The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) is a creature of laws. Entrusted with the sanctity of the ballot, it has been unable to ensure free, honest and peaceful elections and has admitted that it cannot effectively eliminate fraud and violence, a testament to the institutionalization of electoral crime. Even so, it cannot be pinned for blame, at least not solely, for the sorry state of elections. The COMELEC has sought to improve the manner in which elections are held and its most recent efforts brought forth the 1993 Proposed Election Code. However, electoral reforms which would address perennial problems were not forthcoming as the Proposed Code ran into an immovable object the legislature which was not inclined to overhaul a system that has served its lawmaking members well, and found no support from its so-called supporters, which included no less than President Fidel V. Ramos. Without the political will to legislate electoral laws the Philippines is condemned to endure future political exercises that are neither free nor honest nor peaceful.


The material is very accessible and it is surely one of the best of the genre' - "Nurse Researcher " This book will undoubtedly benefit anyone whatever stage they are with their work. Despite my bookshelf having several books devoted to writing a PhD, I would happily trade them for this book' - "Scott Buckler, Institute of Education, University of Worcester " The book covers its subject thoroughly and comprehensively. It uses simple language, is easy to read and the advice is good. Just about anything a student would want to know about writing a thesis is discussed' - "Douglas Newton, Professor of Education, University of Newcastle" This book is designed to help postgraduate and research students with the process, preparation, writing and examination of their theses. Many students are able to design their programme of research and to collect the data, but they can find it more difficult to transform their data into a thesis. Using his extensive experience as a successful thesis supervisor, the author outlines: the purpose of the thesis and what it should achieve; strategies for organizing your work as you write your thesis; how to the incorporate a theoretical perspective; sound techniques of academic writing; how to benefit from your supervisors' experience; what to do about publishing preliminary findings; and tips on preparing for the oral examination. This book is essential reading for students who are completing theses on 'taught' Masters programmes, M.Phil. and Ph.D. students and for those working on the newer 'taught' doctoral programmes.


*FEATURED IN BILL GATES'S 2019 SUMMER READING RECOMMENDATIONS* 'This is a beautifully written and important book. Read it' Martin Wolf, Financial Times From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit and the return of the far right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts - economic, social and cultural - with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervour of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world's most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself - and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the 20th century. These times are in desperate need of Paul Collier's insights. The Future of Capitalism restores common sense to our views of morality, as it also describes their critical role in what makes families, organizations, and nations work. It is the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes. Let's hope it will also be the most influential - George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001 In this bold work of intellectual trespass, Paul Collier, a distinguished economist, ventures onto the terrain of ethics to explain what's gone wrong with capitalism, and how to fix it. To heal the divide between metropolitan elites and the left-behind, he argues, we need to rediscover an ethic of belonging, patriotism, and reciprocity. Offering inventive solutions to our current impasse, Collier shows how economics at its best is inseparable from moral and political philosophy' - Michael Sandel, author of What Money Can't Buy and Justice For thirty years, the centre left of politics has been searching for a narrative that makes sense of the market economy. This book provides it - John Kay, Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and the author of Obliquity and Other People's Money For well-to-do metropolitans, capitalism is the gift that goes on giving. For others, capitalism is not working. Paul Collier deploys passion, pragmatism and good economics in equal measure to chart an alternative to the divisions tearing apart so many western countries. -Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England


Background: Spine surgery in prone position frequently results in pressure skin lesions (PSLs). No study from Arabic world has published their incidence in literature. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed patients who underwent prone position spine surgery from December 1, 2017, to November 30, 2018. They received standardized anesthesia care and were made prone on Jackson table. The face was supported on a nonface contoured foam device, whereas the chest and pelvis were supported on soft cushions. Following completion of surgery, they were turned supine and their skin was inspected for any skin lesions. The lesions were categorized into five grades depending on severity. Results: Data of 307 patients were analyzed. Their mean age and weight was 41.5 years and 71 kg, respectively. The mean duration of prone positioning was 470 min. One hundred and three PSLs were observed in 45 patients (14.7%), giving a PSL incidence of 43.7% in affected patients. Majority of patients (18, 40%) with lesions remained in prone position between 421 and 600 min. Multiple lesions were observed in 53.3% of the affected patients. The highest number of patients (21, 46.7%) had one lesion only and it was restricted to face. All lesions were of Grade I, II, or III. Body weight >71 kg was more prone to developing PSLs. Females were more prone to PSLs. Conclusion: PSLs in prone position spine surgery occur frequently, and their incidence is proportional to the duration of positioning and weight of the patients. Face is the most commonly affected area.


As a central part of resource management, the OS thread scheduler must maintain the following, simple, invariant: make sure that ready threads are scheduled on available cores. As simple as it may seem, we found that this invariant is often broken in Linux. Cores may stay idle for seconds while ready threads are waiting in runqueues. In our experiments, these performance bugs caused many-fold performance degradation for synchronization-heavy scientific applications, 13% higher latency for kernel make, and a 14-23% decrease in TPC-H throughput for a widely used commercial database. The main contribution of this work is the discovery and analysis of these bugs and providing the fixes. Conventional testing techniques and debugging tools are ineffective at confirming or understanding this kind of bugs, because their symptoms are often evasive. To drive our investigation, we built new tools that check for violation of the invariant online and visualize scheduling activity. They are simple, easily portable across kernel versions, and run with a negligible overhead. We believe that making these tools part of the kernel developers' tool belt can help keep this type of bug at bay.


Information seeking in context is a developing area of research, which explores the subject in settings ranging from high schools to legal practices to health organisations. Relatively little research, however, has been devoted to information behaviour in disadvantaged communities from a non-library perspective, particularly within a UK context. This study contributes to this field of research by exploring the information worlds — the everyday lives and information behaviour — of people living on a disadvantaged estate in Northeast England. The project was firmly rooted within the qualitative paradigm and employed a combination of ethnographic data collection methods to explore information behaviour including episodic narrative and extended participant observation. Interviews were carried out with 21 estate residents and with 13 key workers. The study discovered that everyday life on the estate was difficult and complex, a fact mirrored in the participants' information needs and in their information seeking behaviour. Cognitive information needs stemmed from everyday life issues such as debts, employment and health problems and were often met only with affective support from informal networks of family, friends and trusted on-estate regeneration workers. Trust was a major factor in information seeking owing to the insular nature of the estate and the participants' need for confidentiality and privacy. Participants often used the term information to indicate what was happening on the estate in terms of gossip and local news, but they also found the term a worrying one, associating it with intrusive questioning and with formal institutions. Formal, off-estate information providers were used for health reasons or in crisis situations, and the public library was not considered as an information source. In order to overcome the many barriers to information seeking, information providers need to focus on working in ongoing partnership with other agencies and on developing trusting relationships with people within their communities.


The development of a Post-2015 agenda and Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, provide a global window of opportunity to address both social needs and environmental challenges together. This discussion paper by the Stockholm Resilience Centre looks into the links between human wellbeing and the biosphere, and describes why and how these links should influence the formulation of the new SDGs. It explores what we can learn from the MDGs, and how existing international agreements can be reflected in the Post-2015 MDG process. The paper also seeks to contribute to the elaboration of targets, including process-oriented targets and scalable indicators suitable for a rapidly changing world.


With the development of the times, use the electrical devices is essential for our daily live. For using these devices, we need cables to charge or connect them. So, for people, the cables can be found almost everywhere. The cables also bring new problems, like the cables always appear in a messy form with crosses and knots. We have to tidy up the cables before using them and this is a time-consuming and tedious task. And in colleges and companies where have a large number of cables, when we clean the room or laboratory, we can always find these cables are annoying. For this reason we think that it would make our daily live more convenient to use robots to manipulate and untie the cables. Therefore, for manipulating and untying the cables, this paper proposes a method which can convert the 2D cable data from image into 3D cable data in Unity3D, where the 3D cable model is movable and can simulate the real cable, we call this 3D cable model the "Simulatable Cable Model". In our approach, we use 2D and 3D neural networks to recover the 3D position information of the cable from the input image, then adjust this 3D position information to increase it's accuracy, and finally create the "simulatable cable model" in Unity3D. The "Simulatable Cable Model" provides a new way to manipulate the cables, that is, to simulate the actions in the virtual environment and then apply it in the real world. Such a method can be used not only to support people daily life with robots, but also can be used to arrange cables in the workplace like factories and so on. We believe that our research is applicable and helpful to the recognition and manipulation of all cord-like objects, and will also be useful in the field of recognizing and manipulating soft objects.


Abstract. The number and quality of seismic stations and networks in Europe continually improves, nevertheless there is always scope to optimize their performance. In this session we welcome contributions from all aspects of seismic network installation, operation and management. This includes site selection; equipment testing and installation; planning and implementing communication paths; policies for redundancy in data acquisition, processing and archiving; and integration of different datasets including GPS and OBS.


