 1648. European powers that had been allies against the Spanish turned against the Dutch to dismantle their Atlantic empire and its valuable trade. A series of wars in the second half of the 17th century reduced the Dutch colonies to a handful of smaller outposts, some of which in the Caribbean remain Dutch to this day.
 A recent wave of scholarship has emphasized the dynamism, ambition, and profitability of the Dutch Atlantic, whose fate reflected its origins in the small but dynamic Dutch Republic. Like the Republic, it was acutely sensitive to changes in international diplomacy: neither was ever strong enough to go entirely on its own. Also like the Republic, it was very decentralized. While most all of it was technically under the authority of the West India Company, a variety of arrangements in different colonies meant there was no consistent, centralized colonial policy. Moreover, like the Republic, it was never a purely "Dutch" affair. The native Dutch population was too small and too well employed by the Republic's industrious economy to build an empire alone. As the Dutch Atlantic depended heavily on the labor, capital, and energy of many people who were not Dutch—other Europeans, some Americans, and, by the 18th century, a majority of Africans—colonial Dutch language and culture were overshadowed by those of other peoples. Finally, the Dutch Atlantic also depended heavily on trade with the other European colonies, from British North America to the Spanish Main.
 The Dutch were expert merchants, sailors, manufacturers, and capitalists. They created Europe's first modern financial and banking infrastructure. These factors gave them a competitive edge even as the rise of mercantilist laws in the second half of the 17th century tried to exclude them from other countries' colonies. They also displayed a talent for a variety of colonial enterprises. New Netherland, covering the territory from present-day New York to Pennsylvania and Delaware, began as a fur-trading outpost in the 1620s. However, by the time it was captured by the English in 1664 it was rapidly becoming a "settler colonial society." Suriname and Guyana developed profitable plantations and cruel slave societies. In Africa and the Caribbean, small Dutch outposts specialized in trade of all sorts, legitimate and not, including slaves, textiles, sugar, manufactures, and guns.
 Although their territorial expansion ceased after 1670, the Dutch played an important role in expanding the sugar plantation complex of other empires, partly through their involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Until the Age of Revolutions, the Dutch Atlantic remained a profitable endeavor, keeping the Dutch involved with Latin America from Brazil to Mexico. Venezuela in particular benefitted from easy access to Dutch traders based in Curaçao. Religion played a smaller, but still important role, legitimating the Dutch state and enterprises like the slave trade, but also opening up windows of toleration that allowed Jews in particular to gain a foothold in the Americas that was otherwise denied them. Although the surviving traces of the Dutch Atlantic are small, its historical impact was tremendous. The Dutch weakened the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic Empires, opening up a path to Imperial power that would subsequently be seized by the French and British.


At the Large Hadron Collider, the identification of jets originating from b quarks is important for searches for new physics and for measurements of standard model processes. A variety of algorithms has been developed by CMS to select b-quark jets based on variables such as the impact parameters of charged-particle tracks, the properties of reconstructed decay vertices, and the presence or absence of a lepton, or combinations thereof. The performance of these algorithms has been measured using data from proton-proton collisions at the LHC and compared with expectations based on simulation. The data used in this study were recorded in 2011 at √ s = 7TeV for a total integrated luminosity of 5.0fb−1. The efficiency for tagging b-quark jets has been measured in events from multijet and t-quark pair production. CMS has achieved a b-jet tagging efficiency of 85% for a light-parton misidentification probability of 10% in multijet events. For analyses requiring higher purity, a misidentification probability of only 1.5% has been achieved, for a 70% b-jet tagging efficiency.


Understanding tillage, N, and P interactions can contribute to improved N and P utilization and crop response. This study examined the interaction effects of tillage and N rate of two N sources on N and P uptake by corn (Zea mays L.). The study was conducted on Kenyon loam (fine loamy, mixed, mesic Typic Hapludolls) soil at the Iowa State University Northeast Research and Demonstration Farm near Nashua, IA. A randomized complete block design with a split-plot arrangement in three replications was used for the two separate N source experiments. The tillage systems consist of no-tillage (NT), strip-tillage (ST), and chisel plow (CP) as main plots. Within each tillage four N rates (0, 85, 170, and 250 kg N ha -1 ) were assigned as subplots for each N source of manure (total N) and fertilizer (anhydrous ammonia) in a corn-soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] rotation. Tillage and increase in N rate beyond 85 kg ha -1 had no effect on corn grain yield with both N sources. Tillage x N rate had a significant effect on plant N and P uptake, especially at early growth stages with both N sources. Recovery percentage of applied N across all tillage systems and N rates was 40% and 27% for manure and fertilizer sources, respectively, at the 12th-leaf growth stage of corn (V12). Plant N and P uptake at V12 growth stage was 44% and 37%, respectively, across tillage systems, N sources, and N rates. The findings indicate that the N rate and seasonal variability have more influence on plant N and P uptake than does the tillage system.


BACKGROUND
Whether bone markers have prognostic value in patients with bone metastases is unknown. We investigated this question in patients with bone metastases secondary to prostate cancer and to non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other solid tumors assigned to the placebo arms of two phase III trials of zoledronic acid.

METHODS
Levels of the urinary bone resorption marker N-telopeptide and the serum bone formation marker bone-specific alkaline phosphatase were assessed every 3 months for patients with prostate cancer (n = 203) or NSCLC or other solid tumors (n = 238) and were categorized as low or high. Patients were monitored for skeletal-related events, bone disease progression, and death. The relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for these outcomes were estimated for patients with high versus low levels of each marker using intensity-based multiple event and Cox regression models. All statistical tests were two-sided.

RESULTS
In each disease group and overall, high levels of each marker at the beginning of the study were statistically significantly associated with an increased risk of negative outcomes. Use of recent marker assessments as time-dependent covariates gave even greater prognostic significance. High N-telopeptide levels were a stronger prognostic indicator of negative outcomes than bone-specific alkaline phosphatase levels. In recent assessments, patients with high N-telopeptide levels had an increased relative risk of skeletal-related events (prostate cancer, RR = 3.25, 95% CI = 2.26 to 4.68, P<.001; NSCLC and other solid tumors, RR = 1.79, 95% CI = 1.15 to 2.79, P = .010), disease progression (prostate cancer, RR = 2.02, 95% CI = 1.48 to 2.74, P<.001; NSCLC and other solid tumors, RR = 1.91, 95% CI = 1.16 to 3.15, P = .011), and death (prostate cancer, RR = 4.59, 95% CI = 2.82 to 7.46, P<.001; NSCLC and other solid tumors, RR = 2.67, 95% CI = 1.85 to 3.85, P<.001) compared with patients with low N-telopeptide levels.

CONCLUSIONS
Baseline and recent bone marker levels were predictive of negative clinical outcomes in patients with bone metastases secondary to prostate cancer and to NSCLC and other solid tumors. N-telopeptide levels were more consistent prognostic indicators than bone-specific alkaline phosphatase for all tumor types, reflecting the key role of osteolysis in the development of skeletal complications.


This study aim is to determine the incidence and the virulence of Aeromonas hydrophila in raw milk, randomly collected from Basra governorate by using of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. In this study, the total number of raw milk samples collected from cows, buffaloes and goats that kept from different the regions of Basra governorate were 90 samples. The PCR technique is modern method which regarded as a reliable tool to detect virulent gene of the A. hydrophila isolates. The PCR assays using the primers sets SerAh-F and SerAh-R resulted in the amplification of 650-bp bands from the targeted proteases gene of the A. hydrophil. The result of the present study showed that the results of PCR concerning the proteolytic activity of A. hydrophila in the tested raw milk samples according to animals' source. The higher percentage of the proteolytic activity was found in the cow's raw milk samples 40% and in the buffalo's milk samples was 26.7% while, the proteolytic activity did not find in the goat's milk samples. The association between the source of the milk sample and proteolytic A. hydrophila positive results was considered to be statistically highly significant. The higher percentage of the A. hydrophila isolates found in the raw cow milk was 40%, and the A. hydrophila isolates found in the raw buffalo milk was 26.7%, while, the A. hydrophila isolates did not find in the goat milk.


