In this paper, the effective parameters on the ductility demand of the seismically base isolated structure are investigated, and then a relation between the strength reduction factor and the target ductility is presented. The investigation has been conducted by modelling the base isolated structure as a two degree of freedom model in the OpenSees software, and the possibility of yielding in the superstructure has been considered in the model. Results show that the period of isolator and superstructure have the most effect on the ductility demand, therefore these two parameters beside the strength reduction factor and the target ductility have been used as variables of R − μ relation. A nonlinear regression model has been developed for forecasting the relation and the constant parameters of the proposed scheme has been obtained based on an optimization model solved by modified artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. A database including 224 models under 20 earthquake records with 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years have been generated for this purpose. Since there is not any explicit closed form formula to calculate the strength reduction factor for a specific target ductility; another optimization model has been developed to calculate the data used as input of the nonlinear regression model. The proposed relation includes two nonlinear functions and it is able to quantify the inelastic performance of base isolated structures for a wide range of earthquake records accurately.


Bile acids are well-recognized stimuli of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) secretion. This action has been attributed to activation of the G protein–coupled bile acid receptor GPBAR1 (TGR5), although other potential bile acid sensors include the nuclear farnesoid receptor and the apical sodium-coupled bile acid transporter ASBT. The aim of this study was to identify pathways important for GLP-1 release and to determine whether bile acids target their receptors on GLP-1–secreting L-cells from the apical or basolateral compartment. Using transgenic mice expressing fluorescent sensors specifically in L-cells, we observed that taurodeoxycholate (TDCA) and taurolithocholate (TLCA) increased intracellular cAMP and Ca2+. In primary intestinal cultures, TDCA was a more potent GLP-1 secretagogue than taurocholate (TCA) and TLCA, correlating with a stronger Ca2+ response to TDCA. Using small-volume Ussing chambers optimized for measuring GLP-1 secretion, we found that both a GPBAR1 agonist and TDCA stimulated GLP-1 release better when applied from the basolateral than from the luminal direction and that luminal TDCA was ineffective when intestinal tissue was pretreated with an ASBT inhibitor. ASBT inhibition had no significant effect in nonpolarized primary cultures. Studies in the perfused rat gut confirmed that vascularly administered TDCA was more effective than luminal TDCA. Intestinal primary cultures and Ussing chamber–mounted tissues from GPBAR1-knockout mice did not secrete GLP-1 in response to either TLCA or TDCA. We conclude that the action of bile acids on GLP-1 secretion is predominantly mediated by GPBAR1 located on the basolateral L-cell membrane, suggesting that stimulation of gut hormone secretion may include postabsorptive mechanisms.


In this rational reconstruction, two rival research programmes are identified as dominating the Social Psychology of decision making. Behavioral Decision Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action embody the Rationalist programme. Social Judgment Theory and Attributional Theory exemplify the Empiricist programme. As predicted by the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP), the negative heuristics are shown to condense as hard cores which remain protected from refutation. The historical reconstruction of Social Judgment Theory illustrates uneven development in algorithmic and propositional heuristics. Behavioral Decision Theory shows a progressive problem shift to Multi Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). In a revision of MSRP to include practice shifts, the Theory of Reasoned Action illustrates progressive practice despite empirical anomalies. Attributional theory shows a progressive problem shift by predicting personal-efficacy to influence choice. Practice, however, is restrained through reliance on the ANOVA paradigm. The experimental study partitioned locus and stability attributes for subjects' choice of therapy programmes in an anti-smoking clinic. A significant main effect was found for stability expectancy, though this did not influence choice. The Lens Model algorithm was demonstrated to transpose successfully onto the Self-efficacy model with the intra-system capturing decisions combining the two forms of efficacy expectation. The Theory of Reasoned Action was augmented by transfer of MAUT techniques giving relative weighting to salience. Though Rationalist and Empiricist paradigms illuminate some aspects of stopping smoking, neither adequately addresses the decision-action gap perceived by smokers who disown their original intentions when the the correspondence is seen as inauthentic. An alternative model is proposed with a basis in Objectivist epistemology. Authenticated action is explained as a means of arriving at decisions through consideration of problem and practice shifts at the individual level.


A distorted grid voltage or nonlinear behavior in the current control loop can cause low frequency current harmonics in a grid-connected voltage source inverter (VSI). Many efforts have been made to mitigate such phenomena, including hardware and/or control structure improvements. A well-known suitable strategy to reduce current harmonics in a selective manner is to apply a Proportional Multi-Resonant (PMR) current controller. Inverter-grid stability is another common issue when dealing with grid-connected VSI. Stability is influenced by the inverter impedance, which depends on the controller parameters. This paper presents a simplified tuning strategy for the PMR controller, taking into consideration the inverter-grid stability issue. The obtained controller was implemented and tested in a 10 kW three-phase inverter with a passively damped LCL filter. A significant reduction of current harmonics emission from the inverter up to 650 Hz was achieved without any hardware modification. The limits of PMR controllers to mitigate current harmonics were studied, and the influence of the grid impedance was verified.


In 2003, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) initiated a research effort to develop and test a methodology for estimating congestion delay on Seattle area freeways. The initial phase of the research developed a preliminary methodology for both measuring congestion and assigning that congestion to specific lane blocking incidents. In Phase 2 of this study, that methodology was automated and extended to include an examination of the effects of incidents occurring on the shoulders of the freeway, spillback from incident-caused congestion on one freeway that affects a second freeway that feeds traffic onto the initially congested facility, special events, and weather. Because funding for this effort was extremely limited, only three corridors (with both directions analyzed independently) and two months of data were analyzed. The project found that the Phase 1 methodology works well in assigning traffic congestion that occurs in the immediate time frame and geographic location of incidents to those incidents. It also showed that this process can be automated, making the data preparation effort now the primary determinant of the cost of additional work of this kind. Unfortunately, even with the addition of shoulder incidents, special events, and weather to lane blocking events, the automated process is unable to assign a significant proportion of the non-recurring delay occurring on Seattle freeways. The detailed analysis of freeway performance showed that much of the delay caused by specific incidents occurs in places or at times removed from the incident itself. The result is that much of the observed non-recurring delay can not be assigned to specific causes by the current analytical process. New analytical procedures will need to be developed in Phase 3 of this work. The Phase 2 analysis also confirmed that the congestion effects of specific incidents and other traffic disruptions are highly dependent on the background traffic conditions at the time of the disruption. While the Phase 2 analysis did not produce all of the results desired, the additional analyses showed that the summary statistics output from the Phase 2 software are useful as input to other analytical procedures.


This thesis examines context effects in relation to the performance of children with ADHD in test and 'real world' situations. There is a wealth of empirical research that illustrates poor performance of these children on a range of cognitive measures, particularly tasks that claim to measure executive function and inhibitory control. However, anecdotal reports have suggested that while playing computer games these children display abilities that contrast sharply with empirical findings. This contrast was the basis for a series of studies using computer games and computerised tasks to investigate the performance of children with ADHD across contexts.

The first investigation (Study 1), a questionnaire study, lent support to the anecdotal reports. Parents of children with ADHD confirmed that their children were able to sit still, concentrate, pay attention and achieve higher levels of success when playing computer games. In Study 2 parents of children with ADHD were asked to discuss the features of computer games they felt were most influential in contributing to their child's interest and performance. Observations made in the Study 3 provided further confirmation that performance improves when children with ADHD play computer games; performance in terms of error making and and on-task activity on a standardised test of inhibition and attention, the Conners' Continuous Performance Test II (CPT II), was significantly poorer than performance on a more 'game' like Pokemon version of the task and significantly different to the performance of typically developing children. Features of computer games that may have contributed to the observed improvements for children with ADHD were examined in four subsequent studies. These features included the addition of narrative, the addition of a points scoring system, the addition of character, auditory reinforcement and differing levels of response cost. Inhibitory performance on two commercially available games was also investigated (Study 8), and the performance of participants with ADHD was not significantly different to that of typically developing participants. The results raise questions about current understanding of the disorder and models of ADHD, stress the need for examining contextual sensitivity of children with apparently constitutional disorders such as ADHD, and have implications for methodological design and the contexts in which cognitive abilities are investigated.