Five hundred pupils (250 males and 250 females) aged about 16 years and attending third form classes in regular urban and rural secondary schools throughout Zimbabwe responded to a questionnaire based on their attitudes towards being integrated with disabled students. Percentages were used in analyzing the data and results showed more positive attitudes towards integration with the disabled than negative ones. A t-test (p< 0.1) to determine whether or not there were differences in attitude between males and females was also conducted. There was no significant difference observed. Recommendations for future research are made.


Teachers are well aware that their primary challenge is motivating students. This is particularly true for students who are reluctant, with a history of struggling or failing in school, who may have a "damaged learner identity." After 10 years of studying this problem through teacher research in our own schools and demonstration sites, we have found that reframing curricular topics as inquiry promotes engagement, literacy, and deep learning for all students, especially reluctant ones, and invites them into the classroom project as full and necessary participants. Inquiry is a particularly democratic form of teaching and learning (see Wilhelm, 2007) that privileges preexisting interests, unique perspectives, and the various strengths of students who typically may be marginalized in school. Inquiry takes various forms. Examples include general forms such as the "inquiry and design framework," which we use (Lehrer, 1993), or Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), as well as disciplinary-specific ones, such as Cognitively Guided Instruction in math and Physics by Inquiry, and involves project-based learning and problem-oriented/case-based learning. All these models share the same basic features, are informed by the same cognitive research, and are supported by robust data sets. Inquiry meets the needs of all students, particularly those who are reluctant, because it makes the purpose of learning explicit, provides opportunities to make and do things with what is learned, helps students stake their identities as learners and-perhaps most important-allows students to achieve visible signs of competence, deep understanding, and actual accomplishment (Smith & Wilhelm, 2006). The problem of motivation When Jeff (Author 1) and Michael Smith conducted their award-winning research into the literate lives of young men (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002, 2006), the most salient findings involved motivation. To summarize one major point: every boy in the study-equal numbers of whom were identified as low-, middle-, and high-achieving-rejected most school literacy and learning on the basis that school did not meet specific conditions, similar to those identified by Czikszentmihalyi (1990) as characterizing "flow" experiences. "Flow" is being so immersed in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. He identifies the experience of flow as the hallmark of engagement, motivated performance, and the experience of happiness. However, every boy in the study was highly motivated to engage in literacy and learning activities outside school in ways that met all the dimensions of flow experience. (This included an illiterate boy who subscribed to car magazines that he solicited friends to read to him as he tricked out his car.) The conditions of flow, therefore, were closely associated with the lack or presence of engagement in learning of any kind, including that of literacy. Jeff and Michael collapsed Czikszentmihalyi's eight aspects of flow into four interrelated principles and then added a fifth, social interaction, which was sought after by all the boys and typified all the literacy and learning activities the informants found engaging. Conditions of FLOW experience * A clear purpose, intermediate goals, immediate and continuous feedback about one's progress. * A challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill and assistance to meet the challenge (as needed to be successful). * A sense of control and developing competence (e.g., learners exercise their own voice, stake their opinions and identity, make meaningful choices, and name their growing competence). * A focus on immediate experience (e.g., what is learned has current relevance and is connected personally to students as well as to the world; students make and do things with an immediate function; involves fun and sometimes humor). * Social interaction (e.g., learners are involved in group work, use peer assistance, negotiate and share what is learned, participate peripherally but legitimately in larger communities of practice [see Lave & Wenger, 1991]. …


Mr. Putter and his fine cat, Tabby, are itchy. Not because of fleas, but because it is hot, they're bored, and they're out of orangesicles. So when their neighbor, Mrs. Teaberry, suggests a sightseeing cruise, they're excited about an adventure. The boat makes them feel free! Plus they get orangesicles! But when it's time to go home, there's a little problem with Mrs. Teaberry's good dog, Zeke. The nineteenth Mr. Putter & Tabby book has all the sly, sweet humor that has made the series a huge success. Cynthia Rylant's perfect ear for rhythm and Arthur Howard's comical illustrations continue to bring to life the quartet of characters readers know and love.


This is the changing story of Britain as it has been preserved in our fields, roads, buildings, towns and villages, mountains, forests and islands. From our suburban streets that still trace out the boundaries of long vanished farms to the Norfolk Broads, formed when medieval peat pits flooded, from the ceremonial landscapes of Stonehenge to the spread of the railways - evidence of how man's effect on Britain is everywhere. In "The Making of the British Landscape", eminent historian, archaeologist and farmer, Francis Pryor explains how to read these clues to understand the fascinating history of our land and of how people have lived on it throughout time. Covering both the urban and rural and packed with pictures, maps and drawings showing everything from how we can still pick out Bronze Age fields on Bodmin Moor to how the Industrial Revolution really changed our landscape, this book makes us look afresh at our surroundings and really see them for the first time.


Viruses may be involved in the pathogenesis of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM), either through direct β-cell infection or as triggers of autoimmunity. T- cell proliferation was evaluated in response to Enteroviruses antigens including Coxsackievirus B and Poliovirus in addition to Adenovirus in an HLA- matched population of children with T1DM and in children who were apparently healthy. A total of 60 Iraqi T1DM children were included in the presents study. They were with new onset of the disease. For the purpose of comparisons, 50 apparently healthy control subjects were also selected. HLA typing was measured by microlymphocytotoxicity, while methylthiazoltetrazolium (MTT) assay was used for lymphocyte proliferation by culturing peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) with Coxsackievirus B5, Adenovirus 3, 4 and 7 and Poliovaccine. No significant differences were shown in the PBL proliferative percentage in response to Con-A mitogen and tested viruses (CVB5 and Adenovirus) between T1DM and healthy controls, but PBL proliferative percentage of patients showed a significant decline in response to Poliovaccine. HLA class II (-DR3, DR4, DQ2 and DQ3) antigens were significantly increased in T1DM patients and they played an important role in the etiology of the disease. Strong T-cell proliferation in response to the tested viral antigens were observed to be related to HLA-DR4 and HLA-DQ3 antigens, whereas the HLA-DR3 and HLA-DQ2 alleles were associated with week responsiveness to the same antigens. However, in children with new- onset diabetes, responses were decreased and this could be caused by trapping of virus- specific T- cells in the pancreas. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ


The purpose of this research is to develop an interactive virtual whiteboard for collaboration learning (IVWCL). This will allow learners in different places to do activities together through the Internet at the same time. Suppose students from different places are assigned to work on an assignment, they need a way to communicate with each other effectively. Although they can use Web boards or Chat systems as their communication tools, it is difficult for them to understand the details clearly by means of typing, which is different from illustration or drawing. The present problem of using illustration method over the Internet is that the discussed images or pictures have to be saved before everybody can see them. If one person draws a line to depict details, the other party have to login at the same time in order to see the drawing lines. Therefore, it is difficult for the ones who join the discussion and presentation at a later time to understand what details of presentation have been discussed and presented. This is because they will not be able to see the pictures and drawing lines in sequential order. Therefore, the IVWCL system must have the capacity of relaying drawings made by a party to others and saving each drawing stroke including pictures loaded in a central database which can be drawn and loaded afterward. In this way, if someone else joins the conversation later, they can follow the discussion by watching each line redrawn and images reloaded in orderly sequence as if they are in the beginning of the discussion. After they can catch up the discussion, they may give their opinion to the counterparts via the proposed system if they want to. The test was performed successfully allowing one teacher and two students, logging in from three different locations, to discuss about writing Dataflow Diagram of the Enrolled Registration System.


A giant disruption of the heart Certain forms of heart failure originate from genetic mutations. Understanding how the culprit mutant proteins alter normal heart function could lead to more effective treatments. One candidate is the giant protein tintin, which is mutated in a subset of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy. Through a combination of patient-derived stem cells, tissue engineering, and gene editing, Hinson et al. found that disease-associated titin mutations disrupt the function of the contractile unit in heart muscle. As a result, the heart does not respond properly to mechanical and other forms of stress. Science, this issue p. 982 Mutations in titin cause heart disease by disrupting the sarcomere, which normally helps the heart adapt to stress. Human mutations that truncate the massive sarcomere protein titin [TTN-truncating variants (TTNtvs)] are the most common genetic cause for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a major cause of heart failure and premature death. Here we show that cardiac microtissues engineered from human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are a powerful system for evaluating the pathogenicity of titin gene variants. We found that certain missense mutations, like TTNtvs, diminish contractile performance and are pathogenic. By combining functional analyses with RNA sequencing, we explain why truncations in the A-band domain of TTN cause DCM, whereas truncations in the I band are better tolerated. Finally, we demonstrate that mutant titin protein in iPS cell–derived cardiomyocytes results in sarcomere insufficiency, impaired responses to mechanical and β-adrenergic stress, and attenuated growth factor and cell signaling activation. Our findings indicate that titin mutations cause DCM by disrupting critical linkages between sarcomerogenesis and adaptive remodeling.