The southern end of the Paparoa Range in Westland, South Island, New Zealand, comprises an asymmetrical, southward plunging, faulted (Brunner-Mt Davy) anticline, the eastern limb of which is common with the western limb of an asymmetrical (Grey Valley) syncline forming a Neogene foreland basin (Grey Valley Trough). The faulted anticline is a classic inversion structure: compression during the Neogene, associated with the development of the modern Australia-Pacific plate boundary, caused a pre-existing normal fault zone, about which a late Cretaceous-Oligocene extensional half graben had formed (Paparoa Trough), to change its sense of displacement. The resulting basement loading formed the foreland basin, containing up to 3 km of mainly marine sedimentary section. Fission track results for apatite concentrates from 41 shallow drillhole and outcrop samples from the Greymouth Coalfield part of the Brunner-Mt Davy Anticline are reported and interpreted, to better establish the timing and amount of inversion, and hence the mechanism of inversion. The fission track results integrated with modelling of vitrinite reflectance data, show that the maximum paleotemperatures experienced during burial of the Late Cretaceous and mid-Eocene coal- bearing succession everywhere exceeded 85°C, and reached a peak of 180°C along the axis of the former basin. Cooling from maximum temperatures occurred during three discrete phases: 20-15 Ma, 12-7 Ma, and c. 2 Ma to the present. The amount of denudation has been variable across the inverted basin, decreasing westward from a maximum of c. 2.5 km during the first deformation phase, c. 1.2 km during the second phase, and 1.4 km during the third phase. It appears that exhumation over the coalfield continued for about 2 m.y. beyond the biostratigraphically determined time ranges of each of two synorogenic unconformities along the western limb of the Grey Valley Syncline. Stick-slip behaviour on the range front fault that localised the inversion is inferred. The tectonic evolution of the anticline-syncline pair at the southern end of the Paparoa Range, is therefore identical in style, and similar in timing, to the development of the Papahaua Range-Westport Trough across the Kongahu Fault Zone, in the vicinity of Buller Coalfield.


Jim Zuckerman, a photographer known for his vivid, surreal images, reveals a lifetime's worth of tricks and techniques for taking photos with that huge WOW factor.His pro secrets range from the technical to the abstract, from making an impact with complementary colors to getting picture-postcard photos of scenic sites. He'll reveal which editing tools bring out a photograph's hidden assets, how to pan the camera to control the appearance of movement, and much more. Filled with compelling, colorful photographs, this eye-catching volume will inform and inspire both beginners and more experienced photographers.


The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men from relief families, ages 18-25. A part of the New Deal of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it provided unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources on the Nation's forest and agricultural lands. The CCC was designed to provide employment for young men in relief families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression while at the same time implementing a general natural resource conservation program in every State and territory. Men enrolled in the CCC planted over 2 billion trees, built over 125,000 miles of roads and trails, constructed over 6 million erosion control structures, and spent 6 million workdays fighting forest fires. (No women were ever enrolled in the CCC.) Their efforts pioneered methodologies for conserving and restoring forest and agricultural lands. An equally remarkable accomplishment was the program's effect on the lives of the CCC young men, changing despondent youths to confident, well-prepared men who would capably defend the United States during World War II.


Jasmonates (JAs) regulate Arabidopsis thaliana wound and defence responses, pollen development, and stress-related growth inhibition. Significantly, each of these responses requires COI1, an F-box protein. Other F-box proteins interact with SKP1 and cullin proteins to form SCF complexes that selectively recruit regulatory proteins targeted for ubiquitination. To determine whether COI1 also functions in an SCF complex, we have characterized Arabidopsis proteins that bind to COI1. An Arabidopsis cDNA expression library was screened in yeast for clones that produce proteins which can bind to COI1. We recovered two SKP1 homologues and a histone deacetylase. The Arabidopsis F-box protein TIR1 interacted with SKP1 proteins, but not with the histone deacetylase. Mutant COI1 proteins revealed that the F-box is required for interaction with SKP1s, but that sequences in leucine-rich repeat domains are required for interaction with the histone deacetylase. Epitope-tagged COI1 was introduced into Arabidopsis plants and cell cultures. Co-immunoprecipitation experiments confirmed the interaction in planta of COI1 with SKP1-like proteins and histone deacetylase, and also indicated that COI1 interacted with cullin. These results suggest that COI1 forms an SCFCOI1 complex in vivo. COI1 is therefore expected to form a functional E3-type ubiquitin ligase in plants and to regulate expression of jasmonate responsive genes, possibly by targeted ubiquitination of a histone deacetylase.


Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a severe, often fatal illness in humans caused by the Ebola virus. Since the first case was identified in 1976, there have been 36 documented outbreaks with the worst and most publicized recorded in 2014 which ravaged three West African Countries, Guinea, Liberia and Serial Leone. The West African outbreak recorded 28,616 human cases, 11,310 deaths (CFR: 57–59%) and left about 17,000 survivors, many of whom have to grapple with Post-Ebola syndrome. Historically, ZEBOV has the highest virulence. Providing a historical perspective which highlights key challenges and progress made toward detecting and responding to EVD is a key to charting a path towards stronger resilience against the disease. There have been remarkable shifts in diagnostics, at risk populations, impact on health systems and response approaches. The health sector continues to gain global experiences about EVD which has shaped preparedness, prevention, detection, diagnostics, response, and recovery strategies. This has brought about the need for stronger collaboration between international organizations and seemingly Ebola endemic countries in the areas of improving disease surveillance, strengthening health systems, development and establishment of early warning systems, improving the capacity of local laboratories and trainings for health workers.


Vast emerging evidences are linking the base modifications and gene expression involved in essential metabolic pathways. Among the base modification markers extensively stud -ied, 5-methylcytosine (5mC) and its oxidative derivatives (5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC), 5-formylcytosine (5-fC), and 5-carboxylcytosine (5-caC)) dynamically occur in DNA and RNA and have been acknowledged as the important epigenetic markers involved in regulation of cellular biological processes. The modification of C has been characterized biochemically, molecularly, and phenotypically, including elucidation of its methyltransferase complexes (writer), demethylases (eraser), 10-11 translocation proteins (TETs), and direct interaction proteins (readers). The levels and the landscapes of these epigenetic markers in the epitranscriptomes and epigenomes are precisely and dynamically regulated by the fine-tuned coordination of the writers and erasers in accordance with stages of the growth, development, and reproduction as naturally programmed during the life span. In mammalian genome, the TET family is consisted of three members, including TET1, TET2, and TET3. The link between aberrant modifica tions and diseases, such as cancers, neurodegenerative disorders, and heart diseases, has been appreciated. This review article will highlight the research advances in the writers and erasers for the modifications of cytosine in genome, as well as the dual function of TET1 in tumorigenesis as a tumor suppressor and a promoter. Additionally, the future research directions are addressed.


My paper 'Stillness in Hamlet'- will focus on how Romanian productions of Hamlet after the 1989-Revolution negotiated their relation with history, that is to say, Hamlet's 16th century heritage, four centuries of international reception of Hamlet since, and more importantly, the relatively recent Romanian past which had turned Hamlet into 'a Romanian history play'. Looking at post-1989 Romanian productions of Hamlet, I begin by exploring how they strive to bring the 'still' text (which always comes with a 'history') to life in performance, and on the other hand, analysing the productions' methods of 'capturing' Hamlet (as a present story) in spite of the ephemeral quality of performance and before it becomes 'history'. For the purpose of this paper I will approach several Romanian productions of the play after 1989 with a view to their varying use of stillness: from slow-motion and immobility, to tableaux, split-screen, frozen screen, and computer projections.


Introduction: Although there are a large number of patients with chronic liver disease (CLD) in India, the clinico-etiological profile of cirrhosis of the liver and exact prognostic value of the model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score on short-term survival is scarce, and it needs further evaluation. Aims: To study the etiology of cirrhosis of the liver; observe the clinical manifestations at the time of presentation and the subsequent development of complications in patients having cirrhosis; and calculate the MELD score and assess its usefulness as a prognostic marker in short-term survival of patients with cirrhosis. Methodology: A prospective longitudinal study was performed on 50 patients who presented to our institution with CLD. Patients were subjected to clinical examination and laboratory investigations. The severity of the liver disease was assessed by the MELD score. Results: Alcohol was the most common etiological factor for cirrhosis in 60% patients followed by cryptogenic in 22%, autoimmune hepatitis in 6%, Wilson's disease in 6%, alcohol with hepatitis B in 4%, and hepatitis C in 2% patients. Patients with a MELD score of 40 or more have 0% 3-month survival rate. The 3-month survival rate in patients having a MELD score of 30 to 39 is 50%, followed by 75% in patients having a MELD score of 20 to 29. Patients with a MELD score ≤ 9 have 100% 3-month survival rate. Conclusion: Alcohol was the most common etiological factor for cirrhosis in our study. Three-month survival rates were inversely related to the MELD score.


