This book discusses the art of storytelling in a small community of Southern Indiana. Based on audio-taped participant observation in the rural community of Scipio, Indiana, the author presents an analysis of storytelling performances during social events of family and friends. MacDonald discusses performative aspects such as the techniques of the storyteller and stresses the role of the audience during the story event. She also examines several genres of Scipio story, such as fish stories, old codger stories, and practical joking tales. The repertoire and style of one of the community's master storytellers is analyzed along with the attributes of a master storyteller and the passing on of the storyteller's role. Scipio Storytelling concludes with a note on the future of this storytelling style in this particular community.


IMPORTANCE
Optimal chemotherapy dosing in obese patients remains uncertain, with variation in practice. Dose reduction strategies are often used to avoid chemotoxicity, but recent American Society of Clinical Oncology guidelines recommend full dose.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the impact of body mass index (BMI) on chemotherapy dosing and of dose reduction on ovarian cancer survival.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
Cohort study in Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC) health care setting of patients with primary invasive epithelial ovarian cancers diagnosed from January 2000 through March 2013. Analyses focused on 806 patients receiving adjuvant first-line therapy of carboplatin and paclitaxel with curative intent.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES
Overall and ovarian cancer-specific mortality. Deaths were identified through the KPNC Mortality Linkage System, with median follow-up of 52.5 months. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs were estimated from proportional hazards regression, accounting for prognostic variables including age at diagnosis, race, stage, grade, histologic type, chemotoxic effects, comorbidities, cancer antigen 125 levels, and BMI at diagnosis.

RESULTS
The strongest predictor of dose reduction was a high BMI. Compared with normal-weight women, obese class III women received 38% and 45% lower doses in milligrams per kilogram of body weight of paclitaxel and carboplatin, respectively (P < .001 for each agent). They also received lower relative dose intensity (RDI) for each agent and the combined regimen, calculated as average RDI (ARDI). Mean ARDI was 73.7% for obese class III women and 88.2% for normal-weight women (P < .001). Lower ARDI (<70%) was associated with worse overall (HR, 1.62 [95% CI, 1.10-2.37]) and ovarian cancer-specific survival (HR, 1.69 [95% CI, 1.12-2.55]). Women who were obese at diagnosis appeared to have better survival. In multivariable-adjusted analyses considering joint effects by BMI and ARDI, compared with women with normal weight and no dose reduction, normal-weight women with dose reduction (ARDI < 85%) experienced worse survival (HR, 1.50 [95% CI, 1.02-2.21]). For each BMI category, those with ARDI less than 85% had worse survival than those without dose reduction. The improved survival among obese women was no longer apparent with dose reduction.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
Lower RDI was an independent predictor of ovarian cancer mortality. This finding was strongest among normal-weight women but seen at all levels of BMI. Our results suggest that body size should not be a major factor influencing dose reduction decisions in women with ovarian cancer.


Collective dynamic properties of different kind of binary liquid mixtures have been investigated by molecular dynamics simulation. The study includes both the longitudinal and the transverse current spectra in simple liquid alloys, 1:1 molten salts and liquid binary mixtures of neutral particles with an ionic-like structure. These systems were chosen as representative of binary liquids with different static structures in order to analyse the effects of structural ordering on the mechanisms of dynamic collective properties. The effect of the mass asymmetry between the two species in the mixture has been also discussed from the results for two different mass ratios for each kind of structure. Two length scales have been considered. On the one hand, the hydrodynamic scale (low wave numbers), where the modes for the partial currents of the two species are characterised by very close frequencies. On the other hand, the molecular scale (higher wave numbers), where the characteristic frequencies for the two species show noticeable differences. Vibrational concentration current modes (optic modes) have been found in neutral mixtures though their influence is rather weak, being the collective dynamic properties of this kind of systems dominated by the mass current modes (acoustic modes). On the contrary, in mixtures of charged particles such as molten salts the contribution of the concentration (charge) currents to the collective dynamics is important and optic modes can be characterised by a well-defined frequency for a wide range of wave numbers. It has been observed that heavy particles have a more relevant role on the mass current correlations whereas light particles play a dominant role on the concentration current correlations. The overall results for the three kinds of liquid mixtures analysed in this paper show that both the longitudinal and transverse current spectra are little dependent on the static structure of the system whereas marked differences are revealed when the particles in the system are either neutral or carry an electric charge.


The reaction mechanism between cyclopropenylidene and ethylene has been systematically investigated employing the MP2/6-311+G* level of theory to better understand the cyclopropenylidene reactivity with unsaturated hydrocarbons. Geometry optimization, vibrational analysis, and energy property for the involved stationary points on the potential energy surface have been calculated. Energies of all the species are also further refined by the CCSD(T)/6-311+G* single-point calculations. Firstly, one important reaction intermediate (INTa) has been located via a transition state (TSa). After that, the common intermediate (INTb) for the two pathways (1) and (2) has been formed via TSb. At last, two different products possessing three- and four-membered ring characters have been obtained through two reaction pathways. In the reaction pathway (1), a three-membered ring alkyne compound has been obtained. As for the reaction pathway (2), a four-membered ring conjugated diene compound has been formed, which is the most favorable reaction to occur from the kinetic and thermodynamic viewpoints.


An initial public offering (IPO) represents a unique milestone in the lifecycle of a firm. Yet, our understanding of the IPO phenomenon remains incomplete and marked by mixed findings. Using meta-analytical techniques on a sample of 123 empirical studies, we examine the factors that influence the short-term outcomes (i.e., underpricing and proceeds) and the long-term outcomes (i.e., financial performance and risk) of IPO firms. Our efforts yield few significant results for antecedents that prior research had proposed as effective signals of IPO firm quality, and we thus conclude that signaling theory is limited in its ability to capture the IPO process. Our findings, however, provide preliminary support for our contention that stakeholders influence short-term IPO outcomes depending on their temporal orientation. We also find strong support for our prediction that the IPO has consequences for long-term firm development. While high underpricing positively affects long-term firm performance, it also heightens long-term firm risk. Large proceeds result in higher long-term firm performance and lower firm risk, but they come at the expense of a higher percentage of equity being traded during the IPO.


The increased demand and need for continuous learning have led to the introduction of open, distance, and e-learning (ODeL) in Kenya. Provision of this mode of education has, however, been faced with various challenges, among them infrastructural ones. This study was a survey conducted in two public universities offering major components of ODeL, the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University. These universities were purposely selected for the study, whose respondents included the students registered in ODeL and the lecturers and senior administrators involved. Analysis of the relevant documents was also undertaken, while library literature was reviewed on the integration of ODeL into the provision of education in Kenya. The study established that efficient and optimal delivery of ODeL in Kenya faces both economic and infrastructural challenges. However, strengthening the existing relevant structures would address some of the challenges.


This article focuses on the discourses in support of refugees as developed in Greece by local grassroots groups. The article theorises the public debate of the refugee issue as taking place in a hybrid media system, in which elites and policy makers, mainstream media, large non-governmental organisations and smaller solidarity groups as well as everyday people participate in unequal ways in constructing this debate and its parameters. In focusing on the solidarity discourses emerging from the grassroots, this article hopes to show how these groups seek to re-politicise the question of refugees, directly countering the (post)humanitarian and charity discourses of non-governmental organisations as well as the racist and security frames found in the mass media and policy discourses. In focusing on Greece, this article shows how two crises, the refugee and austerity crises – both symptoms of an underlying deep structural crisis of capitalism – may be dealt with in ways that overcome dilemmas of belongingness and otherness. In empirically supporting such arguments, the article posits the issue of solidarity to refugees as a research question: what kinds of solidarity do refugee support groups in Greece mobilise? This is addressed through focusing on the Facebook pages of 12 local solidarity initiatives. The analysis concludes that their alternative discourse is not based on spectacle and pity, nor on irony, but on togetherness and solidarity. This solidarity takes three forms, human, social and class solidarity, all feeding into the creation of a political project revolving around ideas of autonomy and self-organisation, freedom, equality and justice.


Congress enacted the Employee Retiree Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) to protect employees' retirement and welfare benefits. Nevertheless, the Act has been interpreted by the U.S Supreme Court over the years to be in essence an Employers' Security Act, with employers using ERISA to shield themselves against employee benefit-related claims. The flaw in the current ERISA scheme lies at the intersection of ERISA's preemption and remedial provisions. Courts broadly interpret the preemption provisions of ERISA to invalidate employee benefits-related state laws and then force employees to depend on an inadequate, "comprehensive and reticulated" remedial scheme. This "intersectionality" problem leads to a state of affairs that is contrary to ERISA's purpose of protecting the interests of participants and beneficiaries by "providing for appropriate remedies, sanctions, and ready access to the Federal courts." To cure what currently ails ERISA, this article proposes three alternative reforms - one judicial and two legislative. The judicial approach would call for the Court to adopt a remedialist approach, which would be in line both with Congress's intent to incorporate most of the common law of trusts into ERISA, and also consistent with a modern interpretation of a remedial statute. Additionally, Congress should re-examine and reject the far-fetched analogy between ERISA, enacted in 1974, and the "days of the divided bench" analysis and provide an express and expansive definition for "appropriate equitable relief" under proposed Section 3(43). Finally, Congress should pass an ERISA Civil Rights Act under proposed Section 502(a)(11), which, like the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in the Title VII context, would permit capped, compensatory and punitive damage awards in appropriate cases.