Blowing snow is a frequent and widespread phenomenon over most of Antarctica. The transport and sublimation of blowing snow are important for the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet, and the latter is a major contributor to the hydrological cycle in high-latitude regions. Although much is known about blowing snow from surface observations, knowledge of the thermodynamic structure of deep (>50 m) blowing-snow layers is lacking. Here, dropsonde measurements are used to investigate the temperature, moisture, and wind structure of deep blowing-snow layers over Antarctica. The temperature lapse rate within the blowing-snow layer is at times close to dry adiabatic and is on average between dry and moist adiabatic. Initiation of blowing snow causes the surface temperature to increase to a degree proportional to the depth of the blowing-snow layer. The relative humidity with respect to ice is generally largest near the surface (but less than 100%) and decreases with height, reaching a minimum near the top of the layer. These findings are at odds with the generally accepted theory that blowing-snow sublimation will cool and eventually saturate the layer. The observations support the conclusion that high levels of wind-shear-induced turbulence cause mixing and entrainment of warmer air from above the blowing-snow layer, which suppresses humidity and produces the observed well-mixed temperature structure within the layer. The results may have important consequences for understanding the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet and the moisture budget of the atmosphere in high latitudes.


Invasive feral swine combine a number of characteristics (e.g., high mobility, high fecundity, destructive behavior, reservoir of diseases, etc.) that make them one of the most serious wildlife threats to American agriculture. Additionally, feral swine are susceptible to foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) infection and could play a significant role in spreading and maintaining FMD if it was introduced to the U.S. Outbreaks of FMD also have devastating economic impacts and cause the loss of billions of dollars to the agricultural economy. Problems associated with spread and control would be exacerbated if FMD was contracted and spread by feral swine, threatening the 4.3 million head of cattle and 3.1 million head of domestic hogs in Missouri. This study uses a bioeconomic modeling framework to estimate the direct and indirect economic impacts of FMD being transmitted from feral swine to Missouri's livestock. It is predicted that if FMD occurred in feral swine in Missouri, the disease outbreak would last 45 days, resulting in 18,658 head of livestock being destroyed, and would cost the state a minimum of $7.5 million.


Background NHS Health Checks are a national cardiovascular risk assessment and management programme in England and Wales. We examined the experiences of patients attending and healthcare professionals (HCPs) conducting NHS Health Checks. Methods Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 28 patients and 16 HCPs recruited from eight general practices across a range of socio-economic localities. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, anonymized and analysed thematically. Results Patients were motivated to attend an NHS Health Check because of health beliefs, the perceived value of the programme, a family history of cardiovascular and other diseases and expectations of receiving a general health assessment. Some patients reported benefits including reassurance and reinforcement of healthy lifestyles. Others experienced confusion and frustration about how results and advice were communicated, some having a poor understanding of the implications of their results. HCPs raised concerns about the skill set of some staff to competently communicate risk and lifestyle information. Conclusions To improve the satisfaction of patients attending and improve facilitation of lifestyle change, HCPs conducting the NHS Health Checks require sufficient training to equip them with appropriate skills and knowledge to deliver the service effectively.


This exciting book is the first systematic study of how international environmental agreements are transformed into political action in Russia. Using three illuminating case studies on the implementation process in the fields of fisheries management, nuclear safety and air pollution control, this book fills an important gap in existing literature. While the focus in current social science debate on international environmental regimes is accumulating knowledge on 'implementing activities' at both national and international level, this book goes one step further and examines implementation at national and regional level. This topic is of great theoretical relevance to the study of environmental politics since some of the main sources of environmental degradation in Europe are to be found in the Russian Federation. It is also of relevance to the more general debate on contemporary Russian politics and offers valuable new material on regional politics in Russia. With its emphasis on the politics of environmental and resource management, it continues the description and discussion of political processes where most accounts of Russian politics tend to stop. This book will be invaluable for undergraduates, postgraduates and academics studying environmental politics and Russian politics at regional and national level.


Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) class I is a group of genes located on human chromosome 6 which play a crucial role in initiating potentially protective immune responses, by presenting pathogen-derived peptides to CD8+ T cells and thus targeting infected cells for elimination. Compare to other HLA class I loci, HLA-B molecules show some specific characteristics: 1) HLA-B alleles have been associated with opposing disease outcomes, namely susceptibility to, or protection from, parasitic and viral infection. 2) HLA-B elicits more dominant T cell responses with higher frequencies or superior magnitude. In order to discover potential mechanisms which may explain why HLA-B restricted T cell responses tend to be immunodominant, the focus of my PHD project has been on an extensive comparison of HLA-A and HLA-B antigen presentation by analysing their ligands. Besides the experimental verified epitopes downloaded, filtered and analyzed from several public databases, I also selected and applied in silico predictions based on different research questions for main steps of antigen presentation pathway : MHC binding (SMM, NetMHC, NetMHCpan), TAP binding probability (SMM) and proteasome cleavage (SMM or NetChop), as a compensatory of potential bias made by experimental data. Since the differences in CD8+ T cell responses mediated via HLA-A and HLA-B molecules might already begin at the antigen presentation level, in chapter 2 we have analyzed the epitope diversity and epitope binding affinity of this two major HLA class I loci. Opposite to our expectation, the amount of epitopes presented by HLA-A molecules is more than that of their HLA-B counterparts with higher binding affinities. Alternatively, targeting more constrained regions of a pathogen genome might be favourable for the outcome of an infection. Thus in chapter 3 we compared CTL epitopes restricted by HLA-A and HLA-B molecules and found that HLA-B molecules prefer to present more epitopes from certain conserved proteins. Moreover the residues targeted by HLA-B alleles in HIV-proteome were significantly more conserved than the ones targeted by HLA-A alleles. In order to explore if similar mechanism occurs in other infectious disease, in chapter 4 a similar analysis was applied on HCV proteome. As a result, we found that HLA molecules associated with HCV clearance preferentially present epitopes from the conserved proteins, like NS5B and Core. In addition, we found that less promiscuous peptide presentation might contribute to viral control during HIV-1 infection (chapter 5). To test whether the HLA promiscuity across loci has an effect on the frequencies of HLA class I haplotypes, we estimated the ligand repertoires for all HLA class I haplotypes (HLA-A-B) by in silico prediction and found that the most common HLA-A-B haplotypes are enriched in HLA-A and HLA–B pairs with distinct peptide binding motifs (chapter 6). In summary, this research implies that factors other than antigen presentation might be more essential for the protective and immunodominant nature of HLA-B-restricted T cell responses. It will also give mre support information for identifying interesting epitopes which could be good candidates for vaccine design.


Products reviews are one of the major resources to determine the public sentiment. The existing literature on reviews sentiment analysis mainly utilizes supervised paradigm, which needs labeled data to be trained on and suffers from domain-dependency. This article addresses these issues by describes a completely automatic approach for sentiment analysis based on unsupervised ensemble learning. The method consists of two phases. The first phase is contextual analysis, which has five processes, namely (1) data preparation; (2) spelling correction; (3) intensifier handling; (4) negation handling and (5) contrast handling. The second phase comprises the unsupervised learning approach, which is an ensemble of clustering classifiers using a majority voting mechanism with different weight schemes. The base classifier of the ensemble method is a modified k-means algorithm. The base classifier is modified by extracting initial centroids from the feature set via using SentWordNet (SWN). We also introduce new sentiment analysis problems of Australian airlines and home builders which offer potential benchmark problems in the sentiment analysis field. Our experiments on datasets from different domains show that contextual analysis and the ensemble phases improve the clustering performance in term of accuracy, stability and generalization ability.


Background/Aims: It has been shown, both experimentally and clinically, that water-pipe smoke (WPS) exposure adversely affects the cardiovascular system (CVS) through the generation of oxidative stress and inflammation. Betaine, a naturally occurring compound in common foods, has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory actions. However, its potential to mitigate the adverse effect of WPS on the CVS has never been reported before. This is the subject of this study in mice. Methods: Mice were exposed daily for 30 min to either normal air (control), or to WPS for two consecutive weeks. Betaine was administered daily by gavage at a dose of 10mg/kg, 1h before either air or WPS exposure. Results: Betaine mitigated the in vivo prothrombotic effect of WPS in pial arterioles and venules. Moreover, it reversed the WPS-induced decrease in circulating platelets. Likewise, betaine alleviated platelet aggregation in vitro, and the shortening of activated partial thromboplastin time and prothrombin time induced by WPS. Betaine reduced the increase of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 and fibrinogen concentrations in plasma induced by WPS. Betaine also diminished the WPS-induced increase of plasma concentrations of interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor α, and attenuated the increase of lipid peroxidation and superoxide dismutase. Immunohistochemical analysis of the heart revealed an increase in the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase and cytochrome C by cardiomyocytes of the WPS-exposed mice. These effects were averted by betaine. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that betaine treatment significantly mitigated WPS-induced hypercoagulability, and inflammation, as well as systemic and cardiac oxidative stress.