Pediatric critical care is an important component of reducing morbidity and mortality globally. Currently, pediatric critical care in low middle-income countries (LMICs) remains in its infancy in most hospitals. The majority of hospitals lack designated intensive care units, healthcare staff trained to care for critically ill children, adequate numbers of staff, and rapid access to necessary medications, supplies and equipment. In addition, most LMICs lack pediatric critical care training programs for healthcare providers or certification procedures to accredit healthcare providers working in their pediatric intensive care units (PICU) and high dependency areas. PICU can improve the quality of pediatric care in general and, if properly organized, can effectively treat the severe complications of high burden diseases, such as diarrhea, severe malaria, and respiratory distress using low-cost interventions. Setting up a PICU in a LMIC setting requires planning, specific resources, and most importantly investment in the nursing and permanent medical staff. A thoughtful approach to developing pediatric critical care services in LMICs starts with fundamental building blocks: training healthcare professionals in skills and knowledge, selecting resource appropriate effective equipment, and having supportive leadership to provide an enabling environment for appropriate care. If these fundamentals can be built on in a sustainable manner, an appropriate critical care service will be established with the potential to significantly decrease pediatric morbidity and mortality in the context of public health goals as we reach toward the sustainable development goals.


The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was unprecedented in terms of storm activity in the United States, Mexico, Central America and Caribbean. Given the impacts of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Honduran Mosquitia sparked little attention despite being hit by two hurricanes and a tropical storm in 2005. This article recounts the history of these storms in the Afro-Caribbean community of Batalla, drawing from public weather advisories and testimony of local residents obtained through participatory research. We contextualise this local history with results from the first paleotempestological study undertaken in the Mosquitia to shed light on long-term risk of catastrophic storms in the region and to demonstrate the value of integrating these two research approaches. Our findings contribute to recent ethnographic research on hazards by describing how a coastal people understand and respond to tropical cyclones and how landscape change influences the vulnerability of a coastal area. Although residents have not witnessed a storm as intense as those documented in the paleotempestological record, their knowledge and perceptions show how tropical cyclones can be disasters while leaving behind no sedimentary records. The paleotempestological evidence, however, reminds us that catastrophic hurricanes have struck the Mosquitia in the past and will do so again in the future. Understanding the interactions between contemporary human perceptions and responses and long-term hurricane risk provides insight for emergency managers and local stakeholders to better prepare for such a catastrophic event.


The focus of my PhD is to examine the role of cultural regeneration through arts and architecture using Tate Modern as the principal case study. My analysis questions the role of culture in acting as an urban regeneration tool in north Southwark and in London more widely and how cultural output connects with those who influence the urban environment of Tate Modern.
I begin by examining the ways in which the establishment of Tate Modern as an internationally acclaimed gallery of art has influenced the cultural regeneration of Bankside and London more broadly. I discuss local planning policy in which the former Power Station was situated, in order to understand the impact of the subsequent gallery of art socially and economically. I then discuss the wider
ramifications of the establishment of Tate Modern by examining the recent history of developments around Tate Modern, in relation to the changing urban environment, as well as the jostling for urban ʻimaginaries' that potentially prioritises one direction of urban growth over another.
In discussing how the regeneration affected the social conditions and concepts of community I consider how the institution adopted and implemented a strategy of
inclusion towards the local community prior to its opening in 2000. Through my research I embedded myself within key grass roots organisations working directly
or alongside Tate Modern (Better Bankside and Bankside Open Space Trust) and the local community in order to gain close access and observation of and into the field.
Key to this project is identifying how the public interact with the gallery, and the ability of the building to act as a key urban element by knitting the hitherto underused North Southwark site into the surrounding urban fabric, whilst at the same time enabling key connections through and across the site. The focus of my research narrows from a micro to the macro-analysis in which, central to resolving the debate about the unique urban potential of the site and the building
and institution's ability to extend a definition of public within the urban environment, I focus on the spatial condition of the Turbine Hall. My analysis of
the Turbine Hall as a public space, mediated through a major arts institution, enables me to arrive at a definition of public, which transgresses the urban and
art sphere. This research is supported by an architectural theoretical analysis combined with art theory, and examines primary research material made up of
photographic images posted on the social networking site Flickr as well as my own photographic images of the area.


In this paper, we report on the synthesis and applications of semiconducting nanostructures. Nanostructures of interest were zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires and tungsten disulfide (WS2) nanotubes where transistors/phototransistors and photovoltaic (PV) energy conversion cells have been fabricated. ZnO nanowires were grown with both high- and low-temperature approaches, depending on the application. Individual ZnO nanowire side-gated transistors revealed excellent performance with a field-effect mobility of 928 cm2/V middots. ZnO networks were proposed for large-area macroelectronic devices as a less lithographically intense alternative to individual nanowire transistors where mobility values in excess of 20 cm2/V middots have been achieved. Flexible PV devices utilizing ZnO nanowires as electron acceptors and for photoinduced charge separation and transport have been presented. Phototransistors were fabricated using individual WS2 nanotubes, where clear sensitivity to visible light has been observed. The results presented here simply reveal the potential use of inorganic nanowires/tubes for various optoelectronic devices.


Berkeley, New York and London: University of California Press, 2001. 268pp. $45.00. Kimmerling's latest analysis of Israeli society is timely and important. Although as this review was being written Israelis had yet to go to the polls, the most important outcome of the elections to the 16(th) parliament (Knesset) was known well before the voting booths closed down. This outcome was that neither one of the two "major" parties -- Likud and Labor -- will be able to garner enough support to form a stable, ruling coalition. Whether Shinui -- the liberal, militantly secular center to right-wing party -- or Shas -- the ultraorthodox Sephardic party -- emerged as the third largest party, the writing was on the wall many months before the election: Israeli society is on a spiraling crash-course towards fragmentation. Gone is the "communal bonfire." Gone are the days when one and then two parties dominated the political scene, and stability, so we thought, was ours forever. Gone are the days when "Israelis" -- while separated by political positions -- were seemingly united by a shared vision of what "Israel" is, and should be. Gone, to use Kimmerling's terms, are the days of "hegemony." The days of "hegemony," according to Kimmerling, refer to the first two decades of Israeli independence, when Israeli society, and the state, were ruled by a socialist, nationalist hegemonic political bloc. It was their culture, their values and their particular view of politics which came to define and constitute Israel and Israeli national identity. The glory days of Mapai's (the leading socialist nationalist political party, and the party of Israel's first legendary Prime Minister David Ben Gurion) hegemonic rule are long gone, but it is only during this past decade that the reality of post-hegemonic Israel has truly come to surface. Hence, the results of the election reflect the consequences of long-term social, political, and economic upheavals -- not to mention the ravaging of a five year "experiment" with a new so-called "direct election to the Prime Minister" electoral scheme. The roster of political parties reveals that the majority of parties cater to narrow, sectarian, "identity"-oriented politics; the number of seats allotted to these parties reveals their seemingly irresistible appeal to the average Israeli. Thus, if a stagnating economy, a terrorism-ravaged society, and a dead peace process were not enough, the fragmentation of Israeli society has permeated the political system itself. Baruch Kimmerling, in his recent book The Invention and Decline of Israeliness sets out to address and precisely explain this dilemma: the breakdown of Israeli society. The story that Kimmerling tells is one of regeneration and decline; the construction of a unified cultural and political dominance, and its gradual replacement by a multitude of alternative cultures and subcultures. The book incorporates a socio-historical analysis of Israeli society and the Israeli state. Kimmerling provides, however, as he usually does, an alternative history, one that is absent from the more mainstream history and sociological textbooks. …


This study is an attempt to examine the existing processing, marketing system and price behaviour of tea in Bangladesh. It is mainly based on primary data collected from 10 estates and 46 traders. Price data were collected from secondary sources. Processing cost differs significantly among different types of estates. Tea is sold in two ways: direct sale from the estate and sale by auction. The participants involved in the tea marketing system are the tea estate, broker, bidder, exporter, manufacturer, blender, distributor, wholesaler and retailer. Marketing cost was the highest for bidders and the lowest for blenders. Net margin and return on investment was found highest for retailers. Profit from packet tea was greater than that from open tea. Price instability, inadequate storage facilities, strike, lack of market information, scarcity of plywood, shortage of capital, higher amount of charges and barriers created by law are the important problems faced by the tea producers and traders. Tea production increased mainly due to rise in yield and growth rate of former period was much higher than that of latter period. Although nominal price increased but real price remained more or less same during the study period. Nominal price rise in the first period was found higher than that of second period. Marketing margin in the first period remained static whereas it went up significantly in the latter period. Seasonal price and quantity variations were not related and variation in quantity was higher than that of price.