Abstract Legal scholars rely heavily on vocabularies of 'actors', 'agents', and 'experts' to account for the fact that law does not develop by itself. However, the identities, idiosyncrasies, and individual professional contributions of law's people are rarely illuminated. This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps. The task of bringing 'human actors back on stage' creates some new opportunities for transnational environmental law scholarship. It invites attention to both dominant and excluded voices. It offers a way of bridging the gap between the bureaucratic language of law and its lived reality. It also provides an understanding of why, despite ferocious attempts to roll back the advances of environmental law in some places, many scholars and practitioners find reason to be optimistic about the future of environmental law.


Charging discretion is no monolith. Instead, prosecutors consider three sets of reasons to decline or pursue charges: legal reasons, administrative reasons, and equitable reasons. The conventional wisdom is that prosecutors are best positioned to evaluate these reasons. Consequently, prosecutors are granted almost unfettered charging discretion. More narrowly, when prosecutors decline or pursue charges for equitable reasons, they exercise their prerogative unchecked. This is defensible only if prosecutors are most competent to exercise equitable discretion. That question is almost never asked or critically analyzed. Instead, case law and commentators justify prevailing institutional design with reference only to uncontroversial understandings that prosecutors know most about legal merits and strategic priorities. In fact, several reasons exist to believe that prosecutors are ill suited to consider the normative merits of potential charges. First, professional prosecutors fail sufficiently to individualize cases, lumping them instead into legal boxes. Second, professional prosecutors prioritize institutional concerns over equitable particulars. Notably, prosecutors are least competent to adequately consider the equities in the precise types of cases in which commonsense discretion matters most. Specifically, in the petty-crime context, absolute enforcement of expansive code law is both undesirable and impossible, and, consequently, measured exercises of equitable discretion are warranted and anticipated. Put simply, petty-crime enforcement should turn on thoughtful evaluation of equitable considerations, such as relative blameworthiness. Legal guilt, by contrast, is often peripheral (or, in any event, presumed). In this way, easy legal cases may raise tough normative questions. And prosecutors have no special claim to know the answers, as the novel data that I provide help to show.


This paper puts forward a framework for optimal mitigation of regional risk to enhance the resilience of civil infrastructure. To meet this objective, probabilistic models, methods, and software are developed and applied. The work is conducted within a new reliability-based approach, in which reliability methods compute risk. This contrasts several contemporary approaches for risk analysis. Risk, in this context, denotes the probability of exceeding monetary loss. Evaluating such probabilities requires probabilistic models for hazards, response, damage, and loss. This motivates the following contributions in this paper. First, a new computer program is developed that is tailored to conduct reliability analysis with many interconnected probabilistic models. It orchestrates the interaction of models through an object-oriented architecture. Second, a library of probabilistic models for regional seismic risk analysis are developed. The library includes new models for earthquake location and magnitude and building response, damage, and loss. Third, probabilistic methods for multi-hazard risk analysis are developed and applied in a large-scale regional analysis. The results are cost exceedance probabilities and insights into the seismic risk of the region. Finally, sensitivity measures are developed to identify the buildings whose retrofit yields the most reduction in regional risk, i.e., the most resilience of the region.


It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.


The existence of movements in nineteenth century Lutheranism and Anglicanism to revive (repristinate) the doctrines and practices of a former age is well known. The scope of this dissertation only includes aspects of the eucharistic theologies of these movements, and then only as taught by a few representative theologians. The two repristination movements that are compared in this respect are the Missouri Synod of Lutheranism (the Confessional Lutherans - whose main theologian was C.F.W.Walther) and the Oxford Movement in Anglicanism (the Tractarians - whose main theologian of the Eucharist was E.B.Pusey). To investigate the eucharistic theologies of these movements, major writings on the doctrine of the Eucharist by these chosen representatives were studied and compared. An attempt was made to discover how close these theologians came to sharing a common eucharistic theology. The eucharistic writings of the two movements were found to be similar in their dependence upon quotations from historic eucharistic literature to promote orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. But on the Lutheran side material from the sixteenth century was usually reissued without comment in compilation volumes. Although Walther and others usually systematised Reformation-era material for easier reference in the nineteenth century, few additions or reinterpretations were thought necessary. On the Anglican side, Pusey quoted from the early Church Fathers extensively, often with little comment or addition, but was compelled to reinterpret much eucharistic material. This is because the task before the Oxford Movement, of promoting an orthodoxy which was not recognised by many Anglicans, required creative writing which Lutheran Confessionalism did not. For the Tractarians, Anglican doctrinal material from sixteenth century had to be reinterpreted to conform with the desired orthodoxy. Unlike the Confessional Lutherans with their sixteenth century material on the Eucharist completely usable, Tractarians such as Pusey and Wilberforce had to struggle with eucharistic concepts in the authoritative writings available to them and, through a considerable amount of creative thinking on their part, articulate a eucharistic theology which conformed to their ideal of catholic doctrine. Hence a fuller body of nineteenth century eucharistic thought and writing is evident from the Tractarian side than from the Lutheran. The method of investigation consisted of analysing certain issues involved in eucharistic theology and comparing the treatments of those issues in authoritative Lutheran and Anglican sources. How and why the treatments resembled and differed from one another was explored. Particular attention was paid to the doctrine of the Real Presence, because of the influence of that doctrine upon other eucharistic issues and questions. Because, unlike the Confessional Lutherans, the Tractarians received a hostile reaction from within their church to their eucharistic theology, a sample was included of some of the arguments presented by Anglican opposition to the eucharistic theology of the Oxford Movement. It was discovered that the similarity between the goals of the Anglican and Lutheran repristinationists to restore what they believed to be true catholic orthodoxy included a corresponding similarity in many of their theological presuppositions. For the most part they shared a conservative reverence for the Bible, the creedal formularies of Christian antiquity and of certain Reformation formularies. A completely unified approach to the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist did not materialise; yet despite the independence of their respective inquiries, the Anglican and Lutheran repristinationists were discovered to maintain strikingly similar positions on several issues of eucharistic theology. Most notable was the congruence of their teachings concerning the Real Presence. Diversity between the two movements was encountered concerning the language and philosophy behind other issues such as that of eucharistic sacrifice. Nevertheless, such a measure of doctrinal congruence concerning the frequently devisive subject of the Lord's Supper was encouraging to discover. The measure of congruity achieved by the independent efforts of these Lutherans and Anglicans of the nineteenth century, as they tried to repristinate purity of doctrine and orthodoxy, may constitute a superior model for modern-day ecumenical endeavours. This is especially the case if the route to Christian unity via a tolerance of contradictory doctrines around the eucharistic table threatens to collapse under the weight of its own implausibility.


In a given environment, distributing different devices with computing capabilities around us opens up new possibilities. It allows simple and easy interaction between user and computer. In this work we propose an approach to make it easier to handle information in the educational context and to do so we have adapted Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, which provides a simple input to the system. The user only has to bring his/her mobile phone, equipped with a radiofrequency reader, near to a tag, obtaining services like localization, access, or presence. Most importantly for us, we present the visualization of information in what we have called a "Visualization Mosaic".


In the last few years the U.S. economy and a number of Eurozone countries have experienced a recession. One of the results of the recessions has been an increase in their budget deficits and national debts. Both in the U.S. and in Europe policies of austerity have gained momentum. It is questionable however, that in periods of recession austerity leading to reductions of aggregate spending is the answer. It can be argued that emphasis on growth may be a preferable alternative. A look at the U.S. economy in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 we find that because of strong growth unemployment was about 4 percent and budget surpluses characterized all four years. In the case of Europe the countries with most difficulties are peripheral countries of the European Union, e.g., Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece. This raises the question, on whether the integration of small and large countries and of different standards of living was a wise move. Concerns about this issue led the Single European Act of 1986 to emphasize the need for social and economic cohesion. An outcome of this was the use of structural funds primarily to the peripheral countries. Yet, we know that social value changes and economic development take time. Germany, the largest and richest country of the Union seems to be playing a dominant role currently in urging austerity for the peripheral countries which have large deficits and debts. Suggestions that the European Central Bank act as a bank of last resort by lending directly to the various governments in need and/or the creation of Eurobonds have been rejected by the Eurozone leadership. Leaders in Brussels have also voted recently for strict budget criteria for the Eurozone members. Among the peripheral countries in difficulty Greece is the worst case scenario. The Greek economy has shrunk by 7.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2011 and young people in Greece experience unemployment of 51 per cent. On February 9, 2012 the Greek government was able to convince private bondholders to accept a 75 per cent loss in the face value of bond holdings. The result of this was a reduction in Greece's debt by 100 billion Euros. At the same time the Eurozone and IMF are expected to provide Greece with a stopgap package of 130 billion Euros. These developments do not mean that Greece is out of the woods. Its indebtedness is now with Europe and the IMF. It's debt to GDP ratio would still be 151 per cent in 2012, the highest in Europe. The challenges facing the new government resulting from the elections of June 17, 2012 are staggering. Other countries, e.g., Italy and Spain are also facing economic declines and are potentially candidates for bailouts. It is because of this possibility that the Managing Director of the IMF has been urging Europe to raise at least $1 trillion in emergency funds. At this point, it is not clear how the European crisis will be resolved. Perhaps two basic questions may be raised: 1) would the strongest economies be willing to help more effectively the peripheral countries in trouble? 2) Would the "failed†policy of austerity in depressed economies be changed by more emphasis on growth? At present, it appears that a balanced policy including more emphasis on demand side economics makes sense in both the USA and Europe.