Commendably, a number of states have recently approved initiatives to protect workers' right to participate in a secret ballot election before a labor union can represent them. Reifying liberty and the anti-subordination principle, state secret ballot initiatives prioritize employee protection over national uniformity. At the same time progressive scholarship offers potentially useful arguments concerning the need to relax existing labor preemption rules. These arguments may encourage future state and local regulatory diversity and provide an environment conducive to the acceptance and expansion of all sorts of proposals that are protective of workers' liberty interests. Optimism about the possibility of doctrinal convergence between the efforts of progressive and classical liberals ought to be tempered; this move is riven with the risk that constraining preemption doctrine may further constrain workers' freedom and liberty since there is also a corresponding move afoot that favors federalization, centralization and uniformity and can be explained by the pursuit of self-interested rents.


The querying and analysis of data streams has been a topic of much recent interest, motivated by applications from the fields of networking, web usage analysis, sensor instrumentation, telecommunications, and others. Many of these applications involve monitoring answers to continuous queries over data streams produced at physically distributed locations, and most previous approaches require streams to be transmitted to a single location for centralized processing. Unfortunately, the continual transmission of a large number of rapid data streams to a central location can be impractical or expensive. We study a useful class of queries that continuously report the k largest values obtained from distributed data streams ("top-k monitoring queries"), which are of particular interest because they can be used to reduce the overhead incurred while running other types of monitoring queries. We show that transmitting entire data streams is unnecessary to support these queries and present an alternative approach that reduces communication significantly. In our approach, arithmetic constraints are maintained at remote stream sources to ensure that the most recently provided top-k answer remains valid to within a user-specified error tolerance. Distributed communication is only necessary on occasion, when constraints are violated, and we show empirically through extensive simulation on real-world data that our approach reduces overall communication cost by an order of magnitude compared with alternatives that o er the same error guarantees.


EFSA and ECDC were requested by the European Commission to jointly evaluate the possible solutions for the collection and analysis of whole genome sequencing (WGS) data for at least Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and Escherichia coli by: (1) analysing the outcome of the surveys on the status of the use of WGS of food-borne pathogens in EU/EEA countries in both the food and public health sectors; (2) conducting a consultation of relevant actors to assess state-of-the-art pipelines for collecting and analysing WGS data in Europe; (3) involving relevant stakeholders to assess the needs and requirements for the analysis of WGS data and their comparability; and (4) preparing a technical report on the identification and comparison of potential solutions for the set-up and running of a joint EFSA–ECDC pipeline to collect and analyse WGS data. Logical components of the overall system were identified and technical requirements were prioritised and grouped according to functionality. Eleven platforms (solutions) that integrate the relevant functionalities for collecting, analysing and visualising WGS data were thoroughly described. The degree to which the requirements are met by the different solutions (as of 31 December 2018) was evaluated. The assessment made clear that no single solution meets all the critical requirements and each solution has significant gaps regarding the unmet critical requirements. Therefore, scenarios consisting of a combination of several solutions were considered. As there may be many suitable scenarios, and the choice among them will depend on strategic or financial elements that are not within the scope of this report, it contains the scientific and technical elements necessary to generate scenarios, rather proposing individual scenarios. A scenario builder is presented which includes the significant gaps for each solution/functionality and the limitations and risks to be considered when setting up a joint ECDC–EFSA database for the collection and analysis of WGS data. © European Centre for Disease Control and European Food Safety Authority, 2019


To reduce the energy consumption of the Internet, much research effort has been dedicated to the design of energy-minimized IP over WDM networks. In this study, we design energy-minimized IP over WDM networks based on modular router cards and by jointly applying the lightpath bypass and router-card sleeping strategies. As a key advantage, the design does not require rerouting of IP flows or optical channels in either the IPor optical layer. Rather, to save energy, we only need to sleep or wake up the router cards according to user traffic demands when applying the sleeping strategy, which significantly simplifies the network control and management. To minimize the total energy consumption of the IPover WDM network in a time period (e.g., 1 day), we develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization model. Moreover, to alleviate the computational complexity of the MILP model, we divide the minimization problem into two subproblems, namely, 1) establishing a virtual topology and 2) allocating router ports on router cards to the optical channels on different virtual links. For each of the subproblems, we develop a separate MILP optimization model. Further, for large-network design, we also propose two efficient heuristics to optimize energy consumption. Simulation studies indicate that the joint MILP model with the lightpath bypass and router-card sleeping strategies can maximally reduce energy consumption, up to 40% compared to the nonsleeping case. In addition, under the router-card sleeping strategy, the approach of allocating the router ports on different router cards to the optical channels plays an important role in the design of an energy-minimized IP over WDM network. A mixed mode that jointly performs interleaving and sequential router-port allocations can achieve the highest energy savings.


Different authors have argued the importance of central banker's secrecy over alternative targets of monetary policy. One of the argument is based on the welfare results in a well known signalling game of monetary policy by Vickers (1986). This work aims to show how this argument crucially depends on the cost of separation and the specification of the prior beliefs held by private agents about the preferences of central banker. This is performed by solving a model similar to that solved by Vickers (1986) under a different assumption (a continuum of types) about the support of the distribution of prior beliefs. Welfare analysis shows that the result underlying the argument by Persson and Tabellini (1990) about the convenience of Central Banker's secrecy is upturned when the priors are skewed towards high inflation and alternative devices like credible pegging of a nominal variable, delegation and (negotiated) wage controls may be welfare enhancing. Furthermore, we show that if an appointed central banker has to incurr signalling costs a Rogoff (1985) type result can not be obtained and secrecy may be a bad substitute for commitment.


We prove the Feigenbaum-Coullet-Tresser conjecture on the hyperbolicity of the renormalization transformation of bounded type. This gives the first computer-free proof of the original Feigenbaum observation of the universal parameter scaling laws. We use the Hyperbolicity Theorem to prove Milnor's conjectures on self-similarity and "hairiness" of the Mandelbrot set near the corresponding parameter values. We also conclude that the set of real infinitely renormalizable quadratics of type bounded by some N > 1 has Hausdorff dimension strictly between 0 and 1. In the course of getting these results we supply the space of quadratic-like germs with a complex analytic structure and demonstrate that the hybrid classes form a complex codimension-one foliation of the connectedness locus.


Policy-makers and managers in natural resource management (NRM) often complain that researchers are out of touch. Researchers often complain that policy-makers and managers make poorly informed decisions. In this article, we report on a meeting between researchers, policy-makers and managers convened to identify practical solutions to improve engagement between these camps. A necessary starting point is that every researcher and policy-maker should understand, and tap into, the motivations and reward systems of the other when seeking engagement. For example, researchers can be motivated to engage in policy development if there is a promise of outputs that align with their reward systems such as co-authored publications. Successful research–policy partnerships are built around personal relationships. As a researcher, you cannot therefore expect your results to inform policy by only publishing in journals. As a policy-maker, you cannot guarantee engagement from researchers by publicly inviting comment on a document. Actively building and maintaining relationships with key individuals through discussions, meetings, workshops or field days will increase the likelihood that research outcomes will inform policy decisions. We identified secondments, sabbaticals, fellowships and 'buddies', an annual national NRM conference and 'contact mapping' (a Facebook-type network) as forums that can catalyse new relationships between researchers and policy-makers. We challenge every researcher, policy-maker and manager in NRM to build one new cross-cultural relationship each year.


In this paper we introduce Haptic Tutor, a wearable haptic system for triggering vibrations on limbs of a student drummer aimed to help develop multi-limb independence. The system uses portable, wireless vibrotactile devices to display haptic information on drummers' limbs. To asses the usefulness of the system, we analyse response time differences between stimuli and motor action (drum stroke). Our hypotheses are that the use of haptic stimuli will improve the temporal characteristics of performances, but also that the type of haptic stimuli will have an influence on performance results. To validate these hypotheses we conducted two experiments. The first one with participants randomly distributed in three groups, each group performing simple drumming lessons involving both hands under a given condition (no haptics, haptic pulse and haptic ramp). Results show clear improvement in strike accuracy for both haptic conditions, most clearly in the haptic ramp condition. Using these results, a second experiment was carried out in which 6 other participants were randomly divided into two groups (no haptics and haptic ramp conditions) and asked to perform a more complex lesson, this time involving three limbs (two arms and right foot). Results of both experiments show clear improvement on strike accuracy (reduced asynchrony), but a less important difference on strike precision (inter-onset-interval deviation) for the haptic condition. We finally report on participants subjective comments , discussing the limitations of the current prototype.