The quality of student nurse placements is important in the development of competent and confident nurses. On placement, student nurses develop and master the qualities of skilled caring, competence, and clinical skills, experiencing nursing in the acute and community setting. Despite this, many student nurses have little knowledge or insight into the function or role of community intervention acute nursing teams (CIT) in Ireland and their pivotal role in hospital avoidance and supported early hospital discharge of patients. Caredoc in conjunction with Waterford Institute of technology (WIT) School of Nursing identified a need to expand the current student nurse placement opportunities to include a 14-day placement with a CIT nurse delivering acute nursing care in the community. The aims of the placement were to provide a rich learning environment for the student outside of the hospital environment, raising the awareness of how acute nursing care can be provided to patients in the community, that prior to CIT could only have been delivered in an acute hospital settling. For example, chemotherapy pump disconnections, IV infusions, Suprapubic catheterisations, heart failure IV diuretic management, pre/post-operative anticoagulation management, post-operative wound management. These placements are targeted at 2nd year student nurses from WIT school of nursing, with a ratio of 1: 1 preceptorship by a CIT nurse. WIT and Caredoc CIT began to develop predicted learning opportunities outcomes in the last quarter of 2017. Preceptorship training commenced for Caredoc CIT nurses early 2018 with the first cohort of student nurses arriving in May 2018. The collaboration and engagement between WIT coordinators, student nurses, Caredoc CIT nurses and management team ensured an innovative environment of learning, including patient selection suitability skills, utilisation of technology, secure electronic transmission of patient information between the hospital and the community, opportunities to observe autonomous decision-making in patient care and management. There is recognition among healthcare decision makers that the future of healthcare involves greater health promotion, chronic disease management, and care of older patients in the community. Development of student nurse placements between other centres of nurse education and providers of CIT services is transferrable across the country. Placements are already progressing as an initiative with advanced nurse practitioner candidates with University College Cork and Caredoc CIT.  The successful development of coordinated student nurse placements is in its infancy, but has already succeeded in the integration of student and staff nurse learning; fostering a collaborative approach in the development of placement learning outcomes and evaluating student's placement feedback. The main outcomes were: - Students had the opportunity to practice skills they had not previously been offered - Educational training and professional development shared between hospital and community ensure patients receive the same standard of care whether they are treated in the hospital or in their own home - Collaboration between Centres of Nurse education and community teams are a key component to growing the knowledge of the future nurses understanding of acute care beyond the hospital door - The honour of being a trusted guest in a patient's home


NAT444 is an IPv4 extension technology being considered by Service
Providers as a means to continue offering IPv4 service to customers
while transitioning to IPv6. This technology adds an extra Carrier-
Grade NAT (CGN) in the Service Provider network, often resulting in
two NATs. CableLabs, Time Warner Cable, and Rogers Communications
independently tested the impacts of NAT444 on many popular Internet
services using a variety of test scenarios, network topologies, and
vendor equipment. This document identifies areas where adding a second
layer of NAT disrupts the communication channel for common Internet
applications. This document was updated to include the Dual-Stack Lite
(DS-Lite) impacts also.


Desert ants Cataglyphis fortis are endowed with an amazing navigational toolkit. While foraging for food, these insects keep tracking their nest entrance by updating their so called path integrator (PI). This localization system requires celestial cues for the estimation of the heading (solar elevation, polarized skylight, color gradient), and odometric cues based on ventral optic flow and stride-counting (Wehner et al., Ethol. Ecol. Evol., 1990). An insectoid robot, called AntBot, was built and equipped with insect-inspired minimlistic sensors: (i) a celestial compass composed of two UV-sensitive photodiodes topped with rotating linear polarizing filters to mimic the dorsal rim area of the compound eye (Dupeyroux et al., Sci. Robot., 2019); (ii) an optic flow sensor comprising only 12 pixels that can auto-adapt to light changes within 7 decades (Mafrica et al., Opt. Express , 2015) to measure the walking speed. AntBot was also made able to count its stride while walking. Those three sources of information were used in a series of 5 PI models tested over 130 homing experiments (Dupeyroux et al., Sci. Robot., 2019). The fully ant-inspired PI allowed the AntBot robot to reach outstanding homing performances under lighting conditions similar to those encountered by ants, with an overall homing error as small as 0.67% of the full trajectory distance (Dupeyroux et al., Sci. Robot., 2019). AntBot is the first robot ever to successfully perform PI with ant-inspired sensing modalities in real world conditions. We hope that biologists will consider our open-source robotic platform to test in real-time various models of ant-inspired strategies including their neural basis that are still difficult to validate in simulated conditions.


The present study tested the hypothesis that a reduction in calcium flux across the sarcolemma or the sarcoplasmic reticulum at the onset of reperfusion could attenuate subsequent mechanical "stunning" (postischemic myocardial dysfunction). The isolated working rat heart was subjected to 20 minutes of total global ischemia, reperfused in the Langendorff mode for 5 minutes, and then made to work again for 10 minutes. During the early reperfusion period (first 2 minutes), the effects of agents thought to increase cytosolic calcium (high external calcium [modified Tyrode's solution replaced Krebs-Henseleit buffer as the perfusate], isoproterenol, forskolin, and Bay K 8644) were tested. All these interventions worsened stunning. The cardiac output (CO) of control hearts recovered to 74.7 +/- 3.4%, whereas recovery was 56.3 +/- 3.7% (p less than 0.05) for high calcium (10 mM), 53.4 +/- 3.6% (p less than 0.05) for isoproterenol, 43.4 +/- 4.1% (p less than 0.05) for Bay K 8644, and 62.7 +/- 2.4% (p less than 0.002) for forskolin. Interventions aimed at limiting calcium flux during early reperfusion, such as reperfusion with a low extracellular calcium or the addition of ryanodine (3 x 10(-9) M), nisoldipine (10(-8) M), or the inorganic blockers Mn2+ (2 mM) or Mg2+ (16 mM), were also tested. Low extracellular calcium (0.75 mM) improved CO to 91.8 +/- 0.8% (p less than 0.05). Reperfusion with ryanodine and nisoldipine gave CO recoveries of 103.6 +/- 1.8% (p less than 0.002) and 99.0 +/- 2.8% (p less than 0.002), respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


InDesign is now regarded as the industry standard in desktop publishing and is very widely used by publishing professionals and non-specialists alike. Many users have a pressing need for automation of their workflows but have been reluctant to get started because of the lack of a simple internal mechanism for recording steps, like Photoshop and Illustrator actions.Instead InDesign relies on scripting which, for many InDesign users, may seem a little too much like hard work. In fact, InDesign comes with all the tools necessary for creating scripts and scripting is not that difficult--it can even be fun!This book is aimed at the general user and provides an introduction to scripting InDesign, using JavaScript to create simple cross-platform solutions. It also gives a general introduction to XML, DTDs and XSLT, before showing how to automate the importing and exporting of XML data.Learn proactively through step-by-step tutorials on creating JavaScript solutions: the "Try it for yourself!" approach allows you to see for yourself how scripts are put together.Create scripts that manipulate text and images, build documents automatically and output them as interactive PDFs.Become familiar with the InDesign object model: as you work through the book, you will make repeated use of the essential syntax for manipulating InDesign objects such as document, pages, text frames, graphics and preferences.Create user interfaces to make your scripts more flexible and user-friendly. Rather than just creating scripts which always perform the same steps, you will learn to user ScriptUI to provide users with the ability to make choices that determine what the script will do.Learn how to automate XML import and export and provide an interface which allows the user to filter import by supplying parameter values.


Abstract Context. Enclosing nests in cages to exclude predators is a management tool frequently used to increase the reproductive success of threatened ground-nesting precocial birds. This technique has seldom been used with passerines, despite the predicted increased benefit for altricial species due to their longer period of nest dependency. Aims. The aims of this study were to determine (1) whether cages could be installed around the nests of a threatened, shrub-nesting passerine without causing parental desertion, and (2) whether caged nests could successfully exclude the dominant nest predators and increase nesting success. Methods. Cages with four different mesh sizes (1000 mm, 200 mm, 100 mm, 50 mm) were installed sequentially in trials at four nests in a secure population and three nests in an endangered population of white-fronted chats (Epthianura albifrons) to investigate susceptibility to desertion. Trials using 160 caged and uncaged artificial nests were used to determine the efficacy of 50-mm wire mesh in preventing access to eggs by potential nest predators. Key results. Parent birds accepted nest cages, which reduced predation rates on artificial nests from 96% to 14%. Infrared-triggered cameras revealed that corvids were responsible for 94% of predation episodes. Nest success of caged white-fronted chat nests was 85% (n = 7). Conclusions. Nest cages do not appear to have negative effects on nest success of white-fronted chats, and may considerably increase reproductive success. Implications. Nest cages may aid conservation of the endangered population of white-fronted chats and other endangered songbird species.


What are the key areas in which the EU can engage with China in the diplomatic sphere? Karine Lisbonne de Vergeron writes that China's overall economic and strategic interests now seem to go hand in hand with a willingness to engage with Europe culturally. She argues that with Europe's culture forming its most fundamental comparative advantage in soft power, cultural industries should form the basis for strengthening relations between the EU and China.


HBV vaccine was introduced into the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in Senegal and Cameroon in 2005. We conducted a cross-sectional study in both countries to assess the HBV immune protection among children. All consecutive children under 4 years old, hospitalized for any reason between May 2009 and May 2010, with an immunisation card and a complete HBV vaccination, were tested for anti-HBs and anti-HBc. A total of 242 anti-HBc-negative children (128 in Cameroon and 114 in Senegal) were considered in the analysis. The prevalence of children with anti-HBs ≥10 IU/L was higher in Cameroon with 92% (95% CI: 87%–97%) compared to Senegal with 58% (95% CI: 49%–67%), (p<0.001). The response to vaccination in Senegal was lower in 2006–2007 (43%) than in 2008–2009 (65%), (p = 0.028). Our results, although not based on a representative sample of Senegalese or Cameroonian child populations, reveal a significant problem in vaccine response in Senegal. This response problem extends well beyond hepatitis B: the same children who have not developed an immune response to the HBV vaccine are also at risk for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTwP) and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). Field biological monitoring should be carried out regularly in resource-poor countries to check quality of the vaccine administered.