Readers of The New York Times were given something of a surprise on 18 January 2009. For the first time, the entire magazine was given over to one story, by one photographer. The story was inescapable – the incoming administration of Barack Obama, whose historic inauguration was to take place two days later, on 20 January. The photographer was Nadav Kander. When these extraordinary pictures were published in book form as the catalogue for a major exhibition, Hodgson's text put them in the context of previous groups of political portraits from Matthew Brady and Nadar and Carjat through Richard Avedon.


Richard wright might never have said that a spectre is haunting Communism in the United States. Yet his novel Native Son (1940) is strangely like a ghost, fictionally visiting and revisiting a particular history of the Party's attempts to understand race in terms functionally equivalent to those of class. Wright's novel is shaped in part by his own experiences with the Communist Party of the United States, first in Chicago and then in Harlem. But the commitment to Communism Wright may have felt early in the 1930s is tempered at the end of the decade by his portrayal of the nightmare of Bigger Thomas's life. For in writing Native Son Wright imagines a Communism in the United States that quite capably reproduces processes of social dehumanization that exile Bigger into the shadowy role of what Wright once ironically referred to as "the Negro's uncertain position in America" ("Bigger" xxviii). Occupying a position that is scarcely uncertain in 1930s Chicago, Bigger is tried for the rape and murder of Mary Dalton, the white daughter of his employer. While Bigger's conviction was perhaps already assured by the combined historical weight of such charges and contemporary practices of legal-lynching, Wright assigns a significant degree of importance to his trial. In this remarkable episode of Bigger's narrative, Wright's Communist defence lawyer Boris Max offers an impassioned and complexly rendered portrayal of racial discrimination in the United States. Max examines the ways in which charges of rape policed and sanctioned violence against African Americans. The "hunt for Bigger Thomas," he notes, "served as an excuse to terrorize the entire Negro population, to arrest hundreds of Communists, to raid labour union headquarters and workers' organizations" (356). These remarks very rapidly specify particular example of this impossibly overdetermined charge against a black male and the tendency of the United States legal system to ratify what Max calls the "hate and impatience" of "the mob congregated upon the streets beyond that window" (357). Wright refers here to another trial in which the Communist Party of the United States defended several black men who barely survived the "lynch barbarism" of a "mob who surrounded the Scottsboro jail with rope and kerosene" after their initial convictions (Maxwell 132). While Wright himself acknowledges the Robert Nixon case in Chicago (1938-39) as an influence on his representation of Bigger's crime, the legal defence of Bigger, on the other hand, recalls the political prominence of the trial of nine young black men accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931 and the Communist theories of race publicized by the Party during this first significant attempt legally to represent African Americans. Restaging and interrogating the terms of this trial, Wright develops a rhetoric of haunting that conjures up ghosts of a complex history of lynching suppressed by the substantial and compelling Communist hermeneutic of race put forward at Scottsboro. The histories of lynching that Native Son finds palpably absent in an understanding of race put forward by American Communists in the 1930s, moreover, is powerfully marked by the gendered violence perpetrated against the bodies and spirits of black women during slavery and Reconstruction. In revisiting Scottsboro in Native Son Wright summons a form of white violence that is hauntingly absent from the text's narrative of lynching and Bigger's defence. This counter-intuitive possibility that the gendered violence of Native Son may actually constitute a critique of Communism arises in part as a function of a rhetoric concerned with seeing what may not be there. Wright's discussion of these two trials is marked by a language of ghosts, in the summation to his defence of Bigger, Max attempts to understand those "disembodied spirits" like Bigger Thomas and Bessie Mears (368) by employing a rhetoric of ghosts that also marks Wright's earlier narration of Bigger's interactions with the young Communist Jan Erlone. …


The short-term rental accommodation market has experienced incredible growth as a result of technological innovations. This article explores the impact of this phenomenon on property and the concept of ownership in Australia. It does so, first by drawing on Kellen Zale's framework of sharing, which breaks down the activities associated with the sharing economy and applies it in the Australian context. This helps us understand that in many respects, short-term rental accommodation is better characterised as part of the sharing-for-profit economy. This characterisation explains and justifies the choices that Australian states and territories have made in regulating the short-term rental market. This article also analyses disputes that have arisen in Australia concerning short-term rentals, and concludes that whilst the sharing economy prioritises access to property over ownership of it, property law continues to protect the privilege of ownership.


The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) and its extension via activity modes (MRCPSP) are well-established scheduling frameworks that have found numerous applications in a broad range of settings related to artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly, the problem of finding a suitable schedule in these frameworks is known to be NP-complete—however, aside from a few results for special cases, we have lacked an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the problems from the viewpoint of natural restrictions of the considered instances. In the first part of our paper, we develop new algorithms and give hardness-proofs in order to obtain a detailed complexity map of (M)RCPSP that settles the complexity of all 1024 considered variants of the problem defined in terms of explicit restrictions of natural parameters of instances. In the second part, we turn to implicit structural restrictions defined in terms of the complexity of interactions between individual activities. In particular, we show that if the treewidth of a graph which captures such interactions is bounded by a constant, then we can solve MRCPSP in polynomial time.


NATO has recently expanded to include several eastern European, formerly communist states. This article uses empirical evidence on alliances and war to argue that this expansion and plans to expand NATO even more may pose a serious threat to international peace since the expanded alliance possesses two of the three major factors that have been found to be associated with war-prone alliances. In addition, it is argued that the expanded alliance may greatly hamper Russia's transition to democracy. The article concludes that a better long-term policy for NATO states to pursue would be an expansion that included Russia but that would be restructured to resolve outstanding territorial disputes in ways similar to the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The potential impact of this expanded NATO on political transitions in the Balkan states is also discussed.


Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently become the state of the art technology in speech recognition systems. In this paper we propose a new approach to constructing large high quality unsupervised sets to train DNN models for large vocabulary speech recognition. The core of our technique consists of two steps. We first redecode speech logged by our production recognizer with a very accurate (and hence too slow for real-time usage) set of speech models to improve the quality of ground truth transcripts used for training alignments. Using confidence scores, transcript length and transcript flattening heuristics designed to cull salient utterances from three decades of speech per language, we then carefully select training data sets consisting of up to 15K hours of speech to be used to train acoustic models without any reliance on manual transcription. We show that this approach yields models with approximately 18K context dependent states that achieve 10% relative improvement in large vocabulary dictation and voice-search systems for Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Russian languages.


This study compares and contrasts the glyphosate removal efficiency of alum sludge (waterworks residue) and Irish peat in aqueous solution. Organic phosphonate of glyphosate aqueous solution was removed in pot tests separately filled with peat and alum sludge, while effluent samples were taken from each pot to analyse the concentration of phosphorus (P) and COD (chemical oxygen demand); physical and chemical analysis for both media before and after use was carried out subsequently. The results show that the P removal capacity of alum sludge was significant (>99%), while the removal capacity of peat was considerably less than 10% after 10 weeks. Both materials significantly reduced the levels of COD, but it was noted that peat had a marginally greater initial P removal capacity (68 ± 22%) and did perform better than alum sludge (57 ± 12%). Moreover, pre-treatment is a crucial step to harness the full potential of peat. Overall, this study provides a scientific clue for sorbents selection when considering alum sludge and peat to maximize their value in practice.


In Australia, road crashes are the most common cause of work-related fatalities, injuries and absence from work (Haworth et al., 2000), with the average time lost being greater than any other workplace claim (Stewart-Bogle, 1999; WA, 2003). Furthermore, work-related crashes account for up to 49% of work-related fatalities in Australia (NOHSC, 1998), and 13% of the national road toll (Murray, Newnam, Watson, Davey & Schonfeld, 2003). Consequently, there is a growing necessity to implement proactive interventions aimed at reducing crash occurrence and improving driver behaviour whilst maintaining time, cost and resource effectiveness. Based on previous brief intervention techniques used successfully in the health care field, a driving diary concept was developed with aims to reduce engagement in unsafe driving practices. This paper draws together findings from focus group research of government work-related drivers (n = 217) across Queensland metropolitan and regional areas. Results of the study will outline intervention objectives and conceptual characteristics, as well as, investigate issues and difficulties associated with the driving diary program implementation. This paper will further report on the major advantages and barriers associated with fleet safety interventions and propose recommendations directed at improving the implementation of fleet safety interventions, especially, the driving diary program.