Since Astor Piazzolla's death in 1992, his 6 Tango-Etudes pour flute seule (1987) have quickly entered the flute oeuvre to become standard Western 'classical' concert repertoire, despite their association with tango as the core of their musical style. Though Piazzolla's music has much musical appeal abroad, performative differences exist between 'foreign' and Argentinean musical interpretations of the tango – and by extension to the performance of this score – due to various misappropriations of both the notation and the cultural background, which have often been used to suggest an 'authentic' reading. As a way to bridge the gap between the two styles, the current tango performance literature largely focuses on didactic, imitative approaches to the genre, with only limited discussion of how various essential cultural references might pragmatically influence an interpretation of Piazzolla's published repertoire. This thesis addresses ways in which the 'authentic' has been constructed in the tango genre in a variety of contexts both in Argentina and abroad, and how this understanding can suggest a new reading of the score of Piazzolla's 6 Etudes. Current discussions from the field of (ethno)musicology as well as other disciplines within the social sciences are incorporated. The quantitative approaches used draw upon a wide range of performance analyses for understanding Piazzolla's own performances, and those from tango and western players. The author's field work in Buenos Aires and experience as a conservatoire-trained flautist is combined with various qualitative discourse analyses. Initial concepts of what constitutes a pure cultural setting of Piazzolla's scores are challenged, and then expanded from current viewpoints to include various vital cultural practices inseparable from the notation. New approaches to the interpretational processes that are currently found to exist among western flautists when performing this work are pragmatically demonstrated so as to encourage fresh renditions of not only the 6 Etudes, but also Piazzolla's other compositions from the same period.


Research the aim of which was to find out stratification of main exhaust components outside the tailpipe of the vehicle was realized in Alternative Fuels Research Laboratory of Latvia University of Agriculture using two commercially produced testing vehicles (diesel and gasoline) and exhaust gas analytical system AVL SESAM FTIR. Additionally there was created a gas testing camera allowing to measure concentration of exhaust gas components in different heights and windless conditions. Regulated and unregulated emissions from gasoline and diesel engines were measured and discussed. Results obtained during the measurements showed main stratification of toxic components from both engine types from 0.6 to 1.1 m from the ground making a risk to get some health problems by inhalation, especially for children. Main components (NOx, CO, HC) of exhaust gases of gasoline engines stay in the air for about 15 minutes in height of 1.0 m from the ground level, while methane and acetylene stay in the air for a 15 minutes in height of 0.6 m from the ground level.


Baltimore Woods Nature Center's Nature in the City school programs provides K-6 students in the Syracuse City School District with hands-on learning experiences that connect them with their environment. To improve the quality of Baltimore Woods Nature Center's Nature in the City (NITC) program, as well as assess changes in 5 grade students' environmental literacy, assessments were conducted in all participating schools. Assessments were given before and after NITC programs in each 5 grade classroom. Preand post-assessments scores were calculated for each student, and these scores were used to compute statistics for individual schools and the overall district. Paired t-tests were run at a 95% level of confidence (α = 0.05). Following data analysis it was found that the overall participating students showed a significant increase from preto post-scores (percent change of 46.3%). Ten out the 12 schools in this report showed an individual significant increase. Results from Delaware and Porter suggest there is room for improvement in the program. When asked, "will you change your habits to save energy in your daily life," and "do you your actions impact the environment," the initial response was positive with >40% answering "yes," or "I already do." This positive response increased by a small margin of 1 and 3% from preto post-scores. The overall findings of this report show that the Nature in the City program is effective at increasing participants' environmental literacy. This positive change in opinions about the environment, and the significant increase of scientific knowledge, will equip students who participated in the NITC program with the tools they will need to make environmentally conscious decisions and act in its favor. This not only benefits the global environment, but also helps Baltimore Woods Nature Center meet their goal of increasing students' knowledge and engaging them in hands-on activities.


This project investigated the possibility of a user's gaze being tracked within the area of a computer monitor bounded by multiple light sources, each stimulating an SSVEP. If realised, such a system would allow a spatial arrangement of interactive elements around a screen, rather than the discrete list of commands accessible through existing SSVEP based BCIs. Research-level EEG equipment would make the proposed BCI prohibitively expensive for home users. Thus, investigation was made into the utility of inexpensive consumer-grade EEG equipment, as is available for computer-gaming. SSVEPs were elicited using initially a traditional strobe light source and then a set of individual LEDs, as necessary for the simultaneous stimulation of multiple SSVEPs. Clear responses were recorded using the research EEG system for both the strobe and LED sources; however the consumer system lacked sufficient sensitivity to reliably detect the SSVEPs. Tests with two stimulating LEDs showed that two SSVEPs of differing frequencies be resolved simultaneously, and that the amplitude of the response decreases as the user's gaze is directed further from the stimulating light source. Further work will aim to derive the user's gaze location within an area bounded by multiple stimulating LEDs, using the relative amplitudes of the elicited SSVEPs.


Crowdfunding is a phenomenon that is subject to a great growth during the recent years, and the growth rate doesn't seem to stagnate. When new legislation named the JOBS Act in the U.S. becomes effective in late 2015, crowd equity will surely become a popular tool for financing businesses. Because crowdfunding great popularity is caused by the possibility to reach out to crowds through the internet, it is a global phenomenon, why it's relevant to examine current legislations in jurisdictions. This thesis covers an examination of Swedish laws of how they govern crowdfunding, and also suggestions on how the laws should be changed to more efficiently correspond with the purposes of crowdfunding.


In this paper, I assess the 1986 Tax Reform Act relative to the tax system that might have evolved over the several years following 1986 had that particular tax reform not been enacted. Had tax reform not been enacted, I believe that the pattern of steady tax increases, particularly corporate tax increases and tax increases on high-income individuals such as occurred in the 1982 and 1984 tax acts would have continued. I also believe that the 1986 Tax Reform Act introduced an income tax system that will be quite stable; broad changes, in particular changes that raise a large amount of income tax revenues, are unlikely for many years. So I am comparing the tax structure of the 1986 Tax Reform Act to a system that, in part, has an inferior structure, but that provides more revenues. Since I believe that the most important tax policy goal in 1986 and later should have been to raise revenues, not to revise the structure of the tax system, I believe that the 1986 Tax Reform Act was harmful. Tax reform not only did not raise revenues, it has made it more difficult to raise revenues in the future, without providing significant offsetting benefits.


A mid-eighteenth-century traveller noted with surprise that parents in London regularly took their children to watch hangings. Upon returning home, the children would be whipped so that they would remember the spectacle.1 Yet by the 1780s, such literal dependence upon the visual as part of punishment was in retreat. Increasingly, the criminal justice system relied on what remained unseen but imagined. This essay explores how eighteenth-century England discovered the importance of imagination in criminal punishment. It traces the remaking of London's public execution ritual from a spectacle that sought to maximize the number of spectators to its abandonment of large-scale public processions. The sources that have been drawn upon are different from those used for most legal history: stillborn reform proposals, manuscripts left by the architect of Newgate Prison, fabulous and frightening images of punishment conjured up by private citizens, voyeuristic drawings of hangings, and the sketchy notes of administrative figures who hoped to set boundaries for voluble execution crowds. Such fragmentary and obscure sources, aesthetic theory, and the inner world of imagination may not seem significant for shaping the development of criminal legal process. Yet punishment is a cultural construction. Not simply the boundaries of criminality-what activities are criminalized or how seriously society will punish offenders-but the very representational quality of punishment itself becomes the outer garb of criminal law. The problem is how the symbolic meaning of public executions and other punitive rituals should be interpreted.


ABSTRACT CCR5 is the major HIV-1 entry coreceptor. RANTES/CCL5 analogs are more potent inhibitors of infection than native chemokines; one class activates and internalizes CCR5, one neither activates nor internalizes, and a third partially internalizes without activation. Here we show that mutations in CCR5 transmembrane domains differentially impact the activity of these three inhibitor classes, suggesting that the transmembrane region of CCR5, a key interaction site for inhibitors, is a sensitive molecular switch, modulating receptor activity.


A simple hydrothermal method was employed to synthesize 3D hierarchical ZnO nanorods deposited on Si (100) substrate at different growth temperatures (110 and 90 o C) within 3 h. The structure, mode and composition of hierarchical ZnO nanorods were investigated by XRD, FESEM and EDX spectroscopy. The polycrystalline ZnO nanostructures products were indexed as hexagonal wurtzite structured, while the morphology was urchin like ZnO nanorods with different aspect ratio of nanorods and stoichiometric. The photoluminescence (PL) properties were studied of as-grown ZnO samples dependent on various growth temperatures. The PL results after UV excitation source were shown a single broad Vis emission peak for both samples with absents of UV emission peak. The emission edge of Vis peak was exhibited blue-shift due to increase temperature growth, and that suggest enhancement in hierarchical ZnO nanorods crystallinity. Oxygen deficiency is evidence on the creation various defects types in hierarchical ZnO nanorods. It is responsible on Vis emission bands. The results demonstrate promising future for the hierarchal ZnO nanostructure which could be applied in optoelectronics and gas sensing.