Vaccines against Salmonella Typhi, the causative agent of typhoid fever, are commonly used by travellers, however, there are few examples of national immunization programs in endemic areas. There is therefore a paucity of data on the impact of typhoid immunization programs on localised populations of S. Typhi. Here we have used whole genome sequencing (WGS) to characterise 44 historical bacterial isolates collected before and after a national typhoid immunization program that was implemented in Thailand in 1977 in response to a large outbreak; the program was highly effective in reducing typhoid case numbers. Thai isolates were highly diverse, including 10 distinct phylogenetic lineages or genotypes. Novel prophage and plasmids were also detected, including examples that were previously only reported in Shigella sonnei and Escherichia coli. The majority of S. Typhi genotypes observed prior to the immunization program were not observed following it. Post-vaccine era isolates were more closely related to S. Typhi isolated from neighbouring countries than to earlier Thai isolates, providing no evidence for the local persistence of endemic S. Typhi following the national immunization program. Rather, later cases of typhoid appeared to be caused by the occasional importation of common genotypes from neighbouring Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These data show the value of WGS in understanding the impacts of vaccination on pathogen populations and provide support for the proposal that large-scale typhoid immunization programs in endemic areas could result in lasting local disease elimination, although larger prospective studies are needed to test this directly. Author Summary Typhoid fever is a systemic infection caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi. Typhoid fever is associated with inadequate hygiene in low-income settings and a lack of sanitation infrastructure. A sustained outbreak of typhoid fever occurred in Thailand in the 1970s, which peaked in 1975-1976. In response to this typhoid fever outbreak the government of Thailand initiated an immunization program, which resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of typhoid cases in Thailand. To better understand the population of S. Typhi circulating in Thailand at this time, as well as the impact of the immunization program on the pathogen population, we sequenced the genomes of 44 S. Typhi obtained from hospitals in Thailand before and after the immunization program. The genome sequences showed that isolates of S. Typhi bacteria isolated from post-immunization era typhoid cases were likely imported from neighbouring countries, rather than strains that have persisted in Thailand throughout the immunization period. Our work provides the first historical insights into S. Typhi in Thailand during the 1970s, and provides a model for the impact of immunization on S. Typhi populations.


The paper studies the problems of social development of adolescents in multiple-aged groups (MAG). Methods. The methods involve socio-personal approach, consideration of the subject in a certain ideological humanistic orientation, comparative analysis, and comparison of historical facts, the study of social phenomena of different ages, long-term scientific observations, reflections, a retrospective analysis of personal experience. Results. The author describes objective conditions for the uprise of extremist, subcultural youth of multiple-aged groups, and the reasons whence they begin to perform distinctive functions that are specific for teenagers. Options for models of MAG humanistic educational systems formed in Russian and foreign social and pedagogical practice are listed. A complex of pedagogical conditions provided for the formation of social competence of adolescents in multiple-aged associations of humanistic orientation is considered. It has been found that this type of system is characterized by the following features: the principle of voluntary association of people, independence of subjects, rapid adaptation to changing socio-cultural situation, a variety of activities by interests, alternating change of activities, conflict resolution within the team, a high level of team spirit, selfmanagement, the creative nature of educational process, upbringing, socialization and self-realization. A brief description of conditions for development of fundamental human values among adolescents and formation of new specific complicated humanistic human and personal relations in global world is given. Scientific novelty. The author studies the following concepts: educational system of multiple-aged associations, teenager social competence, ambivalent behavior, emotional and moral compass of personality, invisible assets of the team, emergent effect of multiple-aged groups, inter-age communication. It was found that the specificity of MAG educational potential is determined by the conditions for the appearance of multiple-aged associations as a system-forming principle; all members of association are freely operating subjects, which consciously accept external restrictions caused by multiple-aged membership of participants of any activity. Relations of freedom, an openness, trust, equality, safety, collective unity in MAG provide introduction of emerging effect of display of the hidden assets of a personality. The substantial part of MAG space allows to create for its each member enough of educational reality situations and representations about actions in them that creates conditions for positive changes both the separate person, and all community as a whole. The humanistic orientation of MAG activity is that it's each participant, joining cultural traditions, ethnic, civil and universal values, adopting life experience of others, keeps own uniqueness. Practical significance. Based on the Children and Youth Public Centre «Carabela» that has been working in Yekaterinburg for more than fifty years, the author discloses how to use the technology of inter-age communication and interaction to provide the continuity of traditions, to preserve historical memory, to transfer humanistic ideas in the chain of generations, and to create personality with sound emotional and moral compass. It is shown that, on the one hand, subjective component complicates the educational system, but on the other – simplifies basic processes, functions, qualities, factors and connections of the whole educational system; provides the link between «educational and practical life»; allows teachers to align the ambivalent process of formation of social competence among adolescents.


Training applications which use responsive virtual-human technology (RVHT) – training tools based on sophisticated voice recognition and behavior modeling technologies – have great potential for improving training of interaction skills essential to effective interviewing, such as refusal avoidance, probing, and addressing questions related to informed consent. However, our understanding of how to model the behavior of responsive virtual humans and how people interact with them is limited. The overall effectiveness of this technology as a training tool depends upon its ability to provide appropriate learning experiences, its ability to engage the student, and its acceptability to disparate users. This research assesses the accessibility and acceptance of a training application based on RVHT as a tool for teaching refusal avoidance skills to telephone interviewers. The assessment focuses on users' ability to understand the basic features of the application, whether diverse users are able to use the application equally, how users react to problems, whether the virtual humans are realistic enough for the users, and ultimately, whether users accept the virtual environment as a valid proxy for the real work environment.


Irrigation along the Nile River has resulted in dramatic changes in the biophysical environment of Upper Egypt. In this study we used a combination of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 250 m Normalized Difference Vegetation Index data and Landsat imagery to identify areas that changed from 2001 to 2008 as a result of irrigation and water-level fluctuations in the Nile River and nearby waterbodies. We used two different methods of time series analysis – principal components analysis (PCA) and harmonic decomposition – applied to the MODIS 250 m Normalized Difference Vegetation Index images to derive simple three-class land-cover maps and then assessed their accuracy using a set of reference polygons derived from 30 m Landsat 5 and 7 imagery. We analysed our MODIS 250 m maps against a new MODIS global land-cover product (MOD12Q1 collection 5) to assess whether regionally specific mapping approaches are superior to a standard global product. Results showed that the accuracy of the PCA-based product was greater than the accuracy of either the harmonic decomposition or MOD12Q1 products for the years 2001, 2003 and 2008. However, the accuracy of the PCA product was only slightly better than the MOD12Q1 for 2001 and 2003. Overall, the results suggest that our PCA-based approach produces a high level of user and producer accuracies, although the MOD12Q1 product also showed consistently high accuracy. Overlay of 2001–2008 PCA-based maps showed a net increase of 12,129 ha of irrigated vegetation, with the largest increase found from 2006 to 2008 around the districts of Edfu and Kom Ombo. This result was unexpected in light of ambitious government plans to develop 336,000 ha of irrigated agriculture around the Toshka Lakes.


Following the discovery of Legionella pneumophila as the etiological agent of Legionnaires' disease, many different serogroups and related species of this bacterium have been detected. A newly developed PCR method was used to generate strain-specific DNA fingerprinting profiles. This method is compared with the results of typing the same isolates with a set of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs). To identify different strains of Legionella, the authors used different primers to amplify DNA fragments in crude bacterial lysates to generate banding profiles. The complete Dresden MAb panel contains 98 MAbs related to lipopolysaccharide characteristics. Testing of the isolates was made with these MAbs utilized in the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method. The authors conclude that a combination of Gottingen direct fluorescent antibody technique and PCR methods can be a useful tool for subtyping L. pneumophila serogroup 5 strains.