Small water supply systems are often unable to provide a reliable, safe, and sustainable service over time, and this has direct impacts on overall wellbeing of people. Circuit Rider post-construction support addresses this through the provision of technical, financial, and operational assistance to these systems. The Circuit Rider methodology has been proven over time to help sustain services from small water systems in countries in North America and Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean. To date, the Circuit Rider program has not been adapted at scale in the African context. This paper aims to describe best practices learned from existing programs and discuss how the Circuit Rider methodology is being adapted to the Ghanaian context, and to encourage further research into the benefits and costs of post-construction support in Africa.


Axoplasmic transport is a dramatic example of cytoplasmic motility. Constituents of axoplasm migrate as far as 400 mm/d or at approximately 5 micron/s. Thin-section studies have identified the major morphological elements within the axoplasm as being microtubules, neurofilaments (100-A filaments), an interconnected and elongated varicose component of smooth endoplasmic reticulum (SER), more dilated and vesicular organelles resembling portions of SER, multivesicular bodies, mitochondria, and, finally, a matrix of ground substance in which the tubules, filaments, and vesicles are suspended. In the ordinary thin-section image, the ground substance is comprised of wispy fragments which, in not being noticeably tied together, do not give the impression of representing more than a condensation of what might be a homogeneous solution of proteins. With the high-voltage microscope on thick (0.5-micron) sections, we have noticed, however, that the so- called wispy fragments are part of a three-dimensional lattice. We contend that this lattice is not an artifact of aldehyde fixation, and our contention is supported by its visability after rapid-freezing and freeze-substitution. This lattice or microtrabecular matrix of axoplasm was found to consist of an organized system of cross-bridges between microtubules, neurofilaments, cisternae of the SER, and the plasma membrane. We propose that formation and deformation of this system are involved in rapid axonal transport. To facilitate electron microscope visualization of the trabecular connections between elements of axoplasm, the following three techniques were used: first, the addition of tannic acid to the primary fixative, OsO4 postfixation, then en bloc staining in uranyl acetate for conventional transmission electron microscope (TEM); second, embedding tissue in polyethylene glycol for thin sectioning, dissolving out the embedding medium from the sections and blocks, critical-point-drying (J. J. Wolosewick, 1980, J. Cell Biol., 86:675-681.), and then observing the matrix-free sections with TEM or the blocks with a scanning electron microscope; and third, rapid freezing of fixed tissue followed by freeze-etching and rotary- shadowing with replicas observed by TEM. All of these procedures yielded images of cross-linking elements between neurofilaments and organelles of the axoplasm. These improvements in visualization should enable us to examine the distribution of trabecular links on motile axonal organelles.


INTRODUCTION Environmental statutes are among the most complicated national legislation. These laws seek to integrate scientific ambiguity, political competition, management performance and intergovernmental relations. As a consequence they are among the most contentious. No major environmental legislation has been enacted at the national level in over fifteen years. In the face of growing environmental problems, this may be signaling an intellectual and political dead end. Current environmental legislation is based on the assumptions of comprehensive rationality and centralized federalism. With progress in environmental management stalled, new paradigms are needed to advance environmental protection in the United States. This paper suggests that a new intellectual framework, complex adaptive systems theory, can reconfigure national environmental legislation to become more effective. The paper examines the current conditions of the Clean Air Act and suggests an alternative approach to comprehensive rationality for effectively protecting the environment of the United States. The paper discusses the barriers to pursuing this novel approach and suggests that it is time to seek unconventional ways to sustain the United States' environmental health. STATIC CLEAN AIR POLICY AND EVOLVING CLEAN AIR PROBLEMS The Clean Air Act is the flagship statute with which the U.S. has attacked air pollution. This was the first comprehensive environmental statute enacted in the modern environmental era (Rodgers, 1994). Its reach into the national economy is considerable. It regulates most sources of air pollution. It covers activities as sophisticated as automobile manufacturing and as simple as neighborhood dry cleaners. Estimates are that the nation spent $500 billion controlling air pollution in the period from 1970 to 1990 (EPA, 1997). While these costs are considerable, so are the health and welfare effects that they purchase. EPA has estimated that from 1970 to 1990 about $22.2 trillion in benefits flowed to the nation as a result of the environmental regulation of air pollution (EPA, 1997). The method for achieving these benefits and costs is important. The environmental regulatory system fostered by the Act, termed the command and control system, is complex both in government-business relations as well as in intergovernmental relations (Bryner, 1995). At its core is the expectation that government can establish both ambient and emission standards and protect the public health by requiring the most current pollution control technology. These standards are implemented through a federal-state system that identifies situations where nonperformance occurs and uses civil or judicial enforcement to compel violators to alter behavior to conform to the standards. Today's use of this command and control system has encountered a host of new conditions for which the system was not designed. Many of the nation's current air pollution problems come from small sources such as dry cleaners, paint shops, construction sites and the ultimate small source, automobiles, rather than large industrial sources. (U. S. EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, 2005). Further, since these sources are so small, they are exquisitely sensitive to costs such as those imposed by command and control environmental regulation. These sources are not effectively influenced by the command and control system. There are new remedies for these small sources of pollution. With the focus shifting from large point sources to many dispersed sources, we need to employ the best management/operation practices to prevent pollution, rather than treating it with the command and control system as we have previously (Gunningham & Grabosky, 1998). We should turn to different tools if we are to make progress. The resource landscape for environmental protection is also changing. The federal government's increased demands and unfunded mandates and the sharp limitations on funds available at the federal level for environmental activities characterized the 1990s and 2000s (Rosenbaum, 2005). …


SCIENCE FUNDINGA plan to double federal civilian research spending over 11 years is surprisingly contentious because it could cramp biomedicine's push for ever faster growth. Critics of the bill, proposed by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), say that because it is an authorization bill and not tied to actual spending language, it could divert attention from more important budget battles. But proponents argue that authorizing bills can be used to convince appropriators to put money behind an idea, adding that Frist-Rockefeller has created a lobbying coalition that can be unleashed on other research issues.


On April 13, 1992, a section of a 100-year-old underground freight tunnel in downtown Chicago, Illinois was breached where the tunnel crosses under the Chicago River, about 15 meters below land surface. The breach allowed water from the Chicago River to flow into the freight tunnels and into buildings connected to the tunnels. As a result, utility services to more than 100 buildings in downtown Chicago were lost, several hundred thousand workers were sent home, and the entire subway system and a major expressway in the Loop were shut down. The breach in the tunnel was sealed and the tunnel dewatered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and its contractors. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assisted the Corps in their efforts to plug and dewater the freight tunnels and connected buildings. This assistance included the installation and operation of telemetered gages for monitoring water levels in the tunnel system and velocity measurements made in the vicinity of the tunnel breach. A fluorescent dye tracer was used to check for leaks in the plugs, which isolated the damaged portion of the Chicago freight tunnel from the remainder of the tunnel system.


ABSTRACT Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding "coupled identities" at home emerged from the interviews: (i) the importance of privacy and control at home for enabling gay/lesbian partnerships; (ii) the negotiated creation and use of shared domestic spaces; (iii) the accumulation and arrangement of household objects in those domestic spaces; and (iv) the importance of maintaining separate "personal" spaces for each partner for the well-being of the relationship.


While their counterparts in the museum world have received some scholarly attention, no scholarly account of zoo registrars has been published to date. Why bother studying zoo registrars? Firstly, in the (contained) wildness of the zoo, the registrar performs the role of law and order. She (typically this position is employed by females) manages the administrative side of the zoo: a junction between data management and small-scale legal administration. Secondly, registrars both depict and represent the significant transformations that have occurred in North American zoos over the last few decades, from insular urban institutions exhibiting exotic animals for entertainment, to a globalized collective enterprise for conservation and education that corresponds with increasing visibility and legalization as a public institution. This shift of priorities has carved out the two-pronged work of registrars: record keeping and database management, on the one hand, and legal administration, on the other hand. Thirdly and finally, the work of the registrar is important in that it is uniquely situated on the border between the inside and the outside of the zoo. The registrar sets up both the official and legal connections between her own zoo and others and between the zoo's animals and the relevant legal system. The registrar's small everyday management tasks are situated at the heart of the ambitious project of contemporary zoos: the project of controlling to conserve.


This article interrogates two questions: what do teachers believe about their training and preparation to teach sexuality education, and how do teachers reconcile their own identities and beliefs with the content of sexuality education? Using a qualitative research design with in-depth interviewing as method, this article argues that Life Orientation teachers lack training and come from a diverse range of fields, which do not always adequately equip them to teach sexuality education confidently and effectively. The article also makes suggestions for policy, practice and direction that future research might take to deepen our understanding about the teaching of sexuality education, including that schools must provide in-service sessions on the teaching of sexuality and that teacher training in the area of sexuality education must take into account elements of self-reflexivity where teachers begin to recognise and name their own beliefs and prejudices, and begin to separate their own values from the content they are teaching. * Prof. Dennis Francis is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of the Free State in


As infants we are rife with potential. For a short time, we have before us a seemingly infinite number of developmental paths. Soon, however, we become limited to certain paths as we grow into unique products of our genetics and experience. But what factors account for the variation--in skills, personalities, values--that results? How do experiences shape what we bring into the world? In The Human Spark, pioneering psychologist Jerome Kagan offers an unflinching examination of personal, moral, and cultural development that solidifies his place as one of the most influential psychologists of the past century. In this definitive analysis of the factors that shape the human mind, Kagan explores the tension between biology and the environment. He reviews major advances in the science of development over the past three decades and offers pointed critiques and new syntheses. In so doing, Kagan calls out the shortcomings of the modern fad for neuroscience, shows why theories of so-called attachment parenting are based on a misinterpretation of research, and questions the field's reflexive tendency to pathologize the behavior of the young. Most importantly, he reminds us that a life, however influenced by biology and upbringing, is still a tapestry to be woven, not an outcome to be endured. A profound exploration of what is universal and what is individual in human development, The Human Spark is the result of a scientist's lifelong quest to discover how we become who we are. Whether the reader is a first-time parent wondering what influence she, her genes, and the wider world will have on her child; an educator seeking insight into the development of her students; or simply a curious soul seeking self-knowledge, Kagan makes an expert and companionable guide.