The full transformational effects of Social Media have yet to be understood. Alongside its heavily discussed benefits, a number of potentially harmful effects have become apparent lately. Phenomena such as still increasing information overload, cyber-bullying, or loss of identity have been described in recent research literature from various domains. By means of a literature review our paper aims at reviewing, cataloguing and classifying these psychological and social disorders that have been reported to be related to Social Media engagement. We distinguish between active participation in and mere exposure to Social Media. Using a psychopathological classification scheme, we structure the identified symptoms and syndromes, providing a common language and taxonomy with which the identified disorders can be described and classified accurately. Thus, we are laying out a foundation necessary for the research into and the understanding of the aetiology and eventually the means for the prevention of the negative effects of Social Media usage within individuals in information societies.


In this paper, we consider the cloud drop activation of aerosol particles consisting of water soluble material and an insoluble core. Based on the Köhler theory, we derive analytical equations for the critical diameters and su-persaturations of such particles. We demonstrate the use of the equations by comparing the critical supersaturations of particles composed of ammonium sulfate and insoluble substances with those of model organic particles with varying molecular sizes.


Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is an important input for geo-spatial analysis. For various applications like flood management, ortho rectification of remote sensing images, navigation, architectural works, defence, etc., high resolution DEM is required. TanDEM-X mission was launched in 2010 to obtain high resolution global DEM with HTRI-3 standard. SAR interferometry (InSAR) technique is used for DEM generation from TanDEM-X SAR data. The accuracy of DEM depends on many parameters like height ambiguity, incidence angle, polarization, etc. In this study, time series TanDEM-X data spanning over 3 years, had processed for generating DEM at the spatial resolution of 6 m and their accuracy had studied using DGPS elevation data and SRTM 90 m DEM. The products generated during DEM generation process are DEM, precision (or height error), coherence, layover and shadow images. Using weighted average fusion technique, ascending and descending DEMs are fused for improving the quality of DEM and to reduce invalid pixels corresponding to layover and shadow areas. Results from time series data were analysed and found RMSE error of fused DEMs is in the range of 2 m to 4 m, while individual DEM has accuracy of 3 m to 6 m with respect to DGPS elevation data. Fused DEMs are having high accuracy as well as less voids. The reduction of voids by fusion, ranges from 40 to 85% in different combinations of data.


The dust mite allergen Der p 2 interacts with the Toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 complex to promote lipopolysaccharide-driven TLR4 signaling. As anyone who has suffered through a hay-fever season can attest, otherwise innocuous proteins can elicit allergenic reactions. Only a small number of airborne proteins typically act as aeroallergens in susceptible individuals, but why this should be remains unclear. Noting that Der p 2, the main house dust mite allergen, is structurally related to MD-2, an extracellular component of the Toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 complex that recognizes bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS), Trompette et al. examined the effects of Der p 2 on TLR4-mediated signaling. Transfection of Der p 2 enabled the LPS-dependent production of interleukin 8 (IL-8) in HEK293 cells that expressed TLR4 but not MD-2 and enhanced LPS-dependent production of IL-8 in HEK293 cells expressing both TLR4 and MD-2. Tagged forms of Der p 2 and TLR4 could be coimmunoprecipitated from HEK293 cells; Der p 2 also coimmunoprecipitated with LPS and with the TLR4-MD-2 coreceptor CD14 and promoted the association of TLR4 with MD-2. Der p 2 (associated with very small amounts of LPS) promoted TLR4 signaling in primary antigen-presenting cells; airway sensitization and challenge with Der p 2 and very small amounts of LPS elicited allergic asthma in wild-type mice and mice lacking MD-2, but not in mice lacking TLR4. Thus, the authors propose that the allergenicity of Der p 2 arises from its promotion of TLR4 signaling. A. Trompette, S. Divanovic, A. Visintin, C. Blanchard, R. S. Hegde, R. Madan, P. S. Thorne, M. Wills-Karp, T. L. Gioannini, J. P. Weiss, C. L. Karp, Allergenicity resulting from functional mimicry of a Toll-like receptor complex protein. Nature 457, 585–588 (2009). [PubMed]


Abstract This paper examines connections in three case studies of Black churchgoers in Miami and their views toward the natural environment, from environmental attitudes to activism. There were four major findings in the research. First, there is a link between the preservation of Black history and the preservation of the environment among Black churchgoers who feel a strong connection to rural life. Second, these case studies dispute the stereotype of Black churchgoers as less concerned about the environment due to pressing social concerns in Black neighborhoods. This stereotype artificially separates environmental and social issues. Third, public access to public lands is a basic and important right espoused by these Black churchgoing activists. Fourth, spirituality impacts environmental sentiments among Miami's churchgoing Blacks. Possessing an understanding of how Black spirituality, history and local concerns relate to the environment adds to the sparse literature on the subject. The discussion also provides information for policy makers interested in bridging gaps between Black churchgoers and the "mainstream" environmental protection movement, to the benefit of both local communities and the overall ecosystem. Introduction Deacon Baldwin, clad in overalls, stood in the searing Florida sun of September, 2001, and mused about what had brought him to this place. He had recently orchestrated the planting of over six hundred native trees by volunteers. This tree-planting project took place on the outskirts of Miami in foliage-barren Richmond Heights, a neighborhood settled by Black service men after "World War II. Deacon Baldwin revealed through his actions and words the essence of how many churchgoing Blacks in South Florida connect the natural world and the environment to their lives: I was intrigued by the nature, the sun and the rain. Belle Glade [Florida] had such rich soil. You could plant anything and it would grow there. I like to plant things. I believe in nature. Now I've got a generation coming after me that's going to be successful. The way to deal with it is history, environment and church (Baldwin, interview, 2001). For more than two years during 2001 to 2003, I explored environmental preservation and activism through ethnographic research, including qualitative interviews and participant observation, among three groups of churchgoing Blacks in Miami, Florida. The term "Black" is used in this paper rather than African American because the majority of my interviewees seemed most comfortable with that self-description, and I attempted to respect participants' opinions and use of language throughout this study. These study groups included Blacks with ancestry in Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica and the U.S. south, among other locales. I chose to examine them collectively as attendees of Black churches where most congregants had race in common, but not necessarily place of origin. Participants self-defined their volunteer projects, such as preservation of Miami's historic "Black beach," as dealing with "Black history." They described their proposed nature camps and their realized tree plantings as dealing with people from the "neighborhood" who shared race in common, but not necessarily place of birth. This examination of the category of "Black churchgoers" might not have been a useful grouping had all of my case studies taken place in churches in a strong ethnic enclave such as Miami's Little Haiti, where many people come from a fairly small geographic region. However, most of my research took place in neighborhoods or involved church (or multi-church) projects where the ancestry of participants was more geographically diverse, therefore the broadness of the group Black churchgoers seemed appropriate. A note must also be made that several participants clarified that their churches/projects were not "just" for Blacks but were welcoming to all. The results of my research indicate that there are several key aspects of the relationship between Black churchgoers in South Florida and the natural environment. …


Conservation Titles of the 1985 Food Security Act lead to agricultural market and resource use adjustments. This study explores how the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Conservation Compliance (CC) Program influence land use, commodity markets, input and technology use, production costs, and the environment. In the case of the Conservation Reserve Program, CARD/FAPRI commodity models are used to generate a baseline and to evaluate the impacts of increasing the amount of land in the reserve. In the case of the Conservation Compliance Program, the CARD ARIMS model is used to generate a baseline without the program and then to evaluate the impacts of imposing erosion restrictions consistent with the conservation compliance provisions. Lower stocks and higher commodity prices would be consequences of expanding the CRP. Resource adjustment associated with conservation compliance can be protracted and may be costly. Insofar as CRP reduces production and strengthens prices, it also can have the effect of increasing the intensity of input use in the remaining planted area. Conservation compliance clearly influences cropping patterns and choices of technology, as well as rates of soil erosion. While production cost increases of 2-4 percent seem relatively small, this could mean as much as 6-15 percent decline in net farm income.


Based on managerial power theory, with samples in 2002-2009 year, this study analyzes that executives use power to affect the relationship between equity incentives and R & D investments. This study finds that, compared with non-manager control companies, the power of executives in manager control companies is more prominent. In manager control companies, executives can use power to influence the relationship between equity incentives and R & D investments, and the implementation of equity incentives to executives reduces the R & D investment. The results show that the greater the power, the smaller the incentive role of equity incentives to R & D investments. It provides not only references for the companies to launch equity incentive plans, but also new clues and new ideas for in-deep studies on corporate governance and managerial power effects.