This article is written in what can be described as the "post-centennial" era, post 2017, the year marked by the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. 2017 marked a shift in the conversation around and between Denmark and its former colonies in the Caribbean, most notably the increasing access of Virgin Islanders to the millions of archival records that remain stored in Denmark as they began to emerge in online databases and temporarily in exhibitions. That year the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, a group of four women (La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer and Tiphanie Yanique) from the Virgin Islands and from various disciplinary backgrounds, also emerged with an intention to center not only the archive, but also archival access and the nuances of archival interpretation and intervention. This collaborative essay, Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies), is a direct engagement with the archives and archival production. Each member responds to one of the prison records of the four women taken to Denmark for their participation in the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Their reflections combine elements of speculation, fiction, black feminitist theory and critique as modes of responding to the gaps and silences in the archive, as well as finding new questions to be asked.


The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker's short story, "Here I Am, Laughing with Boers"; fly over the American midwest in George Bilgere's poem, "Way Above Illinois"; and read about life as a border patrol agent in New Mexico in Francisco Cantú's essay, "Bajadas." The pieces jump from Manhattan to China to Idaho, but the common thread of humanity is never lost.Read new prose from Meng Jin, Ryan Ruff Smith, and Joan Murray, and poetry from Matthew Lippman, Natalie Shapero, and more. The winners of our Emerging Writer's Contest appear here, along with the announcement of our Zacharis Award winner.This issue is dedicated to William H. Berman (1936-2015), an advisory board member and Emerson College overseer.


As the third most common cancer of the gastrointestinal tract, esophageal cancer has a rather worse prognosis treated with current therapy strategies, and a poor 5-year survival rate lower than 15%. Recent years, emerging immunotherapy has showed a gratifying effect in treating other solid tumors which illuminates its usage for esophageal cancers. Immunotherapy for esophageal cancer basically includes adoptive-cell-therapy-based, antibody-based and vaccine-based therapies, and all of which have shown preliminary favorable results in treating esophageal cancer. However, due to the rather lower mutation rate and a tough microenvironment inside the cancer, promising immunotherapies like immune checkpoint blockade drugs, gene-modified-T cell therapies are hindered by the immunosuppressive factors from microenvironment. Future endeavors will be focusing on targeting immunosuppressive factors, combining immunotherapies with classical treatments to create a satisfying effect.


Abstract Through an innovative trade-in-task case study, we explore how Nokia, which is historically one of the most important mobile phone manufacturers in the world, offshored the development and production of three distinct mobile phones at three different points in time. Adjacent to these processes, we find that the value creation in areas such as design and manufacturing knowledge has rapidly shifted away from advanced economies to emerging economies. Moreover, we find that the value added captured by Nokia decreased dramatically over the studied time period. Based on our results, we uss more generally the challenge of multinational corporations to preserve value and how the realisation of the benefits of offshoring must be assessed with respect to the altered requirements for controlling value-adding activities.


Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers." And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. (Mk. 11:15–18)


Europe is now at a crucial juncture in deciding how to deploy data driven technologies in ways that encourage democracy, prosperity and the well-being of European citizens. Normative preferences about how related technology laws ought to be designed should define sustainable exponential innovation policy. These preferences are dynamic and contextual.

The upcoming European Data Act provides a major window of opportunity to change the story. In this respect, it is key that the European Commission takes firm action, removes overbearing policy and regulatory obstacles, strenuously harmonizes relevant legislation and provides concrete incentives and mechanisms for access, sharing and re-use of data. The article argues that to ensure an efficiently functioning European data-driven economy, a new and as yet unused term must be introduced to the field of AI & law: the right to process data for machine learning purposes.

To make AI and machine learning thrive, we should critically re-examine the applicability and scope of intellectual property rights to data, including copyrights, sui generis database rights and trade secrets. The article demonstrates that exclusive de facto possession or control over machine learning input training, testing and validation datasets hinders healthy competition, a fair level playing field and rapid European innovation. The article rejects exclusive legal ownership rights over autonomously machine generated non-personal data, including AI made creations and inventions: this output belongs to the public domain. Machines do not need incentives, people need freedom of expression and businesses need freedom to operate.

Synchronous to harmonized legislation, the social impact of digital transformation can be balanced and regulated by the architecture of digital systems. Embedding values in design should become a fundamental starting point of our data paradigm.

Data has become a primary resource that should not be enclosed or commodified per se, but used for the common good. Commons based production and data for social good initiatives should be stimulated by the state. We need not to think in terms of exclusive, private property on data, but in terms of rights and freedoms to use, (modalities of) access, process and share data. If necessary and desirable for the progress of society, the state can implement new forms of property. Against this background the article explores normative justifications for open innovation, drawing inspiration from the works of canonical thinkers such as Locke, Marx, Kant and Hegel.

Whether or not data as digital assets are ultimately admitted to the numerus clausus of legal objects i.e. acknowledged as subject matter eligible for private ownership, or whether other modalities and states of property are being developed, the article maintains that there should also be exceptions to (de facto, economic or legal) ownership claims on data that provide user rights and freedom to operate in the setting of AI model training.

The article concludes that this exception is conceivable as a legal concept analogous to a quasi, imperfect usufruct in the form of a right to process data for machine learning purposes. A combination of usus and fructus (ius utendi et fruendi), not for land but for primary resource data. A right to process data that works within the context of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), and that fits in the EU acquis communautaire. Such a right makes access, sharing and re-use of data possible, and helps to fulfil the European Strategy for Data's desiderata.


"This study canvasses employer, academic, and student perspectives on the barriers experienced by international students in gaining exposure to the Western Australian workplace through Work-integrated Learning (WIL). It explores international-student participation in work placements—one example of WIL offerings—as part of their university studies. WIL is highly regarded by international students who seek to gain local experience to improve their employment prospects; it is a key consideration for study destination. WIL also holds significant benefits for industry. These potential benefits include gaining cultural insight, linguistic expertise and, potentially, deepening existing collaborative global partnerships through the placement of participating international students. Findings indicate that a relatively low proportion of international students participate in WIL compared with domestic students. Implications of employer reluctance to engage with international students extend beyond individual employability and may affect international education's status as one of Australia's largest export industries. Stakeholder strategies to alleviate barriers to international students participating in WIL are discussed."


This article presents an ecologically informed approach for comprehending the nature of and perceived changes to the relationship between Indiana's kindergarten-5 classrooms and public history institutions. This perspective offers a lens for understanding the degree to which public history institutions actualize social studies learning and how public policy currently influences their associations with kindergarten-5 classrooms. Consideration was given to how respondents reported exchanges with kindergarten-5 learners, elementary educators, and the extent to which state public history organizations encouraged schools to utilize their resources for extending social studies instruction outside of the classroom. Baseline data gathered in 2007 indicated that: (1) state public history organizations adapted their mission statements to better reflect federal and state educational policy and (2) federal and state educational policy were contributing to both children and teachers being left out of the museum experience. Based on the results, the authors call for sustained inquiry to ascertain the impact such changes are having on the status and quality of kindergarten-5 social studies instruction across the United States.


The proposal of
this work is to detect the existence of patterns of interactive sequential
discursive behavior in three single Mexican adult women from retrospective
analysis of the interview between them and the interviewer. The applied
methodology was observational. It was developed iteratively and thoroughly, a
category system as an instrument of observation, and then it was undergone a
recategorization process. The number of sessions observed was three, of three
hours a duration. Intersessional sequential analysis was used through the
SDIS-GSEQ software. Thus we find that the first significant categories in order
of occurrence are: Being for her self, Paradox and Independence. The following
in significant probability of occurrence position are: Dependency,
self-satisfaction, Complementary, Comprehension andNormal. Finally, the categories that are
inhibitory occurrence probabilistically negative are: Responsible, Myself,
Self-understanding. Finding out these women are learning to live for themselves
within a process of emancipation from their families and social structures.


The palatal coverage is considered as an auxiliary element in the distribution of tensile strains on implant maxillary total prosthesis (implant overdentures) bases, either implant-supported or retained. However, complaints in some patients due to palate and phonetic impairment are constant. The palatal coverage removal would allow the improvement of these issues as well as pharyngeal control, salivary flow and hygiene. Thus, this literature review proposed to analyze the survival rates of dental implants retaining an implant maxillary overdenture without palatal coverage in edentulous maxilla. The review was conducted in Medline database, via PubMed between 2000 to 2016 period, and limited to English language publications. The search strategy took the following key-words, referencing title and / or abstract: dental implants; maxilla; maxillary; overdenture; and palatal coverage. According the data, the rehabilitation of the maxillary edentulous with four implant-supported overdentures with bar attachments and implant-retained with ball attachments has shown great survival rates of dental implants, but there are a few studies reporting the survival rate of implant overdentures.  It was concluded that the prosthetic rehabilitation of total maxillary edentulous patients is viable through palateless implant overdentures when a minimum of four to six implants were used with careful planning and execution. Keywords Dental Implants; Maxilla; Overdenture and Palatal coverage.