Most existing commitments are confined to guaranteeing the levels of access that existed in the mid-1990s, when the Agreement entered into force, in a limited number of sectors. The only significant exceptions are the accession schedules of recent WTO Members and the negotiating results in two sectors (financial services and, in particular, basic telecommunications) that were achieved after the Uruguay Round. The offers tabled so far in the ongoing Round would not add a lot of substance either. Apparently, negotiators are 'caught between a rock and a hard place'. For one thing, the traditional mercantilist paradigm, relying on reciprocal exchanges of concessions, seems to be provide less momentum than in the goods area. For another, there are additional - technical, economic and political - frictions that tend to render services negotiations more complicated, time-consuming and resource-intensive. The novelty of the Agreement adds an additional element of legal uncertainty from a negotiator's perspective. This paper discusses various options that might help to overcome the ensuing reticence to engage. Few appear within reach at present, however. The bare minimum that would need to be achieved is to revive work on scheduling and classification issues with a view to putting both existing commitments and new offers on a safer footing, and to improve compliance with long-existing information/notification obligations.


In the present study, three-dimensional nonlinear finite element analyses were conducted to investigate the effect of several important parameters on the behavior of the external prestressed continuous composite steel-concrete beam. These parameters included the effects of concrete compressive strength, ratio of effective prestressing to ultimate stress (fpe/fpu), external prestressing technique, ratio of thickness to width of concrete slab (T/B), transfer load point to mid span section, type of loading, full and partial interaction, tendon profile, and number of stiffeners. It had been found that, at increasing the concrete compressive strength from (20 to 60MPa) and the ratio of prestress to ultimate stress from (0.264 to 0.79), the ultimate load was increased by about (19.64%) and (9.05), respectively. The ultimate load of a continuous composite beam with external prestressing was increased by about (26.63%) than the same continuous beam without prestressing. The increase in the ultimate load of the continuous beam subjected to three point loads on each span was (25.93%) larger than that of the continuous beam with a single load on each span. It was noted that the ultimate capacity was increased by (7.32%) when draped tendon profile was used. Also it was noted that the ultimate load of beam with full interaction is (3.25%) greater than the same beam with partial interaction. Increasing the thickness to width of concrete slab ratio, from (0.1 to 0.25) with constant area of concrete, led to an increase in the ultimate load by about (6.60%). It was noted that the ultimate capacity increased by about (8.25%) when number of stiffeners were increased from three to seven.


The embargo system--a decades-old gentlemen9s agreement between science journals and reporters that keeps information from scientific reports secret until a journal publishes it--is under growing pressure. The system offers advantages for everybody involved: Journals get maximum publicity, journalists get time to report complex stories, and scientists get more widespread and more accurate public exposure for their work. But it is also wracked by built-in tensions: It can erect barriers to the free exchange of scientific information through which advances are made; it rules out the "scoops" on which newspapers and their reporters thrive; and it has created new problems when information that can send a company9s stock price soaring is distributed to hundreds of journalists under an embargo. But the biggest threat is coming from Web-based publishing, which is speeding up the communication of findings outside the usual embargoed channels and making print publication dates somewhat arbitrary.


Lower crustal garnet granulite xenoliths from beneath the Kola–Karelian domain of the Fennoscandian Shield (Russia) were brought to the surface in Devonian lamprophyre diatremes. To establish the relationships between processes in the lower crust and geological events recorded in the upper crust, zircons from two of these xenoliths were dated by ion microprobe. One xenolith contains mainly primary magmatic zircon grains that yielded an average age of 2.47 Ga. The Kola–Karelia domain formed part of a large basaltic igneous province in the earliest Proterozoic (c. 2.45 Ga); thus, such xenoliths probably represent deep-seated equivalents of this magmatism. A second garnet granulite xenolith contained only internally featureless zircons. Most of these yielded concordant ages between 1.77–1.61 Ga. This age distribution indicates that at c. 1.7 Ga the protolith was migmatized during an event that may be related to emplacement of granites and pegmatites in the region. However, two zircon grains in the second xenolith gave much younger ages of 1.47 and 1.45 Ga. This spread in the ages is related to an unknown younger event around 1.4 Ga (or perhaps later) when the c. 1.7 Ga 'migmatite' zircons were reset to variable degrees. These zircon ages are evidence for the complex evolution of the lower crust, recording multiple events, some of which are not currently expressed on the surface.


Our objective was to identify the biological response and the cross-talk between liver and mammary tissue after intramammary infection (IMI) with Escherichia coli (E. coli) using RNAseq technology. Sixteen cows were inoculated with live E. coli into one mammary quarter at ~4–6 weeks in lactation. For all cows, biopsies were performed at -144, 12 and 24 h relative to IMI in liver and at 24 h post-IMI in infected and non-infected (control) mammary quarters. For a subset of cows (n = 6), RNA was extracted from both liver and mammary tissue and sequenced using a 100 bp paired-end approach. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis and the Dynamic Impact Approach analysis of differentially expressed genes (overall effect False Discovery Rate≤0.05) indicated that IMI induced an overall activation of inflammation at 12 h post-IMI and a strong inhibition of metabolism, especially related to lipid, glucose, and xenobiotics at 24 h post-IMI in liver. The data indicated in mammary tissue an overall induction of inflammatory response with little effect on metabolism at 24 h post-IMI. We identified a large number of up-stream regulators potentially involved in the response to IMI in both tissues but a relatively small core network of transcription factors controlling the response to IMI for liver whereas a large network in mammary tissue. Transcriptomic results in liver and mammary tissue were supported by changes in inflammatory and metabolic mediators in blood and milk. The analysis of potential cross-talk between the two tissues during IMI uncovered a large communication from the mammary tissue to the liver to coordinate the inflammatory response but a relatively small communication from the liver to the mammary tissue. Our results indicate a strong induction of the inflammatory response in mammary tissue and impairment of liver metabolism 24h post-IMI partly driven by the signaling from infected mammary tissue.


This paper seeks to determine the influence demographic / socio-economic attributes ( rank, years of experience and gender) have on information and communication technology use for scholarly communication. One research question and two hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted ex-post facto research design and utilized a questionnaire to generate data. Data was analyzed using mean, chi-square and analysis of variance. Findings revealed, among others, a positive relationship between years of experience and level of ICT use (P=.03 < 0.05). Rank and gender had no significant influence on ICT use for scholarly communication. The paper recommends training and retraining of senior academics in the use of ICT so as to make them compete favourably with the middle and junior academics. Further investigation should be carried out to find other factors that are responsible for rank not having any significant influence on ICT use for scholarly communication. Gender should not constitute any impediment to appointment of female academics to leadership positions that are technologically biased.


This research examines job satisfaction of long-distance truck drivers in the United States. These workers are important to better understand because they are good surrogates for a growing category of contemporary workers; specifically, men and women who work at home with no direct management supervision. Data collection, using a modified grounded theory approach to increase study objectivity, took place at a large truck-stop located adjacent to an Interstate Highway. One hundred-four drivers, who had stopped to refuel their trucks, were each interview ed for 10 to 15 minutes. The respondents were willing to share their thoughts with the researchers, as there were almost no refusals to participate in the study. About 60% of the drivers would not recommend their occupation to their children. The most common reasons were: excessive time away from home, hard to make a reasonably good income, and their work is not a respected occupation. However, almost 40% of the drivers would encourage their children to be long-distance drivers. The most noted positive aspects were: no two days are ever the same, if one works "smart" you can make a good living, and with no direct supervision, the job teaches responsibility and independence. Introduction The long-distance trucking industry faces a serious operational issue in the near future: a shortage of qualified drivers. While the problem is less severe now because of the economic recession the United States is currently experiencing, the impending driver shortage will materialize once again when the economy starts to grow. In 2005, the American Trucking Associations commissioned a study by the marketing research company, Global Insights, to determine the extent of the present and future driver shortage. The study concluded that between 2005 and 2015, the long-distance trucking industry would have to attract approximately 540,000 new drivers. The report was based on the assumption that the industry would grow at a rate of 2.2% per year, which would require an additional 320,000 new drivers over the ten year period. In addition, the report noted many current drivers were age 55 or above, and assuming they retire at 65, the industry will need another 220,000 drivers to replace these workers (Global Insights 2005). In 2008, Joe White, a transportation consultant, studied the ATA/Global Insights report and concluded, "My opinion is that the driver shortage will be worse than predicted. Regardless of when the economy recovers, the large baby boomer demographic will soon begin retiring from all industries and the blue-collar labor shortage will become fierce" (Gallagher 2008, see also White 2008a and White 2008b). More recently, Stephen Russell, president and chairman of the Celadon Group, an Indianapolis, Indiana based truckload carrier, stated, "Demographics suggest that once the economy regains its forward momentum, truckload carriers will once again have to wrestle with a shortage of drivers. The current crop of drivers is aging, and the growth in the pool of potential candidates will not fill the void" (Gallagher 2009). In 2010, trucking management is still highly concerned about the future driver shortage. The president of a trade association of trucking companies observed, "Due to the (economic) problems in 2009, there will continue to be a driver shortage because of drivers who left the industry believing they could not earn a living. These drivers will never return and the future driver pool looks dim" (Bader 20 1 0). Reinforcing this position is Hans Moller, president of large trucking company. He observed, "Driver recruitment, retention and compensation will remain a challenge for the long-term viability of our industry. Many initiatives are ongoing, however, more needs to be done to attract and retain the right individuals to our industry" (Moller 2010, see also Cassidy 2010). There will be a shortage of long-distance truck drivers in the near term, there is literally no doubt about that fact. …