Despite a renewed focus in the field of global health on strengthening health systems, inadequate attention has been directed to a key ingredient of high-performing health systems: management. We aimed to develop the argument that management - defined here as the process of achieving predetermined objectives through human, financial, and technical resources - is a cross-cutting function necessary for success in all World Health Organization (WHO) building blocks of health systems strengthening. Management within health systems is particularly critical in low-income settings where the efficient use of scarce resources is paramount to attaining health goals. More generally, investments in management capacity may be viewed as a key leverage point in grand strategy, as strong management enables the achievement of large ends with limited means. We also sought to delineate a set of core competencies and identify key roles to be targeted for management capacity building efforts. Several effective examples of management interventions have been described in the research literature. Together, the existing evidence underscores the importance of country ownership of management capacity building efforts, which often challenge the status quo and thus need country leadership to sustain despite inevitable friction. The literature also recognizes that management capacity efforts, as a key ingredient of effective systems change, take time to embed, as new protocols and ways of working become habitual and integrated as standard operating procedures. Despite these challenges, the field of health management as part of global health system strengthening efforts holds promise as a fundamental leverage point for achieving health system performance goals with existing human, technical, and financial resources. The evidence base consistently supports the role of management in performance improvement but would benefit from additional research with improved methodological rigor and longer-time horizon investigations. Meanwhile, greater emphasis on management as a critical element of global health efforts may open new and sustainable avenues for advancing health systems performance.


We report on the preparation of thin As35S65 films from their amine based solutions by a spiral bar coating technique on flexible PET substrates and the direct writing of subwavelength surface corrugated gratings with a period of 350 nm into these films by excimer laser interference lithography. The structural and optical properties of bar coated As35S65 glass are investigated in detail and compared with those of samples fabricated by vacuum thermal evaporation. The polarization dependent spectral filtering properties of the guided mode resonance devices built by the waveguiding thin films and the surface relief gratings written by a single laser pulse are presented finally.


A thesis advisor is someone who guides the students' thesis writing. During a supervising process, most of the advisors face some difficulties. It is common at supervising process since at least there are two persons who always interact with the researcher at every thesis supervising. They are advisor and co-advisor. The difficulty itself can be intentional and unintentional. It really depends on those three persons above.
Based on that reason, the writer wants to investigate about the advisors' difficulties when supervising their students in writing their thesis. It is expected that the result of this study will give input or feedback to the thesis supervisors about the difficulties that most of English Department thesis supervisors face. The scope of this study is in English Department of Muhammadiyah University of Malang and this research focuses on non-linguistic factors.
This research uses descriptive qualitative design. The population of this study is all English Department lecturers who are as thesis advisors at Muhammadiyah University of Malang. This research uses non-probability sampling, exactly, purposive sampling because the writer only chooses 15 full-time thesis advisors as a sample. In this case, the writer uses an unstructured interview to collect the data since it will give a chance or possibility for the advisors to express their difficulties freely.
The results of this research are; all of thesis advisors have some difficulties. Those difficulties from the top to the less in a sequence as follows; students' English proficiencies, students' time management, students' research methodology, students motivation, students' attitude, students' research topic, co-advisor relationship, students' plagiarism, students' personalities, the big number of supervised students and advisor workload. Moreover, the level of difficulty experienced by the advisors did not relate with the length of time they supervised as well as did not relate with the subject they taught.


The rising popularity of Korean contents in Asia known as Hanryu ('Korean
Wave'), which was partly supported by Korean cultural policy, has many
implications with regard to cultural policy in periphery countries under
globalisation and the open-door versus cultural diversity debate. This thesis
assesses how recent cultural opening under globalisation in Korea has affected
Korea's cultural industries both quantitatively in terms of economic performance
and qualitatively in terms of cultural content, identity and diversity. These
questions are examined in the context of the changing relationship between the
cultural industries and cultural policy in Korea since the end of the 1990s. The
research draws upon statistical data, historical material and interviews.
By researching how the Korean experience has developed, this thesis attempts to
look at Hanryu not just as a phenomenon in its own right, but also considers the
secondary impact of this phenomenon on perceptions of culture and identity. In
particular the thesis considers Hanryu in terms of the cultural influence on
neighbouring countries manifest through tourism and a new interest in Korean
language and culture. Such cultural effects are less easily measured than
economic data but are important to an understanding of causes and effects of
Hanryu. Finally this thesis places the Korean experience in the broader context of
cultural policy in periphery countries responding to globalisation and the
relationship between national cultural policy and the global cultural economy.
It is still too early to reach conclusions on the future of Korean cultural industries
based simply on the recent trends However, since the mid 1990s, the Korean
cultural industries have been transformed dramatically. Cultural policy has
contributed to this trend and strengthened the competitiveness of Korea's cultural
industries. At the same time the thesis considers some of the limitations and
criticisms of Hanryu, including potential loss of cultural diversity and an anti-
Korean backlash in some other Asian countries.
The Korean cultural industries have benefited from imitating the Hollywood
system and developing a distinctive hybrid cultural content and business model.
This has made possible an alternative approach to policy and management which
lies between two extremes of protectionism and free market ideology. The thesis
comments on some of the difficulties and limitations in sustaining such a balance
and concludes by considering the sustainability of Hanryu both in Korea and in
the broader Asian context.


Due to the scale and computational complexity of currently used simulation codes, global surrogate (metamodels) models have become indispensable tools for exploring and understanding the design space. Due to their compact formulation they are cheap to evaluate and thus readily facilitate visualization, design space exploration, rapid prototyping, and sensitivity analysis. They can also be used as accurate building blocks in design packages or larger simulation environments. Consequently, there is great interest in techniques that facilitate the construction of such approximation models while minimizing the computational cost and maximizing model accuracy. Many surrogate model types exist (Support Vector Machines, Kriging, Neural Networks, etc.) but no type is optimal in all circumstances. Nor is there any hard theory available that can help make this choice. In this paper we present an automatic approach to the model type selection problem. We describe an adaptive global surrogate modeling environment with adaptive sampling, driven by speciated evolution. Different model types are evolved cooperatively using a Genetic Algorithm (heterogeneous evolution) and compete to approximate the iteratively selected data. In this way the optimal model type and complexity for a given data set or simulation code can be dynamically determined. Its utility and performance is demonstrated on a number of problems where it outperforms traditional sequential execution of each model type.


Abstract This essay examines the servants and shopkeepers who play a surprisingly central yet critically unacknowledged role in Henry James9s fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that James9s frequent depiction of lower-class life is a sign not of an unsuspected interest in class but of his familiar interest in consciousness. This interest has been memorably diagnosed by Sharon Cameron, who observes that in the work of James9s last stage ""consciousness is not in persons; it is rather between them""——that thoughts can be shared by characters without being spoken. Yet the writings that immediately precede James9s last works offer a less reciprocal model of consciousness to the one that Cameron provides. Because the characters in What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Turn of the Screw (1898) do not have access to the minds of those around them, they are forced to imagine other forms in which to measure both their own knowledge and that of others. The form they discover is the lives of the people who work for them. These subjects provide a fixed scale by which to measure the growth of consciousness in James9s protagonists because they are assumed to have none of their own. Thus in The Turn of the Screw the terror experienced by the governess at the apparition of the ghosts of the former governess and valet can be understood as her realization that her identity is her situation; like them, she is reproducible, exchangeable, dispensable. The ghosts, that is, function as externalized figures for her own condition.


We use two experimental valuation methods to estimate consumer demand for genetically modified golden rice. The first is an open-ended choice experiment (OECE) where participants name the quantities of golden rice and conventional rice demanded at each of several price combinations, one of which will be randomly chosen as binding. This allows us to estimate market demand by aggregating demand across participants. This estimate of market demand also allows us to estimate own-price elasticity and consumer surplus for golden rice. Comparing willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates from the OECE with those from a uniform-price auction, we find that OECE WTP estimates exhibit less affiliation across rounds, and the effects of positive and negative information under the OECE are more consistent with prior expectations and existing studies. We also find that, while auction WTP estimates more than double across five rounds, OECE WTP estimates are stable across rounds and are always roughly equal to those from the final auction round.


UNLABELLED
Health care quality is being addressed from a variety of policy perspectives. The 2001 Institute of Medicine report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, calls for sweeping action involving a five-part strategy for change in the U.S. health care system. This agenda for change includes use of evidence-based approaches to address common conditions, the majority of which are chronic. A Chronic Disease Management System (CDMS), or registry, is a tool that helps providers efficiently collect and analyze patient information to promote quality care for the rural population. CDMSs can provide a technological entry point for the impending use of Electronic Medical Records. A CDMS is a patient-centered electronic database tool that helps providers diagnose, treat, and manage chronic diseases. The purpose of this brief is to discuss the different types of CDMSs used by a sample of 14 state organizations and 19 local rural clinics in Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin. As part of a larger study examining the challenges and innovations in implementing disease management programs in rural areas, we conducted interviews with national, state, and local contacts. During interviews, respondents helped us understand the usefulness and functionalities of commonly used CDMSs in rural facilities. Our focus was on the use of CDMSs in the management of diabetes, a disease prevalent in rural populations.