In a recent February address before the Freedom Forum at Georgetown University, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed E. Hunt gave a concise summary for the impact of recent events within the telecommunication industry. He said, "The biggest change over the last several years has been a massive acceleration in the movement from a monopoly based communications policy to a competition based policy." He further added that competition has completely changed the operating environment within the telecommunication industry in recent years citing long-distance statistics (prices down by 70% since 1984) as well as those for wireless (the average monthly cellular bill down by 61% since 1988). The news is both good and bad. For the consumer, the news is good. Competition means lower prices making more products affordable. For example, products like "additional phone lines" for the PC have skyrocketed. Caller ID services have experienced increased penetration in recent years. However, a competitive market with falling prices means lower revenue for telecom firms. Although battling back by seeking new geographic markets oversees and implementing significant downsizing strategies, telecommunication companies are now putting more pressure on their risk managers to get the most out of their portfolios. One solution that is finding increasing acceptance is credit scoring - a toolbox of statistical procedures, very similar to those used by market researchers in forecasting the demand for a new product. In the world of new product forecasting, mathematical techniques such as linear regression and discrete choice models have been historically popular because of their flexibility, ease of understanding, and relatively inexpensive way of extracting useful information about consumer preferences and behavior. These types of forecasts typically involve using intent to purchase surveys or data from product trials to obtain penetration rates and create simulation tools for target marketing. In the credit and risk management world, much is the same. A credit score is a measure of the likelihood that a customer will become delinquent in paying their bills within a certain period of time, given knowledge of their past credit behavior. Statistical techniques incorporate a variety of predictive information into a single measure capable of rank ordering a portfolio by risk of delinquency, or in the world of a new product forecaster-the likelihood of product purchase. By using a single measure, telecommunications credit managers can quickly evaluate their portfolios and determine which customers are more risky than others. TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES Given recent increases in computing power, a number of tools and techniques are now available at the desktop level to examine credit information in a quick and understandable framework. SAS, SPSS, SHAZAM, LIMDEP, SPLUS, and other statistical software packages offer a variety of statistical techniques covering a wide range of applications. …


Goods trade is highly concentrated and interconnected throughout the United States, relying on a distinct set of markets and freight infrastructure assets to deliver broad-based economic growth. Due to high levels of interstate trade, the federal government has a unique responsibility to support more efficient freight movement. However, the country still does not have an investment vehicle to prioritize key corridors, productive rural areas, and major metropolitan hubs. To address this, the federal government should establish a multimodal freight investment program that includes a combination of formula and competitive grants to drive regional growth. In particular, that program should also foster the development of more geographically-targeted trade data to deliver the greatest return on future freight investments.


In the United States, a majority of the poor and those who work with the poor are women. Recipients of public assistance and the welfare workers who serve them are both trapped at the bottom of the American welfare system. How do they perceive their place in society? How do they assess their self-worth in the hierarchy of a bureaucratic system? In this ethnographic study of a welfare office and two welfare rights groups, Catherine Pelissier Kingfisher addresses these issues in a thought-provoking analysis, based on the women's conversations with each other. Women in the American Welfare Trap addresses a range of significant issues: policy formation and implementation, the role of men in women's economic lives, low-income women's beliefs and aspirations, and the possibilities for women cooperatively working to change the welfare system. Indeed, Kingfisher demonstrates that women who are often viewed as victims without control actively work within the confines of the system to exert their autonomy.


In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world. Collier identifies and explains the four traps that prevent the homelands of the world's billion poorest people from growing and receiving the benefits of globalization - civil war, the discovery and export of natural resources in otherwise unstable economies, being landlocked and therefore unable to participate in the global economy without great cost, and finally, ineffective governance. As he demonstrates that these billion people are quite likely in danger of being irretrievably left behind, Collier argues that we cannot take a "headless heart" approach to these seemingly intractable problems; rather, that we must harness our despair and our moral outrage at these inequities to a reasoned and thorough understanding of the complex and interconnected problems that the world's poorest people face.


A vital feature of American culture in the nineteenth century was the growing awareness that the literary marketplace consisted not of a single, unified, relatively homogeneous reading public, but rather of many disparate, overlapping reading communities differentiated by interests, class, and level of education, as well as by gender and stage of life. Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, this book analyzes the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself. With sections focusing on segmentation by age, gender, and cultural status, "In the Company of Books" analyzes the ways authors and publishers carved up the field of literary production into a multitude of distinct submarkets, differentiated their products, and targeted specific groups of readers in order to guide their book-buying decisions. Combining innovative approaches to canonical authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and Henry James with engaging investigations into the careers of many lesser-known literary figures, Sarah Wadsworth reveals how American writers responded to - and contributed to - this diverse, and diversified, market. "In the Company of Books" contends that specialized editorial and marketing tactics, in concert with the narrative strategies of authors and the reading practices of the book-buying public, transformed the literary landscape, leading to new roles for the book in American culture, the innovation of literary genres, and new relationships between books and readers. Both an exploration of a fragmented print culture through the lens of nineteenth-century American literature and an analysis of nineteenth-century American literature from the perspective of this subdivided marketplace, this wide-ranging study offers fresh insight into the impact of market forces on the development of American literature.


This paper proposes a guidance scheme to achieve an autonomous precision landing on Mars and proposes a practical fixed-time stabilization theorem to analyze the robustness of the guidance. The proposed guidance is mainly based on the fixed-time stabilization method, and it can achieve the precision landing within a pre-defined time. This property enables the proposed guidance to outperform the finite-time stabilization technique which cannot handle uncertainties well and whose convergence time is dependent on initial states. Compared with the existing fixed-time stabilization theorem, the proposed practical fixed-time stabilization theorem can achieve a shorter convergence time and cope with unknown disturbances. When the Mars landing guidance is designed by this proposed theorem, the upper bound of the landing time and the maximum landing error subject to unknown disturbances can be calculated in advance. Theoretical proofs and Monte Carlo simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed theorem and the proposed guidance. Furthermore, the efficacy of the proposed guidance with thrust limitations is also demonstrated by testing of 50 cases with a range of initial positions and velocities.


Knowledge of the hydraulic conductivity of the vadose zone is important in many agronomic, engineering, and environmental areas. Transient tension infiltrometer experiments can be used to estimate the hydraulic conductivity, K0, corresponding to a given pressure head by a transient single‐test (TST) method that uses the coefficients C1 and C2 of the two‐term infiltration equation. A differentiated linearization (DL) method was previously proposed to estimate these coefficients when a layer of contact material is used for the experiment. A field test of the DL and TST methods was conducted on a sandy loam and a clay soil. Eliminating the early‐time influence of the contact layer was easy when the sorptivity of the contact material was 10 to 12 times higher than the soil sorptivity. In other cases a transition zone, which complicated application of the DL method, appeared between the decreasing and increasing portions of the data set. Therefore, applicability of the DL method required large differences in capillary forces between the contact material and the soil. Estimates of K0 varied by up to 650% with the duration of the experiment and <50% with the time interval between readings at the water reservoir. Sensitivity of K0 to the experiment duration was particularly remarkable for the sandy loam soil for short durations. Considering a minimum duration of the experiment of approximately 1 h caused estimates of K0 to vary by a maximum of 40% with the duration of the experiment.


Ionic liquids (ILs) are novel and chemically inert solvents for a wide range of reactions in organic synthesis and biocatalysis, and at least one of them is known to dissolve cellulose. ILs would provide novel options for cellulose degradation in homogenous catalysis if cellulases were sufficiently stable and active. By screening metagenomic libraries 24 novel cellulase clones were identified and tested for their performance in the presence of ILs. Most enzyme clones showed only very poor or no activities. Three enzyme clones (i.e. pCosJP10, pCosJP20 and pCosJP24) were moderately active and stable in the presence of 1-butyl-1-methyl-pyrrolidinium trifluoromethanesulfonate. The corresponding genes of these environment-derived cosmids were similar to known cellulases from Cellvibrio japonicus and a salt-tolerant cellulase from an uncultured microorganism, S. Voget, H. L. Steele and W. R. Streit, J. Biotechnol., 2006, 126, 26-36.1 The most active protein (CelA10) belonged to GH5 family cellulases and was active at IL concentrations of up to 30% (v/v). Recombinant CelA10 was extremely tolerant to 4 M NaCl and KCl. Furthermore improved cellulase variants of CelA10 were isolated in a directed evolution experiment employing SeSaM-technology. Analysis of these variants revealed that the N-terminal cellulose binding domain plays a pivotal role for IL resistance.


The thesis investigates the notion of an existential dialogism and its relation to the Christian idea of kenosis or descent, which is an emptying of selfhood, and the connections between this and ideas of revelation as expressed in the chronotopes of Orthodox iconography and as they appear in C&P. The thesis argues that in this novel there is a parallelism in the constructions of time and space. The linear chronotope is accompanied by a descending existentialism: that is, the polyphony and dialogism of the novei which relativise discursive personae and propel this sense of descent, are constructed within a language of event and, at the same time, there can be seen a parallel dimension which appears in the form of revalation within the dialogic ·~xistentialism and which points to an underlying essentialism. The parallelism of the chronotopic constructions points to an underlying parallelism of existentialism and essentialism in which the existential eventual discourse is in service to an essentialist anthropology whose centre is involved in a Kierkegaardian paradox. The connection with Orthodox iconography lies not only in the fact that Dostoevsky is a Slavophile but, in addition, can be seen in the way that his distortions and inversions of linearity are in service to revelation and resemble those constructions found in Byzantine and Russian iconography. This also gives way to trinitarian constructions of dialogism and polyphony rather than exclusively binary constructions of self and other. The overall structural motif, then, can be seen as one of descent, propelled by an existential dialogism. It also includes death and rebirth which constitute a trinitarian way of being in relation to the self, the other and the word itself.


OBJECTIVE
To review the literature on nipple pain and to delineate effective strategies for the prevention and treatment of nipple pain in breastfeeding mothers.

DATA SOURCES
Computerized searches on MEDLINE, Pre-MEDLINE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library.

STUDY SELECTION
Articles from indexed journals relevant to the objective were reviewed from January 1983 to April 2004. Preference was given to research-based studies in English.

DATA EXTRACTION
Data were extracted and organized under two headings: prevention of nipple pain or trauma and treatment of nipple pain or trauma. The Critical Appraisal Form by J. Briggs was used to extract the data from research-based articles.