Inhaled beta-adrenergic receptor agonist plays an important role in the management of bronchial asthma especially in the acute setting and still salbutamol (albuterol, USAN) is the most widely prescribed drug in this class. In a randomized, open label, crossover, multicenter study, one and two actuations (100, 200μg) of Ventolin and Butalin inhaler were administered in 4 alternative different conse-quences for patients suffering from mild to moderate asthma for 4 days trial compares forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV1) at (0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes) and peak expiratory flow (PEF) at (0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 120, 240, 360 minutes) to prove equivalent pharmacodynamics, equipotency and safety. Eighty-nine patients completed the study of which 61.8% were male. There was no signifi-cant difference between Ventolin and Butalin concerning the average of Ln transformed re-cords for the FEV1 and PEF, and the AUFC0-1h for the 100 and 200 μg were (96.89-101.07) and (92.69-104.77) respectively, same for the PEF AUC0-4h that came with the ranges of (99.20-104.24) and (90.25-100.49) respectively. No significant difference was noted between the two products in regard of onset and duration of action, and the same was true when as-sessing products potency. Concluding that both products are clearly equivalent and equipotent with similar safety profile.


Most public colleges and universities rely heavily on state financial support. As state budgets have tightened in recent decades, appropriations for higher education have declined substantially. Despite concerns expressed by policymakers and scholars that the declines in state support have reduced the return to education investment for public sector students, little evidence exists that can identify the causal effect of these funds on long-run outcomes. We present the first such analysis in the literature using new data that leverages the merger of two rich datasets: consumer credit records from the New York Fed's Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) sourced from Equifax and administrative college enrollment and attainment data from the National Student Clearinghouse. We overcome identification concerns related to the endogeneity of state appropriation variation using an instrument that interacts the baseline share of total revenue that comes from state appropriations at each public institution with yearly variation in state-level appropriations. Our analysis is conducted separately for two-year and four-year students, and we analyze individuals into their mid-30s. For four-year students, we find that state appropriation increases lead to substantially lower student debt originations. They also react to appropriation increases by shortening their time to degree, but we find little effect on other outcomes. In the two-year sector, state appropriation increases lead to more collegiate and post-collegiate educational attainment, more educational debt consistent with the increased educational attainment, but lower likelihood of delinquency and default. State support also leads to more car and home ownership with lower adverse debt outcomes, and these students experience substantial increases in their credit score and in the affluence of the neighborhood in which they live. Examining mechanisms, we find state appropriations are passed on to students in the form of lower tuition in the four-year sector with no institutional spending response. For community colleges, we find evidence of both price and quality mechanisms, the latter captured in higher educational resources in key spending categories. These results are consistent with the different pattern of effects we document in the four-year and two-year sectors. Our results underscore the importance of state support for higher education in driving student debt outcomes and the long-run returns to postsecondary investments students experience.


With the development of the Semantic Web, an increasing amount of data with semantics has been published on the web according to the Linked Data principles and become ubiquitous. The requirement of utilizing the entire web of data to answer a query has arised since the desire for the application of such ubiquitous semantic data sources. However, limited research work has been made on the query above the web of data and there is not a formal way to describe the query processing procedure. In this paper, we propose a general query processing method on the web of data, which contains three steps: data inference configuration, data discovery, result generation and ranking. Finally, we briefly represent the work already done and the future work.


PURPOSE
To evaluate the risk factors predicting surgical treatment in consecutive esotropia occurring after surgery for intermittent exotropia.

METHODS
The clinical records of 52 patients with consecutive esotropia who underwent exotropia surgery were retrospectively reviewed. All patients demonstrated consecutive esotropia with diplopia or suppression for more than 1 month after surgery for exotropia. Patients were divided into two groups (the surgical group and nonsurgical group) depending on whether surgery was required for consecutive esotropia. Surgery for esotropia was performed only in patients with more than 10 prism diopters (PD) esodeviation that persisted for a minimum of 6 months, those who had suppression in 1 eye or diplopia, and those who could not achieve fine stereopsis. The nonsurgical treatment up to 6 months postoperatively was part-time patching and prism therapy in both groups. Patient characteristics were evaluated in the two groups.

RESULTS
The surgical group was composed of 17 patients and the nonsurgical group was composed of 35 patients. Age, gender, refractive error, best-corrected visual acuity, and postoperative overcorrection at 1 day were not significantly different in the two groups (P > .05). However, the distance strabismic angle at 1 month postoperatively was 2.5 ± 3.8 PD esodeviation (range: 14 PD esotropia to 4 PD exotropia) in the nonsurgical group and 5.4 ± 5.1 PD esodeviation (range: 20 PD esotropia to orthotropia) in the surgical group; these values were statistically significant (P < .05).

CONCLUSIONS
The clinically significant risk factor affecting the surgical decision for consecutive esotropia was a large esotropic angle at 1 month postoperatively in this study.


The study examines whether the form of maltreatment experienced by the child moderates the effects of a parent training program (PTP) on the probability that the child's case will be closed. This study involved 736 children on whom the Montreal child protective services (CPS) agency had an active file between 2007 and 2015. The experimental group was composed of all children with a parent who participated in the PTP Incredible Years (n = 368). A control group was matched with the experimental group based on a propensity score. Cox regression revealed that once parents have participated in the PTP, the probability that their children's cases will be closed increases more for children being followed because of neglect than for those being followed because of emotional maltreatment. Results show that a parent's participating in a PTP is associated with an increase of the probability that his or her child's CPS case will be closed and hence with a reduction of the length of time that the child must receive protective services.


This paper will outline the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative research on youth language (with a special focus on the pluricentric Spanish language) in order to arrive at a reliable description of the characteristics and the contextual conditions of the emergence of youth language in different socio-cultural situations as well as their underlying aims, conditions and possible parameters of investigation in accordance with the (pragmatic) identity functions of youth language. Three types of comparison will be established – reflecting the typological, the contrastive and the diatopic-contrastive approach. A particular focus is on diatopic-contrastive research, since comparison of regional varieties of youth language within one language has not played a major role in the debate about youth language so far.


group metal (pgm) catalysts are irreversible (1). The poisons are so strongly absorbed that they cannot be adequately removed, even with aggressive remedial actions such as steaming or thermal regeneration. Typical examples of permanent poisons encountered when processing hydrocarbon feedstocks would be contaminant metals such as nickel, copper, vanadium and, in particular, 'heavy metals' such as lead, arsenic and mercury (Hg). All these metals have a significant deactivating effect on precious metal catalysts, but the 'heavy metals' have a particularly dramatic impact. This is so even at very low concentrations, either present in the feedstock or accumulated on the catalyst. The metals content of crude oils may vary from a few ppm to several thousand ppm, depending upon the geographical and geological origin of the crude. The primary refining process involves distilling and fractionating the crude into separate hydrocarbon 'cuts'. Distillation tends to concentrate any metallic components in the oil residue. However, some organometallic compounds are volatilised at distillation temperatures; they therefore distribute in some of the higher-boiling distillate fractions which are then processed further for refinery and petrochemical applications. Mercury is an increasingly common contaminant, detected in natural gas deposits, coal deposits and in some crude oils from a variety of geographical regions such as South East Asia, parts of the Middle East and South America. Hg may be present in a range of chemical forms, including elemental, ionic and organic, and as suspended solids, in concentrations ranging from a few parts per billion (ppb) to several thousand ppb. Catalysts consisting of palladium supported on alumina are widely used for the selective hydrogenation of acetylenes in petrochemical processing (2). These catalysts are adversely affected by heavy metals that accumulate on the surface, and effectively alloy with the precious metal through dπ-dπ bonding. The result is to effectively remove active centres from the desired reaction scheme. Catalyst poisoning reduces yields and shortens catalyst life. It is therefore essential to reduce inlet Hg concentrations to < 5 ppb to achieve an economically acceptable service life. Hg poisoning, if left unchecked, may require an unplanned and premature catalyst change-out, with all its associated costs, including downtime. Unfortunately, it is not easy to detect and measure Hg at these very low concentrations as the metal is lost on sample lines and container walls. Exacting analytical methods and sampling techniques are necessary if the results are to be reliable and consistent. Neutron activation analysis and cold vapour atomic fluorescence spectroscopy have both proven successful for determining Hg concentrations. The effects of poisons cannot be avoided completely, but they can be mitigated by a carefully designed upstream purification system to protect the pgm catalysts. Although the Hg compounds are not the most reactive, several products have been developed to remove Hg from both gaseous and liquid hydrocarbon streams. Elemental Hg and inorganic Hg species can be very effectively removed (to levels of less than 1 ppb) through surface adsorption on non-regenerable metal sulfide pellets in fixed-bed reactors at ambient temperature. Hg has a high affinity for sulfur, and the metal sulfide reacts chemically with the Hg impurity to form a stable mercuric sulfide. Several approved disposal and treatment options are available for the Hg-laden spent absorbent. J. K. DUNLEAVY