In online collaborative learning environments, students create content and construct their own knowledge through complex interactions over time. To facilitate effective social learning and inclusive participation in this context, insights are needed into the correspondence between student-contributed artifacts and their subsequent popularity among peers. In this study, we represent student artifacts by their (a) contextual action logs (b) textual content, and (c) set of instructor-specified features, and use these representations to predict artifact popularity measures. Through a mixture of predictive analysis and visual exploration, we find that the neural embedding representation, learned from contextual action logs, has the strongest predictions of popularity, ahead of instructor's knowledge, which includes academic value and creativity ratings. Because this representation can be learnt without extensive human labeling effort, it opens up possibilities for shaping more inclusive student interactions on the fly in collaboration with instructors and students alike.


The field of Information Systems is about bridging the digital and information divide. Advances in the digital world enable information to be stored and structured in a manner that facilitates effective use of the information for future modelling purposes. Elderly inpatient falls are a common global phenomenon, and an inpatient fall incident can have severe consequences for the patient, caregivers and the healthcare provider. An inpatient fall can result from many causes and its risk can be increased through the combination of these causes. Many risk factors of elderly inpatient falls have been reported in various papers in the literature. However, a logical comprehensive categorisation of all these factors does not currently exist. The objective of this research in progress is to come up with a generic categorisation of the risk factors for elderly inpatient falls alongside the usage of a contextual model to illustrate the inherent interactions amongst these various factors. In addition, we found that the effect of the interaction amongst some risk factors is time dependent which also needs to be incorporated in the contextual model. Such comprehensive categorisation and contextual risk model will help health providers in the process of profiling of an elderly inpatient with respect to his/her fall risk. It is useful to experts in health informatics in formulating models to automate this process.


C Influences of fishery activities on herring gulls and great black-backed gulls (Larus argentatus, L. marinus) wintering on the island of Helgoland, south-eastern North Sea, were studied. When cod fishery discards were available close to the island, 83 to 87 % of the gulls' pellets contained fishery discard remains and 70 to 73 % of all pellets consisted exclusively of these. At times when no nearby trawling took place (Christmas/New Year), numbers of herring gulls dropped by up to 86 % and numbers of great black-backed gulls by up to 80%. Similar declines were observed during a trawling moratorium in February 1998. Adults of both gull species had a significantly lower body mass during periods of no fishing around the island (13 and 24% less, respectively). Retraps of single gulls support these findings. The results show for the first time a strong influence of discard availability on numbers and body condition of large gulls wintering in the south-eastern North Sea. Effects on gull winter mortality and thus on population dynamics can be assumed.


Standard hidden Markov model (HMM) based automatic speech recogni- tion (ASR) systems use phonemes as subword units. Thus, development of ASR system for a new language or domain depends upon the availability of a phoneme lexicon in the target language. In this paper, we introduce the notion of probabilistic lexical modeling and present an ASR approach where a) first, the relationship between acoustics and phonemes is learned on available acoustic and lexical resources (not necessarily from the target language or domain), and then b) probabilistic grapheme-to-phoneme rela- tionship is learned using the acoustic data of targeted language or domain. The resulting system is a grapheme-based ASR system. This brings in two potential advantages. First, development of lexicon for target language or domain becomes easy i.e., creation of a grapheme lexicon where each word is transcribed by its orthography. Second, the ASR system can exploit both acoustic and lexical resources of multiple languages and domains. We evaluate and show the potential of the proposed approach through a) an in-domain study, where acoustic and lexical resources of target language or domain are used to build an ASR system, b) a monolingual cross-domain study, where acoustic and lexical resources of another domain are used to build an ASR system for a new domain, and c) a multilingual cross-domain study, where acoustic and lexical resources of multiple languages are used to build multi-accent non-native speech recognition system.


The present study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of naringin, a naturally occurring flavonoid, on experimental esophagitis in Wistar rats. Animals divided into six groups and received carboxymethyl cellulose (0.25%, 3 ml/kg, sham control), standard pantoprazole (30 mg/kg) and naringin (100, 200 and 300 mg/kg) for 7 d orally and subjected to pylorus and forestomach ligation. All animals were sacrificed after 8 h and evaluated for various physiological parameters like total acidity, free acidity, gastric pH, volume of gastric juices and esophagitis index. Esophagitis regions were further subjected to estimation of various oxidative stress parameters including thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, glutathione, catalase and superoxide dismutase. Later, histopathology and scanning electron microscopy of esophagitis regions were also performed to evaluate protective action of naringin. Results revealed that treatment with pantoprazole and naringin significantly inhibited the gastric secretion, total acidity and esophagitis index. Various oxidative stress parameters were restored to normal level in the treatment groups. Histopathology and scanning electron microscopy analyses demonstrated the protective action of naringin as evidenced by normal tissue architecture of esophagitis regions. These findings indicate the potential of naringin against esophagitis.


IN OCTOBER 1994, democracy returned to Haiti and our nation moved from death to life. As the guns were silenced and the rule of law restored, Haitians poured into the streets to celebrate freedom and their renewed opportunity to participate in the democratic life of the nation. With the inauguration of a new president in February, Haiti passed a second milestone: for the first time in its history, Haiti experienced a peaceful transition from one democratically-elected head-of-state to another. For 200 years, power transfers occurred when an individual or group seized rule from an equally illegitimate regime. But 10 years to the day that Jean-Claude Duvalier fled Haiti, the nation's second democratically-elected president took office, demonstrating that Haiti's move to democracy is irreversible. Despite these achievements, the Haitian people know that the success of democracy is measured not only by elections but also by the degree to which a democratic government responds to the needs of its people. Today the Haitian people are asking for the establishment of a state of law, justice, jobs, food, literacy, education, health care, and an end to corruption within the state. To meet these needs Haiti must complete the process of building a state of law and bring to justice those who violated human rights during the coup regime. Moving beyond political and legal reform, the nation must also remove economic and social barriers which keep the majority of Haitians in abject poverty. And finally the nation must institutionalize the participation of the people in the governance of the nation. The coup d'etat of September 1991 was a brutal attempt to silence the voices of the Haitian people and to reinstate oppressive power structures. For three years the Haitian people stubbornly resisted. Those in power responded with a massive campaign of violence, which claimed over 5,000 lives, forced 300,000 people into hiding, and forced another 100,000 individuals to flee by boat. Despite this unrelenting use of state violence, the coup leaders could not govern the nation. The failure of the coup regime to consolidate its power demonstrated a crisis within the traditional structure of Haitian society, which had historically always been able to maintain control through force. For three years Haitians welcomed the embargo, struggled for change, and finally fled when other options proved untenable. This resistance spurred the international community to act in support of their quest for democracy and human rights. With the restoration of democracy, Haitians finally attained the opportunity to dismantle the system of repression that had impeded national development for two centuries. Since its inception, the Haitian army had been the primary instrument of that repression. Under the rule of the coup regime, the 7,000-man army pilfered 40 percent of the national budget while the state failed to provide basic health care or education. The army, a source of internal repression, had never once served its purported mission of national defense. When I returned to the country in October 1994, the Haitian army was so despised by the population it had brutalized that soldiers found it difficult to walk the streets of Port-au-Prince in their uniforms. Popular sentiment, expressed through demonstrations and graffiti, called for the complete dismantlement of the army. My government responded to this desire with both speed and caution by first retiring the majority of the officers and then demobilizing most of the soldiers. The final step, the legal dissolution of the Haitian army, was left to the parliament. In a symbolic demonstration of our break with the past, we transformed the former army headquarters into the newly formed Ministry of Women. The building in which several past coups originated now serves to give women a larger forum within the government. The dismantling of the army has cleared the way for the establishment of a state of law and for the construction of an independent judicial system. …


In many ultrasound measurement situations, deriving models for the acoustic wave propagation through the system being studied is complicated. In such cases, we are often limited to study correlations between observed acoustic properties and the underlying physical properties. Sometimes this can be automated by use of statistical or empirical models. However, this often requires extensive calibration, and it does not provide as much understanding of the underlying system as we would like. In this paper we present a general methodology for estimation of parameters of physical models based on indirect observations. The principle is demonstrated for a system where the kinetic behavior of a chemical reaction is modeled, and where measurements of ultrasound attenuation are used to estimate the model parameters. Experimental results show that we can use ultrasound to measure mass fractions of the different constituents as a function of the reaction time.