KEY FINDINGS
(1) CDMSs are readily available to rural clinics and are being implemented and maintained by clinic staff with minimal expenditures for technology. (2) Use of a standardized system in a collaborative helps provide data comparisons and share costs involved with technical assistance services across the group.


Variation in growth and morphology within the Betula pendula/B. pubescens complex has been investigated by means of a reciprocal transplant experiment. Phenotypic responses to adjacent bog and heath environments have been contrasted and the heritability of morphometric characters has been investigated. The extent to which selection by the two environments had occurred was also examined. Four tetraploid parent trees were selected: two from the bog resembled B. pubescens and two from the heath resembled B. pendula. Progeny were raised from seed and transplanted into the bog and heath field sites as established year-old seedlings. Survival, growth, leaf and twig riiorphology, and the responses to fire and deer browsing were monitored for up to three years after planting. Few of the transplanted individuals died, even after burning. Growth was determined largely by environment. Transplants grew much faster on the heath than on the bog; analysis of the annual radial growth increments in the boles of the parents and their neighbours revealed the same effect had occurred in the longer term. The slower growth of both parents and progeny on the bog was presumed to be due to the effects of soil anaerobiosis. After a fire on the heath, several main stems regenerated from each burned stump, but the progeny of B. pendula-like parents produced taller, more competitive growths than those of B. pubescens-like parents. Deer were highly selective; they browsed only the progeny of B. pubescens-like trees and only on the heath. Browsed trees became bushier and more branched. Principal Components Analysis of eight continuously varying leaf variables showed consistent displacements between bog and heath plantings and between parent and progeny for all four half-sib families. Regressions of progeny on parental values for the individual leaf variables suggested high heritabilities for all except base angle, even allowing for juvenile characters. Despite similar regression coefficients in the transplants to bog and heath, the relationships were displaced relative to one another between bog and heath by large differences of intercept for measurements of size; this reflected dwarfing of the leaves of bog transplants relative to heath transplants. Such displacements were much smaller for measurements of leaf shape, although apex angle was consistently more acute (i.e. more B. pendula-like) in the transplants into the heath than in the transplants into the bog. The significance of soil conditions, heath fires and deer browsing in interacting with heredity to mould the observed phenotypes of birch is discussed.


A new integrated approach for optimal renewal planning of municipal infrastructure systems has been developed. This chapter discusses the application of the proposed approach to implement a GIS-based Decision Support System (DSS) to support the renewal planning of sewer networks. The approach involves several steps addressing condition rating, risk assessment, and prioritization of sewers. It also incorporates a procedure for identifying and selecting the most suitable renewal technologies. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based multi-objective optimization (MOO) technique is used to find a Pareto front and identify a set of feasible solutions, in which a set of sewers is selected for renewal each year, along with the associated costs and expected benefits in terms of condition improvement and risk reduction. The chapter also presents an example application of the prototype DSS on the sewer network in Regina, Canada.


Work is changing. Speed and flexibility are more in demand than ever before thanks to an accelerating knowledge economy and sophisticated communication networks. These changes have forced a mass rethinking of the way we coordinate, collaborate, and communicate. Instead of projects coming to established teams, teams are increasingly converging around projects. These "all-edge adhocracies" are highly collaborative and mostly temporary, their edge coming from the ability to form links both inside and outside an organization. These nimble groups come together around a specific task, recruiting personnel, assigning roles, and establishing objectives. When the work is done they disband and their members take their skills to the next project. Spinuzzi offers for the first time a comprehensive framework for understanding how these new groups function and thrive. His rigorous analysis tackles both the pros and cons of this evolving workflow and is based in case studies of real all-edge adhocracies at work. His provocative results will challenge our long-held assumptions about how we should be doing work.


This paper employs a constant-elasticity of substitution (CES) index formula to improve the accuracy of the preliminary values of the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U). Using the CES behavioural model, I present estimates of the overall extent of consumer response to relative price changes exhibited in Consumer Expenditure Survey data for 1999-2008. The associated parameter estimates are then used to develop CES forecasts of the final C-CPI-U index values. Simulations demonstrate that use of the CES approach over the last several years would have resulted in smaller index revisions between the preliminary and final C-CPI-U releases. Looking to the future, CES-based preliminary estimates could increase the usefulness of the C-CPI-U to government programs and other users.


Joining educational philosophy with theoretical biology has come to form an important part of the growing edusemiotic movement. Edusemiotics has followed the example of biosemiotics (the understanding that the emergence of life is coextensive with the emergence of semiosis) to describe the process of learning itself as being coextensive with semiosis (or, sign-action). Following this recent turn in scholarship this paper argues for a perspective of learning rooted in the dynamics of the living. By 'living', I am referring to the integrated dynamics of reaction and anticipation that is definitional of living organisms, as distinguished from (non-living) inanimate matter. This calls for a theoretical perspective that transcends the realist/idealist divides often inherent in educational theory; offering a possible middle way between the constructivist emphasis on mind dependent reality, and the positivist emphasis on mind independent reality. Such a theoretical approach must be able to account for interactions in states of becoming, and thus calls for a broader causality than reductionist methods or computationalist accounts allow. To approach this re-conceptualization, I attempt to explore the combined relevance of two theoretical perspectives --- anticipatory biology, and the edusemiotic understanding of learning-as-semiosis. To address how anticipatory systems research from biology can be applied to learning theory, I first explore Nadin and Rosen's notion of (Godelian) G-complexity, and how this contributes to an understanding of the living as complex. Secondly, I address Peirce's notion of semiosis as it is embedded in his categorical system and overarching cosmology. In conclusion, I consider the confluences and differences between the concept of semiosis and the triadic relations that Peirce saw as fundamental to the origins of life, and the anticipatory processes that these theoretical biologists use to define living organisms, and examine how and if these two conceptions (taken in union) can potentially enrich theoretical accounts of learning. In this final analysis, the combined relevance of these two perspectives is applied to understanding the process of improvisation as an anticipatory/semiotic dynamic, to demonstrate the possible pedagogical relevance of this theoretical alignment


Transmigration from Java to rural areas of the 'outer islands' appeared finished in Indonesia after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 and decentralisation in 2001. However, the rapid growth of oil palm plantations in the past decade has led to a renewed call for transmigrants by district heads seeking an expanded labour force. A new system has evolved on a district-to-district basis with applicants in 'sending districts' (in Java, Bali and the poorer provinces of East and West Nusa Tenggara) being matched to requests from 'receiving districts' (in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Papua), which largely depend on levels of plantation investment near proposed new transmigration sites. Coordination is in the hands of a rebranded central Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration. Integral to the 'spatial' organisation of the new transmigration will be the creation of towns or cities, known as KotaTerpadu Mandiri ('Integrated self-sufficient city'). A new transmigra- tion region (with its oil palm plantations) will form the 'embryo' for the city's growth. Although these arrangements will aim to reduce poverty, their social and environmental costs have not been evaluated. Examples of these new schemes in parts of Central Kalimantan are discussed, with brief comparisons of earlier transmigration projects.


Objectives: This study analyzed the epidemiology of adult cases with minor head trauma in order to identify the high risk groups for scanning by cranial computed tomography (CT). Patients and Methods: We conducted a prospective observational study. This included 450 patients who had been seen at our Emergency Clinic and had experienced a minor head trauma between January 2012 and March 2012. Results: One hundred and twenty six (28%) of the patients were women and 324 (72%) were men. The mean age was 40.99±17.87 years. Leading trauma mechanisms were motor vehicle accidents, followed by falls and violence. Accidents not involving vehicles and violence were the most frequent causes for trauma in patients with a skull fracture; falls from a height were the most common cause in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Cranial CT scans were performed in 73.6% (n=331) of the cases. Among CT scans, 13% were interpreted as abnormal. The most frequent abnormal CT findings included linear fracture (34.9%), subdural hematoma (25.6%) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (16.3%). Conclusion: The Glasgow coma scale (GCS) score of 14, vomiting more than 3 times and scalp laceration were predictors for a high risk of an abnormal cranial CT. There was no statistically significant relationship between an abnormal CT scan and gender, cause of trauma, complaints at presentation other than vomiting more than 3 times, physical examination findings other than scalp laceration, alcohol or anticoagulant use.


Human hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the prototype member of the Hepadnaviridae family of viruses, characterised by a relaxed circular, ∼3200-bp deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) genome (rcDNA) with replication primarily in hepatocytes, the major parenchymal cell of the liver. HBV infections may be transient or chronic. All hepadnaviruses, including those that infect humans as well as small animal species, are similar clinically and biologically. Part of the replication strategy includes conversion of the rcDNA genome into covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA), which is found exclusively in the nucleus of infected hepatocytes. This cccDNA acts as template for the transcription of all hepadnaviral messenger ribonucleic acids (mRNAs). One of the largest mRNAs, the pregenome, is reverse transcribed in the cytoplasm into new rcDNA. cccDNA is a highly stable molecule present as a mini chromosome with up to 10–50 copies in the nucleus of each infected hepatocyte. The stability of cccDNA, the noncytolytic nature of infection and the fact that hepatocytes constitute a self-renewing population make chronic HBV infections difficult to treat. The natural course of chronic HBV infection consists of four phases: immune tolerance, immune clearance, immune control and reactivation and is associated with liver disease that encompasses a wide range of histological changes.