DATA SYNTHESIS
The health benefits of breastfeeding for mother and infant are well documented; however, nipple pain is a common reason reported by women for the early termination of breastfeeding. Several studies have compared various treatments for either the prevention of or treatment for nipple pain. These treatments include warm water compresses, tea bag compresses, heat, application of expressed mother's milk, lanolin, vitamin A, collagenase, dexpanthenol, hydrogel therapy, glycerin gel therapy, moist occlusive dressing, education regarding proper latch-on and positioning, and no treatment.

CONCLUSIONS
No one topical agent showed superior results in the relief of nipple discomfort. The most important factor in decreasing the incidence of nipple pain is the provision of education in relation to proper breastfeeding technique and latch-on as well as anticipatory guidance regarding the high incidence of early postpartum nipple pain.


In the context of the market deregulation process the EU dairy sector has been reinforced by the Milk Package, comprising a series of measures addressed to producers organizations to encourage them to participate in the dairy chain conduct. The aim of the paper is to explore if milk producers organizations in the Czech Republic dispose with characteristics to become supporting element of the sector s stability and what a potential for the farm economics they may have. The characteristics of a spectrum of organizations are examined and confronted with the business environment using the concept of dairy cooperative model. Most of organisations showed inbuilt transactions related mechanisms which might carry the regulative function, however instead of support they disrupt the chain by bargaining. It is argued for the change of their strategies with a focus on capital involvement in milk processing. Their rational functioning might improve dairy farms profitability.


I seek to understand the dynamic organizational change process by focusing on employees' change-related voice as the mechanism through which their dissatisfaction with change implementation processes relates to their positive behavioral outcomes during organizational change. I propose that employees who are dissatisfied with their organization's change implementation processes are more likely to engage in change-related voice behavior - defined as behavior that expresses constructive suggestions (promotive voice) and challenges (prohibitive voice) to improve change processes - and that their affective commitment to change, change efficacy, and work-unit leader's empowering leader behavior will positively moderate the relationship between dissatisfaction and change-related voice behavior. Through a survey with a sample of 192 employees and 27 work-unit leaders working for an organization undergoing a large-scale organizational change, I found that the patterns of how the hypothesized antecedents relate to change-related voice behavior vary depending on the type of voice behavior. Specifically, employees are more likely to make constructive suggestions (promotive voice) when their work-unit leader shows empowering behaviors and when they are high in change efficacy. Employees who are dissatisfied with the change implementation processes engage in promotive voice behavior only when they are strongly committed to change (affective commitment to change) and believe they are not capable of handling change demands (change efficacy). Furthermore, employees tend to point out problems in current change implementation processes (prohibitive voice) when the levels of their work-unit leader's empowering leader behavior and dissatisfaction with the current change processes are high; and the relationship between dissatisfaction and prohibitive voice was stronger when the level of their change efficacy is low rather than high. Lastly, increased levels of employee change-related voice behavior in both types are positively related with their individual performance of change tasks.


This article deals with several aspects of the need for growth capital for small businesses in the UK. First, the article makes a comparison between equity and debt capital as financing options for a growing small business. The article then advocates the superiority of equity capital in meeting small business needs. Equity capital, supported by the legal rules on the maintenance of capital, provides small businesses a degree of permanence that is important for growth purposes. The article then examines the advantages of public equity financing and advocates the view that public equity is better suited to meet growth capital needs because it allows perpetuity in the capital provided. This degree of perpetuity is provided by the availability of secondary markets where shares could change hands. The article next explores the weaknesses in the UK and European legal infrastructure in securities regulation and why it does not meet small business needs in seeking public equity financing. These weaknesses may be further augmented if the European draft Prospectus Directive comes to pass. This article concludes by recommending that Europe should consider the modification of its one-size-fits-all mandatory disclosure rules in securities regulation and adopt a tiered disclosure regime based on issue size, akin to U.S. federal securities law, in order to facilitate small business access to the public equity markets.


Puxian, a Min dialect of China, has many significant linguistic features. Based on a corpus of spoken data, this thesis sets out to examine aspects of the grammar of pronominal expressions in Puxian, focusing especially on three prominent issues in the linguistic literature, viz. impersonality, reflexive markings and Person effects on linearization. The investigation of impersonality has been built on the latest typological framework (see e.g. Siewierska 2008) and deals with a group of constructions in Puxian that have pronominalized subjects but crucially with impersonal reference. These subjects can be projected onto five semantic domains, i.e. vague, generic, non-referential indefinite, referential indefinite and referential definite, with regard to referentiality and (in)definiteness (cf. Givon 1984: 397). A correlation between these domains and morphophonological realizations of impersonal forms is studied as well. The discussion of reflexive markings focuses on grammaticalization, as different reflexive forms in Puxian assumed interrelated functions along the pathway of grammaticalization. Significantly, some highly grammaticalized functions, e.g. impersonals or anticausatives, are not necessarily associated with more simplified reflexive forms. The attention to linearization is centered on the give morpheme kɛ 21, which acts like a case marker in a number of constructions, ranging from the monotransitive, ditransitive, causative, passive and even to the intransitive. Yet the main concern is how the grammatical category of Person as a whole plays a crucial role in the placement of syntactic constituents as well as encodings of argument roles, as against the unmarked AVP word order. Since Puxian dialect has been relatively unknown in linguistics, a sketch of Puxian grammar and language situation will be offered in the beginning.


The most comprehensive reference work in its field, this book covers a broad range of topics--military, political, economic, social, painting, literature, music, cinema, dance, theater, sports, and daily life--related to France and her empire during World War II. Starting with the 1938 Munich Crisis and continuing through the 1940 defeat, Occupation, Vichy, Resistance, Liberation, and the establishment of the post-Liberation Provisional Government, the work also addresses such legacies of the wartime experience as the role of former President Francois Mitterrand and the trial of former Vichy official Maurice Papon.
Designed to be the reference of first recourse for those interested in World War II France, the book's focus on Occupation, Vichy, and the French Resistance will familiarize the reader with the most recent historical interpretations of French life during a troubled and dramatic period. The work will also introduce the reader to many of the controversies concerning collaboration and resistance, which have stirred postwar French public discourse to the present day. The book is also a bibliographic guide for those who would like to know more about the period.


Background Conventional methods of agricultural pest control and crop fertilisation are unsustainable. To meet growing demand, we must find ecologically responsible means to control disease and promote crop yields. The root-associated microbiome can aid plants with disease suppression, abiotic stress relief, and nutrient bioavailability. The aim of the present work was to profile the community of bacteria, fungi, and archaea associated with the wheat rhizosphere and root endosphere in different conditions. We also aimed to use 13 CO 2 stable isotope probing (SIP) to identify microbes within the root compartments that were capable of utilising host-derived carbon. Results Metabarcoding revealed that community composition shifted significantly for bacteria, fungi, and archaea across compartments. This shift was most pronounced for bacteria and fungi, while we observed weaker selection on the ammonia oxidising archaea-dominated archaeal community. Across multiple soil types we found that soil inoculum was a significant driver of endosphere community composition, however, several bacterial families were identified as core enriched taxa in all soil conditions. The most abundant of these were Streptomycetaceae and Burkholderiaceae . Moreover, as the plants senesce, both families were reduced in abundance, indicating that input from the living plant was required to maintain their abundance in the endosphere. Stable isotope probing showed that bacterial taxa within the Burkholderiaceae family, among other core enriched taxa such as Pseudomonadaceae, were able to use root exudates, but Streptomycetaceae were not. Conclusions The consistent enrichment of Streptomycetaceae and Burkholderiaceae within the endosphere, and their reduced abundance after developmental senescence, indicated a significant role for these families within the wheat root microbiome. While Streptomycetaceae did not utilise root exudates in the rhizosphere, we provide evidence that Pseudomonadaceae and Burkholderiaceae family taxa are recruited to the wheat root community via root exudates. This deeper understanding crop microbiome formation will enable researchers to characterise these interactions further, and possibly contribute to ecologically responsible methods for yield improvement and biocontrol in the future.


After ECN was first added to IP in 2001, it was hit by a succession of deployment problems. Studies in recent years have concluded that path traversal of ECN has become close to universal. In this article, we test whether the performance enhancement called ECN++ will face a similar deployment struggle as did base ECN. For this, we assess the feasibility of ECN++ deployment over mobile as well as fixed networks. In the process, we discover bad news for the base ECN protocol: contrary to accepted beliefs, more than half the mobile carriers we tested wipe the ECN field at the first upstream hop. All packets still get through, and congestion control still functions, just without the benefits of ECN. This throws into question whether previous studies used representative vantage points. This article also reports the good news that, wherever ECN gets through, we found no deployment problems for the "++" enhancement to ECN. The article includes the results of other in-depth tests that check whether servers that claim to support ECN actually respond correctly to explicit congestion feedback. Those interested can access the raw measurement data online.