Goblet cell densities were determined in the eyes of normal subjects and in the eyes of patients with various ocular surface diseases using an impression cytological technique. For normal eyes goblet cell densities on the interpalpebral bulbar and inferior palpebral ocular surfaces were 443 (+/- 266 [+/- SD]) and 1,972 (+/- 862) cells millimeter, per square, respectively. All patients in the ocular surface disease groups had decreased goblet cell densities compared with subjects with normal eyes. Compared with normal eyes, eyes with keratoconjunctivitis sicca (KCS) demonstrated a 17% greater goblet cell loss on the interpalpebral bulbar compared with the inferior palpebral ocular surface, while eyes with blepharitis and secondary KCS demonstrated an 8% greater loss on the inferior palpebral surface compared with the interpalpebral bulbar ocular surface. Eyes with cicatricial ocular pemphigoid and Stevens-Johnson syndrome demonstrated greater than 95% goblet cell loss on both the interpalpebral bulbar and inferior palpebral ocular surfaces compared with normal eyes.


This paper reports a classroom study in which group learners brainstormed ideas in virtual group space and justified their ideas through articulating their rationales in the shared rationale space. The investigation focused on the learners' practices of articulating and sharing rationales. The results suggest that group members would brainstorm the ideas and generate rationales to justify the ideas before reading the others' ideas and rationales. Also, the members in general brainstormed all the ideas first and then elaborated the rationales to justify the ideas; and grouped the shared rationales according to their authors. The group members' reasoning styles were examined by using Rhetorical Structure Theory to analyze the shared rationales. It was found that similar reasoning styles existed across the groups. Additionally, the group context seemed to have affected the members' strategies of using contextual and additional information to justify their ideas. Several design implications are presented to support the practices of articulating and sharing rationales in virtual group workspace. The authors also articulate how their work contributes to other research areas such as project management, crowdsourcing, and online deliberation. Based on their study, the authors argue for a rationale-based knowledge management approach to complex collective activities in the online environment.


Abstract We have reviewed large studies that demonstrate different methods that have been adopted to prevent or delay the progression to Type 2 diabetes in high-risk individuals. The principal interventions include behavioural modifications in diet and physical activity, use of insulin sensitisers such as metformin and glitazones, and alpha-glucosidase inhibitors. Although there is no evidence of benefit in health outcomes from large-scale population screening for impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) or impaired fasting glucose (IFG), screening of high-risk individuals has merit. During prolonged periods of dysglycaemia that precede diabetes, individuals remain largely asymptomatic. These periods can be from 8–10 years as extrapolated from the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study data. This phase of pre-diabetes is not innocuous, and is often associated with the concurrent development of complications, which highlights the importance of early detection and treatment of this 'silent killer'. Although different methods for screening of diabetes are available, preferred techniques include measurement of fasting plasma glucose and 2 hr post-load plasma glucose. People should be encouraged to eat correct diets, be active, and maintain a healthy weight—these behaviours have other benefits in addition to preventing or delaying the onset of Type 2 diabetes. There are various diagnostic criteria used for the diagnosis of diabetes. In this article we have presented two sets of criteria, one from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the other from the American Diabetes Association (ADA).


Causal Inference Using Educational Observational Data: Statistical Bias Reduction Methods and Multilevel Data Extensions Jose M. Hernandez Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Robert Abbott, Ph.D. College of Education This study utilizes a data driven simulation design, which deviates from the traditional model-based approaches most commonly adopted in quasi-experimental Monte Carlo (MC) simulation studies, to answer two main questions. First, this study explores the finite sample properties of the most utilized quasi-experimental methods that control for observable selection bias in the field of education and compares them to traditional regression methods. Second, this study lends an insight into the effects of ignoring the multilevel structure of data commonly found in the field when using quasi-experimental methods. Specifically, treatment effects were estimated using (1) Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multiple linear regression (treatment effects, adjusted for mean differences on confounders), (2) Propensity Score Matching (PSM) using nearest neighbor 1:n with replacement, (3) Propensity Score Matching using Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) of the propensity score, and (4) Propensity Score Matching using Subclassification (Subclassification). There were five main factors that were varied to simulate the data, all of which were fully crossed, as follows: Four sample sizes (600, 1000, 2000, and 5000); three association levels among simulated variables (low, moderate, high); two treatment exposure levels (25% and 50%); four treatment effect sizes using Cohen's d (none, low, moderate, and high); and five levels of ICCs (0, .10, .20, .30, and .40). These 480 conditions were each analyzed with four methods of analysis, for a total of 1920 conditions. Additionally, using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), an applied study demonstration of the different estimation methods in question was performed and compared to the simulation results. Findings indicate that under certain conditions all methods compared perform the same and have similar estimates of treatment effects. Additionally, when the clustering of the data is ignored bias is introduced for smaller sample size conditions.


Background and Purpose: Spirituality is part of the psycho-spiritual dimension and encourages a feeling of piety in an individual. One can feel overjoyed and blessed if his/her main concern in life is to attain true intimacy with God. The purpose of this study was to determine students' experiences and perspectives about spiritual vitality at Golestan University of Medical Sciences in 2011. Materials and Methods: In this qualitative study, 50 students were recruited via purposeful sampling by considering maximum variety and data saturation. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were conducted. The interviews were transcribed word by word and were analyzed through content analysis. Informed consent forms (about enrollment in the study and voice recording) were obtained from the participants. Results: Based on data analysis, major themes including "intimacy with God", "freshness and vitality", "calmness", "activities affecting spiritual vitality", and "real and perpetual vitality" were extracted. Conclusion: The students could experience a sense of spiritual vitality if they were able to establish a close relationship with God and act based on His will.


Developed through research and community collaboration with the out-of-home care (OOHC) sector, including people with lived experience and local providers, Live, Learn, Grow aims to address some of the barriers faced by care leavers in learning about, accessing and engaging in higher education. Over 40,000 children and young people in Australia are currently in OOHC. Research shows Australians who have a previous OOHC experience are less likely to commence and complete tertiary education, and more likely to be unemployed, or employed in low paid, low skilled roles. Through collaboration with local agencies, Live, Learn, Grow has provided information about higher education pathways to young people in care, as well as on-campus experience days. The Navigator/Linker role has also provided support for first-year university students, with participants highlighting this support as a key factor in their decision to remain engaged in university study past their first month.


At the outbreak of World War II, four scientists left their comfortable college teaching positions to work for the government. Three served in uniform, the fourth oversaw contracts for the Navy. Such dramatic changes in life styles during the period were common -- for men. But these established scientists were women, and each made significant contributions to a Navy embroiled in a modern, science-dependent war. Mary Sears, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution planktonologist, headed the Hydrographic Office's Oceanographic Unit. Grace Hopper, a Yale-trained mathematician, went to the Bureau of Ships Computation Laboratory at Harvard where she worked on one of the first computers, churning out essential data for ordnance and other projects. Florence van Straten, a New York University chemist, served as an aerological engineer analyzing the use of weather in combat. Mina Rees was the chief technical aide to the applied mathematics panel of the National Defense Research Committee. This book firmly places the women within the context of their times. Deeply rooted in previously unexamined primary sources, the work helps readers understand the personal and professional experiences of women in the military and the attitudes they faced, and fully appreciate the educational and occupational barriers faced by women scientists in the 1930s and 1940s.The author focuses on their efforts during the war, but also discusses the women's skills and training, tells how they came to war work, and examines the contributions they made once there. She further considers how the war changed their lives, especially their professional lives, and how it affected their future careers. While other books havebeen written about women in the military, this is the first to focus on Navy women scientists.


Child labor is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. We show how reducing vulnerability can affect child labor and schooling. We exploit the extension of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution (MFI) that was set up as a randomized controlled trial and accompanied by household panel surveys. Together with increased coverage the MFI offered assistance with claim procedures in treatment branches. Using Difference-in-difference techniques we find lower incidence of child labor and lower child labor earnings caused by the innovation. Separating the two parts of the innovation package, the effects of claim assistance are mostly insignificant, while increased insurance coverage has large effects on child labor outcomes and days missed at school. Consistent with a theoretical model we develop in this paper, the effect is largely due to an ex-ante feeling of protection as opposed to a shock-mitigation effect.