Globalization forces companies to internationalize their operation in the global market. Exporting plays a vital role in economic development of a nation as well as for the development of the particular exporting company. Although, the benefits derived from exporting in an increasingly globalized marketplace are enormous, but for many companies, exporting is constrained by numerous challenges. The purpose of the study was to assess export marketing challenges of Ethiopian vegetable and fruit commercial growers. The study investigated 20 Ethiopian vegetable and fruit commercial growers and 8 stakeholders with questionnaires and interviews. The research utilized a mixed research design and analysis techniques specifically concurrent embedded approach. It is found out that the Ethiopian vegetable and fruit commercial growers export volume and sales lacks consistency and constrained by different challenges. Of the major challenges which were classified as internal barriers and external barriers, macro environmental barriers highly affected the growers. Local investors were highly affected by both the internal and external problems whereas foreign and joint ventures are affected in some extent with those problems. Less experienced growers were highly affected by the export problems than those who are more experienced. Management commitment problem; technological advancement problem; financial; lack of accessible transport system; low awareness of stakeholders; seasonality of Ethiopian supply; shortage of cargo; shortage of infrastructure; government bureaucracy; lack of potential markets; and shortage of inputs were identified as problems for the vegetable and fruit export. Therefore, to minimize these problems creating enabling policy environment; fair and competitive air freight cost; the growers to incorporate challenges in their export marketing strategy; the government to explore new markets, provide technical supports and long-term loans to growers; to create new competitive input suppliers; integration of stakeholders of the sector; and to recruit skilled manpower are forwarded as recommendations.


With far right parties and hate crimes on the rise, civil liberties and minority rights seem more at risk today than we could have imagined. In these turbulent times, Hope is Strong explores the power of art to question the world in which we live.

Hope is Strong features work by Conroy/Sanderson, Ashley Cook, Kate Davis, Jeremy Deller, Ruth Ewan, Jamie Fitzpatrick flyingleaps, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Kivland, Goshka Macuga, Ciara Phillips, Keith Piper, Olivia Plender, Hester Reeve, Sean Scully, Ai Wei Wei, and Artur Zmijewski.

Sharon Kivland exhibited a work entitled The Good Readers:
The Good Readers is a work that takes a number of formations, according to circumstances. It can be mobilised according to the situation. Here the foxes carry books by Marx in their jaws, each wearing the cap of liberty. The Paris sans culottes displayed their revolutionary ardour and plebeian solidarity in wearing the cap, which, during the Great Terror, was adopted even by those who might be denounced as moderates or aristocrats, eager to demonstrate their adherence to the new regime. They encircle a mannequin, a woman in miniature, a model woman, who has become a marianne. She is also, it would appear, half-fox. Marianne, symbol of France, that lovely allegory of the Republic of whom there is no single rule for her representation, is often shown wearing a Phrygian cap. When she wears the bonnet rouge, she is rebellious and popular. In 1793 she is war-like, fierce, liberty leading the people, hair streaming back, breast uncovered, fighting and victorious, as she is shown in Delacroix¹s painting of 1830, the year of the July revolution that led to a constitutional monarchy until the revolution of 1848. The men follow her. She is a symbol and she wears symbols; her bonnet is freedom. She is both an effigy and a principle, clad in a short tunic, in the style of antiquity. Her arm is raised with her fist clenched in a gesture of rebellion. She holds aloft a flaming torch to represent the light of progress. She incarnates the Republic and the people, liberty and reason. Under the Directoire she becomes rather more languid and assumes a draped classical dress, restricting her movement. In the representation of Marianne changes to one of the most bourgeois discretion; her breasts are modestly covered, she is sitting still, her bonnet is replaced by the rays of the sun. Two Mariannes are authorised. A bust is installed in every mairie; most frequently found in public buildings after 1870 is the bust after the model by Jean-Antoine Injalbert, a Marianne with the gorgon¹s head on her breast. Often in my arrangements, it is unclear if the foxes are the liberators and educators, or if there has been an act of violence, wrenching the book or another object (a silk negligee, for example) from a body or bodies by force, an exchange that the woman  if she is a commodity  cannot do for herself. The foxes, too, are things, objects rather than the animate beings they were once, yet they are brought again to life in this new encounter, capricious, sportive, endowed with life, like wanton women. Perhaps they are going to the market on their own, in their own right, and if so, then social organisation is subject to change (if the dead, animal or woman, starts to speak, moves, acts). Here it is evident that a mob has gathered, with an objective, and a symbolic leader (she is headless, of course).


Cancer growth is fueled by genomic alterations that confer selective advantage to somatic cells 1. A major goal of cancer biology is determining the relative importance of these alterations. Genomic tumor sequence surveys have frequently ranked the importance of genetic substitutions to cancer growth by P value or a false-discovery conversion thereof2,3. However, P values are thresholds for belief4, not metrics of effect5,6. Their frequent misuse as metrics of effect has often and ineffectively been vociferously decried 5,7–9, even in cases when the only attributable mistake was omission of effect sizes 10,11. Here, we draw upon an understanding of the development of cancer as an evolutionary process 12,13 to estimate the effect size of somatic variants. We estimate the effect size of all recurrent single nucleotide variants in 23 cancer types, ranking their relative importance within and between driver genes. Many of the variants with the highest effect size per tumor, such as EGFR L858R in lung adenocarcinoma and BRAF V600E in colon adenocarcinoma, are within genes deemed significantly mutated by existing whole-gene metrics. Quantifying the effect sizes of somatic mutations underlying cancer has immediate significance to the prioritization of clinical decision-making by tumor boards, selection and design of clinical trials, pharmacological targeting, and basic research prioritization.


INTRODUCTION: Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most common bacterial infections. Escherichia coli remains the most frequent cause of UTIs. More important is the increase in resistance to some antimicrobial agents. Furthermore, bacterial species are capable of living in a biofilm. There is increasing evidence for the role of bacterial biofilm in causing recurrent UTIs. AIM: The present study aimed to evaluate the ability of E. coli, isolated from UTIs to form a biofilm, and its association with catheterisation and to correlate the role of biofilms with their antimicrobial resistance. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 403 urine samples were processed. All the isolated E. coli strains (226) were grown in Luria broth and were incubated overnight in high-glucose Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium using a microtitre plate. The plate was stained with crystal violet, and the biofilm was quantified using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay plate reader at 570 nm. An optical density value more than that of the mean negative control plus three standard deviations is taken as positive for biofilm production. The antibiogram was done using the Kirby–Bauer disk diffusion method. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Of 226 strains, 54.4% were found to produce biofilms. Of them, 81.3% of patients were catheterised. Most of them were found to be resistant to commonly used antibiotics such as Cephalosporins, Quinolones and Aminoglycosides. Imipenem and Nitrofurantoin are the most effective antibacterial agents, showing 77.3% and 73.2% sensitivity, respectively. CONCLUSION: The biofilm assay using a microtitre plate is convenient and useful in screening the biofilm producers. Catheterisation is a risk factor for biofilm production, and catheter care is of paramount importance to prevent catheter-associated UTI.


The spatial Bessel filters are studied for their ability to reduce ultrasonic speckle and enhance the boundaries of regions of interest (ROI) in medical B-mode images. Using the concept of the heterogeneity index, a new parameter is defined to provide a quantitative measure of the edge visibility. It is hypothesized that this edge visibility parameter will be almost equal to unity if the ROI does not contain a boundary and greater than unity when the ROI contains a boundary. Analyses of 2 computer-synthesized images containing speckle and B-mode images of tissue-mimicking phantoms were carried out. The improvement in contrast and enhancement in edge visibility were estimated. In addition, parametric images containing a map of the edge visibility were created that showed clear boundaries. The quantitative measures strongly support the visual perception of contrast and enhanced edge visibility provided by the spatial Bessel filters. Results demonstrate the potential use of Bessel spatial filters in providing speckle reduction along with the ability to enhance the boundaries of regions of interest in B-mode images.