Two new U-Pb concordia zircon ages are reported for granulite-facies rocks from the Mozambique Orogenic Belt in eastern Tanzania. These rocks are thought to have been generated during collision-related crustal thickening process and exhumed by deep erosion. A two-pyroxene granulite sample from the Pare Mountains has yielded a concordia upper intercept age of 645 ± 10 Ma, whereas a granulite-facies meta-anorthosite sample from the Uluguru Mountains has given an upper intercept age of 695 ± 4 Ma. Evidence for the involvement of older crustal material (pre-Late Proterozoic) was not found. These zircon data indicate crystallization during the peak of granulite-facies metamorphism during the Pan-African orogeny (c. 950 to c. 550 Ma) consistent with a subduction-collisional environment.


Banaba (Lagerstroemia speciosa Pers) leaves has been used as tea or decoction type in the Philippines for blood sugar control and used in the treatment of diabetes in India and con-tain a treterpenoid compound know as a corosolic acid which can promote the absorption and utilization of glucose in the cell by transporting the stimulated glucose. As such, banaba plays a role in regulating levels of blood sugar and insulin in the blood. Banaba might de-crease blood sugar but most of countries prefer to use diabetes medications even though they aware of serious side-effects. Additionally, various adverse effects are reported recently when many diabetic patients have been taken antidiabetic drugs in the long term. Here we reviewed whether banaba and corosolic acid can be replaced for current antidiabetic drugs through published several mechanisms of banaba and antidiabetic drugs, respectively. Con-sequently, banaba, one of medicinal herbs for antidiabetic effect surely can be functioned and can be a perfect candidate instead of antidiabetic drugs on lowering or maintaining normal blood sugar levels and prevention of diabetic complications without as well as treat-ment without any adverse effects.


Machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to Chinese character recognition; nonetheless, automatic generation of stylized Chinese handwriting remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose StrokeBank, a novel approach to automating personalized Chinese handwriting generation. We use a semi-supervised algorithm to construct a dictionary of component mappings from a small seeding set. Unlike previous work, our approach does not require human supervision in stroke extraction or knowledge of the structure of Chinese characters. This dictionary is used to generate handwriting that preserves stylistic variations, including cursiveness and spatial layout of strokes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by a survey-based evaluation. The results show that our generated characters are nearly indistinguishable from ground truth handwritings.


Learning with Positive and Unlabeled instances (PU learning) arises widely in information retrieval applications. To address the unavailability issue of negative instances, most existing PU learning approaches require to either identify a reliable set of negative instances from the unlabeled data or estimate probability densities as an intermediate step. However, inaccurate negative-instance identication or poor density estimation may severely degrade overall performance of the nal predictive model. To this end, we propose a novel PU learning method based on density ratio estimation without constructing any sets of negative instances or estimating any intermediate densities. To further boost PU learning performance, we extend our proposed learning method in a multi-view manner by utilizing multiple heterogeneous sources. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate the eectiveness of our proposed methods, especially when positive labeled data are limited.


Different from general cognitive wireless networks, there is no centralized scheduling and management infrastructure among heterogeneous cognitive networks. Multiple cells may operate in the same vicinity resulting in unfair spectrum occupation time (when the cells belong to different industries) and degraded performance of the cellular networks. A distributed self-coexistence mechanism is necessary. In this paper, we take the self-coexistence of multi users in heterogeneous scenarios as the problem of spectrum allocation in non-cooperative mode. Hence we propose Fair Self-Coexistence Strategy (FSCS). In this strategy, not only the fairness of occupation time is considered, but also different competitive priority metric based on Quality of Service (QoS) is adopted. Each cognitive cell independently completes the spectrum allocation process, by use of sensing techniques and perceptual information about neighboring network cells. The simulation experiment results show that our spectrum allocation strategy guarantees the fairness among the heterogeneous secondary networks. And in the resource scarce environment, our strategy can effectively achieve the differentiation competition results.


The power consumption of the Internet and datacenter networks is already significant, and threatens to shortly hit the power delivery limits while the hardware is trying to sustain ever-increasing traffic requirements. Existing energy-reduction approaches in this domain advocate recomputing network configuration with each substantial change in demand. Unfortunately, computing the minimum network subset is computationally hard and does not scale. Thus, the network is forced to operate with diminished performance during the recomputation periods. In this paper, we propose REsPoNse, a framework which overcomes the optimality-scalability trade-off. The insight in REsPoNse is to identify a few energy-critical paths off-line, install them into network elements, and use a simple online element to redirect the traffic in a way that enables large parts of the network to enter a low-power state. We evaluate REsPoNse with real network data and demonstrate that it achieves the same energy savings as the existing approaches, with marginal impact on network scalability and application performance.


A test of Michigan half-sib progeny of paper birch (Betula papyrifera Marsh.) and European white birch (B. pendula Roth.) was conducted in Michigan to examine species variation in growth, bark color, and resistance to bronze birch borer (Agrilus anxius Gory). Paper birch was superior to European white birch in height and borer resistance at age 12 years from seed. Families of paper birch were identified that grew exceptionally well, had developed white bark within 6 years, and exhibited borer resistance. The magnitude of additive genetic variance and narrow-sense family heritability estimates for paper birch indicated that sufficient genetic variation and inheritance exist to support selection and breeding for height. Paper birch may be an acceptable substitute for European white birch as a landscape species in northeastern North America.


Zeolite crystallization occurs in the presence of inorganic and/or organic structure-directing agents (SDAs) that facilitate the formation of microporous crystals with various pore geometries. One of the most common zeolites is ZSM-5 (MFI type), which is used as a catalyst and sorbent in a wide range of industrial applications. One of the challenges with ZSM-5 synthesis is to identify new and inexpensive organic SDAs that can tailor the physicochemical properties of the final product. The most frequently used SDA in ZSM-5 synthesis is tetrapropylammonium (TPA); however, recent studies have shown that the surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium (CTA) can be used as an alternative SDA. Here, we examine the effects of dual structure-directing agents using CTA and TPA as organic SDAs in combination with a variety of alkali metals as inorganic SDAs. Our findings reveal that the selection of SDA combinations has a significant impact on the kinetics of ZSM-5 crystallization, as well as the properties of the resulting crystals. Notably, we show that TPA/Na and CTA/K are optimal combinations of SDAs that can markedly alter the size, morphology, and aluminum distribution in ZSM-5. Using a combination of experiments and molecular modeling, we explore the use of CTA as an alternative organic SDA for zeolite MFI and show that we can achieve smaller crystals (ca. 600 nm) in similar time (<24 h) as syntheses employing TPA. Given the relatively low cost of CTA and its high market availability compared to other organic SDAs, these findings have the potential to impact commercial production of ZSM-5 for a variety of applications.


The Article argues that the law of fiduciary duties provides a good framework for friends to understand their duties to one another better, gives courts a useful set of rhetorical and analytical tools to employ when they are forced to entertain disputes that arise between close friends, and, finally, can help direct courts to furnish betrayed friends certain kinds of remedies that are most appropriate for achieving justice within that dispute context. This is not the first Article to make an effort to expand the reach of the fiduciary concept into new sorts of relationships that are not always considered within the ambit of fiduciary duty law. But the case for thinking of friends as fiduciaries is exceedingly persuasive and underappreciated, both in the law and in our lives.


We introduce an extreme function theory as a novel method by which probabilistic novelty detection may be performed with functions, where the functions are represented by time-series of (potentially multivariate) discrete observations. We set the method within the framework of Gaussian processes (GP), which offers a convenient means of constructing a distribution over functions. Whereas conventional novelty detection methods aim to identify individually extreme data points, with respect to a model of normality constructed using examples of "normal" data points, the proposed method aims to identify extreme functions, with respect to a model of normality constructed using examples of "normal" functions, where those functions are represented by time-series of observations. The method is illustrated using synthetic data, physiological data acquired from a large clinical trial, and a benchmark time-series dataset.


This paper surveys evidence on discrimination in Latin America and shows that there is a widespread perception of discrimination, especially against the poor, the uneducated and those who lack connections. The channels through which discrimination occurs may be built on the basis of economic factors. However, while perception surveys may be informative, they are less than ideal at helping pinpoint the extent and mechanisms related. Recent experimental evidence suggests little room for discriminatory practices in the region. This puzzle, where individuals perceive discrimination is in the air, but few act discriminatorily, is consistent with an explanation about stereotyping that vanishes when information flows operate well.


Abstract Minerals with the general formula Cu4(OH)6 A2/nn ± pH2O (A = Cl-, NO3-, SO42-) were synthesized and their behaviour following treatment with chloride, nitrate and sulfate solutions was studied by powder XRD and SEM. Two types of transformation were found: (1) an ion-exchange reaction manifested by preservation of both the precursor's morphology and structural type; (2) a dissolution-crystallization mechanism characterized by changes in the structural type and the morphology. The results were considered by simultaneous application of the binary presentation of the structures, a bond valence approach and the ion-exchange ability. It was found that the structures of minerals with ion-exchange properties are built from similar layered structural unit of edge-shared and corner-shared Jahn-Teller square frameworks and different interstitial complexes of exchangeable ions, water molecules and cation-water groups. On the basis of their structural features the position of the investigated minerals in mineralogical classifications is also discussed.