Key Concepts:

There are two possible outcomes of HBV infection: transient or chronic infection.

Transient (acute) HBV infections often spread to infect >95% of hepatocytes and can be rapidly cleared from the liver.

Ninety to ninety-five percent of adults experience transient infections, whereas 30–90% of children develop chronic HBV infections.

Chronic HBV infection can result in liver disease including portal and lobular inflammation, fibrosis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

Multiple copies of cccDNA are present in each infected hepatocyte and act as a stable reservoir for HBV infection.

The highly stable nature of cccDNA is the major factor in the failure of antiviral therapy during chronic HBV infection.

Pre-exposure vaccination with HBV surface antigen (HBsAg) particles results in an anti-HBs antibody response that provides immunity against HBV infection.

HBV remains a major worldwide problem with >360 million people with chronic infection.

Keywords:

DNA genome;
cccDNA;
reverse transcription;
transient infection;
chronic infection;
liver disease;
hepatocellular carcinoma;
vaccination;
interferon-α;
antiviral drugs


This book breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems. This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help household to protect themselves, against this impoverishment. The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public policy in this field. It provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk pooling to the informal sector.


Letters recording the reactions of ordinary Russians to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, an account of the day-to-day scramble to make a living after the end of the Soviet Union, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management— The Russia Reader brings these and many other selections together in this introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the world's largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today. Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the book is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, emigres, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians, and thirty are translated into English for the first time.

Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary's description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus', to a scientist's recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist's depiction of the decadence of the "New Russians" in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.


This preliminary survey deals with experimental observations on the degree of entrainment exhibited between heart rate variability (HRV), respiration and electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings for 5 subjects, trained in the use of a particular inner self-management technique, as they change their mode of heart function through various states of order. As the heart approaches its first major ordered mode of functioning (entrainment), both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system shift their power into the mid frequency range (~ 0.1 Hz) in the HRV power spectrum which is associated with the baroreceptor feedback loop between the heart and brain. One then sees frequency pulling of the respiratory system towards this mid frequency range, until frequency-locking of the HRV waveform and respiration rate occurs. Thereafter, the signal amplitude in the ~0.1 Hz range of the brainwaves begins to increase significantly. Strong cross-correlation functions are found to exist between these pairs of biological oscillators. However, the brain wave signals from different areas of the brain don't all frequency-lock with the baroreceptor signal. The auxiliary data indicates that there is much hidden complexity yet to be elucidated. Evoked potential data reinforces some of the major findings.


Abstract Study Objective Exacerbation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) symptoms prior to weather change has not heretofore been described. Methods Case Study: A 60 year old right handed female with lifelong anxiety and four years of depression presented with a 20 year history of MS manifested by bilateral lower extremity pain and weakness and urinary incontinence. Since the onset, she observed that approaching storms or weather changes cause her symptoms to worsen. This manifests one day prior to the meteorological shifts of rain or snow. This occurs whether she is at home or on vacation and unlike the weatherman, "she is never wrong." The aggravation of symptomatology would consist of worsening leg pain and weakness of both lower extremities so that her functional status changes from using a cane to a wheelchair. These symptoms begin one day prior to the storm and gradually worsen to the point of maximum intensity as the storm arrives. The baseline pain is usually 5/10 in severity but with the storm it increases to 8/10. The pain, which progressively worsens as the storm advances, is a vice-like numbness in her shins and spasm in her legs. The pain and weakness will persist for as long as the storm lasts. The pain diminishes and the motor symptoms improve six hours after the storm is over. She can differentiate approaching snow or rain such that snow causes more intense symptoms. She denies change in symptomatology on airplanes or when she is present at high altitude such as Las Vegas or Colorado. She also affirms that her symptoms are worse when she is in a hot tub and better in a cold-water bath. She reports that there is a family history of similar ability to predict the weather in a cousin and nephew, both who also suffer from MS. Results Abnormalities in Neurological Examination: BP 159/115. Pulse 100. Mental Status Examination: disheveled. Depressed mood with congruent affect. Short-term memory: 5 digits forwards, 2 digits backwards. Recent memory: able to recall none of 4 objects in 3minutes without improvement with reinforcement. Unable to interpret similarities or proverbs. Poor ability to calculate. Reflexes: 3+ bilateral lower extremities. Clock Drawing Test: 1 (abnormal). Conclusions Uhthoff's phenomena (hot bath test) is well described in MS (Humm, 2004), however the worsening of symptoms prior to weather change has not been reported. Possible mechanisms include meteorological induced anxiety and depression with associated exacerbation (Ackerman, 1998). Other possible mechanisms include misattribution, selective recall, or a misreporting due to psychological needs for acceptance by examiner, similar to the Hawthorne effect (observer effect) (Adair, 1984). With the approaching storms there could be a change in internal temperature, which then preferentially affects areas of demyelination (Kudo, 2014). It is worth querying those with epoch associated neurological disorders as to linkage with meteorological events.


Environmental knowledge is often regarded as difficult to define and position in education in general and in teacher education in particular. This presents challenges for both knowledge production and for curriculum development for teacher education programmes. While many 'traditional' disciplines have well-defined knowledge bases developed over time, environmental education does not, and is also less easy to integrate into teacher education programmes. In this paper, the policy framework for teacher education in South Africa is explored so as to develop ideas for knowledge selection and inclusion in environmental education for professional (teacher) education in South Africa. The works of Short (2002) on mission/practical knowledge and of Ball, Sleep, Boerst and Bass (2009) on high-leverage practices in teacher education curricula are used as ways of doing in order to enable environmental education. It is contended that these processes can provide ideas to exploit the generative spaces that exist in national policy for inclusion of contextualised, issue-based knowledge for curriculum organisation and of practice-based processes in order that environmental issues and sustainability goals may be included in teacher education curricula in South Africa.


Objective: To explore the analysis of drug information inquiries at a Mental hospital in Saudi Arabia. Method: It is 4.5- years cohort analysis of drug Information centers inquiries at a 500-bed Mental hospital in Riyadh city, Saudi Arabia. All drug information centers should enter the electronic answer form of drug information inquiries. American Society of Health-System Pharmacist (ASHP) drug information model. The form consisted of questioner demographic information, questioner contact information, patient demographic data, patient diagnoses or health problems, question classification, the specific inquiry, and answer, drop list of references (Tertiary resources, secondary resources, and primary resources), and pharmacist answered demographic data. The form made through survey monkey system. The format analyzed through the Microsoft Excel sheet version 10th. Results: The total of drug information inquiries was (1088). Most of the inquiries asked by pharmacist 504 (46.32%), physician 496 (45.59%) and patients 49 (4.5%). The most type of inquiries was drug dose 272 (25%), and drug of choice 204 (16.74%), followed by drug interaction 186 (17.1%) and adverse drug reaction 172 (15.81%). The physician frequently asked about adverse drug reaction 120 (24.19%) followed by drug dosing 106 (21.37%)and drug of choice 101 (20.36%). While the pharmacist most frequently asked about drug dosing 156 (30.95%) followed by drug interaction 100 (19.84%) and drug of choice 85 (16.87%). The most type of references used to answer the question was other 416 (38.52%) and Drug.com website 263 (24.35%) followed by Medscape website 226 (20.35%) and prescribing guidelines in psychiatry book 162 (15%). Conclusion: The drug information services prove comprehensive answering of drug inquiries at a mental hospital in Riyadh city, Saudi Arabia. The drug information services need update references and more awareness to medical staff. Key words: Drug information, Inquires, Mental hospital, Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia.


For summer semester European Patent Law class. Databases for patent searching, sources for paper topic selection, primary and secondary sources for researching European Patent Law issues.


Protein fold recognition is a crucial step in inferring biological structure and function. This paper focuses on machine learning methods for predicting quaternary structural folds, which consist of multiple protein chains that form chemical bonds among side chains to reach a structurally stable domain. The complexity associated with modeling the quaternary fold poses major theoretical and computational challenges to current machine learning methods. We propose methods to address these challenges and show how (1) domain knowledge is encoded and utilized to characterize structural properties using segmentation conditional graphical models; and (2) model complexity is handled through efficient inference algorithms. Our model follows a discriminative approach so that any informative features, such as those representative of overlapping or long-range interactions, can be used conveniently. The model is applied to predict two important quaternary folds, the triple β-spirals and double-barrel trimers. Cross-family validation shows that our method outperforms other state-of-the art algorithms.