The treatment of patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is slowly evolving from empirical cytotoxic chemotherapy to personalized treatment based on specific molecular alterations. Despite this 10-year evolution, targeted therapies have not been studied adequately in patients with resected NSCLC who have clearly defined actionable mutations. The advent of next-generation sequencing has now made it possible to characterize genomic alterations in unprecedented detail. The efforts begun by The Cancer Genome Atlas project to understand the complexities of the genomic landscape of lung cancer will be supplemented further by studying a large number of tumor specimens. The Adjuvant Lung Cancer Enrichment Marker Identification and Sequencing Trial (ALCHEMIST) is an NCI-sponsored national clinical trials network (NCTN) initiative to address the needs to refine therapy for early-stage NSCLC. This program will screen several thousand patients with operable lung adenocarcinoma to determine whether their tumors contain specific molecular alterations [epidermal growth factor receptor mutation (EGFR) and anaplastic lymphoma kinase rearrangement (ALK)], making them eligible for treatment trials that target these alterations. Patients with EGFR mutation or ALK gene rearrangement in their tumor will be randomized to placebo versus erlotinib or crizotinib, respectively, after completion of their standard adjuvant therapy. ALCHEMIST will also contain a large discovery component that will provide an opportunity to incorporate genomic studies to fully understand the clonal architecture, clonal evolution, and mechanisms of resistance to therapy. In this review, we describe the concept, rationale, and outline of ALCHEMIST and the plan for genomic studies in patients with lung adenocarcinoma. Clin Cancer Res; 21(24); 5439–44. ©2015 AACR.


This work considers the problem of decentralized coordination between multiple non-holonomic vehicles, each navigating to a specified goal. By augmenting the Generalized Roundabout Policy (GRP), which guarantees collision avoidance, this paper improves the performance and liveness characteristics for such problems. These gains are achieved by integrating a second hybrid policy with GRP that updates the desired direction for each vehicle based on a dynamic priority scheme. In this scheme, minimalistic communication between vehicles is employed, such that information is periodically exchanged when changes in the high-level operating mode or prioritization occur. This information exchange is taking place only locally and data are exchanged only between neighboring vehicles. Additionally, each agent selects a control using only this local information and rules established by the two underlying hybrid automata. The proposed technique scales well due to its decentralized nature and as the computational complexity depends on the maximum number of vehicles in communication range for a vehicle. This paper presents simulations which show that the proposed approach can solve problems faster than using GRP alone, as well as solve instances in which GRP fails to find a solution, with minimal communication and computational overhead.


Graphical models provide a powerful formalism for statistical signal processing. Due to their sophisticated modeling capabilities, they have found applications in a variety of fields such as computer vision, image processing, and distributed sensor networks. In this paper, we present a general class of algorithms for estimation in Gaussian graphical models with arbitrary structure. These algorithms involve a sequence of inference problems on tractable subgraphs over subsets of variables. This framework includes parallel iterations such as embedded trees, serial iterations such as block Gauss-Seidel, and hybrid versions of these iterations. We also discuss a method that uses local memory at each node to overcome temporary communication failures that may arise in distributed sensor network applications. We analyze these algorithms based on the recently developed walk-sum interpretation of Gaussian inference. We describe the walks ldquocomputedrdquo by the algorithms using walk-sum diagrams, and show that for iterations based on a very large and flexible set of sequences of subgraphs, convergence is guaranteed in walk-summable models. Consequently, we are free to choose spanning trees and subsets of variables adaptively at each iteration. This leads to efficient methods for optimizing the next iteration step to achieve maximum reduction in error. Simulation results demonstrate that these nonstationary algorithms provide a significant speedup in convergence over traditional one-tree and two-tree iterations.


The concept "Building Back Better" (BBB) was formally introduced following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, which implies using a collaborative approach to improve the physical, social and economic conditions of a community during post-disaster reconstruction and recovery. This paper introduces eight BBB Principles which contribute towards achieving BBB. The post-tsunami recovery effort in Sri Lanka was examined using the BBB Principles to determine the extent to which BBB has been incorporated in immediate and long-term disaster management practices. Reports, literature, and data collected from a site visit made to Sri Lanka in 2010/2011 were analysed to establish the findings. Although BBB concepts were recognized, failure in execution resulted in a non-BBB recovery. Lessons learnt from shortcomings have been understood and incorporated into current disaster management practices. Good BBB practices currently in effect include: hazard-based land-use planning and risk-based structural regulations; increased awareness; participatory approaches; and stakeholder training. The absence of legislative support to implement BBB initiatives is the only drawback preventing so far. Lessons from Sri Lanka can benefit disaster management practices worldwide.


Health policy is taking a new direction towards a global definition of well-being, mental health together with a significant revaluation of human rights. The author proposes a critical and constructive analysis of the current Italian mental health system. Moreover, the article highlights the need and potential effectiveness of introducing a psychotherapeutic practice as a primary treatment for psychotic patients in the public mental health service. Based on Massimo Fagioli's Human Birth Theory, this practice is centred on the inter-human relationship between psychotherapist and patient, in which the pathology is addressed on three different levels: unconscious, consciousness and behaviour. The aim of this therapy is to cure and recreate the original healthy state at birth. In this context medications and rehabilitation are an important yet secondary means of support, while psychotherapy represents the main tool of psychiatric intervention in psychotic patients.


A central equation for the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) is the government budget constraint (or "government valuation equation"), which equates the real value of government debt to the present value of fiscal surpluses. In the past decade, the governments of most developed economies have paid very low interest rates, and there are many other periods in the past in which this has been the case. In this paper, we revisit the implications of the FTPL in a world where the rate of return on government debt may be below the growth rate of the economy, considering different sources for the low returns: dynamic inefficiency, the liquidity premium of government debt, or its favorable risk profile.


We study a multi-step hider-seeker game where the hider is moving on a graph and, in each step, the seeker is able to search c subsets of the graph nodes. We model this game as a zero-sum Bayesian game, which can be solved in weakly polynomial time in the players' action spaces. The seeker's action space is exponential in c, and both players' action spaces are exponential in the game horizon. To manage this intractability, we use a column/constraint generation approach for both players. This approach requires an oracle to determine best responses for each player. However, we show that computing a best response for the seeker is NP-hard, even for a single-step game when c is part of the input, and that computing a best response is NP-hard for both players for the multi-step game, even if c = 1. An integer programming formulation of the best response for the hider is practical for moderate horizons, but computing an exact seeker best response is impractical due to the exponential dependence on both c and the horizon. We therefore develop an approximate best response oracle with bounded suboptimality for the seeker. We prove performance bounds on the strategy that results when column/constraint generation with approximate best responses converges, and we measure the performance of our algorithm in simulations. In our experimental results, column/constraint generation converges to near-minimax strategies for both players fairly quickly.


Although our health professional students have some experience of simple charts, such as pie and bar, and some intuition of histograms, they do not appear to have much knowledge or understanding about box and whisker plots and their relation to the data they are describing or compared to histograms. The boxplot is a versatile charting tool, useful for presenting data from surveys and any other projects, where a reasonable quantity of data has been collected. An opportunity arose to create a reusable learning object (RLO) to describe, explore, and interpret boxplots, especially in relation to their data and summary statistics. Examples included interprofessional learning, as this was the main remit of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, from which funding was obtained. The RLO is aimed at both undergraduate and post-graduate HP students, who would be able to use the resource flexibly, to augment their limited exposure to statistical techniques, and add to their appreciation of IP learning and working. The RLO includes animation and opportunities for students to interact with the resource. Existing, available 'real' data, collected as part of research projects concerning (IP) learning, as well as generated data, is used as illustrative material. This paper explores some of the issues raised during the creation of the RLO, and presents limited feedback from users. Issues raised include the working of the project team, delivery platform, copyright and intellectual property rights and software incompatibilities. To date, feedback from colleagues and students has been very positive and has encouraged further improvements. The creation of this RLO has been a longer and more time-consuming experience than anticipated, and has highlighted the importance of a team approach, with constant reviewing. It will be interesting to see how the RLO will be used, and usage will be evaluated in the future.


(Weeks 1969) has described a number of sites where slip surfaces have been encountered on slopes where the angle is less than the angle of ultimate stability against land sliding. The purpose of this note is to report two sites in Northamptonshire where slip surfaces have been observed on similarly low-angle slopes, and to suggest a possible mechanism for their formation. Reference to Fig. 1 shows that the two exposures are both at the 'feather edge' of cambered slopes of the Inferior Oolite (in this instance the Northampton Sand), overlying Upper Lias Clay. In both cases the Northampton Sand forms a structureless rubble, the junction with the Lias clay being about an inch above a slicken-sided slip surface of considerable extent. The slip surfaces are ascribed to solifluction movements. The first site (A in Fig. 1), at Wellingborough [SP 903 693] was a temporary section in a cutting slope which exposed a slip surface that could be traced for nearly 150 ft parallel to its strike. The second site, (B), a road improvement scheme at Isham [SP 881 745], provided a section aligned obliquely to the direction of greatest slope. This section is shown in Fig. 2. The down-slope extent of the Northampton Sand rubble was marked by a topographical feature where the slope increased from 4 to 6°, and where the slip surface ran out to ground level. In each case there is some evidence that the slip surface may be somewhat undulatory, though in general