This book was written to accompany the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2011-12, curated by Gill Perry. The exhibition included 54 portraits and objects and involved extensive research in British archives, and some collaborative explorations with colleagues in theatre studies, music history and literature. Perry edited the book and wrote 70% (20,000 words), including three chapters and a section on biography. The book explores the role of feminine portraiture in the history and visibility of the first British actresses. It reassesses the often controversial relationship between art, gender and the theatre during the late seventeenth can d eighteenth centuries, providing a critical analysis of the 'feminine face' of eighteenth century celebrity culture.
The exhibition was designed to bring to public attention the important role of gender and feminine portraiture in perceptions of the theatre and its cultural influence, and in the construction of early celebrity culture. It also highlighted the remarkable symbiosis between the fine and dramatic arts during this period, and the important role of women in this synergy. In the first chapter 'Introduction: Painting Actresses' Lives' Perry explores the origins of the term 'actress', and the complex ways in which the idea of the 'actress' and its cultural associations have been mediated through visual culture, and biographical and autobiographical narratives. Her chapter 'Divas, Dancing and the Rage for Music' draws on new research on the relationship between musical and visual culture during the period, arguing that portraiture could be seen to embody (and sometimes to seek resolutions for) many of the social and cultural contradictions implicit in public musical performances (both singing and dancing) by women. Perry argues that portraiture offered another form of 'performance', a visual re-staging of femininity as somewhere between art and nature. In the final chapter 'Star Systems: Then and Now', she explores parallels and differences with modern celebrity culture, considering some definitions and historical overviews of concepts of 'celebrity', often argued to have first developed in the eighteenth century with a growing commercial culture of consumption. It is argued that eighteenth century feminine portraiture provided a visual embodiment of the conflation of public and private identities and gendered myths. She argues for the continuation of a 'distinctively feminine face' of this culture, and a parallel and voyeuristic obsession with 'public intimacy'.


Built environment is a function of man-made setting, surroundings, conditions which is the center of human activity in architectural places. The integration of nature into the built environment determines the urban or the rural form of settlements. The present research aims to specify architectural morphology of sub-tropical region through a case analysis of the situation in Pakistan. The field study analyses the existing housing stock in Pakistan, in urban settings and as a result of vernacular traditions in the villages. The paper identifies the regional characteristic behaviour of highland, lowland, coastal and arid region. It gives an overview of the current urban housing situation in Pakistan. It discusses the type of housing unit, the occupant behaviour, lifestyle of the people, It also identifies the pattern of energy used within the residential buildings of Pakistan. The architectural planning in urban and rural regions, their long term passive design techniques to cope with the climate challenges of a particular area have been discussed in detail. The paper recommend some contextual and adapted passive features of vernacular architecture in urban houses.
 Keywords: Architectural-morphology, Urban, Housing, Vernacular, Passive Design, Built Environment


In western Europe, the majority of wild goose populations have increased exponentially over the last decades. Such increase is the source of many socio–ecological conflicts. The need for coordinated management actions to handle the goose-related conflicts at the European scale has led to the establishment of a specific European Goose Management Platform (EGMP) under the auspices of the Agreement on the Conservation of African–Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA). The northwest/south-west (NW/SW) European population of greylag goose Anser anser has been considered as a priority concern, and an AEWA international single species management plan has been recently adopted. Because of the complex structure of the greylag goose population (e.g. spatial differences in migration strategies), and management (e.g. different hunting schemes among the range states), delineation of management units (MUs) based on goose movement characteristics was deemed necessary to further implement effective management actions. Based on neckband marking in various breeding regions and subsequent resighting locations, we conducted spatio–temporal analysis based on kernel methods to infer spatio–temporal and migratory movements of greylag geese in the NW/SW European flyway. The results highlight the existence of contrasted migratory behaviour, dispersal patterns and phenology within the flyway. From these results three international management units could be delineated. The first MU would include migratory birds from Norway. Birds from breeding grounds in Sweden and Denmark would represent the second MU. Finally, a third central MU was delineated, including primarily breeding birds from the Netherlands and northwestern Germany, which do not show migratory behaviour at the flyway scale. The delineation of these MUs has to be considered within an adaptive process, and future studies will enable a refinement of the definition of such units in order to continuously improve the efficiency of management plans.


This paper is about the relevance and goals of teaching and learning about statistics and probability in basic education. From results of researches carried out in statistics education in mathematics education, in the last few decades, it brings up considerations about the stochastic teaching and learning process during childhood and adolescence. The text also presents recommendations related to the mathematics curriculum referring to the study of probability and statistics. It highlights issues related to teacher education both in the beginning of their careers and along their professional lives, professional development and professional knowledge of professionals who teach mathematics at kindergarten, elementary, middle school and secondary school levels.


From December 1989 through 1998, a total of 68 children with deep neck infection were enrolled into this study. The mean age was 5.9 years (range, 1 month-15.8 years). Infections in the retropharyngeal space (36.7%) were most common, followed by parapharyngeal space (30.8%), peritonsillar space (20.6%), and submandibular space (11.9%). Fever, neck pain, and swelling were the most frequent symptoms. The most common pathogens were viridans streptococci (41%, 16/39) and Staphylococcus aureus (26%, 10/39). Other isolates included Prevotella spp., Veillonella spp., Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, Morganella spp., and Enterobacter spp. Mixed infection was found in 46% (18/39) of patients. The mean duration of hospitalization was 12.4 days (range, 2-45 days). Complete resolution was achieved in 61 (89.7%) children. Complications occurred in 7 patients, including recurrence, mediastinal spread, bacteremia, and suppurative thyroiditis; the patient with mediastinal spread plus bacteremia died. Five patients had congenital cyst and 4 of them had complications or recurrence/relapse. In conclusion, infections in the retropharyngeal space and polymicrobial infections were most common in deep neck infection of Taiwan children.


The equity premium is a key parameter in asset allocation policies. There is a vigorous debate in the literature regarding the actual measurement of the equity premium, its size and the determinants of its variation. This study aims to take stock of this literature by means of a meta-analysis. We identify how the size of the equity premium depends on the way it is measured, along with its evolution over time and its variation across regions in the world. We find that the equity premium is significantly lower if measured by ex ante methods rather than ex post, in more recent periods, and for more developed countries. In addition, looking at the underlying fundamentals, we find that larger volatility in GDP growth tends to raise the equity premium while a higher nominal interest rate has a negative impact on the equity premium.


Over-criminalization takes many forms and impacts the American criminal justice system in varying ways. This article focuses on a select portion of the over-criminalization phenomenon by examining two types of over-criminalization prevalent in white collar criminal law. The first type of over-criminalization discussed in this article is Congress's propensity for increasing the maximum criminal penalties for white collar offenses in an effort to punish financial criminals more harshly. The second type of over-criminalization addressed in this article is Congress's tendency to create vague and overlapping criminal provisions in areas already criminalized in an effort to expand the tools available to prosecutors and increase the number of financial criminals prosecuted each year. While these types of over-criminalization are not the most egregious examples of the phenomenon, they are important to consider because the statutes being affected by these legislative enactments are far from obscure and, in fact, represent some of the most commonly charged offenses in the federal system. While much has been written about the plethora of negative consequences resulting from over-criminalization generally, it is worth noting that not everyone believes these negative consequences outweigh the potential benefits that might flow from the two types of over-criminalization discussed in this article. First, some might argue that repeatedly increasing the statutory maximums for white collar offenses is justified because doing so means culpable individuals will receive longer prison sentences reflective of their conduct and, in addition, others will be deterred from committing such crimes. Second, some might argue that enacting broad new criminal provisions in areas already criminalized is justified because such enactments provide prosecutors with the tools necessary to ensure that creative and sophisticated white collar criminals are brought to justice in larger numbers, thereby deterring others from committing similar offenses. This article will examine the accuracy of the underlying premises utilized by both of these "justifications" for the over-criminalization discussed herein – (a) the assumption that increasing statutory maximums results in ever lengthening sentences for individual white collar defendants, and (b) the assumption that enacting additional laws that are vague and overlapping in areas already criminalized results in increased levels of enforcement against white collar criminals. Through such an examination, this article seeks to understand whether new crimes and punishments really achieve their intended goals and, if not, what this means for the over-criminalization debate and, in particular, the over-criminalization "justifications" discussed above.