Over the past forty years research has attempted to understand and define the concept of meaning in life.  A variety of definitions of meaning in life have been proposed but all theories agree that meaning in life is an important factor which contributes to well-being.  Studies have endeavoured to identify what gives meaning to life, to whether having meaning in life brings positive returns and to what life is like without meaning.  Factors such as being in a stable relationship, having experienced a loss or being involved in a religion, have been suggested as possible influences on how individuals experience meaning in life and why they may search for meaning.  Theory has speculated that if an individual is searching for meaning in life, that they may be distressed.  Not having meaning in life has been shown to impact negatively on well-being, but what is happening for an individual who is searching is unclear. This study investigated the hypothesized two-dimensional typology of the presence and searching subscales in the Meaning in Life Questionnaire and examined the relationship between presence of, and search for meaning in life and subjective and psychological well-being.  Utilizing a survey design, 106 participants completed the Meaning in Life Questionnaire and the Depression Happiness Scale.  Pearson's correlation and a bivariate scatterplot support the independence of the two-dimensional typology.  Statistical analysis revealed significant main effects for presence of, and search for, meaning in life on depression/happiness scores as well as for the interaction between presence, search and depression/happiness levels.  Participants who reported high levels of search for meaning and low levels of presence of meaning in life recorded clinical levels of depression.  Surprisingly, participants who reported high levels of presence of, and search for meaning in life also recorded high subjective well-being.  Only when presence of meaning in life is low does searching appear to impact on recorded levels of well-being.  Possible theoretical frameworks which may explain these results and suggestions for future research are discussed.


Abstract. Over recent decades oil palm plantations have rapidly expanded across Southeast Asia (SEA). According to the United Nations, oil palm production in SEA increased by a factor of 3 from 1995 to 2010. We investigate the impacts of current (2010) and near-term future (2020) projected oil palm expansion in SEA on surface–atmosphere exchange and the resulting air quality in the region. For this purpose, we use satellite data, high-resolution land maps, and the chemical transport model GEOS-Chem. Relative to a no oil palm plantation scenario (∼ 1990), overall simulated isoprene emissions in the region increased by 13 % due to oil palm plantations in 2010 and a further 11 % in the near-term future. In addition, the expansion of palm plantations leads to local increases in ozone deposition velocities of up to 20 %. The net result of these changes is that oil palm expansion in SEA increases surface O3 by up to 3.5 ppbv over dense urban regions, and in the near-term future could rise more than 4.5 ppbv above baseline levels. Biogenic secondary organic aerosol loadings also increase by up to 1 µg m−3 due to oil palm expansion, and could increase by a further 2.5 µg m−3 in the near-term future. Our analysis indicates that while the impact of recent oil palm expansion on air quality in the region has been significant, the retrieval error and sensitivity of the current constellation of satellite measurements limit our ability to observe these impacts from space. Oil palm expansion is likely to continue to degrade air quality in the region in the coming decade and hinder efforts to achieve air quality regulations in major urban areas such as Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.


For several decades, courts have approached citizen suits with judicially created rules for standing. These requirements for standing have been vague and unworkable, and often serve merely as a screening mechanism for docket management. The use of standing rules to screen cases, in turn, yields inconsistent decisions and tribunal splits along partisan lines, suggesting that courts are using these rules in citizen suits as a proxy for the merits. Numerous commentators, and some Supreme Court Justices, have therefore suggested that Congress could, or should, provide legislative guidelines for standing. This Article takes the suggestion a step further, and argues that Congress has implicitly delegated the matter to the administrative agencies with primary enforcement authority over the subject matter. Courts regularly allow agencies to fill gaps in their respective statutes, meaning congressional silence on a point often constitutes discretionary leeway for the agency charged with implementation of the statute. Agencies already have explicit statutory authority to preempt citizen suits or define violations for which parties may sue. The existing statutory framework therefore suggests agencies could promulgate rules for the injury-in-fact and causation prongs of standing in citizen suits. Moreover, agencies have an advantage over courts in terms of expertise about the harms involved and which suits best represent the public interest. On the more delicate question of citizen suits against agencies themselves, agencies could default to the "special solicitude for states" rule illustrated in Massachusetts v. EPA. Finally, this Article explains how standing can function as a beneficial channeling tool rather than an awkward screening device, by allowing agencies to align citizen suits more closely with the larger public interest and established policy goals.


The successful micropropagation of woody or herbaceous perennial plants is often limited by large losses which occur as
plants are transferred from culture to soil. Poor photosynthetic capability may be partly responsible for losses at this
stage.
Results show that growth irradiance, CO 2 and carbohydrate in the growth medium are all factors which combine to affect the
development of photosynthetic capability in vitro. Low capacity for the photochemical dissipation of excess light energy
is primarily a result of endproduct inhibition of photosynthesis by accumulated leaf carbohydrate, and results in plants
being extremely sensitive to photoinhibition.
Manipulation of carbohydrate in the growth medium and growth irradiance may result in increased photosynthetic capability
of plants transferred to soil, and can increase survival.
This appears to be a result of increased energy supply for growth during the first few days ex vitro. Manipulation of carbohydrate in the growth medium and growth irradiance also affect growth morphology. In particular, root production in woody material can be affected, and can have a significant effect on nursery survival.


A wind tunnel study was used to investigate flow and the dispersion of elevated emissions over and in the wake of both generic building groups and a real industrial site. Much research has been previously carried out on low level releases passing through extensive building arrays, but very little has treated elevated releases. The objective of the present research was to investigate the requirements of 'practical' models to predict dispersion from elevated releases above an industrial complex. The experiments were carried out in the EnFlo wind tunnel at the University of Surrey in simulated neutral and stable boundary layers at 1:500 scale. The behaviour of the mean flow and turbulence in array wakes was compared with predictions from an analytical, three dimensional, eddy viscosity model. The model was successful when arrays were aligned normal to the approach flow but, as it did not treat the secondary flows associated with roof vortex systems, it was not adequate for other wind directions. The measurements showed that when roof vortex systems were prominent they created strong mean streamline deflections downwards over the wake, leading to velocity excess rather than deficit within the central part of the wake. Diagonal wind directions produced the higher ground level concentrations, or the greater reduction in effective stack height, for all the building groups studied. This correlated well with the measured mean streamline deflections. Dispersion measurements in the stable boundary layer for releases below 1.5 building heights were very similar to those made in the neutral boundary layer, but the building effect appeared larger in the stable boundary layer for the higher releases. This latter feature probably resulted from interactions with the boundary layer edge in the relatively shallow stable layer. Analysis of extensive measurements in the neutral boundary layer showed that a group of buildings could be adequately represented by a single, effective building of appropriate dimensions as far as the maximum ground level concentrations were concerned. However, the size of the effective building was a function of array orientation relative to the wind. Vertical plume spread in elevated releases was unaffected by the presence of the buildings. Streamline deflections or downwash, which caused the mean height of a plume to reduce, were the predominant cause of increased ground level concentrations in the array wakes. In situations where the plume was significantly entrained into the wake, the lateral plume spread was enhanced. A modified Gaussian plume model including downwash and enhanced lateral spread represented the resulting concentration field quite well.


Some inflationary models predict the existence of isocurvature primordial fluctuations, in addition to the well known adiabatic perturbation. Such mixed models are not yet ruled out by available data sets. In this paper we explore the possibility of obtaining better constraints on the isocurva- ture contribution from future astronomical data. We consider the axion and curvaton inflationary scenarios, and use Planck satellite experimental specifications together with SDSS galaxy survey to forecast for the best parameter error estimation by means of the Fisher information matrix formal- ism. In particular, we consider how CMB lensing information can improve this forecast. We found substantial improvements for all the considered cosmological parameters. In the case of isocurvature amplitude this improvement is strongly model dependent, varying between less than 1% and above 20% around its fiducial value. Furthermore, CMB lensing enables the degeneracy break between the isocurvature amplitude and correlation phase in one of the models. In this sense, CMB lensing information will be crucial in the analysis of future data.


Alzheimer's disease (AD) is sometimes preceded by a stage known as amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which is characterised by memory deficits abnormal for age in the absence of dementia. Although not in itself a diagnostic entity, because individuals with aMCI are at a greatly increased risk of developing AD there is an interest in characterising brain changes associated with the syndrome as compared to healthy ageing. In the current study we investigated the resting state functional connectivity (FC) of two important subcortical brain structures, the hippocampus and thalamus using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a group of 15 aMCI subjects and 16 healthy controls (HC). The groups were matched for age, gender and education level. Compared to the HC, the aMCI group showed significantly reduced FC of the hippocampus and thalamus to a number of brain regions (p < 0.05 corrected in all cases), particularly in the frontal and parietal cortex. FC was reduced between both right and left thalamus and bilateral supramarginal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left cerebellum; and between both right and left hippocampus and areas of frontal, temporal and parietal cortex. This study is being conducted as part of a wider project which incorporates diffusion imaging tractography of limbic white matter pathways. In the same cohort there was found to be almost no difference in white matter indices of the fornix, which directly connects the hippocampus and thalamus, suggesting that FC may be an earlier biomarker for connectivity changes in aMCI.