Much recent thinking about performance documentation has coalesced around an apparent
opposition between the relative stability of the document and the ontological ephemerality of the live event.
Indeed, if we begin from the problem of translating a singular and ephemeral event into a stable document,
then failure is guaranteed from the start. Understood as an inherently transient moment, performance "cannot
be saved, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it
does so, it becomes something other than performance" (Phelan 1993: 146). But the problem of
documentation is illusory insofar as the performing arts have no special claim to ephemerality. As I have
argued elsewhere, it is not performance but life in general — the world, the real, being itself — that escapes
documentary capture (Spatz 2015a: 234). In fact, the questions faced by a documentarian are not entirely
different to those faced by a director or choreographer who works through the craft of composition to
condense various embodied and dramaturgical materials into a repeatable performance score. Nor do the
spectators who attend such a performance necessarily have better or more direct access to the underlying
processes that gave rise to it than do those who encounter the work through written or recorded documents.
Understood in this way, documentation poses not the insoluble problem of grasping the ungraspable but
rather the concrete challenge of isolating and articulating those aspects of a practice that can be shared and
transmitted through the available tools. As the tools change, the potential for sharing and transmission also
changes


It is extremely challenging to formulate and evaluate agricultural development strategies for regions as large and diverse as proposed in the Action Areas, and it will require multiple perspectives and thoughtful simplifications (Omamo et al. 2006). Empirical studies in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda (e.g. Pender et al. 1999; Pender et al. 2004; Ehui and Pender 2005) suggest that interaction of the three socio-economic and biophysical layers—population density, agricultural potential and market access—provide good explanatory power in predicting the type of agricultural enterprises and development pathways encountered in different rural communities, as the layers are strongly related to the feasibility and attractiveness of specific development and livelihood strategies (Wood et al. 1999). Omamo et al. (2006) used for East and Central Africa (ECA) GIS tools and databases to gain a better appreciation of the regional patterns of agriculture and of agricultural development challenges and opportunities. The GIS analysis disaggregates the region into geographical units, called 'development domains', in which similar agricultural development problems or opportunities are likely to occur, based on the spatial layers population density, agricultural potential and market access. The breakdown is done by classifying each of the three factors into two values: high or low. In the proposal for the CGIAR Research Program on Integrated Systems for the Humid Tropics an example is given for ECA, based on the Nairobi 2012 workshop. Stratification here is by domain at Field Site level with a different form of stratification used at the Action Site level ('farming system'). The development domains in this example are defined using consistent data and criteria across the region, thus helping diagnose development constraints and formulate and evaluate strategic intervention options in comparable ways. These development domains permit consideration of the following issues: Where are those geographic areas within and across countries in ECA in which development problems and opportunities are likely to be most similar? Where will specific types of development policies, investments, livelihood options and technologies likely be most effective? For established developmental successes in any given location in ECA, where can similar conditions be found in the region? 2 Description of potential development domains for Humidtropics—A CGIAR Research Program


This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study on the shear capacity of zero-slump, dry-cast synthetic fiber-reinforced concrete (SYN-FRC), aiming at applying the test results gained from this study, to reduce or even eliminate the structural reinforcement. Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE) G-553 test method is used to measure the beam shear performance. In adjacent with shear test, flexural and compression behavior of concrete determined based on American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) C1609 and C39, respectively on concrete with 28 MPa (4,000 psi) compressive strength. A total of 30 beams with different fiber dosages were cast and tested based on JSCE G-553 and ASTM C1609. The test results demonstrated that the application of synthetic fibers in concrete yielded to significant improvements in material properties of concrete such as shear strength, shear toughness, flexural strength and flexural toughness. These enhancements were greater at higher synthetic fiber dosage rates.


Monsoon-bound seasonal abundance of two species of rotifers (Brachionus calyciflorus and Keratella tropica) was examined in relation to the population densities of Cladoceran zooplankton and phytoplankton and some limnlogical characteristics in Kandy Lake, a tropical urban water body in Sri Lanka, using standard techniques. Kandy Lake did not show marked seasonal variation influenced by the monsoons with respect to limnological parameters except for bicarbonate alkalinity and chlorophyll-a content. The population densities of Brachionus calyciflorus declined and Keratella tropica became dominant during the first inter-monsoon (March-April) when the abundance of total cladocerans and Microcystis aeruginosa, a cyanobacterial species with toxigenic strains, were high under relatively turbid conditions. Brachionus calyciflorus was re-established progressively during the subsequent season with decreasing populations of Microcystis aeruginosa and increasing densities of Aulacoseira granulata, a filamentous centric diatom, and Pediastrum simplex, a colony forming green algae. The likely explanation for the marked suppression of Brachionus calyciflorus during the first inter-monsoon could be the abundance of toxin forming cyanobacteria strains of Microcystis aeruginosa or else a combined effect of Microcystis aeruginosa and interference competition resulting from high densities of total cladocerans under unfavourable environmental factors such as high turbidity.


The interplay between optimization and machine learning is one of the most important developments in modern computational science. Optimization formulations and methods are proving to be vital in designing algorithms to extract essential knowledge from huge volumes of data. Machine learning, however, is not simply a consumer of optimization technology but a rapidly evolving field that is itself generating new optimization ideas. This book captures the state of the art of the interaction between optimization and machine learning in a way that is accessible to researchers in both fields.Optimization approaches have enjoyed prominence in machine learning because of their wide applicability and attractive theoretical properties. The increasing complexity, size, and variety of today's machine learning models call for the reassessment of existing assumptions. This book starts the process of reassessment. It describes the resurgence in novel contexts of established frameworks such as first-order methods, stochastic approximations, convex relaxations, interior-point methods, and proximal methods. It also devotes attention to newer themes such as regularized optimization, robust optimization, gradient and subgradient methods, splitting techniques, and second-order methods. Many of these techniques draw inspiration from other fields, including operations research, theoretical computer science, and subfields of optimization. The book will enrich the ongoing cross-fertilization between the machine learning community and these other fields, and within the broader optimization community.


Approximately a quarter of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are diagnosed before 20 years of age, presenting with more extensive distribution and severity of disease than adult onset. The purpose of this review was to determine facilitators of, and barriers to, successful transition of patients with IBD from adolescent to adult services. A systematic review of IBD transition research was conducted in March 2014 searching PubMed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Web of Science and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews databases. A hand search of reference lists and narrative reviews was carried out to maximise the potential for retrieving all relevant manuscripts. Primary studies written in English of full-length peer-reviewed journal articles that investigated transition of paediatric patients with IBD to adult services were included. Studies were excluded if the primary focus was not IBD. The search produced 283 potentially relevant studies. After removing duplicates and screening for suitability, six met our inclusion criteria. Barriers to transition included system inadequacies and a lack of resources, clinical time and training. Successful transition involved joint medical visits, structured transition services, improved communication between paediatric and adult services and improved education for patients and staff. If the transition process for adolescents suffering with IBD is to improve then it is vital that more research is conducted to better our understanding of ways in which we can ensure that defined protocols are in place for a smooth transition for every adolescent, leading to improved standards and minimal disruption to care.


Abstract. Spatial and temporal characteristics of extreme temperature events in northeastern Spain have been investigated. The analysis is based on long-term, high-quality, and homogenous daily maximum and minimum temperature of 128 observatories spanning the period from 1960 to 2006. A total of 21 indices were used to assess changes in both the cold and hot tails of the daily temperature distributions. The presence of trends in temperature extremes was assessed by means of the Mann-Kendall test. However, the autocorrelation function (ACF) and a bootstrap methodology were used to account for the influence of serial correlation and cross-correlation on the trend assessment. In general, the observed changes are more prevalent in hot extremes than in cold extremes. This finding can largely be linked to the increase found in the mean maximum temperature during the last few decades. The results indicate a significant increase in the frequency and intensity of most of the hot temperature extremes. An increase in warm nights (TN90p: 3.3 days decade−1), warm days (TX90p: 2.7 days decade−1), tropical nights (TR20: 0.6 days decade−1) and the annual high maximum temperature (TXx: 0.27 °C decade−1) was detected in the 47-yr period. In contrast, most of the indices related to cold temperature extremes (e.g. cold days (TX10p), cold nights (TN10p), very cold days (TN1p), and frost days (FD0)) demonstrated a decreasing but statistically insignificant trend. Although there is no evidence of a long-term trend in cold extremes, significant interdecadal variations were noted. Almost no significant trends in temperature variability indices (e.g. diurnal temperature range (DTR) and growing season length (GSL)) are detected. Spatially, the coastal areas along the Mediterranean Sea and the Cantabrian Sea experienced stronger warming compared with mainland areas. Given that only few earlier studies analyzed observed changes in temperature extremes at fine spatial resolution across the Iberian Peninsula, the results of this work can improve our understanding of climatology of temperature extremes. Also, these findings can have different hydrological, ecological and agricultural implications (e.g. crop yields, energy consumption, land use planning and water resources management).


Climate engineering technologies, sometimes also referred to as geoengineering technologies, attempt to ward off the worst effects of climate change by intervening in the global climate system. We see the potentials offered by climate engineering technologies in counteracting the threats of climate change but also take into account the risks that arise from the side effects of these technologies on natural, social and political systems. We find a paradox of climate engineering, which consists in the circumstance that exactly those technologies that are capable of acting fast and effectively against rising temperatures at comparatively low costs, are also the technologies that are likely to create the greatest amount of social and political conflict. To address this apparent paradox, we argue that an institutional setting for researching and potentially deploying climate engineering technologies is needed which creates a sufficiently high degree of social and political legitimacy and addresses a set of specified problems connected to climate engineering. We present a proposal for such an institutional setting that explicitly addresses these concerns.

Policy Implications

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 Research on and potential uses of climate engineering technologies need to be coordinated internationally in a multilateral institutional setting.

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 An international climate engineering agency should be created that coordinates and disseminates research on climate engineering.

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 Research results should be evaluated by the IPCC.

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 Decision-making on climate engineering should occur within the UNFCCC, where the states party to that convention should decide on norms and rules that govern climate engineering (regarding, for example, an upper limit for manipulations of the radiation balance, a uniform metric for making different responses to climate change comparable, and a time limited moratorium on field tests and deployments of climate engineering technologies).